Licensed to Kill (34 page)

Recognizing the future possibilities for a corporate army prepared and capable of providing security in unstable environments, the new business associates registered a UK-based EO to work the Angola contract as a joint operation with the South African EO. Though the public documents filed for the creation of the new EO list only Eeben Barlow and his wife, Sue, as the owners, all accounts indicate that Mann and Buckingham were the real forces behind the creation of the new entity. With offices in South Africa and the UK and a lucrative contact opportunity in Angola, Executive Outcomes only required a stable of clients to transform itself into a fully developed, multimillion-dollar, multinational business entity. The recruiting commenced immediately, but not before Simon Mann contacted his old friend in the Scots Guard, Tim Spicer, to offer him an executive position with the new company. Since he was still active military and hoping for a promotion, Spicer declined the invitation on the grounds he was up for a long-awaited command position.

While Mann and his EO cabal may have envisioned themselves as the vanguard of an entirely new industry, they had to achieve success with their first big operation before declaring the new golden age of the modern mercenary. Their first hurdle would take the form of training a ragtag government force of ill-equipped, ill-disciplined, inexperienced, and somewhat indifferent Angolan soldiers. Though the initial contract dictated that EO was only supposed to train and equip the Angolan army, it again became quickly obvious that that alone would never make them an efficient fighting force. Mann and Buckingham renegotiated the contract to support their mercenaries' moving into full combat operations, jacking the price up to $100 million for one year, which eventually expanded to $300 million for three years.

As is the case with current ex-military becoming independent contractors, the new EO hires could expect a significant pay bump over what they had earned earlier in their careers. Frontline grunts, primarily black Angolan, Namibian, and South African 32 Battalion veterans, were paid $2,000 a month, and Ukrainian and other foreign pilots could earn upward of $10,000 in U.S. dollars. The average pay for a white officer was around $4,000, which could be five to ten times what they had been paid in the South African army. It was not a piecemeal white mercenary army in the mold of Bob Denard or Mike Hoare, but rather a privatized reconstruction of the classic counterterrorism structure of white Afrikaners leading and fighting side by side with Angolan and Namibian tribesmen. As a result of South Africa's program of decommissioning the 32 Battalion, the recruitment drive for EO's mercenary army would require only a couple of phone calls.

Since many fighters of the 32 Buffalo Battalion had engaged in combat against the nations of their birth throughout the seventies and eighties, these veterans had found themselves essentially refugees with no homeland to which they could return without fear of persecution after the SADF (South African Defence Force) no longer required their services. As part of the transition from apartheid to majority rule, the South African government agreed to grant citizenship to all foreigners who had fought in the 32 Battalion and to provide somewhere for them and their families to live. In an audacious demonstration of the ANC's (African National Congress) lack of appreciation for the black soldiers' defense of the apartheid regime, the new government resettled the veterans to a former SADF military base, which had been abandoned because of the health threat lurking in the air, water, and soil of the surrounded asbestos mining town. Pomfret occupies a barren land on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, about a hundred miles from the nearest town. With no arable soil for farming and no industry for employment, the ex-soldiers settled into a desperate existence devoid of any opportunity, facing a bleak future of poverty and hunger. Fighting someone else's war was often the only way to feed a family, and the number of eager takers always exceeded demand.

For the EO operation, the ex-soldiers could obviously endanger their lives, though that would be a calculated risk, since African bush wars tend to start with a brief intense firefight until one side decides they are overpowered and retreats to fight another day. Greater fears would be the risk of contracting a prolonged or debilitating injury, or the worst—capture. While some mercenaries or African rebel leaders may have at one time in their long history of fighting heard the two words “Geneva Convention,” rebel groups and mercenary armies don't tend to think of themselves as bound by the tenets of an agreement designed to dictate laws of war between nation-state signatories. Despite the dangers, the men of Pomfret needed to provide for their families, and EO was able to field its small army of a few hundred men in short order.

EO's air support, unconventional tactics, and use of advanced weaponry such as fuel-air explosives dramatically tilted the balance of the conflict. The EO fighters and the Angolan army aggressively pushed UNITA out of all key diamond-producing regions, restarting the flow of money into government coffers. The rapid offensive drove UNITA to the negotiating table, and in November of 1994 the two warring groups signed the Lusaka Protocol, effectively ending the three-decades-old war.

Though UNITA had specifically added a demand to the peace agreement that EO leave the country, it took the Clinton administration's threatening to block UN aid to Angola for dos Santos to actually break off the relationship, leading EO to withdraw in January 1996 before the term of their contract had ended. It wasn't so much that Clinton wanted to force dos Santos to honor his commitments under the Lusaka Protocol, but more that he wanted Angola to replace EO with the politically correct version of a private military company: Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), a collection of American generals and contractors who train foreign armies with the blessing of U.S. policy. The idea of mercenaries propping up a corrupt oil-rich dictatorship was apparently not a palatable arrangement. The United States preferred to provide their own private military company to train troops to prop up an oil-rich dictatorship for the much more reasonable fee of $2 million a year.

Even though the lucrative Angola gig had drawn to an abrupt close, Mann and Buckingham had no reason to worry about future prospects. EO had succeeded spectacularly in proving the utility of their professional fighting force in resolving Angola's long-simmering conflict, and in doing so had introduced a new working model for modern mercenary warfare. A new paradigm had been set whereby corporate sponsors could pay for the provision of security if granted the assurance of a certain return on their investment. The leader of a nation and the president of an oil company could enjoy a symbiotic relationship in that they both would benefit from the uninterrupted flow of oil. Politics, human rights, democracy, and all other warm and fuzzy considerations commonly enjoyed, expected, and revered in Western nations were little more than secondary concerns in the pursuit of wealth through natural-resource exploitation. EO had stripped away the moral pretense of war and made it a profitable business.

Buckingham, Mann, Luitingh, and Barlow represented the central core of Executive Outcomes in the early days, but as the venture expanded, Barlow's participation petered off and the nucleus grew to include business advisor Michael Grunberg. A former Stoy Howard accountant, Grunberg had greatly impressed Mann when he assisted in restructuring a financial deal for dos Santos while on vacation in Angola with Simon. As the cousin of Mann's then-future wife, Grunberg had more than just professional reasons to loyally manage Mann's most sensitive undertakings. Grunberg cleaned up the sloppy financial end of the business and created ironclad contracts—taking great pains to protect his clients from any potential legal liability. Grunberg also began to handle the ever-expanding stable of business ventures developed by Mann and Buckingham with their Angola money. At one time, at least eighteen different businesses listed Grunberg's Plaza 107 office in Chelsea as their mailing address. New companies developed under the EO umbrella ranged from air charter companies and tourism ventures to software security products, one of Mann's particular areas of expertise. While software security and tourism sound like rather innocuous endeavors, most of the new businesses—such as the charter airplane service Ibis Air—were designed to serve a dual purpose for their parent company. While Ibis publicly operated as a standard civilian business enterprise running flights for nonmercenary clients, having an air charter business in the family would enable EO to economically arrange for air transport without having to worry as much about the operational security of their more sensitive undertakings. What stunned the normally hush-hush world of contractors was the audacity of EO to actually have a public website that offered a full menu of military services, showcasing images of tanks, jet aircraft, and combat operations in a manner that made selling violence as innocuous as pest removal or extermination.

As a legitimate corporate entity with a recent dramatic influx in revenue, EO behaved like most aggressive and ambitious upstarts trying to expand their operations and publicize their successes. They embedded journalists like Al Venter and Jim Hooper. They did interviews that spun off articles with headlines like “An Army of One's Own.” The marketing offensive apparently achieved some degree of success. When the Angola operation wound down, EO already had another contract lined up and flew one hundred twenty-five of its mercenaries directly from Angola to a tiny country in West Africa in their well-worn Boeing 727. On board was a group of white South Africans and black Ovambo tribesmen who were only told their destination just before landing. The mercenaries had come to save Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone is a tiny West African country known more for its status as a refuge and repatriation center for former British slaves than for its mostly unexploited wealth of diamonds and minerals. Backed by the notoriously rapacious Charles Taylor, rebel leader Foday Sankoh entered Sierra Leone with about a hundred Liberian mercenaries in March of 1991, and began a four-year brutal bloodletting in their slow push toward the capital. By April of 1995, with Sankoh's forces battling on the outskirts of Freetown, it appeared the festering war teetered on the cusp of a final, bloody resolution.

The leader of Sierra Leone was Captain Valentine Strasser, who had come to power in 1992 at the age of twenty-five after a group of military officers knocked on the president's mansion to demand their back pay. The president had fled and the officers decided to install Strasser in a de facto coup.

In early 1995, after Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front (RUF) forces had scored some major successes against the Sierra Leone military, Strasser contracted renowned American mercenary Bob MacKenzie to command a group of four thousand Gurkha soldiers hired from a Channel Island company named Gurkha Security Group (GSG). Within two months, RUF forces had killed MacKenzie and a number of the Gurkhas in ambush and GSG pulled out their remaining troops. The rebels were approaching the outskirts of the capital.

Strasser then turned to Executive Outcomes, which was just coming off its successful operation in Angola. According to a source close to the contract negotiations, not only was EO eager and capable of undertaking the assignment, but they had also figured out a way Strasser could charge the security costs to International Monetary Fund (IMF) payouts. The contract initially was for one year but eventually added up to $35 million for 21 months.

In May of 1995, pilot Neil Steyl flew one hundred twenty-five EO men directly from Angola to Freetown in a white 727, and within days the mercenaries began military action against the rebels. After nine days of aggressive contact, the rebels had retreated from the outskirts of the capital and the EO fighters had pushed them back into the jungle. The RUF could not withstand the Hind gunships manned by expert pilots and the mortar skills and aggressive counterambushing tactics practiced by the experienced mercenaries. Within a matter of weeks, EO troops had pushed to reclaim a broad swath of territory; the diamond fields were secured and the mines locked down. This time there was no need to pretend that it was a training or a support mission. The men of EO had simply “sorted out” the opposing mercenaries of the RUF.

Following popular protests, Strasser consented to hold the first democratic elections in thirty years, which brought Ahmed Tejan Kabbah to power in March 1996. As part of his peace negotiations with the RUF, Kabbah agreed to cancel the contract with EO. Grunberg would bill $35.2 million but would only receive $15.7 million before leaving due to nonpayment of their contract in January of 1997. A number of mercenaries stayed as contractors under the corporate name of LifeGuard, one of EO's security start-ups, to guard critical diamond and mineral mines. With EO gone, another coup quickly replaced Kabbah in May of 1997. The new military junta allied itself with the RUF and chaos reigned again. This time EO did not come to the rescue.

Even though they had difficulty extracting payment for the second operation, the men had generated an extraordinary personal income. After the successes in Angola and Sierra Leone, EO had come to a natural end. According to Grunberg, “Eeben took ten million and walked away. They all did very well. Simon pocketed $60 million and Tony banked $90 million.” Grunberg doesn't mention his own take, but considering the multiple houses, multiple cars, and other obvious trappings of wealth he enjoys, it must have been significant. Further, the direct revenue generated by the operations does not include the potential proceeds from future mineral exploitation.

Although EO fought their way across Angola to push back the rebels and secure diamond mines, Grunberg claims there it was only a coincidental link between mercenaries and diamonds. “The goal was to push the rebels out and recapture the towns. Were there diamond areas there and were they secured? Of course. But you go for the towns because that's where the civilian population is, not the mines.” Grunberg's interesting logic sounds convenient and would have a more solid resonance had the principals in Executive Outcomes simply walked away from both countries. Michael is correct in that once Savimbi's UNITA lost the diamond areas, he quickly lost the ability to pay his army and himself. But, Buckingham's Branch Energy (a company he bought from Eeben Barlow in 1995) negotiated and was awarded two diamond exploration concessions in Angola in 1996. Branch Energy then folded their Angola and Sierra Leone properties into DiamondWorks, a public company that was traded on the Vancouver Stock Exchange in which Tim Spicer and Simon Mann also had significant stock options.