CHAPTER NINE

EXECUTIVE OUTCOMES IN WEST AFRICA

‘It was November 1995 and the outlook couldn’t have been bleaker’, recalls Neall Ellis.

I had no job, no money, I didn’t want to go back to work on the farm, the fishing issue was history and Zelda had left me and moved to Stellenbosch on her own. Frankly, I didn’t have a clue what to do next. Then the ‘phone rang.

The call that came from Ibis Air, the aviation component of Executive Outcomes (EO), was from somebody I knew from way back and who asked whether I was doing anything just then. I hesitated briefly so as not to appear over-eager and answered something about being busy, but what did he have in mind? He suggested that I get myself to Pretoria the next day and find out. I didn’t have the money for the air fare, so I borrowed some cash from a neighbour and headed to Cape Town Airport.

In one respect, the approach puzzled me. Early on, while EO was still working in Angola, they had spoken to me about taking a contract to fly gunships against the guerrilla forces of Dr Jonas Savimbi. The UNITA leader was somebody I’d worked with in the past and whom I both liked and admired for the consistent stand he’d made against a government that had been a Soviet client-state from the first day they had taken over from the Portuguese. It was Moscow that had helped to bring the ruling MPLA political party to power, so in my eyes this was a puppet regime. As events have subsequently proved, I was right.

I couldn’t help but refuse the EO offer, even though it was lucrative and money was short. I told EO that it would have meant going operational against somebody who had been a trusted ally in our Border War and, by my book, you don’t just start killing your friends because somebody offers you the cash to do so. These were pretty harsh words and I never thought they’d actually approach me a second time. However, they did.

I was told that the new job had nothing to do with Savimbi or Angola. The deployment would be in Sierra Leone. I was obviously pleased because I wouldn’t have to consider going against my conscience this time round.

Once Nellis arrived in Pretoria, it was explained to him that a particularly brutal bunch of rebels was in the process of murdering civilians in the tiny West African country of Sierra Leone. Moreover, they were doing so at an astounding rate and there didn’t appear to anybody able or willing to stop them. ‘Sierra Leone was remote, corrupt and inefficient,’ Nellis declared, ‘and from what I understood, everything centred around diamonds, which were abundant in the country’.

The EO contact told Nellis that although the UN had a large number of men there, the force was all but moribund. ‘They couldn’t organise a good crap if their lives depended on it’, commented another of the men present at the meeting.

Sadly, as I was soon to discover, all this was true. The last time the UN had fought a decent war was in the Congo, and that was 30 years earlier. The EO personnel manager explained that if I were willing to leave for Sierra Leone almost immediately, they would offer me a contract to fly choppers there and to become part of a fairly large component of aviators already active against the rebels.

Ibis Air, the company running the aviation side of things—as opposed to the mercenaries who were actually doing the ground work against the rebel force—was British owned and, as Nellis was to discover, ran a pretty tight ship.

Ibis’ directors had acquired two practically new Boeing 737s from surplus stock in the United States for US$1 million. The only problem with them was that their engines exceeded newly imposed FAA noise-limitation regulations. That effectively resulted in both aircraft being put out to pasture. Ibis snapped them up for use in the African conflicts in which the company was involved, both in Angola and Sierra Leone. The two passenger jets were used to move mercenaries and their supplies from South Africa to the various operational areas to the north.

Ibis also bought a number of other planes for use in the various African wars in which EO and its associates were involved, including at least one King Air, four Mi-8 helicopters (two each for Angola and Sierra Leone), a Cessna 337 for Sierra Leone, and a pair of former RAF Hawker Siddeley Andover CC Mk2 twin-prop transports, previously operated by No. 32 Squadron for the Queen’s Flight.

Ostensibly, the Andovers were for casualty evacuation and, indeed, they did save lives. However, overall they did comparatively little work because EO suffered minimal casualties. Most of the evacuations involved men who went down with tropical diseases, malaria especially. One of the Andovers was stationed at Luanda International Airport, which served the Angolan capital, and the other sat at Lungi, outside Freetown.

Nellis says of that time: ‘Of course, the deal I was offered was immensely appealing because, money apart, I already knew quite a few of the people associated with these ventures.’ He added that it was a pleasure renewing those old acquaintances.

It was then that I realised what I was missing when working with men like Zarif. While I was attached to the Ibis crowd, we all spoke English, enjoyed the same kind of food and beer and could get things done without the bullshit to which we were subjected in Bosnia.

Without more ado, I signed on the dotted line and was flown to Freetown in one of the Boeings the next morning. There were more revelations after we arrived at Lungi. We were billeted in one of the better Freetown suburbs—not that it made much difference, because the city had already been thoroughly trashed by the rebels—and stayed in what had once been an executive villa. It had high ceilings, tiled floors and walls that were concrete and all of 18 inches thick, which would have been comforting had there been anybody hurling rockets or mortars at us. Also, our doors were great hulks of steel and wood and were bulletproof. In the end though, while living in Freetown we never actually became targets, not then, anyway.

There were almost 20 of us living at the house and, as I was to discover, this little entourage was one great big, happy family, with a minor army of servants, cooks, cleaners, gardeners and others. They would arrive at dawn each morning, including Sundays, to attend to our needs.

The aircraft engineers in charge of keeping the helicopters operational were all American-trained Ethiopians, so they knew the business. They’d been recruited in Addis Ababa by one of Ibis’ managers, Paddy Mackay, who kept a beady eye on everybody in his fiefdom. An original, pint-high, crazy Irishman, who spoke with a thick brogue, his saving grace was that he was a pilot himself and he would tell people that he lived for his flying and that the Cessna was his ‘babe’.

The rest of the air crews were mainly South African, but there were some British and New Zealand nationals. One of the New Zealanders would sit on the old colonial veranda, arms outstretched, and toast the sunset with the comment: ‘God, I do love Africa!’

Those early days, just after EO had first arrived in Sierra Leone, were difficult. In initial discussions with the mercenary group, Chairman Valentine Strasser’s government promised the South African mercenaries everything they asked for, but, as it transpired, almost nothing was forthcoming. Consequently, to make things work, EO had to improvise and it did so very effectively. The purchase of the two Boeings was all part of said improvisation.

EO had its own ideas about what it had to do once it got to Freetown because hostilities were escalating at an alarming rate. Led by Foday Sankoh, a former Sierra Leonean Army NCO (he’d been trained in signals by the colonial army), the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) wasn’t so much an effective military force as one able to strike terror into the hearts of the populace.

The situation became so bad before the South Africans arrived that if the word went out that the RUF was heading somewhere, everybody there would grab their things and try to flee. Those who did not get away often had their arms or legs chopped off with machetes. Ordinary people suffered shocking privations at the hands of groups of pubescents who appeared to take great delight in savagery. Some of the innocents had their eyes gouged out and this author was shown a little girl of 18 months at the Murraytown Amputee Centre in a Freetown suburb who had had one of her arms sliced off in what was termed ‘a show of force’ by the rebel commander responsible for the atrocity.

Stories that emerged after EO arrived were macabre, sometimes horribly so. Others were too gut-wrenching to repeat. However, one deserves to go on record. A group of juvenile RUF rebels, having slit open the stomachs of two pregnant women in a remote bush village, made the victims boil the foetuses and eat them. They were told that if they did not, they would be killed. They were murdered anyway.

An EO patrol came upon this horrible spectre shortly afterwards and they were appalled. Totally incensed at this barbarism, for that is what it was, the squad set off on its own and went looking for the perpetrators. They tracked them down a short while later as they were taking a break at a stream and killed every last one of them.

Under the auspices of their British contacts, some senior EO executives had already visited Sierra Leone and met the youthful Chairman Strasser who had originally come to power at the age of 26. He was the youngest head of state in the world at the time. Former British SAS operator, Tony Buckingham, who had originally put together EO’s contract in Angola, had been looking for other opportunities and took it upon himself to introduce Strasser to EO’s directors. Meanwhile, he and his friends provided assessments of their own, based on reports gleaned from contacts in British Intelligence and elsewhere.

The situation, EO was told prior to their involvement, was critical. The organization would have to move quickly to have any hope of countering rebel advances. They went ahead anyway because promises of excellent returns, which included diamond mining concessions, were good.

Meanwhile, back in South Africa, Eeben Barlow, chief executive of EO, and his directors put together a team and in no time at all produced a working blueprint for the operation. This was rushed to London and Freetown just in time, as already the first elements of an RUF advance guard were on the outskirts of the capital.

Until EO arrived, nobody had a complete picture of what was going on in the interior of Sierra Leone. The South Africans had to assess the situation for themselves and this they could only do after having been active for a while because none of the men brought in by EO had been further than Freetown’s city limits. Part of the problem lay with the already desperate Valentine Strasser, who was hardly likely to level with the newcomers about what was really going on as he wouldn’t have wanted to frighten them off. However, he was not aware of what the South Africans were made of: almost all EO personnel sent north to quell the rebel insurrection in Angola and Sierra Leone had served time in their country’s Special Forces.¹

Fred Marafono, an illustrious, larger-than-life, former British SAS operative who had been living in Freetown had offered his services to the mercenary force around the time they delivered their blueprint for action. Married to a local girl, he was an ideal choice because he had good local knowledge and the kind of West African connections the company desired. Without prevarication, EO took him up on his offer after the company financial director, Michael Grunberg, had checked his background.

Marafono was not only familiar with what was going on in his adopted country, he’d been living on the periphery of some of the earlier fighting. At one stage, he’d recruited a group of his military pals and struck out deep into the interior to bring his in-laws to safety. In the process, he’d killed a number of rebels. From then on, the RUF were wary of this seasoned veteran and for very good reason. Before Foday Sankoh’s disciples were beaten, he killed scores of them.

What he told EO about the rebel force was sobering. The situation had all the ingredients of a long-term guerrilla struggle, he declared. Being ex-Special Forces himself, and having been faced with this kind of insurrection for a good part of his professional career, it was agreed that if anybody knew what was going on, he did. As a result, EO director Lafras Luitingh immediately formed two combat groups—a Mobile Group and a Fire force Group. Instructions were passed to his field commanders to prepare for action.

Heading EO’s mission in Freetown was Bert Sachse, a former Rhodesian SAS and Selous Scouts veteran who, until approached by EO to run the Sierra Leone mission, was a serving officer with the Recces. As he says today, ‘I didn’t even think about it. I’d made colonel and when the offer came, I wasted no time and took six weeks leave from the army’. A couple of days later, Sachse was heading for the west coast of Africa. He returned to South Africa after that brief session to resign his commission in the SADF and immediately went back to Freetown to take command of all mercenary operations in Sierra Leone.

Sachse was an obvious choice as field commander, not only because he was an experienced bush warrior, but also because he’d seen a good deal of fighting in his day. As a senior operations officer in Angola during the Border War period, he’d crossed swords with Soviet- and Cuban-backed battle groups numerous times and invariably came out on top, although in his last encounter with Castro’s forces in the Cuando region, a shell fired by a T-54/55 tank exploded in a tree above his IFV and he took a hefty chunk of shrapnel in his back. He conceded years later that he was lucky to be alive.

For all that, Bert Sachse had always been the thinking man’s soldier. His vision was never clouded by immediate demands and his views came across as clear and dispassionate. He had the ability to view conditions from every perspective, blemishes and all, and if he gave an order he expected it to be expedited immediately.

By the time Neall Ellis arrived in the country, EO forces had driven the rebels back into the interior and had also managed to retake the diamond fields at Kono, which EO then used as their main base in the interior.

I started my flying along the west coast of Africa in one of the EO Mi-8s with Mark von Zorgenvrei, an oversized, very jovial colleague who had served with me in the South African Air Force. Initially, while Mark put me through the conversion, I served as his co-pilot, but a few days later I took over as flight commander, in part, because I was already familiar with these machines.

Meanwhile, the war in Angola had been all but won so large numbers of EO troops were surplus to requirements. Most of these men were transferred northwards to Freetown at short notice, which meant that the majority of the time we were deploying those troops out into the interior.

My initial contract was worked on the basis of four weeks in and two weeks out, all of it on full pay. This was made easy by the Boeing’s bi-weekly visits. The terms were different from those of most private military or security companies, where the money stops when you’re on leave.

EO had suddenly started picking up problems from the Sierra Leonean government and the word was out that EO’s Sierra Leone contract was coming unstuck. ‘The company hadn’t been paid for months and, as with this sort of thing, you can only carry your principles for so long’, he commented.

‘By March 1996, our pilot strength had been cut from an initial nine to four. With one of the aviators on leave at any one time, that didn’t leave us with a full crew each time we were called out’, commented Nellis. He explained that some of the small-scale stuff like reconnaissance and pinpointing the positions of enemy camps was left to the Cessna 337 fixed wing, which he also started flying when time allowed. He would go up after dark with some of his people in the back wearing NVGs and search for enemy camp sites, which would often be found because of their fires. Other times there would be a prominent glimmering in the jungle where something was going on below the triple canopy, all of which the aviators would pinpoint with their GPS.

The following morning we’d load up a pair of choppers with a fighting group, together with mortars and bombs, and take them into a landing zone near to where we had reconnoitred the previous night; then we’d take off again and watch the action from above. If the guys on the ground needed us to lay down any covering fire, the side gunners would oblige. When it was all over, we’d count the dead, load up everybody again, return to base and head off to Paddy’s for a couple of beers, or more. It was all fairly mundane, but at least we were achieving results.

Nellis’ helicopters were based at Cockerill Barracks on the eastern fringes of Freetown, an ideal position, he reckoned, because there was a huge swamp around three sides of it. However, although this headquarters was arguably the most important military base in the country, the only people who observed any kind of martial routine were the South Africans based there.

Each morning at about eight, after all the EO personnel had mustered for the day, Sierra Leone’s military forces would be lounging around sipping their Pega-Packs of locally brewed gin and getting doped-up. There was usually quite a lot of drugs around as well. It was hardly a satisfactory situation because you couldn’t miss the acrid smell of ganja that hung over the camp as if somebody had aerial sprayed the base.

Obviously, we weren’t happy. We were sharing the same space and would sometimes feel vulnerable in front of these hyped-up troops, as we could never be sure if they were going to pull a weapon and start shooting. That meant that most of us avoided moving around Cockerill earlier in the day if we could help it.

We also had a disparate bunch of Russians to contend with. Hired to fly the country’s lone Mi-24 gunship, they were perpetually drunk. I recall that one of their ground crew members, who seemed to act like a political commissar from Soviet times, was constantly arguing and full of hooch. It eventually became a fairly serious problem both for us and the government.

Looking back to when they arrived in Sierra Leone in 1995, one of the first tasks facing the South Africans had been to train the Sierra Leonean troops who were detached to work with them. They were an unruly, unprofessional lot, but were rated by their officers, most of whom weren’t much better, as ‘the best of our best’.

Sierra Leonean troops at the base were very cautious at first as they were wary of these people from ‘down south’. While the civilian population was ecstatic about the new arrivals, the soldiers of the Republic of Sierra Leone Military Forces (RSLMF) weren’t so sure. It took the tough South African veterans about a day to quash any doubts about their ability. Sachse commented:

The guys who came from Angola were more than useful. They not only looked fit and strong, nobody who had anything to do with them could dispute that this was one capable bunch of fighters: you could see it in their mién and by the way they handled their weapons.

Things took a turn for the better when their hosts discovered that the men had been fighting Savimbi for a year. Moreover, it had become clear to the South Africans that Foday Sankoh’s men were not in the same league as many of UNITA’s seasoned guerrillas who, when really pressed, could remain on the trot for a day or more at a stretch. ‘We should know. It was our guys who’d originally trained Savimbi’s special units’, Sachse declared.

In the original agreement with EO, the Sierra Leonean Government had promised that there would be vehicles at EO’s disposal at Cockerill. However, these did not materialise. Undeterred, Sachse commandeered a handful of Land Rovers. Among them were four that had been shipped out of the UK for use by a mining subsidiary linked to EO. He also ‘acquired’ a couple of heavier trucks from the Sierra Leonean armed forces and some of the men did what was needed to make them ready for ops. Others were sent to scout around town for spare parts. More vehicles were expected, he explained, but since they were coming by sea, it would be a month or more before they got there.

Sachse went on:

What they did have was a pair of not-so-new Soviet BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles that were a part of the original army inventory. There were two more guarding Valentine’s residence and we couldn’t touch them. Like everything else, all those machines had done a lot of time without maintenance … the tracks on one were pretty worn, while the other ‘was sort of OK’, although neither of the turrets would turn. Also, the guns looked like they’d never been cleaned and their electrics were totally defunct.

That meant that if EO intended using these IFVs operationally, almost everything on board would have to be manually controlled, which would include physically cranking the turret to bring it to bear. Jos Grobelaar, a tough EO veteran and former Koevoet combatant who liked to double as a technician, got to work and sorted out some of the problems. In the end, quite a few of the others helped because they had all worked with BMPs in Angola and had mastered the weapon’s idiosyncrasies. Also, they’d quickly learnt to keep them mobile, sometimes while the fighting raged all round them.

One of Colonel Sachse’s deputies was another old Angolan hand, Colonel Duncan Rykaart, who had been with the company almost since its inception. One of his first jobs was to create an effective intelligence unit together with an operations room, complete with operatives in the field. Using his vast experience of this kind of combat, gained while serving in the South African military, he told senior Sierra Leonean Army officers, with whom he was in daily contact, that they needed to train and integrate interpreters and analysts. It was an essential part of the war, he explained, although he shouldn’t have had any need to. It took him no time at all to appreciate that hardly any of the indigenous senior staff with whom he was dealing had the vaguest idea what he was talking about because, for most, it was something they had never seen done before. Nonetheless, he kept at it and an ‘Int’ network gradually started to take shape.

Conditions at Cockerill Barracks, where most of the 80-strong EO contingent lived, were appalling. Accommodation that had been promised never materialized. On the contrary, living conditions, if anything, deteriorated: the place was inundated by rats because the men also ate their food there; there was also no air conditioning, which, because of mosquitoes, made sleep difficult; and since the men had no place to secure their personal belongings, pilfering became a problem.

There was a lot more that wasn’t up to scratch. A single tap serviced the entire garrison, together with two modest-sized bathrooms: all for 80 men. Rations weren’t much better. The bulk consisted of homemade parcels that had been flown out from South Africa, a lot of it commercial packs of sugar, coffee and other perishables that had been bought in supermarkets and bundled into manageable ‘kits’ by wives. The most notable problem in Freetown was its humidity, which can be both clinging and fetid, and which meant that everything quickly deteriorated because it was packed in paper bags. Within a week, for instance, a half-pound of coffee became a lump of brown rock. The same happened to sugar.

According to Nellis, much of the time he spent with EO in Sierra Leone was occupied with putting local troops through their paces at a training barracks outside Freetown. It was his job to teach them helicopter trooping drills.

One day, we had a bunch of them arrive, almost all with their heads shaven and unceremoniously decorated by little plaster adhesive dressings, like those used for a cut finger. It was unusual, so we asked the EO sergeant major what it was about and he laughed. He called them ‘battle wounds’, and explained that that when the trainee troops didn’t listen to orders, they were given a sharp crack across the head. ‘Which is why we carry these sticks’, he said, pointing to bulky shillelagh tucked under his arm. ‘We can see very quickly who’s performing well and who is not’ he jocularly explained.

As it turned out, the EO training programme was tough. It was also uncompromising. However, in the end the South Africans turned out a small group of competent, trustworthy and reliable soldiers. Two of them served as side gunners on board Nellis’ Mi-17 and both proved to be outstanding fighters. Those trainees who could not, or would not shape up, were sent back to their original units.

In spite of problems with the government, which were dealt with as they arose, usually with a measure of compromise and adaptation, things generally seemed to work themselves out in the customary African way and the offensive against the RUF proceeded steadily. The rebels, meanwhile, were made very aware that they were facing some extremely determined opposition from small EO units who, with gunship back-up, ranged well into the interior.

Very early on in the campaign, EO commanders had demonstrated a ruthless brutality in the implementation of their pacifying programme. Moreover, they only took prisoners if they believed they might be useful. Neall Ellis explained:

We began an extensive offensive against the RUF in September 1996, downriver from Kenema, where we’d discovered they’d established their first headquarters in that region. For a while we’d experimented with additional firepower on all the aircraft, and finally fitted a 12.7mm heavy machine gun into the side door of the Hip. It was the first time we’d done so on an Mi-8, and it worked very well because we flew with the doors off anyway and were able to give close air support to our ground units using HE instead of ball ammunition.

As Nellis was to recall, driving the rebels into the interior after EO’s first series of battles in Sierra Leone had a significant effect not only on Freetown, but on much of the rest of the country. As the word spread, the people felt that they could breathe again. Also, it stymied Sankoh’s hopes of occupying the capital, although it was not the last time that he would try his luck.

Meanwhile, the South Africans were hailed as heroes wherever they went in the city. Never mind that they had come from a country steeped in racial discrimination, they had put their lives on the line in an African state and saved the day for everybody. The job was never easy and some of the men were killed while fulfilling their obligations, but they did what they had been paid to do and felt good.

However, the war was far from over. Sankoh’s RUF still had a sizeable force in the hills around the capital and one group after another was dealt with in the weeks that followed EO’s success. Also, for the first time, usable intelligence was coming in which eased things considerably for the gunships.

On a personal level, Nellis recalls, it was impossible not to get involved in the plight of the people of Sierra Leone. One of the victims was a lovely young woman: ‘She’d been crowned Miss Sierra Leone a short while before and had a can of paraffin thrown over her by her boyfriend because he was jealous of all the attention she was getting. The poor soul was terribly burned. I tried to raise funds to bring her back to South Africa for treatment, but that was in vain. She died soon afterwards.’ The tragedy affected Nellis so deeply that once the fighting in Sierra Leone had subsided, one of his dreams was to establish a burns care unit there.

Back in South Africa not long afterwards, Nellis once more found himself without work. One of his EO associates from East London offered him a job as manager of a Freetown supermarket, but Nellis felt that the $1,000 a month that came with the deal simply wasn’t worth it. ‘Just as well I refused’, he recalls. ‘Had I been in Sierra Leone, he would probably have asked me to fly the planeload of marijuana he’d organised to England. He flew it himself in the end. However, the Brits were onto him and when the aircraft landed somewhere in Cornwall, the cops were waiting. He ended up in prison for several years.’