Executive Outcomes’ Soyo adventure was eventually to become synonymous with what a well-disciplined bunch of war dogs can achieve in a regional Third World conflict. To other PMCs that might be active in remote, distant lands, it also offered what Kipling said of the Boer War: “No end of a lesson.”
While the Battle for Soyo ranks right up there with Executive Outcomes having pushed Sierra Leone’s RUF rebels from the precincts of Freetown, not much has appeared in print about either of these events, even though a lot of lives – the majority of them enemy—were lost in the process. What has been published so far about this extended African campaign has either been fragmentary or inaccurate, or in one notable instance, plagiarized.
Mauritz le Roux’s very personal impressions in the previous chapter, in contrast, are remarkable. Not only was he there, right in the thick of it, he was also one of the original movers behind the founding of Executive Outcomes.
An organizer with guts and an indomitable spirit, he has since gone on to nurture one of the most successful Private Military Companies active in today’s Iraq. In keeping with his no-nonsense, low-key approach—and unlike most American companies of a similar ilk—he neither seeks publicity nor does he get it. He was very specific about me not using the name of his Baghdad company in this book, a confidence that I intend to honor.
As he said when he, Nellis and I spent time together at the mouth of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest in the spring of 2005, “Anybody can talk. I just like to get on with the job.”
With that kind of approach, and a face that remains incognito, Le Roux has had protection teams working the “Baghdad Beat” for more than two years. He has yet to lose one of his men to hostilities. At the same time, he and his team have battled their way out of several scraps with Sunni fundamentalists. That included an attack in Falluja in the spring of 2005, when his group, traveling in convoy with no military escort, was hit by a sixty-strong rebel group.
In the contact that followed, his attackers were routed. Le Roux’s only casualty was his American client who, despite pleadings for him to travel in one of the protected vehicles, preferred to ride up front and exposed alongside one of the machine-gunners.
“A great guy. It was a catastrophe to lose him. But sadly, he wouldn’t accept my advice. He was determined to be a part of it and we saw what happened. You need to be discreet rather than macho in the Sunni Triangle, and my friend, great pal that he was, paid a terrible price.”
Le Roux flew back to Houston with his client’s body and attended the funeral. It says something that the Texas concern remains a client.
As might be expected, there are quite a few notables who were involved with him in the Soyo operation that now work for him in Baghdad, including Harry Carlse. Neall Ellis has also joined him.
All of this underscores one of Mauritz le Roux’s many strengths: he prefers people working for him who have fired a few shots in anger during the course of their professional careers. It is much the better if they have seen real combat. When push becomes shove, he likes staff members who are able to extricate both themselves and those who they are paid to protect from situations that can sometimes be fraught.
Compare that approach with the exploits of Blackwater USA, one of the most illustrious PMCs of the modern lot. At last count, in late 2005, Blackwater had lost twenty-six of its people in contacts, ambushes and the like. The majority of the fatalities occurred in Iraq.
What Executive Outcomes proved during the course of its activities in Angola was that with a solid command structure coupled to the correct choice of combatant, discipline that fringes on the exemplary, and a level of dedication you don’t often find among the ranks, it is possible for a commercial concern to achieve good results under austere conditions.
In an article that I did for Britain’s Jane’s Information Group, I illustrated another reality: unconventional conflicts sometimes demand unconventional solutions. With decades of bush war combat behind them, this South African group managed to open doors that had been shut ever since Africa was vacated by the Colonial Powers in the 1960s and 1970s.1 Some considered Soyo as arguably the toughest single campaign fought by any group of mercenaries The tragic economic situation was made even more horrific by an outbreak of Marburg, a deadly hemorrhagic fever related to Ebola. (See Colonel Mike Hoare’s final days in the Congo in the 1960s, Chapter 10.)
Subsequent EO participation in Sierra Leone might have come close, but the level of competence among the rebels facing this mercenary group in the jungles beyond Freetown and in the approaches to the Kono diamond fields were no match to what Savimbi threw into the fray.
Considering the fact that there were a dozen or more battles fought in the sixty days that Soyo lasted, and the exceptionally low casualty rate among company personnel, what took place at this isolated oil installation in the jungle was both a tribute to their tenacity and a remarkable display of professionalism under fire. EO certainly vindicated any doubts that the company’s adversaries might have had as to their efficacy outside the ambit of a conventional military force. And make no mistake; EO had critics aplenty, in Angola itself as well as in Britain, the United States and South Africa.
As Lafras Luitingh told me on the plane that took us to Sierra Leone not very long afterward, what happened at Soyo was often emulated but never surpassed. In terms of sheer numbers and the paucity of equipment available, he said, a tiny group of South Africans managed to keep a far superior Unita force at bay. The company played a significant role in preventing a major guerrilla force from neutralizing one of Angola’s most valuable assets. That Savimbi’s people took Soyo again after the South Africans had pulled out was of no consequence. EO, Luitingh declared, had done what it had set itself and that was what mattered.
Ousting Unita from Soyo a second time became a formality because this time around the attackers had support from both armor and helicopter gunships.
Once launched, the initial Soyo operation was the start of a most demanding regimen for the mercenary force in Angola. Within months of their return to this West African state, EO was very much in the thick of it. Their activities took them to the north and to regions that adjoined the Central Highlands in the interior. Only then did they tackle the east, though from the start, the company had an advanced operational base at Saurimo, the country’s principal diamond city. (See Chapter 17.)
Looking at the broader scenario, some of Executive Outcomes’ successes are said by insiders to stem from what Duncan Rykaart—a senior member of the company’s original command group—termed EO’s “four interlocking principles.”
This codification—informal but strictly adhered to throughout the expanded campaigns that followed in both Angola and Sierra Leone—was much discussed during my two visits to EO positions in Angola in 1995. They were also to become the basis of many of the core values established by management. As such, declared Rykaart, himself a former Special Forces operator,2 they were sacrosanct. Any EO member ignored them at his peril.
Briefly, these fundamentals included air support for all ground operations, reliance on the individual in the field for good level of personal initiative and basic common sense, and finally, logistics. Since most of EO’s men had served long and hard in their own country’s guerrilla struggles—many of them having seen action in Special Forces regiments—they weren’t unduly taxed by these demands.
It was interesting that much of what ultimately took place under EO was dictated as much by the need to run an efficient business as to prevent loss of life in combat. The issue is perhaps best encapsulated by the credo, crude but emphatic, that was printed on some of the T-shirts issued to the men at Angola’s Rio Lomba Special Forces training camp (about an hour’s drive south of Cabo Ledo). Emblazoned across the back, in bold Day-Glo letters four inches high, were the words “Fit In or Fuck Off.”
The first of the four EO basics, that there was to be no ground operation without close air support, was routinely observed in Angola where there was never a shortage of government Hips and Hinds. These Russian rotor wings were used extensively in every punch-up into which the company was thrust. Angolan Air Force pilots flew some of them. Others were piloted by South Africans working for EO, though as the war progressed, the company itself increasingly played a more dominant role in air ops.
In Sierra Leone, by contrast, things were different. Because that tiny West African state had no combat pilots of its own, EO at first made use of the government’s solitary Mi-24 gunship (the Hips only arrived afterward). A big obstacle that needed tackling after their arrival in Freetown was that the South African company was obligated to employ those Russian pilots who were already there since they were contracted directly to the state.
In order to establish a more effective, versatile system, Executive Outcomes commanders had to find a way of bringing the air asset under their control. This was not easily achieved. The Russians balked—as was expected they would—because it put a rather abrupt end to their monthly paychecks. They argued that they were doing a competent job, when in fact they weren’t. Their idea of top cover was, as at Soyo a short while before, hovering somewhere above five thousand feet. South African gunship pilots, in contrast, thought fifty feet might sometimes be too high.
The issue was resolved, according to Barlow’s financial mentor Michael Grunberg, by EO using the clout it had accumulated from organizing the supply of pilots, parts and ordnance to protect Freetown. Thus, the company took the helm and the Russians were ditched, but not before they sabotaged the Hind’s electronics. In this spooky world of point and counterpoint, one of the Russian pilots was later found murdered, though another source maintains that the death had more to do with diamonds and the Russian mafiya than mercenary activity.
Notably, it helped EO’s cause that there had also been a fairly serious language barrier between the components. With former Soviets flying these machines, EO’s ground forces couldn’t communicate properly with the men who were supposed to be providing air support. As they explained to Valentine Strasser, the Sierra Leone leader, “when people are shooting at you, you don’t need to waste time with translators.” Strasser was usually too spaced out on cocaine to comprehend very much of what was going on around him, but that message came through loud and clear.
EO eventually brought its own Mi-17s into play. Two Hips bought from the UN in Angola (and still in that organization’s white livery) were flown halfway across Africa, though that didn’t prevent them from being “arrested” in Nigeria while in transit because their pilots were South African.
The second EO canon centered on initiative and good common sense—values for which the majority of Third World forces are not especially renowned. EO’s command and control approach encouraged resolute, often independent action to achieve these aims. As Hennie Blaauw, another of EO’s combat commanders in Angola pointed out: “That sort of thing doesn’t feature in the handbooks.”
The third element comes back to discipline, enforced with a very strong arm. Anyone who stepped out of line—which excluded getting drunk as many times a week as you liked as long as you weren’t smashed on duty—was put on the first plane home. Every unit, no matter how remote, had its rules, which were rigidly applied, even if it meant ousting someone from a pivotal position. Liquor-inspired fisticuffs was the main culprit here.
Two of EO’s best and most valued combatants were peremptorily kicked out of the organization after they had attacked the British manager of Ibis Air—the airline founded by Buckingham and friends and used to bring in supplies—in a bar in Freetown. In a vicious attack that was described by one of those present as reflecting “a pit bull mentality,” they broke the poor man’s jaw and some ribs. He was rushed home on an emergency flight.
Later, in both the Angolan and Sierra Leonian diamond fields, several of the men were fired for illicit dealings in precious stones. There might have been more, but diamonds are easily hidden and anyway, it was a difficult charge to prove.
The last was logistics. The key to EO’s philosophy regarding conflict in Africa was, quite simply, that nothing happened unless it was made to happen. The South Africans had been dealing with African governments for a while by now and, without exception, government support throughout had been found wanting.
Said Lafras Luitingh, in charge of EO’s operations: “All governments with whom we’ve been associated make promises. They make lots of them. They always do, especially when the bottle is being passed around. But we’ve found, sometimes to our disadvantage, that these promises were rarely kept. By morning they were forgotten. Consequently, if we were to deploy a force on the ground in some remote region, we’d have to keep it supplied.”
If anything were needed by the men in the field—from a tooth-brush or a sjambok (quirt) to a toilet roll—it had to come on the weekly (and eventually fortnightly) Boeing (Ibis Air) flight that was allowed unimpeded access to Lungi. It was also part of the deal that EO was not subjected to any immigration or customs controls. As hostilities developed in Angola, the same system was adopted and relief flights became twice-weekly events after they commenced in 1994.
Michael Grunberg actually remembers being on the tarmac at a military field outside Luanda when the first of these passenger jets was delivered: it was still in its American Airlines livery. He also recalls that after regular flights between South Africa and Angola—and further north—had been introduced, EO pilots instituted a sophisticated logistics structure into the Sierra Leone operations envelope. It was passed on, together with the requisite international component, to the West African air controllers at Robertsfield.3
Basically, in all theaters of military activity in which EO was active, the organization worked on the principle of the host nation providing the main component of military “muscle” in order to get the job done. With the odd exception, this included arms, ammunition and land support vehicles, together with the basic military infrastructure that any army should be able to come up with. Men in arms from the host nation were part of the equation. At the end of it, the company took with them everything else that might be needed to keep its force in the field.
Its main menu included direction, the men needed for the task at hand, their personal equipment and food, plus helicopters for close air support.
The movement of EO troops, replacements and casualties were also the responsibility of the company. Apart from the two Boeing 727s, two other aircraft came from Britain: former RAF Hawker Siddeley Andover CC Mk2 twin turbo-prop transports that had previously been operated by No 32 Squadron for the Queen’s Flight. Depending on criticality, these were used to evacuate casualties either to London or South Africa, with one stationed at Luanda and the other at Lungi. Both had full aircrews on the company payroll and were maintained on the basis of a twenty-four hour standby. It was a notable advance from the Cabinda debacle where the first doctor only arrived weeks into the campaign.
The Andovers ended up playing a crucial role in the war, even though they weren’t tasked that often. For a start, the troops had the reassurance that if things did come unstuck, they would be airlifted to the best hospitals abroad, almost always with a company doctor in attendance. They could be airborne and on their way within an hour of a contact in the jungle, the Hips handling the first transit.
Consequently, lives were saved by flying some chronic malaria cases to the tropical fever hospital run by Canadians in the Ivoirean capital. More than once a Boeing was diverted to Abidjan if a doctor believed a case was life threatening.
As Grunberg observed, you had to give the company its due: when it came to health issues. “Cost was never an issue.”
There were several more EO planes, including two King Airs, but these mostly worked Angola and the rest of Africa. One of them crashed in Uganda in bad weather, killing a senior EO director. Also on company books was a Westwind jet located at Lungi and used by EO personnel for airborne surveillance work.
Things developed quickly following the two thirty-day deployments in the Soyo area early in 1993. While producing nothing spectacular, the EO presence had achieved its aims.
Once the new contract had been signed with Luanda, the Angolan Army (FAA) immediately thrust numerous responsibilities at the organization. Almost overnight, a lot more men had to be recruited, every one of them South African. The EO directorate was aware that they needed to be much more discriminating with regard to the caliber of their recruits than before. Also, it became a sine qua non for the new-comers to have had good combat experience, preferably with a Special Forces or an elite infantry unit and over a period of several years.
A significant aspect here is that Luitingh, Barlow and their cronies were interested not only in individual operators, but also support personnel with whom these people had been linked during their period of military service. They reckoned it was axiomatic that shared hardship bred trust.
Race was never a criterion. Despite apartheid, elite SADF units that had fought the Border War and in Angola were totally non-racial. In fact, they had just as many black troops as whites in their ranks and, in some cases, in command positions over white soldiers as well.
The majority knew and understood the strengths and foibles of their officers and NCOs; after all, they had taken a lot of flak over the years in each others’ company in operations that spanned more than a decade. What mattered a great deal to EO’s bosses was that during that period, these people had not only fought together but had sometimes saved each other’s lives.
Luitingh viewed his company’s black troops with immense respect. He regarded their welfare as his personal responsibility and would tolerate no officiousness towards “my manne” (Afrikaans for “my guys”). He’d actually served with quite a few in his Recce days and was on first name terms with many.
The company would be that much poorer without these black troops, he would say. They were strong, likable and every one in the team had seen a good bit of action in his day, which made them invaluable when things got rough.
He also liked to emphasize that there were few soldiers anywhere who were able to display such remarkable versatility with squad weapons as the African troops under his command. In this regard, one of the men quipped, it was ironic that EO was now handling the same guns while working for the Angolan government that FAPLA and FAA had used against the South Africans when they were opposed to Luanda’s Marxist regime.
A fundamental mistake made by the majority of critics of private military companies—and one which never escaped the attention of EO—was the pigeonholing of those who were prepared to do this filthy work as criminals. The press used various epithets, almost all of them unflattering. Others called them retards, contract killers or worse.
The perception in the civilized world, generally, is that mercenaries are semi-literate psychos with no scruples. And while EO always conceded the experience bit, it was only because that was what the majority of these veterans had been doing all along.
The truth is that some dogs of war could probably slot comfortably into all of the categories mentioned. Granted, there is also the occasional psychopath and over the years I’ve met a few: in Rhodesia, the Congo, Angola, Uganda, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. But then most military establishments have the occasional loose cannon.
Looking at the broader canvas, it’s axiomatic that the concept of killing people is repugnant to civilized people anywhere. While EO might have done an excellent job in destroying the rebel infrastructure in Sierra Leone, and before that, in forcing Savimbi to the negotiating table in Angola, the subject nonetheless remains unsettling.
There are those who feel that mercenaries indulge in violence for the sake of it. Yet anybody who has seen these people at work from up close knows that that is not true. At the same time, one has to accept that the ideal is blurred by perceptions spawned by the events of recent history, like Callan’s mindlessly brutal role in Angola and what went on in the Congo before Colonel Mike Hoare pulled the operation up by its bootstraps. Obviously, there is an image factor here that needs to be dealt with. It is hardly flattering.
What went on in the Congo in the early days is perhaps at the core of it, compounded more recently by the doings of some American freelance operators who have since been charged with killing dissidents in Afghanistan. Mercenaries everywhere were done another disservice by the large group of South Africans who, at the behest of Mark Thatcher, the son of the former British Prime Minister, and his sidekick Simon Mann, tried to bring down the government of Equatorial Guinea in 2004. Almost all of those involved in that fiasco ended up in jail, with some of them subsequently dying in prison.
In the earlier phase of the Congo’s war, reports were reinforced by the show-and-tell photos of smiling mercenaries who held aloft the decapitated heads of black men. This gory display of trophies was disgusting and it didn’t help that some of these pictures appeared in the news magazines of the time, particularly in Europe.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century and just about everything has changed. Today’s professional soldier for hire, in the main, is a pretty ordinary guy. The majority probably wouldn’t be out of place in your local police force. About the only thing that sets the contemporary soldier of fortune apart from the rest is that he is a veteran with a good run of experience to show for it. He’s seen combat and he’s survived.
These are also folk who are not only familiar with the multi-disciplined precepts of most regular armed forces, but are able to handle themselves with deftness under fire. Indeed, many have half a lifetime of military service and, to be blunt, they’re dinkum proud of it.
Neall Ellis, who, on his own, twice turned the war around in Sierra Leone, is a case in point, though admittedly he is not your typical hired gun, if only because most combat pilots are a good ten or fifteen years younger by the time they return their flying helmets to the ready room for the last time. Still, there are few combat pilots who have had as much experience as Nellis.
In Executive Outcomes’ first new phase in Angola, the first deployments took place to the east of Luanda and around the diamond fields of Lunda Sul. Soyo too, once again required pacifying.
The company chose as its headquarters in the east the airport at Saurimo, not far from what was then still the Zairean frontier (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
While this contract was renewed a year later, and then extended again for a further three months, it was officially ended early in 1996. By then EO had about five hundred men in the field, the majority of whom were either in combat or busy training the FAA. South African mercenary pilots were also active throughout, and whether they were providing support for their own people or assisting the regular army, Angola couldn’t have managed without them.
Several developments contributed toward Dr. Jonas Savimbi finally signing an accord with the Luanda government in November 1994. The first, in February 1994, was the recapture by FAA—with a strong EO presence in support—of N’dalatando in Cuanza Norte. Until then, this little junction town, which lies about halfway between Luanda and Malanje, had been pivotal to the guerrilla penetration of the oilrich northwest.
Four months later EO was engaged—in conjunction with FAA’s 16th Brigade—in a three-month operation to retake the Cafunfo diamond fields (see Chapter 18). It was a blow from which Unita never recovered.
The alluvial diggings encompass miles of Angola’s northern forest regions along the Cuanza River, and at that stage this valuable resource was supplying the rebels with about two-thirds of their diamonds. If Savimbi was of half a mind to continue with his war, he couldn’t do without it.
Finally, when Huambo—Angola’s second largest city—fell to the government after battles that left thousands dead in September of that year, the Unita leader sued for peace.
There was another issue constantly being raised by the media whenever contact was made with the mercenary force. That centered on whether any mercenary in the pay of a foreign government could actually be loyal.
In Freetown, where journalists and mercs shared the same nightspots, the specter of divided allegiances would be raised more often than was necessary and, once or twice led to blows. As some of the hacks were to discover, a tavern is not exactly the place to ask a tanked-up war dog about whether he’s likely to defect to those whom he’s fighting against. Lafras Luitingh phrased it rather neatly when he said that while both Freetown and Luanda might have been pleased with what EO had achieved on the battlefield, “That didn’t mean that we were always above suspicion.”
He explained: “The black leaders who hired us would invariably judge us by their own standards. Of course, in their minds, that often made us complicit. We are, after all, marketable commodities and obviously, that would make us suspect.”
Luitingh accepted that governments for whom his people (and other groups of mercenaries) fought had been “bought,” as it is usually phrased, by a higher bidder. It happened within the ambit of the major powers as well, he pointed out, only there, turncoats are called spies.
Because of this, he suggested, there was sometimes a real fear among African leaders that if a better offer came along, these hired guns might switch sides. “Our problem,” he stressed, “is that we do what we do not for any cause, or ideal, but for money.”
But, he declared, there were limits. The financial motivation was obviously something that any African leader could understand. But it was also true that he and his EO colleagues sometimes encountered suspicion about what some of them termed “real agendas.” He accepted, too, that some of these misgivings stemmed from recent events. As he pointed out, “History has left the world with a legacy of betrayals.”
This former Recce operator illustrated his argument by citing the Angolan experience. EO had won several key battles in a country that had seen decades of war. Soyo was a part of it. But it hadn’t gone unnoticed that in achieving its objective, Executive Outcomes had lost several of its best men. Yet, he said, there were still senior Angolan officers who questioned, if not the company’s allegiance, then that of several former SADF officers who were directing EO’s efforts at winning the war.
“For instance, they would pose questions about our motives for coming across. After all, they argued, the two sides had been blood enemies for a generation. The switch didn’t make sense, they liked to aver, and as a result the suspicion bogey continued to worry us.”
At the time we discussed it, Luitingh hadn’t been prepared to discuss this option in such depth before, though he’d alluded to it once or twice. It was a serious matter once we got into it and his voice assumed a conspiratorial urgency.
“As contract people—PMCs, mercenaries, war dogs, whatever—our motives are always going to be suspect, if only because we fight for profit. So, the argument goes, what the one side offers, the other, feasibly, can top.”
But that was not the way the company worked, Luitingh insisted. EO, throughout its brief career, maintained stringent codes of conduct that were inviolable.
He used himself—well dressed, clean shaven, reasonably well read and informed about matters military—as an example of today’s corporate soldier of fortune. As one of the top men in the organization, everybody who had anything to do with Luitingh had to concede that he was hardly what one would have expected of a mercenary leader.
Lafras Luitingh joined the army after leaving school, and for more than a decade, following his selection for South Africa’s elite Reconnaissance Regiment, he did nothing but fight. His operations would sometimes take him on deep penetration insertions into Angola or Mozambique, either on foot or in vehicles. Other times his unit would be put ashore in kayaks, launched from navy submarines or make clandestine high altitude HALO/HILO entries from SAAF C-130 freighters.
A tall, powerfully built man with a perennial smile, Luitingh had long ago learnt to become uncompromisingly aggressive when he had need to. EO was formed after he had left the SADF with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. To his—and to everybody else’s surprise—he found it relatively easy to combine the art of survival of a fighting man with the battles sometimes encountered in the rarefied atmosphere of Yuppiedom. Clearly, this tough and fit erstwhile combatant was a quick learner.
Very early on, Executive Outcomes established its own brand of definitive criteria when fighting a war. Being in the business of war, everything that the company represented stood or fell by the core values it advocated.
Executive Outcomes offered Sierra Leone a feasible military solution for the kind of insurgency the nation faced, in much the way that it approached the same issue before that in Angola. Basics were coupled to good old-fashioned experience and a solid gumption to implement such programs to good effect.
Financial considerations, said Luitingh, were obviously the basis on which everything turned, or as he declared, “Just about all we do starts and ends with money. Consequently, it’s good to accept that we’re not into welfare. In fact, we charge what we think the market will bear. And to get to that figure, we do our homework.”
There was a time, he suggested, when the people of Freetown really did think that the company might switch sides, which was possibly to be expected because almost nothing in Sierra Leone was based on a handshake.
Also, he added, “the Russians had been running the Air Wing before we arrived and they had screwed the government so often that there were some who queried whether the South Africans wouldn’t do exactly the same. And when you’re faced with that kind of dilemma, a very real danger materializes when someone believes that you might betray him. They start to see shadows where there are none.” It was the story of Africa, he believed.
As in Angola, Luitingh and his colleagues quickly countered that perception by getting into some of the most aggressive battles against Unita that its military leaders had yet observed, with their own people taking still more fatalities. After that, things changed markedly, especially once the group had clocked up a succession of strikes that began to hurt the rebel movement. That included killing some of Savimbi’s most experienced field commanders, including some of the generals who were closest to him.
Luitingh: “As soon as we could show that the other side was taking some serious losses, things began to ease up. Also, you don’t easily disregard casualties among people who are fighting for you.” It took a while, he added, but by doing what was expected, these “Demon Boers”—as they had been described in Angolan newspapers and radio broadcasts in the past—were able to show the Angolans that they had themselves a bunch of fighters that were both professional and reliable.
Similar problems were sometimes encountered in Sierra Leone. Luitingh took matters in hand at his first meeting with Chairman Strasser at State House by arguing—with some aplomb, one of his sidekicks commented—that to betray the Freetown government would irrevocably destroy the credibility that the company had worked so hard to foster. This applied not only to Sierra Leone, he told the youthful head of state—who was then still only twenty-five years old—but to governments on three continents to whom EO was then talking.4 It was a point well made and even the usually verbose Strasser couldn’t argue.
“I told him that we couldn’t operate in this business without trust. We might be a band of brigands, I said, but we were an honorable band of brigands.” The Sierra Leone leader seemed to enjoy the quip.
Still more important, Luitingh explained, the company offered its services only to recognized governments. It wasn’t interested in factions, or political parties trying to unseat rulers, no matter what kind of money was being put on the table. A year before, he disclosed, a dissident Nigerian group had approached EO with an offer of a hundred million dollars to train a guerrilla army to overthrow the tyrant Abacha.
“You can do a helluva lot with a hundred million US. But we refused. We had no option. Once you get into that sort of thing, you’re going to have the international community on your neck.”
Such actions might also be classed international terrorism, he believed. “Then you’re into something that involves big government, Washington, London, the United Nations, war crimes commissions at The Hague, Interpol. And then what? In the end we convinced Chairman Strasser that it was just not on and I know he believed us because he never again questioned our motives.”
While Executive Outcomes lasted, it was active in almost a dozen African states. Apart from Angola and Sierra Leone, it accepted contracts in the two Congos, Uganda, the Sudan, Mozambique and else-where. For a while, toward the end, it guarded South African farmers from cattle rustlers, though that option eventually became too expensive for its client base.
Prior to going into any country—and while still negotiating the contract—EO would state very clearly and in writing what they were able to offer and exactly what it was that the company intended to achieve. Having agreed on something of a template, and with a contract price settled, other needs would be explored. These would include the extent of the threat, exactly who would fund what, together with a timeline, sundry expenses and so on.
Discussions always involved the company’s British associates, and Michael Grunberg’s experience was a reliable adjunct from the start. At a very early stage, these would detail finance, the apportionment of assets and what needed to be procured, as well as liaison with local forces. The small print would contain specifics concerning equipment and weapons systems. Ancillary issues included support aircraft, logistics and exactly what EO would be expected to bring into the country.
Other aspects detailed security, internal movement, bases and airports to which the mercenary unit would have access. To get a permit each time a man entered a security area would have been impractical. Consequently, the company demanded blanket clearances, and though it took a while in Angola, they got them in the end.5
There was also the matter of accommodation, which, in places like Freetown and Luanda, included serviced apartments with attendant domestic staff. All this would be tabulated, and after a bit of a haggle, both parties would sign.
Perhaps the strongest attribute shared by senior EO personnel was that, as a group, the men all had intimate knowledge and understanding of the continent on which they worked. Just about everybody in EO had grown up in Africa.
On arrival at Freetown, the men were to discover a remarkably empathetic environment. Freetown’s kids weren’t all that different from those in the “Far South,” as some Sierra Leone newspapers would refer to South Africa. Consequently, none of the men who went into Angola or Sierra Leone labored under any of the misconceptions that might have encumbered Europeans and Americans who suddenly found themselves among disadvantaged folk.
It was that way in Somalia after the U.S. Army arrived, something graphically depicted in Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. The book is a classic example of what takes place when you don’t understand the people and the ambiance into which you’re thrust. In such circumstances, mistakes lead to fatalities.
Also, the people around Freetown were indigent, as are the majority of black people in kwaZulu-Natal or the former Transkei. Almost from the time that Sierra Leone got its independence from Britain in 1961, the nation had been abused by a string of despots, as had South African blacks under apartheid. Similarly, these west coast people were little different from throngs of Angolans or ethnic Namibians among whom these former South African soldiers had worked and fought in the past.
And as Luitingh also pointed out, Africa is the ultimate leveler. EO personnel didn’t have to be told what the region could—or could not—offer. It was taken for granted that conditions would be tough, to be treated simply as part of the job’s demands.
To take one illustrative example: consider the British Army major who, with ten of his men, blundered into Magbeni, the Sierra Leone village controlled by lunatics with guns in late September 2000. Had this been an Executive Outcomes operation, nobody would have gone near the place until they’d taken the trouble to find out who or what was there. Reconnaissance was necessary not only in the face of the enemy but at all times. This simple precaution is essential in any conflict environment in the Third World. American troops recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to echo the sentiment.
The consequences of the Magbeni catastrophe were serious. Apart from millions spent in getting a rescue effort off the ground, the operation that followed caused the death of an SAS bombardier and the wounding of almost a dozen more British troops, two of them seriously. The British Army is not likely to make that kind of mistake again.
So, too, with relations with the people. From the President down, any kind of social interaction between EO and local folk had to be exemplary. If a man couldn’t relate comfortably with Africans—an EO recruit was routinely warned on signing up—he had no place in the organization. And while there were examples of interracial strife else-where on the continent, and South Africans—as we are constantly reminded—are hardly paragons of racial virtue, EO would always stress that its people were required to be empathetic toward those with whom they had contact.
This was not a problem for the men who had been in elite units of the SADF. For them a man’s race had never been an issue—even in the days when the severest racial strictures bedeviled life in South Africa. In any event, that country’s Special Forces were always more than half-black. In fact, the elite, partly-Angolan 32 Battalion was eighty percent African, and the Ovambo 101 Battalion had only white officers and some white NCOs.
At the same time, while EO executives would quickly ingratiate themselves with a country’s leadership, there wasn’t all that much socializing between EO officers and the host country’s military. That was in marked contrast to the cavorting that went on in Sierra Leone’s bars once the newcomers discovered some of Freetown’s wilder nightspots.
In the upper echelons of Angola’s armed forces, in contrast, “gifts” would feature prominently. There was always something on the plane out of South Africa for key generals. A new Range Rover and a $32,000 electric generator went to the three-star headquarters general that ran their show when I was there. Most times, such things were kept to practicalities.
Further down the ranks, life was informal, with the result that the people of both Luanda and Freetown soon embraced these newcomers. During the time I spent with Luitingh, the locals looked after us exceedingly well. Whenever the two of us drove around the city after dark—without an escort—we were never checked at roadblocks, even though security controls in those days (as opposed to during Nellis’ term) were letter-of-the-law as far as the rest of the population was concerned.