Licensed to Kill (44 page)

According to statements by the Zimbabwean government immediately after the incident, a curious airport guard had wondered why all the aircraft's oval windows were shuttered. When the soldier asked to look inside, he was rudely rebuffed. He and a cohort told their commander and the plane was then boarded by armed men. The mercenaries and flight crew were immediately arrested. A few minutes later, the Zimbabweans took Mann, Horne, and Carlse into custody as well. A television crew was invited to board the plane and film the “military cargo.”

Though the initial reports of the capture of Mann and his mini-army made it seem like a case of serendipity, Zimbabwean officials would later insist that it had been part of an orchestrated sting operation set up after they had been alerted of Mann's intentions by South African intelligence. While conceivable, it also seems possible the Zimbabweans were just trying to cover the embarrassment of having their own state-owned defense industry selling weapons for a coup in Equatorial Guinea, and rebels in the Congo.

Before he was arrested, Mann managed to make a sat phone call or text message to tell Niek: “It's necessary to cancel the operation due to last-minute difficulties.” He also quickly sent a text message to the others in the twin-engine plane with Moto waiting on the tarmac in Bamako, Mali. Mann and his crew were taken to Chikurubi Prison just outside Harare. The mostly black team of mercenaries was packed in eight to a cell, while Mann was put in solitary confinement.

That was enough to scatter the wild geese. Moto and his contingent flew back to the Canary Islands, where they were briefly detained and questioned by immigration officials early on the morning of March 8. It seems Crause had somehow entered Spain from South Africa without even a passport, but even so, the entire crew was released once a member of the Spanish intelligence force arrived, adding to the suspicion of Spanish complicity in the plot.

On Tuesday, March 9, Niek and fourteen men were arrested in Equatorial Guinea and dragged to the Black Beach jail. Two of the men say they were tortured and beaten by being hung upside down and shocked with electricity. The next day, Niek was paraded on TV with his confession. Suddenly Africa's two most reviled and ignored dictators, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Equatorial Guinea's Obiang Nguema, became the saviors of post-colonial Africa.

The participation of so many players from previous Executive Outcomes business made it seem like a tired, worn-out plot. Many media reports drew parallels between the coup attempt and the 1974 book
The Dogs of War
by Frederick Forsyth. Forsyth had written the bestselling book in the Hotel Bahia on a hook of land overlooking the city of Malabo, and his fictional country of Zangaro was indeed based on Equatorial Guinea. His characters Cat Shannon and his backer Sir James Manson were based on real people who had attempted to overthrow the previous Macias Nguema regime in 1972. According to Forsyth's fictional account, a group of business interests had gotten together to mount a coup in order to control EG's precious mineral resources—an interesting analogy to the modern attempt to dominate the oil industry. In that attempt, the mercenaries had taken a fishing boat from Spain via Lansarote in the Canary Islands toward Equatorial Guinea. Due to the security leaks and the incongruous sight of foreigners sailing from Spain in a trawler, the ship and crew were arrested upon arrival. Forsyth, now a shareholder in Aegis, was implicated as a backer of the 1972 coup in the media, though he has always denied the charges.

The trials in Zimbabwe and Malabo were a foregone conclusion. In Zimbabwe, the mercenaries from Pomfret were given twelve-month sentences for immigration violations, and returned home shortly after the coup attempt. Members of the flight crew were sentenced to sixteen months but were also released early. Charged again in South Africa, Neil Steyl paid a $25,000 fine and agreed in his plea bargain to assist in the investigation.

Mann was convicted on two weapons charges on July 22, 2004, and given seven years, though the Supreme Court in Zimbabwe later reduced it to four with a third of his sentence reduced for good behavior. According to a source close to Mann's family, the Zimbabwean government had offered to allow him to pay a massive fine in exchange for his release. His freedom would have required he unload one of his houses, but Simon's wife, Amanda Mann, thirty-nine and pregnant at the time with their seventh child, refused to sell.

A couple of weeks after his arrest, Simon Mann wrote a letter to his wife that was intercepted by South African intelligence and eventually leaked to the media. The letter, written in Etonian schoolboy slang, appealed for a big “splodge of wonga” to be spent on his release. He insisted that he had been tortured and that his confession had been coerced. The “Smelly” and “Scratcher” mentioned in the letter were crude codes for Eli Khalil and Mark Thatcher. Mann wrote his wife to forcefully demand a promised $200,000 from Gianfranco Cicogna, another $200,000 from “Scratcher (he of the Scratcher Suite),” and the remaining $500,000 from Greg Wales. Mann wrote, “Do they think they can be part of something like this with only upside potential—no hardship or risk of this going wrong. Anyone and everyone in this is in it—good times or bad. Now it's bad times and everyone has to F-ing well pull their full weight. GW's was for the last resort and this
is
the last resort.”

The scandal sparked by the letter only served to cement the divide between the backers and those in prison. In a later affidavit, Mann would try to distance himself from his former supporters, saying, “It is a matter of great regret to me that some of my friends and acquaintances, such as Sir Mark Thatcher, Eli Khalil and Tony Buckingham, have been accused… of conspiring with me…. I maintain there was no plot or understanding or conspiracy in which I was involved.”

Despite his long association with Mann, Greg Wales has sought to distance himself from the plot, as he told the British press, “Whatever Simon was doing, he was incredibly stupid. Finding yourself in Harare with a bunch of blokes, an aircraft, and buying lots of kit—if you think you can do that without a problem, you are a bit naïve.” Wales has never been arrested and denies any involvement, though he had enough inside information to have written a yet-to-be-published book about the coup called
Power and Terrain.

On August 25, South Africa's Scorpions arrested Mark Thatcher as he was preparing to fly to Dallas for the beginning of his children's school year. James Kershaw had also been arrested but negotiated himself a reduced sentence and fine by becoming a witness for the prosecution of Thatcher. Mark pleaded guilty to a reduced charge and was given a four-year suspended sentence and had to pay a fine of half a million dollars.

In Equatorial Guinea, Niek du Toit was sentenced to thirty-four years, an effective death sentence for a forty-eight-year-old. He complained before his trial that they had been abandoned by all the big players behind the coup plot, and said, “I feel bitter more than anything.”

The six Armenian airmen arrested with Niek were sentenced to between fourteen and twenty-four years in jail but were mysteriously pardoned a year later and flown home. Four other South Africans were given seventeen-year sentences.

Severo Moto was not charged with anything by Spain but was ejected from the country. He was also sentenced in absentia to sixty-five years (on top of his previous 101-year sentence) in Equatorial Guinea. Moto has suggested that Obiang is attempting extrajudicial means to extract revenge and has claimed to have barely escaped an assassination plot by Balkan hit men paid for by Obiang. Though there is no verification of his story, it's entirely possible that Obiang would want to neutralize Moto as a threat before he returns for a third try at the presidency. Even with Moto gone, Obiang rule is likely not long for this world. No one that vulnerable can sit on a pile of resources that valuable indefinitely. Niek tells me there have been at least six coup attempts since he has been in prison.

The End

If there is a lesson in all of this, it is that once the security business is unhitched from established corporate or government clients, its proponents can quickly turn it into the insecurity business. Mercenaries are above all opportunistic businessmen. It is completely logical, and perhaps necessary, to ask where these men will find the same income and sense of mission once Iraq and the War on Terror gold rush end. Just as an army could be raised with two phone calls to the pool of unemployed ex-soldiers in Pomfret, South Africa, the next generation of mercenary may be found in the bars of security shows in Texas, or even on websites where the guns-for-hire network looks to find the next opportunity.

If Erik Prince convinces the U.S. government that his private army can bring peace to war-torn regions, the private military contractor could become a profession as respected as medic or teacher. If private backers exploit the large pool of available talent for self-serving deeds, then the world may see more “Bight of Benin” companies and 727s full of armed men. The ultimate direction of these nearly converging paths of the private security contractor and mercenary could closely resemble a combination of both.

What I learned from Niek is that in the debate between contractor and mercenary, it will always come down to the individual. When Niek du Toit was my security man, I knew him as an upstanding, loyal, dependable provider of security in what was at the time the world's most dangerous place. Now, four years later, he is a criminal behind bars for what appears to be the rest of his life.

In Black Beach prison, I ask him why he does not take a plea bargain deal offered for him and Simon Mann. In order to take the deal, Niek would likely have to turn and testify against all the planners and financial backers. Despite having signed a confession before the trial, Niek now sticks to his original story—that he is a businessman and knew nothing of the coup. He insists he has no knowledge of a possible plea deal and is not even allowed South African embassy visits and mail.

When the light begins to fail and his jailers begin tapping their watches to let me know I have had enough time with Niek, I begin to pack up. I leave Niek with some minor gifts and a stern admonishment to the guards to allow him and the others fresh fruits and vegetables, time outside, and shackle-free ankles. Outside the prison in the stifling heat, the attorney general, who had escorted me to the prison, shakes his head and wonders aloud why Niek sticks to his story. I tell him that Niek is a soldier, a professional, and will remain loyal to his own credo to the end.

Epilogue

“This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast… and if you cut them down… d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.”

—T
HOMAS
M
ORE IN
R
OBERT
B
OLT'S
A M
AN FOR
A
LL
S
EASONS

Picturesque beach cottages dot the California coast just south of Santa Barbara—the former weekend getaways for people of moderate means decades ago have become $1-million, thousand-square-foot primary residences for double-income middle-class families. Every turn takes me down yet another exceedingly quaint street lined with brightly painted bungalows, sometimes color-coordinated with their neatly manicured landscaping. As I pull up in front of my destination, I have a moment of incongruous revelation when confronted with the Stateside reality that one of the “shit hot” badasses I rode back and forth with on Baghdad's Route Irish actually lives in a cute little house with a picket fence. As if he has been watching for my arrival, “Miyagi,” the former LAPD cop and leader of the Mamba team, comes out to greet me.

Miyagi gives me his typical “Hey, bro” handshake but his grip is weaker now. A fresh pink quarter-inch jagged scar with industrial-sized stitch marks runs down the inside length of his forearm, but that wasn't his worst injury. “I still have a hole in my ass,” he tells me, tracing the point where a piece of shrapnel ripped a fist-sized hole in his right buttock and exited his crotch, seriously nicking his penis. A close call, though Miyagi's doctors expect a full recovery. “They told me my boy is going to be fine. Man, I shoulda got the five-hundred-dollar upgrade,” he laughs. He further describes the trajectory of the bomb blast to explain how that same shard of flying metal then sliced a furrow in the back of Tool's hat and finally became embedded in the steel wall of the Mamba.

The day of the attack, April 21, 2005, Miyagi took the lead gunner position in a convoy of three Mambas and one truck heading toward Ramadi. “We were driving down the road, and there was a parking area on our right, people just hanging around outside their cars. I was looking through the AimPoint on the PKM. We were doing eighty to ninety kilometers an hour. My attention was towards two cars that came off a dirt road. I was thinking, ‘Gosh, I feel like they are slowing us down.' Tool blew the air horn two to four times. Those dudes wouldn't turn around, and within seconds—BOOM—an IED went off. I knew they were slowing us down, boxing us in.

“The Mamba came to a complete stop because the air line had been hit. Tool got on the radio and asked the second Mamba to push us out of the kill zone. They came up and tried to push. We didn't know that once the air line was gone, the wheels lock up. It's some safety feature.

“I knew my right hand was totaled, but I was waiting for secondary fire. My legs were on fire. I did a quick check. I could feel it was hot. I kept flexing my right hand. I remember pulling the trigger with my left hand and yelling, ‘Hey, fucker, I can still fight!' Tool was cussing the entire time and he looked at me and said, ‘How ya doing?' I was bleeding. I said, ‘I can still fight. I got one good hand.' Then I ducked down and looked in the back. Shit, Sparky was on top of the other guys just laying there. He was just laying on top of the other two guys just dying. I didn't see any marks on his face and chest. He was hit in the groin, and it blew out his femoral artery. He got it from the knees up.” In an all-too-familiar twist of fate, Sparky wasn't supposed to be in the convoy that day. He had actually been scheduled to fly home for a few days, but the boredom of repeated delays had him volunteering for the run. Miyagi remembers, “Sparky was a great gun guy, fabulous worker, real nice guy—one of the ‘dudes.'” Two other contractors in the back of the Mamba had also suffered shrapnel wounds: “The back of the Mamba was like Swiss cheese. Whatever was in that bomb just blew through all that armor.”

Sitting amid the wreckage of one destroyed vehicle, Miyagi started getting the ominous feeling that the insurgents might come back for more. “Traffic behind us had been stopped by the rear guy. In the distance I saw a kid running at about two hundred meters ahead, carrying a big white flag. If you looked further down you could see traffic stopped. I remember seeing that kid in his late teens. I yelled, ‘We need to get off the X.' From the time we got hit to the time we started moving—we were gone, vehicle torched, and reloaded in less than fifteen minutes.”

Miyagi describes the fortunes of his survival as simply “blessed, bro.” His wife appears more distraught than he is about his near-death experience, and the most supportive superlative she can come up with to describe his most important success in Iraq is to call him “the most messed up contractor that didn't get killed.” Miyagi escaped the attack with his life intact, but he has no illusions about how close it came. “If Tool would've been leaning back one inch, he would have been dead. If I'd been turned an inch either way, it would have taken out my femoral.” As he talks, he rhythmically squeezes a rubber ball painted with the cartoon face of a baseball player. “The worst part was when I got home, my youngest saw me with my arm all messed up and he started crying. He said, ‘You promised you would throw a baseball with me.' That hurt.”

Miyagi is about as philosophic as he ever gets about the risks of his chosen profession. “Call it faith. Call it what you want. You know going into it.” Despite his serious wounds and the deaths of many friends, Miyagi still plans a comeback as a security contractor. “Either you love what you do or you don't. I love what I do. It keeps my wife from working full-time. We want to do a room addition. I don't want her to work so she doesn't have to bust her ass. She is a court reporter. She was stressed. My wife grew up here—a town of fourteen thousand people a quarter of a mile from the beach. My son can ride to the beach, my nine-year-old. This is like Mayberry RFD with a beach.” It is a common refrain I have heard repeated so many times during the past few years. Though critics have accused security contractors of working “for the money,” in my journey I have found it would be more precise to describe a good majority as working “to support their families.” Miyagi likely wouldn't be able to afford his mortgage payments if he rejoined the LAPD on a beat-cop's salary. However, he knows his skills are in high demand on a global scale, though it remains to be seen where exactly he will work next.

Though they lost one man and one Mamba in the attack on Miyagi's convoy, it wasn't the deadliest encounter Blackwater had that day. Insurgents shot down—reportedly with missile fire—an Mi-17 transport helicopter leased by Blackwater, killing all except one on impact. The attackers had their propaganda tool at the ready and began filming the aftermath. When they discovered the one survivor, the pilot, they forced him to stand before executing him in a barrage of bullets, making for another very vivid and public broadcast of the fate that may befall a security contractor in Iraq. Six American Blackwater contractors, along with three Bulgarian crew members and two Fijian security guards, died in the Mi-17 attack. In total, on April 21, 2005, Blackwater Security suffered a loss of seven employees, four wounded, one torched Mamba, and one downed transport helicopter.

By scouring the media for accounts of attacks like April 21, icasualties.org had come up with an unofficial count of 314 contractors killed in Iraq by the spring of 2006. The Department of Labor has had more than 400 death-benefits claims filed for Defense Bases Act insurance. This higher number also includes claims from the surviving members of Iraqis who had been employed by American companies, but likely also indicates that not all contractor deaths garner mentions in the press.

It should not be surprising that neither the American nor Iraqi government keeps an official count of the number of contractors killed, since they can't even seem to estimate the number of security companies now operating in the war zone or the number of contractors they employ. In the spring of 2006, 730 members of the Iraqi government alone required the services of private security details—all operating without direct control from either the occupying regime or the beleaguered Iraqi government. The proliferation of armed civilians providing security and the lawless environment in which the business has expanded have resulted in a flourishing of private militias, many of which double as death squads.

To counter this trend, an organization called the Private Security Company Association of Iraq (PSCAI) has been established to try to organize the legitimate companies and to push for legislation to rein in the illegitimate ones. The problem the PSCAI has encountered is that the government of Iraq is simply not capable of or willing to regulate the contractors. Confidential PSCAI internal documents from early 2006 outline the response of the ministry of the interior after the first batch of security companies attempted to register with the MOI. Fifty of those who submitted the paperwork to the MOI either received no response or were rejected, while forty-eight were still waiting for their weapons permits four months after they had applied. The MOI had also admitted that there were at least fifty-four armed private “security” companies about which they had no information. A more disturbing revelation can be found in the notes of a PSCAI meeting, where discussion centered around their determination that 14,600 unregistered individual Iraqi members of armed personal security details were operating in Iraq, who therefore exist completely outside the boundaries of the current modicum of regulation now in place. Adding to that the additional 19,120 unregistered foreign security operators makes for an estimate of more than 33,720 men with a license to kill in Iraq. Another PSCAI internal document, discussing the accountability of those unregistered entities, states, “Each PSD is effectively its own entity, and subject to the perceived power of those whom they protect.” The implication is that the security situation is driving the country toward a kind of neo-warlordism. The PSCAI best estimate is that there are more than 70,000 privately armed men in Iraq, not including insurgents or militias.

While waiting at BIAP with the Mamba team during my November 2004 visit, I chatted with two American security contractors working for one of Iraq's largest employers at the time. They seemed freaked out and told me that their Kurdish owner would routinely leave their secure compound to extract payback for the death of family members during the Saddam era. “We have caught him more than once outside the wire before dawn,” they confided in me. Though it would be difficult, if not impossible, to verify their account, if true it would be entirely in line with everything I have learned in my journey about the lawless environment in which security contractors are operating in Iraq.

An American partner in an Iraqi security company told me that his firm gave up on the Western-style PSD after finding it more effective for the security of their operations to hire Iraqi Sunnis from Saddam's former elite guards. He told me that the effect of this shift in human resources recruitment policy is that “you shoot at us or cause a problem, and the solution is taken right down to the family level.” While he wouldn't go into exact details of what that might entail, it suggests that his new contractors are using revenge as a tool aimed at preventing future attacks. The Iraqi security company al-Rawafid also employed many Sunni ex–security forces from the Saddam era and is owned by a prominent Sunni sheik and member of Parliament. In March 2006, armed men wearing Iraqi police uniforms abducted fifty employees of al-Rawafid. The ministry of the interior said that the attackers were insurgents with stolen uniforms, though al-Jazeera reported that Iraqi police had long-held suspicions about al-Rawafid's manner of providing security. In Iraq, it is becoming increasingly unclear who is working for whom and to what end exactly.

The one thing that has become clear is that Western contractors fire at or into Iraqi vehicles on a regular basis. The controversial Aegis video—taken out of context and judged by a public with a limited understanding of standard operating procedures and the working environment for security convoys—gave the impression that PSDs randomly shoot at Iraqis with the same restraint as a fourteen-year-old playing a violent video game. In reality, the video more likely portrayed an inexperienced and terrified contractor uncertain whether cars behind the convoy were friend or foe. A comparison could be drawn with the issues raised in the United States after an accidental shooting by police officers. Police have to make split-second decisions of life and death, and if they're in what they feel is a dangerous situation, the heightened tension makes an irreversible mistake more likely. The most dangerous environment an American police officer might encounter, multiplied by a hundred, may begin to give a sense of the pressure under which PSDs working in Iraq must operate. Mistakes happen, but the lack of accountability for even justified accidental shootings makes abuses more likely.

Neither the Pentagon nor the Iraqis keep statistics—at least publicly—on the number of civilians injured or killed by contractor shootings. However, in early 2006, the Pentagon did release a cache of four hundred serious incident reports that spanned nine months of 2004–2005. In analyzing the documents, Jay Price of Raleigh-Durham's
News and Observer
determined that contractors in Baghdad had reported shooting into sixty-one vehicles during that nine-month period. Of those, only seven incidents involved the targets shooting back, threatening violence, or conducting threatening activities. In most cases, the contractors fled the scene after the incident.

The four hundred reports represent only a portion of the actual incidents. Contractors are supposed to file an account about the reasons for every single weapons discharge, including warning shots. However, during my time with contractors in Iraq, I never saw a single report filed, even though gunfire against civilians was an everyday event, possibly to an average of three to six warning shots per run. I must add, however, that I never witnessed any of the men I rode with acting outside the bounds of the standard rules of engagement, but then again, none of the Iraqis they fired on were insurgents but normal commuters.