Licensed to Kill (43 page)

Mann was inspired by the beautiful simplicity and profitability of the plan, and quickly expanded the initial idea into a much bigger vision of how Africa could be changed by a small private army. There is a detailed intelligence report by Johann Smith, a former South African intelligence officer, indicating that at one point the conspirators may have been planning a coup hop—starting by taking out the leadership of São Tomé before moving on to EG. Early on, there had also been discussions at Mann's house with financial advisor Greg Wales and real estate broker Gary Hersham about Sudan and Gabon—both oil-producing countries with upside potential for an aggressive investor with a private army. Mann had actually met with someone to discuss filming the coup with an eye toward a PR program to benefit his future plans.

Before he could move on to other countries, Mann would have to pull off the EG gig, and there was at least one man who was going to try and throw up roadblocks. Johann Smith, former 32 Battalion officer and contemporary of du Toit, was based in Malabo and considered EG his turf. He had often touted himself as security advisor to President Obiang, though Obiang denies such claims. Smith is one of the many South Africans who hover on the fringe selling their skills to the highest bidders, and he initially learned about Mann's operation when two other 32 Battalion vets complained to him that they had missed out on a well-paying mercenary job. Smith told the men that if they could try again to get themselves hired, he would pay them for any information they could feed back to him.

The men managed to pass on enough details for Smith to discover the involvement of Niek, a friend and SADF contemporary. Smith actually confronted du Toit to warn him that the gig was up. Although Smith's warning gave Niek serious cause for reflection, he and Simon still decided to proceed. Perhaps the decision would have been made differently if the conspirators had known that Johann Smith was assembling a detailed dossier on the impending coup, which he began to forward to what he thought were interested countries. According to Smith, he forwarded a detailed report to government officials in the United States and the UK, including Pentagon official Michael Westphal. The report outlined preparations for the coup, listed the backers (including cell phone numbers), and estimated a date of mid-March 2004.

On January 29, the British government received Smith's report, which ended up in the hands of foreign secretary Jack Straw. Straw said later in an official statement, “It was not definitive enough for us to conclude a coup was likely or inevitable. It was passed by another government to us on the normal condition that it not be passed on…. I considered the case and agreed the [Foreign Office] should approach an individual formerly connected with a British private military company, both to attempt to test the veracity of the report and to make clear the [Foreign Office] was firmly opposed to any unconstitutional action such as coups d'état.” Since the coup plan as outlined had all the hallmarks of an Executive Outcomes or Sandline operation, it's not surprising that Jack Straw called Tim Spicer for more information. According to the British Foreign Office's official account of the meeting, “the individual concerned claimed no knowledge of the plans.” While the exact level of Spicer's involvement in the coup is unknown, and there is no evidence he actually was involved, people who know both Spicer and Mann find it highly unlikely that two people with such aligned interests, social contacts, and financial interests did not talk about such a major opportunity. And it surprises no one in that circle that the first person Jack Straw called was Tim Spicer.

In Straw's official recounting of the meeting, Spicer was told to notify his long-time friend Simon Mann of the FO's displeasure and disapproval. However, a source close to Simon Mann recollects being briefed on a different exchange. In this version, Spicer told Mann that he had laid out the full details of the coup and described Straw as pleased: “When Spicer met Simon in February last year, just after he had met the FO, reports are that TS and SM had a good meeting and that SM was not in the least discouraged by TS's FO meeting, and whatever TS had to say to him put him in a good mood.” Spicer denies briefing Mann after the meeting.

Jack Straw had initially claimed that the UK government had no foreknowledge of the coup, but a year of media coverage made that position unsustainable, and Straw finally admitted he'd known of the plans five weeks prior to the coup. He had even set up an emergency evacuation plan for UK citizens from the island of Bioko in preparation for any fallout from the coup.

Someone had given Mann the impression that the UK government had tacitly assented to the coup plot, which buttressed the same sentiment associate Greg Wales had already informed him would be coming from the U.S. government. If any major government had informed Mann's cabal not to go ahead with their plans, it would have been clear that there would have been no benefit from continuing with the coup. The truth is that no one took any concrete steps to interfere, and the U.S. and UK governments may have simply sat back to watch with interest. Once the operation had succeeded, the PR component would have made it very difficult for anyone to reinstall Obiang or argue that Moto was not a better ruler. After all, the coup was being presented as a persecuted and enlightened government-in-exile mounting a return by humanely deposing one of Africa's most brutal oppressors. No government could oppose that. Mann kept close the secret that the plot was really about a group of private investors hiring security contractors to take over an oil-rich country.

By January of 2004, Mann had most of his investors lined up and had received or had pledges for the required funds. Khalil was pressuring Mann to schedule the coup for the third week of February 2004, lest the impending democratic process disrupt their carefully laid plans. There were upcoming elections in Spain, and the plotters discussed the possibility that they would lose Spanish support if the conservative prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, lost his bid for reelection. Also, imminent elections in EG could potentially install a new, democratically elected leader, which would make it more difficult to put a positive PR spin on the coup. Further, December had seen yet another coup attempt against Obiang, this one staged by General Agustin Ndgong Ona, the president's half brother and commander of the army. Obiang's premature death or overthrow could shut out Moto's chance at leadership. Mann determined the third week of February would be the target date for the coup and went to work formulating the operational plan.

The First Attempt

By late January, fifty-five men had been hired and were doing house clearing and small squad tactics training at a farm in South Africa. They practiced shooting and breaching doors with wooden rifles in groups of five or so. The training may have seemed a little rigorous for the mining security operation they had been told they would be doing, but the soldiers might not have questioned it for fear of losing the work.

In early February of 2004, Mann and du Toit traveled to Harare to purchase a stock of weapons. ZDI officials would later say that the men had raised suspicions because their business cards showed the same address—Mann's for Logo Logistics and du Toit's for MTS, or Military Technical Services, a company he had started in 1989. Further, it seemed curious that the men would purchase arms from Zimbabwe, since their businesses were based in South Africa—a much larger supplier of weapons—and MTS was a legally licensed dealer. The officials may have not really believed that the men intended to help President Robert Mugabe seize valuable diamond areas in the Congo's Kolwezi region, but arms dealers aren't known to ask too many questions. ZDI obviously didn't care enough about Mann and du Toit's motivations to refuse $180,800 in exchange for sixty-one AK-47 assault rifles with 45,000 rounds of ammunition, twenty PKM light machine guns with 30,000 rounds of ammunition, a hundred RPG anti-tank launchers with 1,000 rockets, five hundred hand grenades, ten Browning pistols with 500 rounds of 9-mm ammo, and two 60-mm mortar tubes with 80 mortar bombs. James Kershaw flew in from South Africa the next day with $90,000 to make the first payment. The entire shipment was supposed to be ready within a week.

Niek and Simon arrived at the Harare airport on February 18 with the final $90,800 payment for the weapons cache. They were supposed to pick up the weapons and then rendezvous with the mercenaries to combine forces and commence the coup, but the planned operation hit an insurmountable snag. The plane carrying the mercenaries had hit a bird and broke its nose wheel, leaving the plane a motionless hulk of metal in Ndola. The fifty men who had flown up to Ndola from Wonderbroom Airport in Pretoria were stranded and had to make their way back home. Simon Mann had to put a hold on the weapons, fly from Harare to Ndola to drop off money for the plane repair, and return home in a funk. Agitated by the setback and blaming Crause Steyl for the excessively complicated plan, Mann sidelined Steyl and hired Ivan Pienaar, a South African pilot and former mercenary for UNITA, to develop the new aviation logistics. It was a decision that likely cost Mann dearly, since it would be this new plan that would be leaked directly to the highest level of the Angolan government, leading to the exposure of the coup.

Second Attempt

Mann wanted the plan simplified, and Ivan Pienaar did just that—no fancy ruses with luxury cars and no multiple flights and connections. They would use only one aircraft, which would stop to pick up the mercenaries in South Africa, then Simon and the weapons cache in Harare, and then on to Malabo for the coup. Instead of inviting Obiang to the airport, Niek—through his partner, Armengol—would invite Obiang to dinner on the night of the coup. Obiang would be forcibly held until the mercenary army arrived a few hours later to take over.

Without the luxury cars, they wouldn't need the massive Ilyushin cargo plane for transport, and the Antonov was too small for all the weapons and men. Simon made some urgent phone calls and finally located the classic choice for mercenary operations at Dodson Aviation in Kansas—a forty-year-old 727-100, which had been converted from a civilian airliner for use by the U.S. Air National Guard. The converted 727 was complete with a pressurized cargo hold and could carry twice the capacity of the Antonov with a range of three thousand miles. It even had a U.S. flag on its tail.

Mann bargained hard with Dodson Aviation and agreed in the first week of March to buy the plane for a price of $400,000. Dodson arranged for a U.S. crew to deliver the plane to South Africa. The white plane arrived at Wonderbroom Airport just north of Pretoria at 8:00
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. on Sunday, March 7, where the U.S. crew deplaned to go into town, and the mercenaries immediately started loading up. What they did not know was that someone with excellent and exact knowledge of their aviation activities had already contacted Angolan president Eduardo dos Santos on March 4 with explicit details of the coup. On Friday, March 5, Angolan intelligence contacted the minister of the interior for EG and told him to come to Luanda immediately. Manuel Nguema Mba, who has since been promoted to Obiang's minister of national security, chartered a Falcon jet and flew down for a briefing on the coup plot by dos Santos. Manuel urgently began relaying the information back to Malabo. Even if the mercenaries had managed to make it into EG, they now would have met fierce and violent resistance.

Back in South Africa, the mood was cheerful. First on board the new 727 was pilot Neil Steyl, an old Executive Outcomes hand and one of the “million-dollar men.” Hendrick Hamman took the copilot's seat, and Ken Payne was the engineer. The flight crew would be transporting sixty-four men, a pile of supplies, $30,000 in cash for fuel, and $100,000 for expenses. After loading the cargo, the mercenary army took their places in the hold. Altogether there were twenty-three Angolans, eighteen Namibians, twenty South Africans, two Congolese, and a Zimbabwean.

One South African contractor on board had just finished a gig in Haiti and had only been back for two days. Raymond Stanley Archer, a former EO hand, was working for the Steele Foundation when President Aristide was deposed on February 28. He had been part of the security detail that had escorted Aristide into exile in the Central African Republic. After his arrest in Zimbabwe, Archer stated in court that he had arrived home in Johannesburg on March 4 and was having lunch with his ex-wife three days later when James Kershaw contacted him on his cell phone. “He said if I could get to the airport within an hour, I could have the job.” When security contractor Archer boarded the plane, he recognized ten of the men on board. It looked like a reunion of South Africa Defence Force vets from the old Executive Outcomes days.

The fighters did not know they were heading to Equatorial Guinea via Zimbabwe, but it was not the first time mercenaries and contractors working for Mann were not told their ultimate destination. Although the group had been training for combat operations and house clearing—neither related to guarding mines—the contractors were happy not to know too much. They would be briefed just before the plane landed.

Meanwhile, Simon Mann, Lourens Horne, and Jacobus “Harry” Carlse had arrived in Zimbabwe to make sure the weapons were ready. The South Africans, Horne and Carlse, were part owners of Meteoric Tactical Systems, a private security company with contracts in Iraq—one to guard the Swiss mission and another to train the Iraqi army. The two had taken off from Iraq, telling their clients that they were taking two weeks to go buffalo hunting in South Africa. Instead, they ended up spending their “vacation” in a Zimbabwean jail.

At 7:30
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., the unmarked 727 touched down at Harare and taxied to the military side of the airport to refuel. The pilot's manifest said they had three pilots and four loaders on board and were refueling on their way to Bujumbura, in Burundi, and Mbuji-Mayi in the Congo.