The Wonga Coup (22 page)

The latter view prevailed. The next question was how to act. An option was to arrest the plotters before they left South Africa. While foiling the coup, it would be hard to prosecute them for breaking anti-mercenary laws. Another choice was to warn Equatorial Guinea to fight the mercenaries on arrival in Malabo. That was risky. Mann's invaders might yet triumph. Even if the hired guns were quashed, there would be bloodshed and another case of instability in Africa. A third option was to tell Zimbabwe, whose police could catch the plotters red-handed as they collected the weapons. The hired guns might be treated roughly, but that would set a lesson for others. ‘We allowed things to go through … We wanted to send a message. We stand for peace on the continent,' a government spokesman said later. A call was made to Harare.

Intriguingly, Zimbabwe's rulers seemed to believe Mann was a threat to them. Zimbabwe's government had grown increasingly paranoid and its relations with Britain, the old colonial power, were at their lowest point ever. Some Zimbabweans even worried that Britain might launch or sponsor a military attack on Zimbabwe itself. A senior official in the ruling party, Zanu PF, and close ally of Robert Mugabe gave
an interview for this book. Efriam Masiwa spoke in an unlit room late one afternoon in Harare, in March 2005. He denied Zimbabwe had laid any trap to catch mercenaries, but said officials had been worried about Mann. They had suspected the former SAS officer might have been working for the wicked British. ‘These guys wanted to put us in a corner,' he explained. Once Zimbabwe knew of a plan to attack Equatorial Guinea, such fears were confirmed. ‘If they had succeeded it would be known that the weapons used to remove the Equatoguinean president were acquired from Zimbabwe', and that would ‘authenticate the British [and American] thinking about Zimbabwe … as an outpost of tyranny'. It is a convoluted argument, but Masiwa believes the Zimbabwean government ‘would be blamed for the coup' in Equatorial Guinea. Thus: ‘It was not us that trapped the Simon Mann group. It was the Simon Mann group that was trying to trap us.'

Back in Malabo, rumours of a coup had been spreading for weeks. Expatriate oil men knew to stay in their compounds. A foreign aid worker later told a French documentary team that ‘everyone knew by March there would be a coup. Everyone knew. Moto couldn't keep a secret. And all knew that Madrid's intelligence was involved in the affair.' One expert on Equatorial Guinea says several senior people, including President Obiang, had slipped quietly out of the country by early March. The last to leave, said this source, was Gabriel, the moderate second son.

Du Toit recalls briefing his employees that Saturday, 6 March. He told his men to take cars to the airport, with bottled water. According to one version, they were to leave the keys in the ignition for the arriving team. By now they, too, should have noticed the swirling rumours of a plot and sensed a threat. Mark Schmidt, the youngest and least experienced of
du Toit's forward team, later spoke to a South African reporter of an ominous atmosphere under Malabo's grey skies. ‘On Saturday the soldiers and police were very busy all around us. We asked the people what was going on and they said they were arresting strangers.' It was obvious there were problems.

At dawn on Sunday 7 March, the plotters were ready. After a long flight from the United States, via Sao Tome, the white Boeing 727 landed at Lanseria airport, near Pretoria. Its American registration, N4610, remained on the starboard side. Its chrome-rimmed engines glinted in the morning sun. From Lanseria it hopped the short distance to Wonderboom airport. There Niel Steyl and his assistants took charge, relieving the American crew.

That Sunday an ex-soldier called Raymond Archer was sitting down for lunch with his girlfriend in Pretoria. He had returned the night before from a bodyguard job in Haiti, in the Caribbean. He took a call from Harry Carlse. ‘I've a job for you,' said Carlse. ‘Leon Lotz has pulled out, we need you. You have two hours to get to the plane'. He gave no details but told Archer to go to Wonderboom airport. There would be a full explanation mid-air. Archer agreed and kissed his girlfriend goodbye. Lotz, witting or not, made a smart choice. Archer, the last recruit for the Wonga Coup, had just made a terrible one. ‘He was the unluckiest guy,' concludes a relative of the Steyl brothers.

Lourens Horn organised a bus to get the footsoldiers to Wonderboom airport. There James Kershaw counted everyone on, noted names and checked each person's bank details. The plane was loaded with blue and black bags, each marked
with the brand ‘Carry All'. One was stuffed with new lace-up boots still bearing labels. Another held sandals. There were sleeping bags, bull horns, bolt cutters, a sledgehammer with a green head, radios, a first aid kit and a satellite phone. They filed on board, sixty-four men scattered about the cabin seats. Kershaw stayed behind.

At 4 p.m. the plane took off, heading due north. It barely had time to climb before landing again, this time in Polokwane, the dry town halfway to the Zimbabwean border. Everyone cleared emigration. It was a warm and sleepy afternoon, late on a Sunday and late in the summer. Back on board, the men settled down to doze, play cards or chat.

In Zimbabwe, Mann finished lunch with Captain Mutize of ZDI. He confirmed his technical problems with planes were over. A Boeing would collect the weapons that evening. He returned to Cresta Lodge and checked the others were ready. At 6 p.m. he sent a message, the last of several, to a contact in South Africa. He confirmed that all was going to plan and he was in position.

At 6.20 p.m. the Boeing lifted from the runway in Polokwane. It reached cruising height some twenty minutes later and crossed the wide Limpopo river, entering Zimbabwean airspace and speeding above the darkening farmland. A few stared from the plane's port side windows as the sun slipped below the horizon.

Niel Steyl, the pilot, radioed the air traffic control tower in Harare. A few days earlier permission had been obtained to land at the airport and proceed to its military zone. He says he called ahead to the airport, reporting a need to stop for fuel and to load cargo. In pilot's parlance, he wanted a ‘technical stop'. He claims, too, he admitted to having sixtyeight passengers aboard, but none destined for Harare. ‘We
landed, refuelled, parked in the military area. We were still in the international airport, but a different apron. We crossed no gates, we were still in no-man's land. We waited two hours. I went to sleep in the cockpit.' Zimbabwean officials recount another story, saying Niel Steyl did not report his passengers, who were concealed in the darkened cabin of the plane. Written instructions were circulated telling the men to keep still and silent after landing. Lights were to remain off. One air traffic controller, Faith Gutsire, says she was told there were only ‘three crew on board'.

One of the men on board describes the arrival:

We landed in Harare it was dark. All we knew was we're going to DRC [Congo]. They told us we're in Zimbabwe to get fuel and cargo. Some of us were asleep. Some were in economy class and could not hear. I was at the back, right at the back, back. They told us, ‘This is not our destination, we are here to refuel.' There were no written instructions for everybody, just one piece of paper. The lights were on when we landed. Some of us were playing cards, some were drinking, some sleeping. We were three hours on the plane at Harare. We landed at 7 p.m. and stayed until 11 p.m. I was sleeping. Carlse and Loutjkie [Horn] came in and even Simon Mann came in with customs officials. I didn't see him, but he walked in and came out. He said, ‘Everything is OK.' Then Hendrik Hamman, the [co]pilot, says he's coming back, he's just having a coffee and he'd be back.

Lourens Horn left Cresta Lodge, in Harare, and went with Mann and Carlse to the military part of the airport that Sunday evening. The 727 had already landed. Carlse spoke to some of the crew on the plane. An official ‘told Simon Mann
he would inspect the plane as a standard procedure', recalls Captain Mutize. Mann ‘tried to resist' and offered a bribe, but Mutize assured him inspection was normal practice. Mutize says Mann first claimed there were only a couple of crew and cargo handlers aboard. Now the story changed. In fact, he said, there were over sixty men ‘whom he claimed were medics and logistics personnel'.

Then Carlse, Horn and Mann were asked to inspect the weapons in crates atop pallets in a nearby hangar. Mutize continues: ‘While inspection went on, I took Simon Mann and his assistants to the parachute training hangar, where a truck loaded with the arms and ammunition was [parked].' Horn recalls he and Carlse walked up to the crates in the hangar and looked at the weapons. The goods did not correspond to Mann's order, they complained. An operative of the Central Intelligence Organisation – a man called Nhamo Mutasa – was filming from the shadows.

‘I woke with a barrel of a gun in my face.'

Footsoldier

Several thousand kilometres north of Zimbabwe, in the Canary Islands, the escort team was ready. From this launching point, Mann's close friend Greg Wales would escort Severo Moto, the man who would be president, to Equatorial Guinea. They would be flown by Crause Steyl and another pilot, Alex Molteno. David Tremain, the British financier, and Karim Fallaha, the Lebanese investor, were coming along for the ride. This team would head south east, converging with Mann's team as it flew north and west from Zimbabwe. If all went to plan, Moto would be brought into a secure Malabo airport roughly an hour after Mann had overseen Obiang's removal.

Moto's entourage had been scattered between different hotels on Gran Canaria. Now they gathered at a small coastal airstrip, Club Aeroport. The Beechcraft King Air plane, registration ZSNBJ, was primed and ready. Crause Steyl's aviation company had hired it three months earlier in South Africa on a ‘dry lease', meaning he provided his own crew and maintenance. Finally it would be used. But, to Steyl's dismay, the airstrip was busy.

That Sunday afternoon, motorbike enthusiasts were using the runway as a racetrack. The event could not be stopped. Steyl and the others were to leave without drawing undue attention to themselves, so could only wait. To their mounting frustration, the bikers droned on for three more hours.

Just before dusk the bikers cleared the strip. One of the men aboard the King Air plane says Molteno took the pilot position on the left of the cockpit while Steyl took the other seat. The cabin was small. At the front sat Tremain, facing sideways. Wales sat on the right, looking forward. At the back were four seats in a square. Moto took the furthest corner on the right side. He had a speech and an economic plan ready. The plan promised to get small things done fast, to show people a better life under the new president. Equatorial Guinea would be the ‘star of Africa' and ‘a new model for the continent'. The new ‘state, discreetly but effectively present' would promote economic growth, cut poverty and push ‘monetary orthodoxy'. It was stirring stuff. Opposite sat Karim Fallaha. On Moto's left sat his closest assistant. ‘Sargoso was the main planner in the Moto group. He let Moto be as clean as possible, to play the part of Good King Wenceslas,' says one aboard. A minister in Moto's ‘government', probably a man called Biyogo, took the last chair.

According to one source on the plane, though no one else volunteered this, another aircraft shadowed the King Air that night: ‘There was also another plane on the way to Bamako and I suspect Tremain and Sargoso knew more about that one. It had more Spaniards and Moto's people on board. Sargoso was liaising between the planes.' The source adds obliquely that there were ‘Spanish guys, serious ones … [and] some serious American guys' on the Canary Islands. This plotter implies that the second plane and the unamed ‘guys' in fact
represented American intelligence, and thus some sort of American approval for the plot.

The take-off was thrilling. Alex Molteno took the controls, leaving Steyl in the co-pilot's seat. He wore a golf hat and explained that he would take the plane low – ‘as low as you can go, over the wave tips and below radar for the first 120 miles'. The small aircraft lifted up from beach level, but just to the height of a single-storey house. The idea, explains a plotter, was to lie low beneath the radar screens of local air traffic controllers, allowing officials to say – honestly – there was no record of the plane's departure. ‘Which is what the Spanish briefed us to do,' he says. The small flying club is at sea level and they were soon skimming past boats and over a calm sea. The sun was low and the passengers looking from the windows had a view as if they were in a speed boat. They passed two or three cruise liners, glancing up at their funnels and windows. Everyone was briefed not to move. ‘If you need to go to the toilet, tough luck. If you need a drink, don't get up, get someone to pass it to you.'

Eventually, to save on fuel and once a safe distance had been reached, the pilot rose up again. Fly too long at a low level and the pilot risks losing a sense of proportion. Steyl explains: ‘The danger is you can't judge height over water, there is no reference. A wave can be one centimetre or ten metres.' But for ongoing security the plane's radios were kept silent. There were rumours of a couple of F16 fighter jets in the Canaries, though no one expected them to be scrambled for a departing plane. There was a security lapse, says Steyl: ‘An asshole at the airport, a manager at the Club Aeroport, he phoned the bigger tower at the main airport. He told them a plane has just taken off with no flight plan and flying low.' But by sunset the plane was heading towards mainland Africa, to the Moroccan coast
and then to the western edge of the great Sahara. By the time the Atlantic had finally given way to desert, the night had set in. They flew 2000 km (1250 miles) to Mali. At this stage the pilots were relaxed, chatting about possible loot in Equatorial Guinea. Steyl had his heart set on some aircraft – ‘P51s, Mustangs' – that were sitting somewhere in crates in Malabo. He heard there were three old planes: ‘We'd sell one and keep two. We were making plans for how to get them.'