Cry Havoc

Simon Mann

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781868424504
• eBook ISBN: 9781868424511
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

On 7 March 2004, former SAS soldier and mercenary Simon Mann prepared to take off from Harare International Airport with an aeroplane full of heavy weaponry and guns for hire. Their destination: the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea. Their mission: to remove one of the most brutal dictators in Africa in a privately organised coup d'état. The plot had the tacit approval of Western intelligence agencies and, according to Mann, the backing of a European government and the endorsement of a former British Prime Minister. Simon Mann had personally planned, overseen and won two wars in Angola and Sierra Leone. Everything should have gone right. Why, then, did it go so wrong? When Simon was released from five years' incarceration in two of Africa's toughest prisons, he made worldwide headlines. Since then, he has spoken to nobody about his experiences. Now, he is telling everything, including: • His belief that the CIA deliberately compromised the coup to court favour with Equatorial Guinea's President Obiang, in return for access to the country's vast oil resources. • How the British government approached Simon in the months preceding the Iraq war, asking him to suggest ways in which a justified invasion of Iraq could be engineered. • The financial involvement of a controversial and internationally famous member of the British House of Lords in the plot, backed up by banking records. • Simon will also tell of his pain when he had to tell his wife, Amanda, who gave birth to their fourth child while he was incarcerated, that he believed he would never be freed. This is Simon's remarkable first-hand account of his life: an account that will read like a thriller as it takes us into the world of mercenaries and spooks; of murky international politics, big oil and big bucks; of action, danger, love, despair and betrayal.

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

SATURDAY 6 MARCH 2004: D DAY MINUS TWO: EN ROUTE WONDERBOOM TO PILANESBERG, SOUTH AFRICA

Gun-smoke-grey vapour rips past; a silver spate river of cloud. A jagged mountain ridgeback lies too close beneath the thin metal hull of our Hawker biz jet. The Krugersdorp Ridge. Rock-crag fingers claw my arse.

Up front, the three pilots bicker and shout. Pien is number three. His arse is on the jump seat, but this is his airplane. Pien doesn’t give a toss about ‘cockpit human resource management’ – he knows this Instrument Approach. He knows the Krugersdorp Ridge. The other two have got us below the published approach height; I can see it. That’s a fuck-up. Pien, bollocks them. Fly up!

Imprecisely, we are flying a Precision Instrument Approach into Pilanesberg, near Sun City,1 a playground for wealthy whites.

From our base, Wonderboom, Pretoria, that’s a 20-minute hop. This odd route is part of today’s cunning plan, by which we will fly out of South Africa without being clocked by Immigration. I mean, we will be clocked, of course, but this makes it easier for the powers that be to scrub around their seeming dopiness in failing to detect a large number of mercenaries leaving the country at the same time. That’s if we make it as far as a landing at Pilanesberg.

Rock reefs rip up through cloud below. I don’t need an altimeter; through my port-side window I can see that the ground is too close. The flying is shit; this cockpit tantrum is an omen.

Here I am, about to give the ‘GO GO GO’ on the most risky job of my ramshackle career. The lives of many now hang from this beam of fate: victory or an abyss. But bad omens hurt.

Thankfully, ten minutes later we’ve landed. We ask to clear Pilanesberg Customs and Immigration, outbound. We josh black officialdom. But Pien has bribed them.

We take off for Kinshasa,2 Cathedral of Crime, heart of the ‘Heart of Darkness’.

We reach the cruise. Our Hawker is straight and level – MACH 0.74, 440 knots TAS (true airspeed), Flight Level 340 (approximately 34,000 feet ASL [above sea level]) – en route from Pilanesberg to Kinshasa. One thousand four hundred and thirty nautical miles (NM); Estimated Time En Route (ETE) 3 hrs 30 mins.

The cabin is fridge chilly. I zip my jacket to the neck. If I tell the air crew to warm us, then in five minutes we’ll be toast. After their toddler tantrums I don’t want to talk to them.

Sitting back in my wanker’s black leather biz jet executive power chair, I close my eyes, breathe deeply, count to ten. I listen to myself. Who I am, what I am about.

Tugged, scratched, I pull myself through tangled jungle thorn. Tearing with haste. Hunted. Never sure which way. Harried, soaked. Sweat and dirt grime. With this piece and that, I’ve cobbled together a monster child. I drag him along with me, through sopping, super-heated thicket. Can I shoot the little bastard now, after all this? I wish. That’s how I feel.

More calm, my mind runs through the night before. Dinner with Frank Thomas. Red-faced, fat. I find him pompous, sly, often drunk. Blimp. He is a liar and traitor by profession – a private spook – but he hasn’t betrayed me yet … and he is clever. It was Frank who introduced me to some of the great and the good in Constantia, Cape Town.

Frank is on my payroll for this Op – a coup d’état against the regime who rule EG: a private-venture Assisted Regime Change (ARC) – all the rage. Frank has already been paid $10,000. He’s my spy and secret agent – into Nigeria, that is – and he’s set up and ready. He’ll go to the capital, Abuja, straight after the coup has struck. He’s already been up there once for me.

After that he is earmarked to ride shotgun to those EG locals who will be running security and anti-corruption in the new interim government. That’s the one I’m about to put in power. I hope.

Frank is also my snout into South African National Intelligence (SA NI)3 In fact – come to think about it – he is more like one of the Liaison Officers we had in Northern Ireland than a snout. Jesus. An LO4 between me and NI? But that’s the way this bloody thing’s going.

Frank’s fat face of last night swims in front of my shut eyes. It looks flushed across the dinner table, as if through a Vaselined lens, soft focus, candle-lit.

‘Well, ha ha ha, Simon! Dicky and the Director…’

‘The Director, Frank?’

‘The Director of NI.’

‘Go on!’

‘Well, ha ha ha… They think it’s funny how you’re dashing in and out of the country … up and down Africa … up and down like a whore’s drawers.’

This is Frank-speak. Blimp telling me how closely I am being watched.

But I know that I am being closely watched from other – better – sources than Fat Face. For God’s sake: I’ve seen the transcripts of my own phone calls with Amanda, complete with snotty handwritten shit down the margins.

But I’ve also been shown the top-secret INT (intelligence) report that tells SA NI of our coup plot. Of course, that report’s spook author – not Frank – had been unaware that he was in fact telling them about a coup that – in the lush imagination of NI at least – is their coup anyway.

I’d not only seen that intelligence: I’d ordered it to be hacked off the computer of the creep in question, a spook who was sending reports to both MI6 and the CIA.

Frank stuffed in more food.

‘Mmm… mmm… So, it looks like everything will work out then, doesn’t it?’

‘What do you mean, Frank?’

‘I didn’t think it would work.’

‘You’ve said that before … often.’

‘I thought that Severo Moto wasn’t well enough known – to become the new President of Equatorial Guinea, I mean. But now you’re going … and everything’s gonna be all right! … So when are you all off, then?’

‘Tomorrow morning – to Kinshasa – to see the Greek… By the way, thanks for the intro, Frank.’

‘He’s good … but his partner is the Boss, don’t forget… That means even the Greek has to do what he’s told.’

‘Sure … then Harare – direct from Kinshasa…’

‘What are you flying?’

‘Pien’s Hawker … so we’ve got the range… D Day is the day after…’

We both paused, knowing that D Day might mean D for Death, or – God forbid – capture. For me it might mean that. Not for Frank.

‘Can you get me the contact details for Severo Moto, Simon? The Director asked me to ask you.’

‘I’ll clear it – then let you have the numbers tomorrow.’

I think: South Africa’s thumbs-up for what’s going on couldn’t come clearer.

During dinner my mind keeps hopping to Amanda, the woman I love. The child inside Amanda – one she had told me about only a few days before – would be our fourth. I’m in love with her. How many times had the two of us had dinner together here in the Sandton Towers, Jo’burg’s finest?

I think of when I drove the children to school just last week. When I said goodbye to them, the idea like a burr in my head had been that I might never see them again. I may not.

For the thousandth time I scan my virtual instrument panel of this Op: a coup d’état – a putsch – against the gangster regime who boss EG. My feet are cold: I want to see a red light. One would do. With just one clear red I can jack it in, shoot the bastard child.

We are living dangerously. Sixty-nine mercenaries fly from South Africa to Harare tomorrow night. They will rendezvous in Harare with me and the weapons. Then we fly into Malabo, capital of EG, to execute Plan E: a coup against the gangster regime which tyrannises the poor bastards who scratch away their lives in that oil-rich shithole. Plan E for Easy. Sure.

On D Day – the day after tomorrow – in the early hours, we’ll take out EG’s self-appointed President Teodoro Obiang, one of the most brutal tyrants in Africa. We’re flying in with the exiled opposition leader, Severo Moto. He’ll take Obiang’s place. Moto’s mission is to take democracy and the rule of law into EG. To spend their petrodollars on clean water, education programmes, blitzing malaria – the good stuff.

Our plan – our hope – is for a bloodless coup. Just in case it isn’t, we’ll be bombed up with enough guns and ammo to win a war.

It is 2004 and regime change is in vogue. The US and UK governments have just unseated another despot: Saddam Hussein in Iraq. We too are doing the right thing. But, as I feign sleep in the Hawker, it’s as I say. My feet are cold. We are living dangerously.

We’ve already tried this Op once, two weeks ago – Plan D for Daisy. But the little flower fucked up. After Daisy was all over – without tears, just – we had to laugh. The little flower turned into a rolling goat fuck. Better than anything else – giggled the troops – had been the sight of three DC-3s (the WWII vintage Dakota – except these all had the old South African Defence Force (SADF) conversion, their two piston radials each replaced by Pratt & Whitney PT6 gas-turbine prop engines) sitting all afternoon on the apron of Ndola International, Zambia, stuffed with 70 mercenaries and their kit, waiting for the ‘Red ON … Green ON … GO!’ A ‘GO’ that never came.

There are geeky anoraks who would find that sight a bigger, better thrill than Farnborough Bloody Air Show. To others it would smell as fis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Disclaimer
• Maps
• Prologue
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Postscript
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Appendices
• Picture section
• Copyright page