The Great Cat Massacre (14 page)

After their loss, the rest of Operation Fuller finally staggered into action. A few Beauforts joined the fray hours later, but were hampered by the fact that they were under-strength due to some of their squadron having been armed with bombs instead of torpedoes (no one knew that ‘Fuller’ was a naval operation). In addition, a number of their fighter escort had failed to turn up because their command base was trying to communicate with them in Morse code, but the planes had recently switched over to radio telephones and no one had mentioned it to the base, so it was like writing a letter to a blind man. Altogether a massive 675 planes were nominally involved in Fuller. Of them, only 39 attack aircraft sighted the enemy and dropped their bombs. All missed and 15 planes were shot down.

It could have been worse, though. The Royal Navy was not entirely absent from the battle – the British destroyer
Walpole
engaged the enemy and was attacked by two aircraft. It was especially surprised by the fact that they were RAF Wellington bombers, which flew out of a cloud and aimed their bombs at their naval colleagues, luckily missing their target. The commander of the Wellington must have been even more astonished to see a squadron of fighters arrive and chase away the British, considering the heroic guardians who continued to escort and safeguard the
Walpole
were equally confused Luftwaffe Me-109s. Soon realising their mistake, the Germans withdrew, unsure what to do next.

The greatest damage to the German fleet came from a mine that the
Scharnhorst
hit soon before it arrived back in Germany.

The Cambridge Spy Ring will go down in British history as the debacle that will forever undermine the image of British intelligence officers as suave, tough or brilliantly cunning, and replace it with a caricature of effete, effeminate chaps without the faintest idea of what they are doing or what they came into the room for.

The five spies (one of whom has never been identified for certain) were all high up in the British intelligence and diplomatic services. For decades, they fed the Soviet Union information that often had British agents killed.

Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were the first to be unmasked as traitors but they were tipped off and fled for France on 25 May 1951, on their way to mother Russia. Their attempt to escape had a hitch, however – they had been recognised boarding a ferry to the French port of St Malo by a customs officer at Southampton. After he informed the authorities, an MI5 officer was dispatched to head them off. He was to fly to St Malo and arrest them – he just had to run home to get his passport first. When he did so, he noticed that he had forgotten to renew it and he wasn’t going anywhere. He could only return to the office with his tail somewhere between his legs. He was later knighted and made chief of the Security Service.

In 1983 a government inquiry, the Franks Committee, partly blamed the Falklands War on Margaret Thatcher’s decision in 1981 to withdraw the Royal Navy’s only ship patrolling the South Atlantic, HMS
Endurance
. As Britain’s sole vessel in those waters, removing it had sent a message to the Argentine military junta that the UK was not interested in defending the Falklands, the Committee declared.

The funny thing was that that message sent to Argentina was quite true. Although the
Endurance
was withdrawn simply to keep in with Thatcher’s ‘good housekeeping’ financial policy, the British government was also planning an orderly withdrawal from the Falklands. In 1981 Nicholas Ridley, one of the Foreign Office ministers, told a journalist: ‘We have 13 colonies left. It is my job to get us out of them. After Honduras [British Honduras, now independent Belize] the Falklands are next on the list.’

Later that year he designed a sale-leaseback deal which would hand sovereignty over to Argentina, so long as the islanders could remain there under a British administration. Thatcher had wanted rid of the islands too and was drastically scaling back that part of the Navy that could defend them – the aircraft carrier
Hermes
was to be scrapped, as were two assault craft; and the carrier
Invincible
was being sold to the Australian Navy, which was preparing to take delivery when Argentina invaded.

Had
Endurance
not been withdrawn, it is unlikely that Argentina would have thought it could stage an unopposed military takeover. For that matter, had Argentina waited
another year before its incursion, Britain might well have voluntarily handed over the islands – and even if it hadn’t done so the Royal Navy would not have had the vessels needed for the counter-attack. Withdrawing
Endurance
saved £2m; the war that it led to cost £3bn.

And the war was never a foregone conclusion. In fact, in 1982, one foolish mistake nearly turned the whole thing around.

The British media are a pugnacious lot. According to them, the government is always venal, wrong and amateurish, and they always know better. But does anyone listen? Nope. Still, there’s one time when they all fall into line – when the nation is at war. Publishing stories that would actively help the enemy is considered something of a no-no, even in Fleet Street (well, with the sole exception of the
Guardian
, anyway). Despite this, in 1982, at the height of the war, the Ministry of Defence sent out a press release. It was good news of Argentine naval failures and the BBC happily ran an item based on it. The BBC’s report sang: ‘Following the Argentine air attacks on 21 May two unexploded bombs on one warship have been successfully defused and a further one dealt with on another warship. Repairs are being carried out on the other warships.’

In fact, the problem with the report was that it was absolutely true. British craft were being repeatedly hit by Argentine bombs which were failing to explode, most probably because the Argentine pilots were flying too low over their targets, so that when they dropped the bombs the fuses didn’t have enough time to arm the device before it
hit the ships. Nearly three-quarters of all the ordnance dropped on the British ships was failing to detonate and the British Navy wanted to keep it that way. The last thing they wanted was for the Argentineans to cotton on, and start flying a bit higher up, because the sea was the real battleground when it came to the Falklands. On land, British troops entirely dominated, but on the water things were more evenly matched and the Argentines sank a number of British boats, drowning many of the crew.

Had the Argentine pilots been able to treble their effectiveness simply by realising they were flying too low, the entire campaign might have been reversed.

The Americans do like their dramatic codenames. And the invasion of the former British dominion of Grenada was named Operation Urgent Fury, which seems excessive.

Anyhow, the American invasion restored the constitutional government to the small island a wee bit north of Venezuela, after a military junta had seized power from the ruling People’s Revolutionary Government, which had itself seized power from the elected government four years previously with the help of the Soviet Union and Cuba. The American invasion outraged the sort of person who gets outraged by that sort of thing, but especially the People’s Revolutionary Government, which went so far as to send a telex to the British Foreign Office on 23 October 1983 alerting the British government to the invasion and begging them to talk the Yankee imperialists out of it.

Unfortunately, the telex number the People’s Revolutionary Government used was for an office no longer used by the Foreign Office, but instead occupied by a Scandinavian plastics firm, which seemed bemused by the request for military assistance from Grenada to fight off an invasion by the United States.

Margaret Thatcher was another of those people outraged by the US invasion, but by the time she heard about it the best she could do was telephone the White House and object to it. Had the telex been sent to the right number, she would have known rather earlier and could possibly have mediated between the Americans and the Grenadians. As it was, relations between Britain and the United States were severely soured by the affair.

In the House of Commons, Denis Healey, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, posed the question:

Question: According to the CIA World Factbook, which African country has the highest Gross National Product per person?
Answer: Equatorial Guinea.

For those who did not even know there was somewhere called Equatorial Guinea in the first place, it must come as a real shock to know the inhabitants are some of the richest people in the world. Well, up to a point, anyway.

Equatorial Guinea is an oil-and gas-rich brutal African dictatorship where most of the 500,000-strong population desperately trying to find enough food to eat each day probably have no idea that they are all millionaires. One person perfectly aware of the nation’s wealth is President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who seized power from his uncle in a military coup in 1979. It must have been quite a day when massive oil and gas fields were discovered in Equatorial Guinea’s waters, propelling the country up the international wealth list overnight. But, as every African dictator knows, one thing that tends to follow a sudden expansion of your bank account is an expansion in the number of people who want to shoot you.

In 2004 it turned out that the latest group of people attempting to depose Obiang in a very direct manner were
a group of foreign professionals – i.e. mercenaries. They were led by an Old Etonian former SAS officer, Simon Mann, who was then working in South Africa.

On 7 March 2004 a plane landed in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. The passengers were 64 mercenaries, most of whom had fought in the civil wars that had rampaged through Mozambique and Angola. They were stopping off in Harare to pick up weapons and ammunition arranged by Mann, who was already there. From there, they were to fly to the capital of Equatorial Guinea, Malabo, where they would join an advance team of 15, who were already there. They would then infiltrate Obiang’s home and either fly him to exile in Spain or simply blow his brains out, depending on how pleasant he was. Behind them was an opposition leader, Severo Moto, who would declare himself president and no doubt bring in an era of peace and prosperity for all, without any more of the corruption and systematic embezzlement that had characterised Obiang’s murderous regime.

Sadly for those concerned, the coup was scuppered before it had even begun when the Zimbabwean police arrested everyone upon arrival in Harare. The problem was that plans for military coups in Africa tend to be common knowledge – even if most of the people involved are professionals who keep their lips sealed, there’s always one who boasts about it at the local bar or brothel. Not only was Obiang aware of the scheme, having been tipped off by the South African security service, the Scorpions, but Zimbabwean security was also on the case because they had become suspicious of Mann’s attempts to buy arms in the country.

So, when the passengers of the plane were arrested on immigration charges, Mann was also seized. Not one to lose his nerve, though, he tried to talk his way out of it, claiming the men were all on their way to a contract to provide security for diamond mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The story was believed until the Equatorial Guinean police got in touch, after arresting the advance party. Most outraged was the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, perhaps angry that there was a plan to create a military dictatorship that wasn’t going to involve him. When interrogated, Mann revealed that he had been introduced to Moto by a Lebanese businessman, Ely Calil, who had originated the coup plan.

The captive Mann knew he needed the support of the money men behind the scheme – probably to bribe his way out of prison and away from the danger of being executed by what passed for a justice system in Equatorial Guinea, should he be extradited. He managed to write a letter to his wife, Amanda, on scraps of paper, asking her to get in touch with the rich men in the shadows. Here is where he made his fatal error, however. Having neglected to agree codenames with his wife in advance, he resorted to schoolboy-like attempts to disguise the names, thus revealing the full details of who organised what when the letter was intercepted. Mann had referred to ‘Smelly’ and ‘Scratcher’. ‘Smelly’ was clearly Eli, but the South Africans rightly guessed that ‘Scratcher’ was Mark Thatcher, the businessman son of the former British prime minister, then living in South Africa. This letter and its laughable approach at disguise was the evidence that the South Africans needed to prosecute.

Thatcher was arrested and charged with providing logistical support for the coup, which became known as the ‘Dogs Of War’ plot after Frederick Forsyth’s novel of the same name, which dealt with a similar story. Although he denied any knowledge, it didn’t look good for Thatcher when the police noticed that his home in South Africa was up for sale and his bags were packed in what looked a lot like an attempt to evade the law.

Newspapers worldwide reported the case – many in Africa portraying the Mann affair as a British plot to once more rule the continent, which went to the very top of the establishment (Eton, the British Army, Margaret Thatcher). All this added to anti-British feeling and soured a few relations.