I have walked a circuitous route in putting this book together. It is the exploits of many men, the occasional woman and more than enough wars, insurgencies, revolts and coups for a dozen generations of bloodlettings. My span of activity as a military correspondent covers almost forty years of it.
While most of what is here is contemporary, I’ve had to look back a little. We need to remember that the modern mercenary, war dog, private military contractor, freebooter et al., really only emerged when people like “Mad” Mike Hoare and my old friend Bob Denard started to do their thing in the early 1960s. These days there are many thousands of people willing to put their lives on the line for a monthly paycheck (at last count, some thirty thousand of them in Iraq alone) and some of the old timers are no longer around. Quite a lot of them are dead, killed in the line of duty.
Among the latter is the American mercenary Bob MacKenzie, who I got to know quite well when he was still around. We were together in the war in El Salvador for a spell, and before that I’d met him in Rhodesia. Bob was killed while in command of the first mercenary unit to go into action in Sierra Leone. As a freelance military contractor hired by a British private military company (PMC), Bob had offered his services to the Freetown government. His job, stated in his contract, was to put down a military uprising in the interior of this tiny West African state that, in normal circumstances, any enthusiast could probably cycle across in two or three days.
It was not to be, because things went against him from the start. Having been wounded in a contact, Bob was taken alive by the rebels. Word has it that after he’d died following a particularly barbaric torture session, they tore out his heart and ate it. Sybil, his lovely wife, survived their posting to the lonely army outpost at Mile 91, which as the name implies, lies ninety-one miles beyond Freetown. She gave willingly of their experiences during that brief West African sojourn as well as some of her photos.
Many of the soldiers of fortune I have encountered over the years were veterans of a succession of conflicts. These are people like helicopter gunship pilot Neall Ellis, or more popularly, “Nellis,” without whose friendship this book wouldn’t have happened. Neall and I have walked a long road together, the last time in northern Oregon watching salmon twirl in the Columbia River before he went on to more adventures in Baghdad and I returned to Africa. There is also the indomitable Ron Reid-Daly who not only achieved an MBE fighting communist terrorists with the SAS in Malaya, but went on to become the founding commander of the Selous Scouts.
There was also Lafras Luitingh, himself a rugged warhorse who made a few million dollars from organizing a group of mercenary fighters under the banner of Executive Outcomes (EO). That group went on to battle it out in a succession of campaigns in Angola and Sierra Leone.
Mauritz le Roux, one of his fellow combatants in the historic Soyo operation (which set the seal for EO’s military participation in Angola) did even better as a corporate warrior since he today runs a huge PMC concern in Baghdad. To Mauritz (who features within these pages in the debacle that took him and Nellis to the Congo) I owe much for correcting earlier misconceptions about what really happened at Soyo. His involvement highlights one of the problems associated with war reporting. If you weren’t there yourself, people tell it the way they want you to record it, which is not always the truth. Then, when those lies appear in print, it’s your credibility that takes a knock.
Others to whom I am indebted include a former British officer with the Scots Guards, Colonel Tim Spicer, whose writings have provided valuable insights to what went on with Sandline when he still ran that show. His latest gambit as head of London’s Aegis Defence Services managed to achieve a huge Pentagon contract to act as the “coordination and management hub” for the fifty plus private security companies in Iraq.
Let’s not forget the likes of former SADF Reconnaissance Regiment (and Executive Outcomes) veteran Colonel Bert Sachse, together with my old friend Arthur Walker, the only man, in twenty-one years of conflict, to twice be awarded the Honoris Crux in gold.
Then there are people like Jim Maguire, Charlie “Tatties” Tate and Carl Dietz, as well as the incorrigible Peter McAleese, with whom I took a lot of fire at Cuamato in southern Angola. In his classic book on freelance fighting, No Mean Soldier, Peter went on to record his adventures as a contract soldier in places as diverse as Rhodesia, Angola and in the drug wars of Colombia. That book was published several years ago by Orion Publishing in the UK and for aficionados of the genre it’s well worth a read.
Lt-Colonel Rob Symonds, British Military Liaison Officer at the High Commission in Freetown during the period that I flew combat with Nellis, deserves a slot of his own. Though hardly in the mercenary mold, he showed great empathy for the efforts of these people trying to stop the rot in West Africa. Rob had a difficult role there, balancing strictures imposed by his Whitehall bosses with the often immediate operational demands in a country where nothing happened by the book. At the end of the day, it was Rob who showed us how the professional does it.
Another fine source for what went on, this time in the Congo, is my old friend Dave Atkinson, formerly a gunship pilot for Mugabe at a time when that tyrant went to the aid of Kabila. “Double Dave” is now instructing aspirant pilots in Lesotho.
Some of these veterans, like Duncan Rykaart, former British SAS operator Fred Marafano, Roelf van Heerden, Nick van den Bergh, Hennie Blaauw, Harry Carlse, Juba Joubert, Carl Dietz, Andy Brown, Simon Witherspoon (who spent time in an African jail as a result of his involvement in a planned insurrection in Equatorial Guinea), the indomitable Du Preez brothers—Louis and Nico—as well as Cobus Claassens, originally served with Executive Outcomes. I was hosted by many of them when I spent time with that organization in Angola and Sierra Leone. Others will recognize in these pages the shenanigans that some of them initiated while fighting under foreign flags, and a few, like French secret service agent “Christophe,” would rather that I did not mention their real names.
War dogs come from just about everywhere. George Yazid, who for a while (because, as he claims, “I had nothing better to do at the time”) flew combat with Neall Ellis, holds joint Irish/Sierra Leonian nationality. Before going to the Sharp End beyond Freetown, George originally studied electronics in Canada. There was also Ethiopian flight engineer Sindaba Nemera Meri and the rest of his team from Addis Ababa who employed their quite remarkable skills to keep Sierra Leone’s aging Hinds in the air long after both machines might otherwise have been relegated to the scrap heap.
And then there is my not-so-old comrade-in-arms Hassan Ahmed Hussein, who we would all refer to, though never disparagingly, as “our tame Shi’ite.” While he was serving as our Mi-24 side-gunner I was able to watch him in action from up close many times. Hassan must be one of the most ruthless combatants that I’ve met and his aggression under fire is legend.
In the late 1990s, during one of the rebel incursions into Freetown, he and Neal Ellis, using the only helicopter in the country still able to fly, rescued hundreds of civilians trapped behind enemy lines and brought them to safety, taking quite a few knocks themselves in the process. Had this been a conventional war, they would probably have shared the kind of kudos that most nations bestow on those who “go beyond the call of duty.” Don’t take my word for it: rather, judge for yourself since many of their exploits are within these pages.
Several of my fellow scribes also deserve credit. Topping the list is Jim Penrith who, while still bureau chief with the Argus Africa News Service in Nairobi in the 1960s, took me in his charge. So did the indomitable Henry Reuter, though sadly he is no longer with us.
Nor is my old rafiki Mohammed Amin. He was killed when a bunch of radicals hijacked an Ethiopian airliner out of Addis Ababa in which he was traveling to Nairobi, and crashed it off one of the tourist beaches in the Comores Archipelago. Many is the night that I “camped out” in the sitting room of the tiny apartment that Mo and Dolly used as their office and home near the main bus station in the Kenyan capital—but that was long ago, before he moved off tangenitally to become one of the wealthiest journalists I’ve known. With Amin’s sometime help I would cover all of East Africa, from Zanzibar, the eastern Congo and Burundi to Idi Amin’s Uganda and the Tanzanian Army invasion that finally ousted that dreadful monster.
It was also “Mo” who got me through the Sudan and, before that, Somalia and on to Yemen. And let’s not forget another old pal, Michael Knipe, then a plucky Southern Africa correspondent for the London Times. We went overland through a badly ravished Mozambique where Lisbon was fighting a rearguard action to salvage what was left of its African colonies. Before that, I’d spent a month covering Lisbon’s wars in Angola with Cloete Breytenbach, and that sojourn eventually became the subject of the very first book I wrote. In Portuguese Guinea afterward I was to cross paths with Jim Hoagland of The Washington Post and Peter-Hannes Lehman of Germany’s Der Spiegel. Of course, Gerry Thomas still deserves all the accolades I can muster for his incisive reporting at the start.
In more recent times there has been The Daily Telegraph’s Chris Munnion, and briefly in Sierra Leone, Anton la Guardia, as well as Chris McGreal of London’s Guardian, whom I sense has a better handle on developments in West Africa than most. Like Mark Doyle of the BBC, McGreal likes to follow the action. Nor should I forget Bob Morrison: he made Combat & Survival what it is today.
I also ended up sharing some astonishing confidences about what was then going on in Charles Taylor’s Liberia with Jim Rupert, formerly Africa correspondent of The Washington Post. Jim’s revelations about the groups of South African and Israeli seditionists who supported this wicked psycho were appalling. I visited Liberia often over the years, the first time in 1965 when the elaborately named William Vacanarat Shadrack Tubman benignly ruled. That was an era when one could still travel alone through the remotest regions of Africa. Most times I slept, unarmed, on the side of the road and my biggest worry was not malaria, but rather, where I would get my next meal.
All that took place on my second overland trip through Africa, the first being across East Africa. I traveled from Johannesburg to London and the trip lasted almost six months. Some of it was spent in Liberia, then still a delightfully quaint place. My path took me from the Ivoirean capital Abidjan, through the recently mercenary-embattled Toulepleu (on the border with the Ivory Coast) to Monrovia on the Liberian coast. Along the way—serious logging of Africa’s forests had not yet started—I spent time in the kind of primeval jungle country that these days you only read about. Part of the journey, I’d imagine, was similar to that undertaken decades before by Graham Greene, though in my case without the hardships, because he was on foot. Greene’s overland efforts eventually found form in his classic work, Journey Without Maps.
While I took many of the photos in this book, others come from people like Cobus Claassens Arthur Walker, Werner Ludick, Danny O’Brien, Dave McGrady, Craige Grice, Mike Draper, Hennie Blaauw and a few others who passed on pictures over a few ales and who I may have neglected to formally thank.
Two colleagues who didn’t make it were Reuter’s correspondent Kurt Schork and AP cameraman Miguel Gilmoreno. Tragically, both men were killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone while the events recorded here were taking place. I’ve lost a lot of colleagues as a consequence of violent action over the years. Among them were people like the photographer Ken Oosterbroek, Nicholas Della Casa (I gave Nic his first job in news gathering) the redoubtable Danny Pearl, George De’Ath (who covered Beirut with me: he on the Muslim side and me with the Christians), George Cole in the Congo, who was shot in the approaches to Stanleyville, Priha Ramrakha in Biafra, Michael Kelly in Iraq—the first American journalist to die in Gulf War 2—and a lot of others besides. The deaths of Schork and Gilmoreno seemed different. We were shaken because of what had happened out there in the jungle that day. Rather sharply, we were reminded that this kind of work is dangerous.
Kurt, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford with former President Bill Clinton, had been in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and East Timor. For his part, Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora was a Barcelona trained lawyer who threw away everything to follow the action. In the process, he won his share of awards as a cameraman for Associated Television News (APTN). This book pays tribute to both these brave souls and the rest of my mates who went on to take the long walk.
At Jane’s Information Group in London there are editors and friends to thank for help accorded over the years. Having written for International Defense Review for more than thirty years, it was natural that a former editor, Clifford Beal, should have initiated my second phase with the company. When he moved on to Jane’s Defence Weekly, he passed that mantle on to Peter Felstead, then putting out Jane’s Intelligence Review. At one stage I was doing work for all three publications. That trend continued after Mark Daly took over as editor-in-chief at IDR.
Thanks must also go to Michael Grunberg, a planning and financial boffin of repute who spent a lot of time putting both Sandline International and Executive Outcomes on the map. Having read some of the proofs, he dispelled myths and misconceptions galore about what mercenaries do. Also in London, or rather on the western outskirts of that great city—along the upper reaches of the Thames in Richmond—is one of the computer whiz kids of our time. Hanno Gregory pulled my chestnuts out of the fire computer-wise often enough and a gracious thanks for his efforts, always at short notice.
The same with Bruce Gonneau of Durban who did his thing in helping to complete the photo sections. Bruce’s help has been incalculable with some of my earlier books as well: a truly-inspired graphic artist.
Among my American friends, two literary stalwarts, Don McLean and Tom Reisinger, are among the most helpful people I know.
The same with Jim Morris, a much-wounded Special Forces vet—and an accomplished author in his own right with a turn of phrase that often awes us lesser mortals (even if he does go on a bit about Montagnards and continues to believe that there’s something to be said for living in Los Angeles). Morris has always been ready to speak to the world on the web when I needed something in a hurry. He then went on to edit my next book, Cheating Death, which deals with cops who got themselves shot and survived.
Essentially, that book is about the history of concealable body armor, something that another compadre, Richard Davis, invented more than three decades ago. To date, Richard’s brainchild—emulated by some, brazenly and illegally copied by others—went on to save the lives of three thousand Americans, the majority of them men and women working in law enforcement.
In an altogether another league is Dana Drenkowski, the only merc pilot I know who Libya’s Muammar Qadhaffi hired as a combatant. His story is included here as well. So is Dave McGrady’s, together with a few of the things that French Foreign Legionnaire Phil Foley has done. And Robin (Hawkeye) Hawke—recently commissioned into a U.S. Special Forces unit—whose experiences as a hired gun in Sierra Leone’s earlier days are certain to provide a few unusual insights. Hawkeye’s story, macabre one moment and almost poetically lyrical the next, is worthy of much more attention than it has so far achieved: it is a truly epic tale. So is Tom Staley’s, who added a vignette, as did Hank Kenealy who, while operating as a communications geek for the U.S. State Department, sometimes found himself in unusual places.
His story about a couple of stateside ham radio operators who, when all conventional radio communications with Freetown were cut, tapped into the ether in order to keep U.S. Embassy communications with Washington alive, must be a classic. I deal with that little episode in the Prologue.
Danny O’Brien often came up with the unusual. An enterprising former Special Forces operator turned corporate bigwig, Danny today runs one of the most successful private military companies on the globe, International Charter Incorporated of Oregon (more commonly called ICI, though not be confused with Britain’s Imperial Chemical Industries). The first time I saw an ICI chopper it was a Russian-built Mi-8MTV with American flags painted on both sides of the fuselage, parked on the helipad at Freetown’s military headquarters.
During the course of finishing this work I also touched base with another of America’s finest, Gary Jackson, who today devotes a good deal of energy and effort at the helm of Blackwater USA. Doug Brooks, President of IPOA (International Peace Operations Association) is someone else who came up with the goods.
Floyd Holcolm, who recently found himself in an unusual Special Forces liaison role in Iraq, has been a singular—if sometimes critical—source of inspiration. Floyd speaks Mandarin, Arabic and Farsi, and is a member of that new breed of combat elite that the American military establishment has recently nurtured to cope with the ever-variable face of war. He and I propped up the bar at The Schooner in Oregon’s Astoria often enough, regaling Mark (America’s best barkeep), Peter Marsh, the lovely Cynthia, Jennifer Genge, Wayne Symonds, Matt (or as he prefers, Cap’n Matt) Stein, as well as the rest of the gang with some of our improbable “war stories.” Also in Astoria, Steve Forester and Patrick Webb at The Daily Astorian have always been on hand with advice and information, as has Police Chief Rob Deupree.
The intrepid Suzie Sizemore of Seaside, Oregon, to whom this book is dedicated, pulled so many good things out of the hat during difficult times. A lovely, spiritual soul, she had a way of making things happen. Bless you my precious friend.
There are also my Chinook friends in Washington. That includes my walking-buddy, Joyce Otterson, who has always cast a critical eye over my work and I am deeply in debt to you my dear. A bow must go, too, to the man I still regard as the best wordsmith in the business, my old editor and friend, Jack Shepherd-Smith, who, when the world was still young and innocent, taught me most of what I know about syntax.
And Steven Smith, with whom I worked for many months in getting out my previous book on Iran’s putative atom bomb program. At very short notice he came in and helped with the American version of this one. Others who served in getting aspects of War Dog together include Willem Steenkamp, David Williams and Larry O’Donoghue. I must also remember Clare, Larry’s delightfully innovative daughter for keeping me in touch with the old country.
I have left Freddie Forsyth till almost last for good reason. Freddie and I shared some of our earliest impressions of conflict in Africa—if not together, then within an AK-rifle shot of one another. Both of us were reporting from Biafra toward the end of that nasty affair that left a million people dead, though Freddie had been there from the start. I suspect that neither of us came out of that experience emotionally intact; I certainly did not. Unlike me, this polymath and former Reuters and BBC correspondent put his experiences to good use. Having been one of the last whites to leave the rebel enclave in late 1979, he celebrated that Christmas and New Year’s in London and then settled down in a friend’s pad with his rickety old Olivetti portable and set to work. Thirty-five days later Freddie emerged with the first draft of The Day of the Jackal.
By the time that this work appears in the U.S., another Forsyth offering—this one titled The Afghan—should be almost done. While doing research for his latest work, he spent a bit of time with me and my friends at the estuary of the Columbia River in Washington. Being the raconteur that he is, what a delightful few days those were.
In a peculiar way, I also owe David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, a special vote of thanks. David wanted to talk about some of the goings-on to be found within these covers. His own book, due out in the summer of 2006 and titled The Mission Song, involves mercenaries as one of its themes, though it is set in London, a Danish island and, inevitably, the Congo Republic. So, together with his lovely wife Jane, we met for lunch in Hampstead and the rest of the afternoon was spent in a briefing session on the subject of today’s private military companies.
Until then, I’d prevaricated a little with this edition, but that fortuitous get-together over maps, African reference works, parts of an unfinished manuscript, the nature and tactics involved in this kind of unconventional warfare, and, I thought, even an English-Swahili dictionary, instilled in me the resolve to sit down and finish this book, which has been years in gestation. A few months later it was done.
Linked to this side of things as well, was the husband and wife team Duane and Rebecca Sentgeorge. What lovely support I had from those delightful people, as well as Ryker and Katrina.
I’ve left David Farnsworth, my often intrepid, always helpful publisher till now because he and Sarah deserve the biggest toast of all. This book originally saw light under the auspices of David when I was still in South Africa. He kept at it by an extremely subtle process of coercion, persuasion and hard-assed business acumen, fueled by the occasional dram of a good quality vintage Fonseca. In so many ways, this book is a tribute to Philadelphia’s Casemate Publishers, a small company that the two of them resurrected and restructured into one of the largest distributors of military books on the American continent.
And so to Caroline Delius, my lovely, wild “free spirit,” as she likes to call herself, who became almost iconic during the final stages of the book. Thank you darling one. Here’s to our next trudge through the heather atop our beautiful Isle of Bute.
AL J. VENTER
Rothesay, Western Isles
January 2006