BACK TO SIERRA LEONE— THE SANDLINE DEBACLE
In early February 1998, Neall Ellis was back home again when he got a call from one of his old friends from EO. He asked whether Neall would look at working in Sierra Leone again. Neall remembers:
The money was good and once more I was broke. The company I would be working for was Sandline International, which was run by Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Spicer OBE, a former British Army officer. There was a specific demand and should I be interested, I was to be in Johannesburg ‘within hours’ to talk, which tells you that nothing really changes in this business.
I’d already heard of Spicer and the private military company for which he worked. He’d emerged from the Falklands War as one of Britain’s leading battalion commanders, having fought in battles such as the Battle of Mount Tumbledown.
The offer from Spicer represented a much-needed lifeline for Nellis and a day later he was heading for Conakry, the capital of the Republic of Guinea, Sierra Leone’s nearest neighbour on the far west coast of Africa. From there, he was told, he would be flown to Freetown by the company. He remembers:
Obviously the question of visas did arise at some point, but nobody thought it important enough to examine the matter in detail. We thought Sandline would take care of all that. However, we thought wrong and when I arrived at Conakry, sans visa, I was put straight back on the plane and returned to South Africa. What it meant for me was the inconvenience of a journey of more than 12,000km and all the dubious African travel crap that went with it—bad food, sleepless nights, mosquito-infested airport terminals and, of course, the obfuscations of legions of what can best be termed as ‘Little Hitlers’, each one of them wishing to impose their will on us transients just wanting to board our planes and move on.
When Nellis did eventually get to Freetown it was on an Embraer that was in such bad shape that he believed it should never have been allowed out of the hangar, never mind carry passengers. He was met at Lungi International Airport by former EO senior officer Bert Sachse, the Country Manager, and his old pal ‘Juba’ Joubert, with whom he had escaped from Zaire. Nellis takes up the story:
My first impression of Sierra Leone was that not much had changed, except that Freetown was more run down than before and was showing its scars. There was evidence of the serious fighting at the airfield the previous year, when the RUF rebels had been ensconced on one side of the airport and the Nigerian Army on the other. It had apparently been a classic showdown and the Lagos team won, with the ‘home side’ forced to evacuate their positions and flee into the jungle.
Once formalities were over, I was taken to a house that had originally been commandeered by the Nigerians and offered to Sandline as a temporary base. It was a big place, and was eventually turned into the Mahera Beach Hotel. However, when I was there it was blessed with neither power nor water. Since the crew wouldn’t have been able to manage without cold beer, a generator had been installed to keep the fridge working and that kept the guys content. Beds and bedding came with the deal, but no air conditioning so I slept on the wide veranda, which faced the bay and enjoyed the nightly onshore breeze that also tended to keep malaria at bay.
Our water problem was solved by a group of locals who would hoist 20-litre containers onto the roof and fill the tank so that at least we were able to shower. It wouldn’t have done to drink from that tank because it also contained water drained off the roof when it rained. Said roof was populated by half a dozen vultures that did their bit by picking at the cadavers littering the fields in the vicinity.
Nellis discovered that, in keeping with what was clearly a strong British Army tradition, Tim Spicer ran an exceptionally thorough military-type operation. He ran the company with Bernie McCabe, an American. Ostensibly, their objective was to recover the mineral interests, ergo diamond concessions, that had been given to another EO subsidiary and to protect the Sierra Rutile, an oxide mineral used in the production of titanium metal.
To achieve this, Sandline needed to be loosely linked to the local Nigerian head of ECOMOG1, Colonel Maxwell Kholbe, and the Deputy Minister of Defence in the government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, Chief Hinga Norman. These two men coordinated the activities of the Kamajors, a tribal group from the jungle that was arguably the best fighting unit in the country. They had been brought in to replace EO as the principal anti-rebel reactionary force and it was left to Sandline to train the Kamajor combatants in some of the fundamentals of counterinsurgency warfare. Nellis comments:
By the time I arrived, Juba was already flying the Sandline Mi-17, dubbed ‘Bokkie’, and had an Ethiopian ground crew led by Sindaba Meri. Sindaba was to become one of the most valuable members of our team and after Sandline had been forced out of the country, he basically kept our chopper flying.
They also had former SAS operative Fred Marafono as a side gunner, loader, observer, advisor, ‘bruiser at the door to stop unwanted people from entering’ and general factotum who knew more about Sierra Leone than most. Originally from Fiji, he was one of those traditional fighting men who bowed to nobody, and feared nothing. While with the Regiment, he had been awarded a gong by Queen Elizabeth for the role he played in freeing hostages taken prisoners at the Iranian Embassy at Princess Gate, South Kensington, in April, 1980.
As Nellis recalls, their basic task in Sierra Leone was to fly in support of ECOMOG forces that were mainly based in Monrovia in Liberia, although there was a small detachment of two or three battalions in Freetown itself. They also flew support missions for the Kamajors operating in the interior.
Initially, we were regularly tasked to fly the Freetown–Monrovia leg, taking ECOMOG troops on R&R and returning with supplies for those soldiers who were operating against the rebels. It wasn’t easy. Freetown was in a state of war and every soldier tried to make money by bringing in something to sell in local markets, which meant that we were sometimes so overweight on take-off that we couldn’t get off the ground. Then Fred would go to the back and, virtually at gunpoint, hurl some of the ‘cargoes’ out of the open hatch.
At the time, we were working in and out of an open field at the ECOMOG base in Monrovia, but we weren’t allowed to go into the city itself because Charles Taylor, the local oligarch, had put a bounty on the heads of all us helicopter crews, with a bonus if somebody could knock ‘Bokkie’ out of the supply equation. The reason for this was simple. Taylor was not only in cahoots with the rebels, but he was also supplying Sankoh and his RUF with all the weapons and ammunition they needed, the idea being that he would eventually get a stake in the Sierra Leonean diamond fields.
I recall some of those take-offs from the football field inside the military camp where we would land. Juba was a brilliant pilot who had spent a lot of his professional career flying chopper gunships in Angola and elsewhere. Self-taught, he’d learned to fly the Mi-17 very well indeed. He ended up teaching me a trick or two, which I applied to my work in other contract areas when we were overweight on take-off or there weren’t any decent runways or areas for take-off.
He demonstrated a technique for taking off from a field the size of a football pitch that could be surrounded by high-tension wires, 20 metres high. He’d go into the hover using ground cushion and then slowly reverse back to the furthest point downwind of the field, where he’d initiate a positive move forward. He’d go on doing that to the point where we lost the ground cushion effect and translational lift and that would effectively allow the Hip to descend. At the same time, he’d pull maximum collective and would allow downward movement to the ground to continue. Together with forward speed, he would compress the oleos, which would cause the helicopter to bounce back into the air and, at the same time, pass through transition. The helicopter would accelerate while climbing out of the LZ and clear the wires.
It was all very hairy the first couple of times, because once committed nothing would prevent the chopper from striking any of the obstacles if all that didn’t succeed. However, once mastered, the technique was sometimes the only way to clear confined areas safely, albeit with a small margin, without sacrificing load. We never considered the possibility of an engine cut during the take-off—after all, we were supposed to be immortal.
As Nellis recalled, Juba would never head directly to Freetown as that would have meant flying over the jungle. Apparently, he was paranoid about being shot down by a SAM missile because, in the Cafunfo raid in Eastern Angola, his Mi-17, with John Viera as co-pilot, had actually taken a strike by a SAM-7 fired by rebel troops. The hit should have destroyed the machine but it didn’t. Consequently, he was able to auto-rotate and land without too much damage to the helicopter.2‘At least they were able to walk out of the downed machine alive’, Nellis commented with a nod of his head.
Clearly, Juba’s fear of being blown away by SAMs was well founded, but it did make for much longer journeys between Monrovia and Freetown because, as Nellis remembers, sometimes they would head out as much as 50km to sea before heading back towards Sierra Leone again.