War had tainted Freetown long before I arrived. The city wasn’t exactly burning, but there were big bangs, automatic fire, flares, and tracers going off in the outlying areas and occasionally in the middle of town. What had begun with the rebels sporadically probing army defenses—usually during the dark hours—ended with the capital of Sierra Leone facing a protracted urban revolt that resulted in terrible death and destruction. I am writing with 1999 in mind, because the RUF campaign had started in the Kono diamond fields in December 1998. Significantly, it wasn’t the first time that Foday Sankoh’s RUF rebels had tried to take charge.
American warships, meanwhile, were stationed off Africa’s West Coast to evacuate the country’s expatriates. Most Freetown residents were being airlifted to Lungi so that US aircraft wouldn’t have to venture into the interior. For their part, the British weren’t all that interested in what was going on. Not yet, anyway. To them, Sierra Leone was just one more in a large number of hotspots around the world. It was believed that matters would eventually settle down and work themselves out, just as they had in the past. What was going on along the west coast wasn’t all that unusual; this was, after all, Africa. So Whitehall remained aloof to the goings-on until Washington pointed out that if the Sierra Leone military junta was toppled, the entire coast—Ghana, the usually stable Ivory Coast, and Nigeria—could go the same way.1 This was bad news and helped Whitehall focus on the problem. Although not the most stable country on the African continent, Nigeria was a major oil supplier with almost all of it going to the West. With that in mind, and with unhealthy things taking place in the Middle East, West Africa suddenly started to matter to Britain’s bean-counting mandarins.
For better or worse, it was Nigerian troops who were holding what was left of government ground in Freetown. This was significant because many of the Nigerian soldiers were hardly any better than the rebels. Meanwhile, Sierra Leone was forced to muddle through, which was remarkable considering the mess in which the country now found itself. If anything, Sierra Leone was on the brink of becoming ungovernable. Even a cursory glance at the facts drives that home: the army’s efforts were disjointed and ineffectual because its soldiers were ill-disciplined and the majority barely trained; there was almost no domestic order because the police hadn’t been paid for six months; Parliament remained suspended; the civil service had effectively ceased to exist; and the country’s president had hotfooted hastily into exile, taking the customary fortune in diamonds with him.
That was roughly the time that Neall Ellis came into prominence. Initially he had been flying the Mi-17 that everybody knew as “Bokkie” for Sandline, a Private Military Company with headquarters in London. Things had been going fine until somebody took a photo of the helicopter being worked on by Royal Navy technicians in Freetown harbor and passed it on to one of British tabloids. Parliament came down hard and demanded an immediate end to “this mercenary activity.” Sandline was out of there in record time and in lieu of a financial settlement package, the South African pilot was offered the Mi-17 instead. He accepted gratefully, even though he knew that the Hip was already overdue for a service. But there was a war in the offing and shrewd operator that Nellis is, he and his new found partner, Hassan Ahmed Hussein, eventually made a million dollars in hauling refugees to safety. Ostensibly, they were working for ECOMOG who, with the Sierra Leone government, paid them.
It is worth noting that hostilities had begun earlier in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, when the South African mercenary helicopter pilot “Juba” Joubert, his Ethiopian flight engineer Sindaba, and former SAS operator Fred Marafano originally got the ball rolling in October 1997 in conjunction with Sandline. It was Hassan that had actually got them started there and why Taylor wanted them all dead. They all fled across the border to nearby Freetown with rogue Nigerians right behind them.
For much of the preceding year, Neal Ellis’ multiple tasks had been supplemented by an unusual and enterprising company that maintained its headquarters in Oregon. International Charter Inc. (ICI) operated a pair of Russian-built Mi-8MTVs out of Cockerill Barracks on the fringe of Freetown. It was no accident that Brian Boquist, at that time ICI’s CEO (before he was elected to Congress in Oregon) decided to base his helicopters at the same military headquarters that Nellis used. Situated on the eastern edge of the capital, this was one of the few relatively secure places left in the country.
The South African’s relationship with the American was, of necessity, equitable—the two men never knew when they would need each other. They had already worked together once in October 1998, when Nellis was put on standby to help ICI crews evacuate US Embassy staff from Liberia. Nellis commented later that he liked to stay in touch with such friends. He would down a few beers with them when the occasion presented itself and “help where I can. It was sort of the accepted thing to do.”
Nellis is also generous in his praise for ICI. “Without them we would never have survived, and that’s the kind of reality we all faced.”
ICI’s two Mi-8s were distinctive. Both had large United States flags painted on their fuselages—one on each side. The American flags did not dissuade the rebels in the least, and the two choppers were routinely hit by ground fire. One of ICI’s crewmen (the pilots were East European) was heard to say in Paddy’s Bar one night that the flags did nothing to stop enemy fire. “We could immerse both fucking birds in a pink bath and decorate them with polka dots and the bastards would still shoot at us,” was how he phrased it. The man’s frustration was obvious, though the palm wine he gulped by the tumblerful also had something to do with it. Paddy Warren, owner and chief factotum at Paddy’s, would happily get just about any libation you asked for. He’d been doing that work for so long that somebody in London eventually decided to reward him with an MBE for his good work.
Some people in Sierra Leone were worried about ICI’s role in the country. While ICI’s involvement thus far had been constructive and had contributed a semblance of stability in the regions in which it operated, the company’s ties to Washington were close enough to cause a huff among some of the more politically correct. As usual, European NGOs living in Freetown were vocal about their concerns and labeled the ICI crews “a bunch of spies.” Part of the reason for this friction was that many of these do-gooders despised anything to do with the United States. They also resented a US presence in West Africa. In their minds, an American connection presupposed some kind of intelligence link. Its purpose had to be nefarious, they would claim. The fact that the ICI crews went about their business armed only heightened their suspicion. These were the same people that journalist Anton la Guardia had spotted when he was in-country—ICI crews sporting AK-47s on the chopper pad at Cockerill. But none of this was unique for a US company working in an African war zone.
ICI was only one of several Stateside combines that sometimes operated in an Africa beset by revolt. Another was Military Professional Resources, Inc., or MPRI for short. MPRI is a massive Washington-based organization offering all manner of military training and other programs. Like ICI, its detractors always like to say that the company has specific links to the Pentagon.
There is also Florida’s AirScan, another US entity that flits about on the fringe of the world’s trouble spots. For a long time, AirScan monitored developments in that tiny oil-rich enclave that, while it is twice the size of Rhode Island, lies north of the Congo River and is very much an integral part of Angola. That someone would want to keep an eye on Cabinda made sense because most of that country’s oil also ends up in America.
Interestingly, AirScan did some reconnaissance work in Sierra Leone during 2002, contracted for the job by the mainly British group International Military Advisory and Training Team, IMATT (SL) with a headquarters element in Freetown.
ICI’s primary job as a private military company under contract to the U.S. State Department was to run supplies into Sierra Leone’s interior, mostly to towns and garrisons under siege by rebel forces. Since most of their tasks were in support of military operations, ICI’s helicopters often returned to base “having grown holes in the fuselage.” That little comment came after a particularly hairy run to the town of Kabala in the northern part of the country. Kabala was the same place that Nellis took us from time to time, where the rebels were well equipped and didn’t mind using their hardware against “intruders.”
ICI’s motto is proudly proclaimed on its website: “Anytime…Anywhere.” The company’s specialty is operating in regions where few others are willing to take the risk, including Haiti, Liberia, the Sudan and Sierra Leone, together with a few others that the company does not list. As ICI unequivocally declares, “Our staff has worked on every continent.” The well-connected company’s contracts have even included presidential security details. At least one European diplomat in Freetown referred to ICI as “Africa’s own Air America.” His comment was prompted by the fact that the firm used to draw its staff almost exclusively from US Army Delta, Navy Seals and Special Operations’ elite forces, though it now includes former South African Special Forces veterans among its crews. Another unusual departure is that ICI, an American concern, prefers to use Russian helicopters instead of those manufactured in the States. That is unusual, especially for the proud patriots on its pay sheets.
As Danny O’Brien, a former Special Forces operator and current CEO, told me at his home near Fort Lewis in Washington, there is good reason to fly these foreign birds. The Mi-8MTV used by ICI is a souped-up version of the original Mi-8 and offers five hundred more horsepower than the earlier, military model. It is also a tough and reliable transport chopper—the perfect choice for what he called “sustained, heavy use in harsh environments.” Never mind that it has the additional advantage of being comparatively simple to convert to a basic form of gunship. Rocket pods, obviously, are optional.
Like the Hind, the Hips were originally built by the Soviets for durability. They’re also the workhorses for dozens of air forces around the globe. When I questioned Nellis about flying birds that had been designed and produced by his nemesis, the Evil Empire, he was candid: “No sweat. You puts your oil and gas, you service the bitch regularly and she’ll go forever; just got to treat her right.”
Many Americans who knew about such things agree. ICI reckons that the Hip’s straightforward engineering and reduced reliance on sensitive, high-maintenance technology “makes it an extremely reliable aircraft under any condition,” explained Danny O’Brien. This also means less unscheduled downtime, more flying time, and better safety because the helicopter was essentially designed to fly for extended periods before it needs an overhaul. After a thousand hours in the air, the engine is sent back to Ukraine to be rebuilt, which can be done six times before a new one is installed. The procedure is unabashedly Russian and applies to a lot of other equipment developed during the Soviet era. As O’Brien succinctly put it, “It’s simpler, it’s more practical and most important of all, it’s a lot cheaper.”
One of ICI’s professionals who made a living in some of the world’s more isolated places—his CV includes wounds in Columbia, Haiti and elsewhere—was Robin Hawke. Having banged heads with the UN representative in Port-au-Prince, he was relocated to Sierra Leone by ICI.
In Freetown the man called himself Hawkeye, which was appropriate since he handled automatic weapons with the proficiency of a professional. It’s worth mentioning that since his time in Sierra Leone, First Lieutenant Hawk again entered the US Military and served as an officer with a Special Forces unit in Afghanistan with the 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne). Undoubtedly, his experiences in West Africa found some kind of application against a Taliban-backed insurgency.
Hawkeye’s job with ICI during the short time he worked in West Africa was that of a project manager. Simply put, he ran ICI’s show. He was also willing to provide good backup if and when things turned nasty because he had good military experience in intelligence, communications and as a medic.
I got to know Hawkeye fairly well after he returned to the States. Writing under the pseudonym A.G. Hawke, he kept a remarkable diary of his experiences. Some of the excerpts from a chapter headed “Bad Prez, Bad Gen’s, Bad Troops, and Bad Asses” could have been scripted for an Indiana Jones follow-up:
“As for us, we packed our heaters religiously, to dinners and showers and even in our compound hooch…the mere thought of dying on the toilet for the lack of a heater…and to make battlefield recovery feasible, we packed 9mm’s to leave no distinct American signature. We carried our AK-47s in tennis racket cases…on us, if we felt the heat, near us if not…and always a grenade in the crotch for breaking contact in a bad situation. We went to war with only vests (body armor) and a mule pack full of magazines of ammo, grenades, smokes, strobes, gps, maps, compass, radios, mini-first aid and food. But mostly we were all water and weapons…it was too hot for all the crap typical US soldiers carry because you can’t fight in that heat for very long…your guaranteed lethargy will get you killed faster than anything…travel light, better to fight…that’s the way.”
Hawkeye was a lot kinder to Freetown than most. “Lot of good ass was everywhere to be had,” he wrote:
The women here are fine and, unlike many other African cesspools, AIDs is nearly unheard of here because the war has been raging so long, no tourists have been spreading the dreaded disease…and when you get nearly dead daily, somehow you need that to know you’re alive….
In an article subsequently published in Colonel Robert K. Brown’s Soldier of Fortune magazine, Hawkeye painted a vivid picture of the kind of unconventional helicopter operations that were ongoing at a time when rebels dominated most of the country. As was to be expected, his path crossed with Nellis’ often enough, especially since the ICI’s Mi-8s were helping to evacuate civilians. Hawkeye wrote:
“We woke to the sounds of artillery and mortars in the distance, the sound of sporadic gunfire in the streets and the out-of-control chatter of everyone crying on all the radio channels. So we were asked to assist in getting the people out with our two helos and we did. We worked the better part of a day and evacuated the citizens. Then I had to send one of my choppers out of the country to the nearest safe haven (Guinea) with all my crew and staff and kit so that we could support an operation once we returned. Who knew when that would be, if ever? I stayed with my three best pilots and a minimum amount of kit. We would leave the next day, and since it was Christmas Eve, I didn’t know if we’d see morning.
“Like something out of a bad movie, I watched our secondary chopper fly off into the sunset. I then heard the sound of machine-gun fire on the radio. Nellis, our South African chopper brother was taking fire. He (and Hassan Ahmed Hussein) had continued to try to help the Nigerian peacekeeping force as we evacuated the civilians and said he’d been hit and was going down fast.
“I had to help. Our base began to get the coordinates and I told the guys to kit up and get back into the cockpit. We fired up the turbines…I didn’t know what would happen, but there was an understanding that we would do anything to help our buddies as they would us…so off we went.
“We flew out to get our friend and fortunately, though he’d taken rounds, he could land safely. Said he could make his repairs in the bush. So he only needed us to get his cargo out which consisted of some wounded troops. We landed, loaded and took off…he said he’d be up and running in fifteen minutes.
“Then he told us the news: ‘Hey, Hawkeye…the wounded that you guys have just picked up are actually rebels who’ve defected back to our side!’ ”
Worse, both Nellis and Hawkeye knew that Liberian warlord Charles Taylor had just posted that million-dollar price on each of the choppers. There was also a massive reward waiting for anyone who would bring home one of the crew members flying the Hips: any crew member.
Hawkeye wrote about the presence of a group of white mercenaries working with the rebels and a white-painted rebel helicopter that operated briefly in support of the RUF in the Freetown corridor. The copter was based in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, and regularly crossed into Sierra Leone airspace to support rebel operations. The American and others crunched numbers and dates and deduced that the intruder was probably being run by some of the old South African crews who had flown combat for Executive Outcomes in Angola and Sierra Leone five years before. They were acquiring reputations for all the wrong reasons, he decided.
Hawkeye, meanwhile, wasn’t so sure about another group of whites reported to be working with the rebels, some on the very outskirts of Freetown. At first the Americans were dubious that there were actually mercenaries operating with Sankoh’s people. But the reports kept coming in. The crews had their doubts. Hawkeye and his crowd had been involved in the region for a long time and as he explained, his people knew just about everybody they came across in the interior. If it was happening, he said, if white outsiders were actually fighting with the rebels, the news could cause quite a stir because it meant escalation of the war. At the same time, they were all aware, the only way that Europeans could be attached to the rebel army was if they had been brought in from the outside.
As we all discovered soon afterward, that was exactly what was going on. About a dozen mercenaries of East European stock were serving with the RUF (later joined by some South Africans and Serbs). Most of the imported help were paid their dues in raw diamonds. “We found this out when they brought in the heads of a couple of them after a few battles,” remembered Hawkeye. “It took us a while to discover that they were actually Serb military types on Taylor’s payroll, originally flown in by Gadhaffi’s people in the hopes of changing the course of the war. Earlier we’d thought they might be Spetznaz—Russian Special Forces.”
The American freelancer went on to describe a rather atypical operation as the rebels approached Freetown. He had flown out on a routine mission to pull out the dead and wounded from a government position that had taken a pounding. “We called ahead on the radio, ensured that all was OK: good weather, security along the perimeter OK and so on. By the time we arrived thirty minutes later, the gooks had routed the entire ECOMOG force and, just then, lay waiting for us in ambush. Somehow, they’d been told that we were on our way…or, more feasibly, they monitored our transmissions.”
Hawkeye continued: “We saw the village from the air and it looked like only ghosts lived there. We could see from where we hovered that something was seriously wrong. As soon as we started to pull away, the chopper came under some pretty heavy machinegun fire…no joy for the bastards that day….” Upset that they hadn’t been warned, Hawkeye and his crew headed down the main road leading away from the embattled town in search of what the American called “a lost army.” Coming over a rise they found it. There were almost a thousand men, “all ass and elbows” running down the highway to escape the advancing rebels.
That evening, after several more confrontations, the American and his crowd tried to get the last batch of civilians across the bay to Lungi Airport. The first relief helicopters from an American task force began arriving to airlift the civilians to US naval ships waiting offshore. From there, they were finally shipped to the Gambia and Dakar in Senegal.
“We came in but the Nigerian Army at the hotel wouldn’t allow us to land without charging us—as well as each of the refugees that we had onboard—some big bucks,” complained Hawkeye. “They demanded, virtually at gunpoint, a thousand dollars from each of us if we wanted to leave. True capitalists! We landed anyway and told the people to ignore those assholes and get onboard.”
Matters almost got out of hand when one of the soldiers shoved Hawkeye, who promptly punched the man in the face. “He was bleeding when he reached for his weapon but I drew on him first. The citizens that we’d brought out, meanwhile, afraid of the violence, refused to join us. So we left them there, in deadly fear of their own protectors. Time was tight and we still had to refuel and make ready for our own exodus the following morning.”
Hawkeye thought little of the Nigerian soldiers, but he absolutely despised the rebels, whom he called “barely human” miscreants. With real rancor in his voice he added, “We all know what they did…” He was referring, of course, to their practice of eating captives.
Hawkeye had his own ideas about using Russians to fly ICI helicopters. Always outspoken, especially when he was convinced he was right, it was his view that the Russians work hard. “Fucking hard,” he called it, “just like we Americans used to do a generation ago. Also, they’re very much down to earth. Most important, these guys really are ballsy.” In fact, he rated them right up there with the best chopper pilots he had ever flown with in half a dozen theaters of war. There was no doubt about it, added Hawkeye, the Russians were as competent as the Americans.
Hawkeye’s comments (which outraged some and triggered nodding heads among others) might at least be partially explained by his motto, which went something like “Live, like you’ll die tomorrow, learn like you’ll live forever, love like you’ve never been hurt and laugh like no one is watching.”
According to Hawkeye, his worst experience in Sierra Leone wasn’t having people shoot at him. It was something more mundane: slopping blood out of the helicopter after each airlift of wounded from front-line positions. Although they flew with the occasional medic, the company didn’t have the proper equipment for the job. “We sometimes had inches of blood caked in the back. Soggy pools of it would gather in every hole on the aluminum floor. It couldn’t be left there, not overnight, and definitely not in that heat with all those flies and filth about.” The American mustered teams of local workers and paid them extra to scrape the slime and blood away. Work was difficult to get in Freetown then—as it still is today—and he was n’t short of takers. “We had to use gallons of bleach each day. Afterward I started putting down wooden boards so that we would have some traction as the mucous gelled. Then we’d hose that floor pad down so that it’d drain into the swamp and feed the prawns. But it didn’t always work that way, not with the old stuff that coagulated into lumps.”
A strike on Makeni, the rebels’ regional headquarters in the interior of the country, was something of a watershed adventure for me while flying with the Air Wing. Nellis loved to hit the place whenever he could. I visited it only once, from the air.
“I don’t mind risks,” I explained to Nellis, “but Makeni is at the very heart of the war. If we’re going to be shot down, I’d rather it be as far away from the largest concentration of rebel forces in the country as possible. Then, at least, we’d have a sporting chance.” Nellis only smiled in response.
Our flight path took us first to Rogberi Junction which, despite its notoriety following the death of our two colleagues, was really little more than a handful of shacks along a pot-holed road leading into the forbidding interior. It was manned by UN troops and they waved at us as we passed. From there we went on to Lunsar, which had been captured by Sierra Leone soldiers the day before. To the consternation of us all, it was lost again in a rebel offensive a few nights later. Considering the nature of the war, this was to be expected. The problem was that victories and defeats were quickly promulgated in Freetown, often at astonishing speed. Sometimes we would be flying back from a battle and learn on the radio that Freetown was jubilant at the news of a particular strike that had only taken place an hour earlier. How the hell did they know this so soon?
We believed the rebel intelligence network was a lot better than most people thought, and we weren’t wrong. As expatriates, we were better placed to see the wood for the trees, and it was manifest that in this department the government really wasn’t in kilter. In terms of media relations, for instance, the RUF was streets ahead of anything that all the President’s men together might have contemplated. Also, Sankoh’s men had an outstanding communications network.
Five years later I was able to discuss some of this with Mark Doyle, the BBC correspondent in Africa who spent a good deal of time in that horrific conflict. Though his reports were hardly favorable to the rebels, they treated him well whenever he crossed the lines. He was even allowed access to some of their fighting units. “They pretty well understood the nature of propaganda…the fact that they made me welcome in spite of some of my hostile reports in the past about their militants hacking off legs and arms is certainly indicative of that. Shrewd operators, some of the RUF command,” was Doyle’s opinion.
When bad news spread, whether it was true or false, it was almost like a fog; one could sense the gloom settling on the populace like a heavy shroud. It was also disheartening. As the word spread, some people would become breathless, others frantic. Most would cast their eyes about to see what their neighbors were doing in the hope of finding direction. As we are all aware, fear invariably breeds dislocation, especially when there are two million anxious people in trouble in a community where answers were rarely possible. Children would be called home, food gathered, contact with relatives or friends on the far side of town established. And as conditions deteriorated still more, terror would become almost palpable, not only in the civilian community but also within government.
The newly-arrived British military aid detachment—drawing upon its own experiences elsewhere, including Northern Ireland—was the first to observe that if this was not checked, the situation could rapidly get out of hand. We all knew that rumors and half-baked news spread rapidly, almost like a virus, as it had under previous leaders like Momeh and the delinquent Valentine Strasser, who was usually so spaced out on cocaine that it is surprising he was able to hold on to power as long as he did. If the news was black enough, the civilians might believe that President Kabbah and his diamond-dealing cartel were losing their grip. The next step would be the panic buying of essentials, but little else. The economy of Freetown would quickly collapse. Hassan’s cousin owned a shoe store in the capital. During the week of the Lunsar incident, explained Nellis’ gunner, his cousin sold almost nothing. “The people are very worried,” he explained, “and so am I.”
Lunsar, our first destination that afternoon, was the site of a long-abandoned iron-ore mine dominated by two large hills to its immediate south. There was evidence of government troops about as we flew over the place, but nobody had yet claimed the heights looming over the settlement. Nellis didn’t like that at all. It was obvious that whoever held the place needed to dominate the high ground. And dominating it would not be that difficult, as Nellis had warned his superiors at Cockerill several times. The rebels had only to lug a heavy machine gun up the nearest hill to be able to target all of Lunsar. If they did that, “they’d have their own version of a gunship,” he explained simplistically, trying not to insult their intelligence. Some Sierra Leone staff officers had spent time at Sandhurst—not that it seemed to make much difference in their approach to basic military tactics.
And that’s exactly what the rebels did the next time they took Lunsar. The move underscored one of many contradictions symptomatic of this struggle. Both sides often overlooked the most obvious military options. The difference, however, was that the rebels appeared to us to be markedly less negligent in this regard. The mercenaries in their ranks were earning their pay.
Once past Lunsar we were into the badlands again: Makeni was about ten or fifteen minutes flying time away and Nellis instructed me to trip the passive infrared jammer switch. This was Manpad country.
Within minutes we spotted two United Nations armored personnel carriers (APCs) that had been captured by the rebels a month previously. Both were abandoned, probably for lack of fuel. A half-hearted attempt had been made to camouflage them with branches and shrubs, but their white-painted frames stuck out through the undergrowth like banners. There were gaping holes in their turrets where the heavier guns had been ripped free and transferred to the back of a rebel truck or van, like Mogadishu’s “Technicals,” or so we surmised.
Six or eight villages dotted the road to Makeni, though most did not show any signs of life. Once we spotted a cluster of huts with smoke. It was a communal fire and suggestive of the way the rebels liked to operate; in peacetime, for example, each hut used its own hearth. Nellis opened up on it and moments later the side-gunners reported that armed men were running out of adjacent buildings.
“They’re headed for that clump of forest on the left!” Hassan called out over the intercom, his voice like a rasp. “They’re not government,” he added, since none of them were wearing camouflage. Nellis swung the chopper about and rocketed that clump of bush for good measure while the rest of us watched the thickets below for return fire.
The day’s priority was not this small group of huts but Makeni and its RUF regional headquarters. While most of the rebel brass had decamped into the interior, army intelligence sources indicated that there were still some “heavies” about. Nellis’ mission was to hit a cluster of two-story buildings near the center of the town that the rebels had commandeered about a month before. Back at base, defectors had pinpointed the site as a radio room as well as the RUF commander’s office.
By West African standards Makeni was quite a big place, about a mile or two across. It was laid out in the traditional British colonial “tween-war” style, with an ordered focus toward the marketplace in the center of town. Forty years of independence had done little to alter the place, and I thought it resembled Kumasi in Ghana, though smaller. Similar to Lunsar, Makeni was dominated by a tall communication mast and a series of low hills rimming the skyline. One of these sported a rebel flag; Nellis suggested Hassan use it for target practice as he flew past. He had mentioned earlier that the town was about twenty miles from Malal Hills, where the bones of my friend Bob MacKenzie lay scattered. Out of curiosity, we flew over this low range of hills on the way back. As with so most of the area, there was no evidence of any living being.
With his initial reconnaissance complete, Nellis got busy. He pushed the Hind upward to about eight hundred feet before shoving the nose down, hard. Moments later a rocket salvo crashed into Makeni’s central business district. We should have completed the job with the Gatling, but it jammed. Nellis cursed. Undeterred, he climbed again, swung the Hind around, and went in a second time. By now my mouth was dry.
When emerging from our dives I felt that we were at our most vulnerable. Then and during the tight turns—when the world below appeared to stand still—we must have presented the rebels with a pretty good target. But nothing happened and this was surprising, because intelligence reports had specifically warned that the rebels had 23mm quads and enough RPGs to intimidate any attacker. Worse, we were flying well within the weapon’s thousand-yard destruct envelope.
Suddenly, Hassan screamed: “Trucks!” followed by a bearing on our flank. By the time Nellis had swung his nose round again and gained some height, a vehicle pool emerged a couple hundred yards from our initial target. We shouldn’t have missed it the first time round. There were half a dozen trucks, vans, and Land Rovers, including a BRDM-60 personnel carrier. Nearby, a ten-tonner was parked in the shadow of a large building: almost all of them painted white and indicating more captured UN stock. Nellis’ previous strikes were slightly off center, but this time his aim was spot-on. Pieces of metal, wood and plastic showered down as several columns of smoke rose into the sky. Before I could assess the damage, the South African had pulled his bird up and away to the right; it was no place to hover. We struck again at more targets on the edge of town before heading for home and I was glad to have Makeni at our back.
Because of its headquarters status and target-rich opportunities, Makeni regularly beckoned Nellis, almost like a siren song. He liked the challenge, the certainty of finding targets and, by inference, the kills that resulted. But there would come a time, I suggested once we were on the ground again, when they would hit back, if only for the hell of it. When that happened, I decided early on in the assignment, I’d rather be sitting quietly at Cockerill working on my laptop.
I never flew over Makeni again. The aggressor in my soul had become dormant. Treetop height at a hundred and sixty knots—for hours at a stretch, if necessary—took some getting used to. Frankly, a vulnerable, slow-moving SAM target over Makeni wasn’t something I wanted to experience again. Nellis played on my fears for a long while afterward. “Dry mouth time, again, Al. You coming?” I’d shake my head and he would chuckle quietly to himself.
As noted earlier, the flight to Makeni that afternoon was over land that was almost totally deserted. Going home by a different route, we spotted a few locals; some were washing clothes by a stream. Elsewhere there was a family working their patch of land and pointedly, they ignored us. That was instructive, considering that a helicopter in Africa is an event. In his debrief back at base, Nellis suggested the reason was a rebel presence in the vicinity. He had the coordinates and would go back, perhaps the next day. Innocent civilians always waved, he argued. “Those people were worried about us,” he declared emphatically. “They could very well have been gooks who put their weapons aside on our approach. It’s the oldest gambit in insurgency,” he continued. “Ask anybody who has flown combat in some of these far flung outposts.”
By the time we got back to Lungi to refuel, the floor at the back was half-an-inch deep in spent brass.
Because Nellis flew the only helicopter in Sierra Leone that never returned to base without at least one strike at an RUF position, there were a lot of people at Cockerill eager to sit in on his debriefs. It was to be expected that there were also those in Freetown who would try and forge ties with the man, particularly within the diplomatic community. It was a standard routine: Nellis would be drinking at Paddy’s or Alex’s, and the first secretary of this embassy or the cultural officer of that embassy would greet him like somebody from the old country. It had about as much to do with getting to know the man as what he might reveal. Nellis wasn’t yesterday’s child and he accepted this faux familiarity with good humor.
The same could be said about the High Commission, though there was a special place in Nellis’ heart for the British. Although Nellis was a native of South Africa, his antecedents had come from East Anglia and he had a British passport. London’s emissaries often exploited this situation, almost ruthlessly at times. As author John Le Carré said of British foreign policy in The Constant Gardener, “It’s all ritual and no faith.”
But since Nellis is a likable fellow and many of those involved in military liaison work in Freetown had seen conflict—even if from a distance—there were a few bonds forged. Among those with whom Nellis shared confidences during my swing through Freetown, was Lt. Col. Rob Symonds, British Military Liaison Officer at the High Commission.
An interesting fellow, Symond’s weathered face revealed absolutely nothing. Those who spent time with the man found that he could be simultaneously evasive and elliptical. Or, if the mood took him, explicit and just moments later, infuriatingly vague. To him it was all part of the job. I remember one night when we were having dinner at Alex’s in Aberdeen’s Man of War Bay, one of the few restaurants that maintained acceptable Western health standards. Symonds said something about Nellis’ expertise with the Gatling.
Listening to Nellis’ experiences, the colonel quoted the conventional wisdom regarding close air support crews within NATO. “No helicopter wing should go operational,” he said, “unless there are at least three aircrews dedicated to each pair of gunships.” That meant three pairs of cockpit crews and another three pairs of side-gunners, never mind ground crews. In Freetown, Symonds observed, Ellis’ total complement was himself as pilot and a couple of side-gunners armed with machine guns. There wasn’t even a co-pilot.
The consensus among just about everybody in Freetown—ethnics and expatriates alike—was that this veteran of South Africa’s border wars had achieved an astonishing level of success. What’s more, he and the crew had done so without back-up and it had been going on a while.
But Nellis was paying a price. He hadn’t had a real break for more than two years. Moreover, he, Hassan, and the rest of the gang had only had a couple days off since the most recent bout of hostilities opened months earlier. Sometimes Nellis would show up so dizzy or disorientated that his crewmates would drive him home instead. The next day the pilot would be back at work.
“You can go on for so long and ignore the obvious,” I told him. “Something has to give.” It didn’t help that Nellis had not even seen a doctor in five years. I urged him to take a few precautions. One of my suggestions was to thin his blood, even marginally. His condition so worried me that once I’d joined the group, I practically forced him to take an aspirin a day. Nellis was overweight, enjoyed his liquor, and did not eat or sleep properly. He had adrenaline for blood, and his was a classic prescription for a heart attack. I was aware that even with a complete set of controls before me in the gunners’ seat, I’d be helpless if anything happened while we were in the air. I know marginally more about nuclear fission than about flying.
I’d mentioned his condition to several British officers serving with the Royal Navy task force. There must be doctors to spare, I suggested. Though they were initially enthusiastic, nothing came of it. It also didn’t take me long to discover that while most of them admired the man for what he was doing, it didn’t occur to them to arrange for Nellis to have a proper check-up. It would have been a small but valuable tribute to the one man who was fighting the hardest, especially since Nellis was also broke at the time. It was an entirely different battle to scrape together enough each month to pay the Ethiopians who were keeping the choppers in the air, especially when the government that they were protecting wasn’t prepared to do its bit: C’est l’Afrique.
No slouch while at his post in Freetown, Rob Symonds was a different caliber of officer altogether. He was a participant in the war and would help where he could, playing a significant—though understated—role the hostilities. In intelligence matters, the Colonel was as eager to catch as to throw and his job early on was to head north out of Freetown each morning toward the badlands. Interestingly, he traveled in full camouflage uniform (which surprised us all), sometimes going through Rogberi and behind rebel lines. Mostly he tried to find out what was going on in the jungle and beyond. He worked alone and unarmed, his only “defense” a High Commission Land Rover painted white all over with two large Union Jacks painted on the doors, one on each side.
Symonds must have known what he was doing, though we all thought him a little demented to be moving about the dark and distant interior unescorted. Only after our two journalist colleagues were killed did he accept some help, usually in the form of another Land Rover with a few of the Special Forces operators in it, mostly SAS. But even then they would have been pushed had there been an ambush in that overgrown terrain where the jungle was often so dense that it deflected light. Our greatest concern was that Symonds might be taken hostage. Each day he set out for a new destination “to get the feel of things.” Since he and Nellis were neighbors in the Cape Sierra Hotel compound, we’d afterward sit about in Nellis’ backyard and talk about the day’s events, usually over drinks, snacks, and swarms of mosquitoes. Anton La Guardia would sometimes join us for a natter.
Fit and wiry, “Colonel Rob” was one of the few people I knew who jogged and actually enjoyed his smokes. He was also heading for retirement; Sierra Leone was to be his last foreign posting. This British officer’s simplest and most innovative ploy to win points, however marginal, was to try to get some of the hearts and minds of the locals on his side. His unlikely weapon in this campaign involved a bagful of old tennis balls. When he entered a village, he’d toss a few balls about to get the children scurrying after them and the exercise would delight everybody there since most had never handled a real ball before. Totally out of touch with civilization, their “balls” consisted mostly of rags and stuffing tied with string.
“You want one?” he would ask in an accent polished by years of associating with the right people. Of course they did. In this, these jungle kids were no different from their distant cousins in Brixton or the Bronx; one tennis ball represented their most prized possession. Then Symonds would say, with a candor these kids must have found disarming, “I will give you a ball, and you, in return, must give me a gun…one ball for one gun.” The routine was always the same, with the parents often enthusiastic as interested bystanders.
The ploy was absurd, but it worked. Symonds rarely returned to Freetown without a Kalashnikov or two in his rig. Looking back, what made it scary was that this was the same area where the West Side Boys took a squad of British troops hostage not long afterward.2 Time and again this enigmatic and calculating British diplomat was called upon to outface the enemy, and he was invariably successful.
Rob Symonds worried all of us by the way he went about his business. Many of us kept an eye out for his safe return, sometimes a little anxiously. He would go about his work with a deceptive half smile that belied the depth of his resolve and, in retrospect, I think it would be difficult to find that level of dedication among most military types, no matter what uniform they wore. Invariably, his work took him deep into the kind of primitive bush country where nobody would have been any the wiser if they’d shot him in the back and left his body for the animals to devour. We were all aware that this selfsame brutal scenario played itself out every day, sometimes twenty or thirty times over and quite often within walking distance of Freetown. Had the worst happened to this British intelligence officer in Sierra Leone’s muggy interior, the killers would probably have eaten him themselves, as they did with my American friend Bob MacKenzie after they tortured and killed him (Chapter 19).
Doing what Symonds did, serving in an ultra-sensitive security position in Sierra Leone, placed the man in a class of his own. He was certainly in the same category as the occasional SAS operator visiting us at Cockerill. These were tough, resourceful people, and the demands made on them were often severe. Mostly they operated behind enemy lines and had limited recourse to rescue or assistance if things turned bad. Even so, it was a lot more than what Nellis could possibly hope for if the worst happened.
The actions of so many of these British officers repeatedly underscored the resolve of those who were attached to the Sierra Leone Army to do what they could to help that impoverished war-torn country. By now, I imagine, the good colonel has been properly rewarded for his efforts, though with Britain’s security services such things are rarely made public.
While Whitehall knew and accepted the Hind’s value to the war effort, it son became apparent during the British military deployment to West Africa that British officers were to have no direct association with Neall Ellis. The word was that any contact—personal or operational—was to be limited to essentials. In fact, as I was subsequently told by the South African pilot, a letter was sent out from Army Headquarters in Britain very specifically warning British personnel not to even talk “to the mercenary element” in Freetown. The RAF Air Advisor in Sierra Leone at the time actually had to request a special waiver because he was discussing just about everything to do with the war with Neall Ellis every day. It took a little while, but in the end he got it.
This policy highlighted an event that took place shortly after the Royal Navy squadron arrived. Out of nowhere, Nellis was invited for dinner onboard the helicopter carrier HMS Ocean. Obviously his reputation preceded him. The invitation came with an offer to spend the night onboard; the shindig would end late and it would be difficult to get ashore afterward. Nellis was delighted, of course, because these were his sort of people. Anyway, he was already a familiar figure to the flight crews of both Ocean and Illustrious: they often sank a few together at Paddy’s and he’d briefed some of the carrier pilots at Cockerill several times, as it later transpired.
The invitation was retracted just a day before the event. The fact that no explanation was offered only compounded the insult; the entire affair was the antithesis of just about everything British. Obviously, someone was looking over his shoulder at his pension, which was a pity because it was a deliberate slight and totally uncalled for. I sensed that it cut deep.
It was also no secret that London kept strict tabs on what Nellis might or might not be doing to contaminate Britain’s fine upstanding military ethos. Very early one morning, Rob Symonds—still at his villa at the hotel—got a call from his London headquarters. The question was direct: had he, the British military attaché in Sierra Leone, flown in Nellis’ Hind?
Whether he had or not—he never went up while I was around, so I don’t know definitively one way or the other—was irrelevant. The inquiry reflected an intransigent British government mindset about all things unconventional. As Michael Grunberg of Sandline told me afterward, the policy wasn’t all that surprising. The British government declared more than once in Parliament that it would have no truck with mercenaries, and sadly he added, “That’s been symptomatic of Labor’s convoluted African politics ever since Suez.” Interestingly, Nellis took Joe Melrose, America’s ambassador to Sierra Leone, on a flip (though unofficially, I imagine). That it was unorthodox, there is no doubt: one of the President’s men flying over enemy territory with a merc!
Brigadier David Richards, Force Commander in Sierra Leone, was one senior British officer on a foreign posting who, as a journalist tartly commented, “shot from the lip.” Richards also spoke about the advantage of having the Air Wing’s helicopter on call at all hours. The Brigadier remarked during an interview I did for Jane’s Defence Weekly that Nellis’ dedication was “quite remarkable.” All the more so, he added, since the man wasn’t even from Sierra Leone, although he was permanently living there. The statement was underscored by a rebel radio intercept that same week: “Were it not for the government gunship,” it declared, “the entire RUF command would be sleeping in the capital within three days.”
The Brigadier’s comments were especially noteworthy, coming as they did from an officer everyone acknowledged wasn’t afraid to say what he thought, and in an establishment rarely known for its candor. Sierra Leone was a sensitive operation that involved the potential race card, as well as a dozen other imbroglios. With time, it became so bad that word games—semantics, really—became the norm with any statement issued by the High Commission. So in this regard, Richards was refreshingly different. As the front man for a rescue operation that could have gone horrifyingly wrong, he wasn’t afraid to react when a situation demanded firm action, a character trait that did not endear him to many of the stuffed shirts back home. This youthful senior officer—who, in his previous deployment, had commanded the British contingent in East Timor—must have learned early on that style confessed grace; so, too, when briefing a bunch of cynical hacks. Every question, no matter how astute or absurd, was answered in full and usually with a smile that belied the gravity of what he knew was taking place in the country.
Richards’ maverick nature proved popular with the locals. Indeed, according to British journalist Chris McGreal, by the time he arrived in West Africa, Richards was well on the way to enjoying the same appeal in Freetown as former British High Commissioner Peter Penfold. When this British official was abruptly recalled to London (after being accused of complicity in allowing mercenaries to break the UN arms embargo) his departure sparked violent demonstrations in the capital.
Not unexpectedly, the “hired guns” issue became a topic on the brigadier’s watch, especially as more journalists arrived in Freetown and Nellis’ successes became a topic at just about every bar in town. What was of interest this time around was that neither Nellis nor any members of his team had ever been labeled “mercenaries,” either by the Sierra Leone government or by its military hierarchy. To British military forces and, for that matter, the offices of the British High Commission in Freetown, Nellis was a “contract pilot” and nothing more. In any event, the war had encroached too close to the capital for there to be any need to downplay his role.
Richards was questioned about this and his retort was unequivocal. The Hind had originally been acquired for the people of Sierra Leone, explained the general. “International funds had paid for it, some of which, no doubt, came from Britain. Having achieved that much, the people of this country obviously needed someone to fly it.” Besides, he added,3 “Ellis is under contract to a recognized government.” Indian Army Major General Vijay Jetley, the United Nations Force Commander in Sierra Leone, said much the same thing. His utterances, coming from someone most of us referred to as “the resident artful dodger,” were propounded in more evasive terms, largely because he could never being himself to acknowledge the role that Nellis had played in rescuing some of his men from a rebel attack immediately after the Indian contingent had been pushed into this debacle. “Ellis has a valid contract with this government,” Jetley jousted when I asked him about it in his office at the Mammy Yoko Hotel across the way from Alex’s Bar.
With all this fuss going on, Nellis went about each day doing his thing, and as even his adversaries had to concede, he was damned good at his job. He’d go out on a sortie, kill a bunch of rebels, and return to base. Apart from the British contingent at Cockerill Barracks (and as a consequence, the High Commission) the South African pilot would apprise his Sierra Leonian chiefs of anything he’d managed to learn along the way. That included his immediate boss, Colonel Nelson Williams, as well Brigadier Tom Carew, the Chief of Defense Staff. They, in turn, informed their minister who put the president in the picture. If it were really important, the Brigadier would be the first to know.
Regardless of the explanations, official and otherwise, the mercenary issue festered. I quickly learned that Ellis’ very presence would sometimes provoke unwarranted questions and, on occasion, emotion. People would inquire about what his official position was within the country’s military hierarchy. In supercilious fashion, they’d ask about the meaning of Brigadier Richards’ term “contract pilot.” Untold times Nellis was asked whether he actually was a mercenary. It’s little wonder why he liked to change out of his flying suit before going to the pub.
While many perceived the rebels as villains, not everyone in Freetown agreed. The result was that while there were those who regarded Nellis as a hero, others were convinced that his motives were suspect. “Why else would he do what he did if he wasn’t getting paid vast sums in diamonds?” was the inference wafting about Freetown.
Worse, it was regarded as chic in some circles on the West Coast to take a passive line about the war, even though only months before Sankoh’s rabble had all but broken down the gates to Freetown. Even that little episode notwithstanding, the consequences of rebel actions could hardly be missed since so many of these disfigured creatures were all over town: everywhere you looked were amputees. It was astonishing, then, that so many non-governmental personnel in Freetown were outspoken in their hostility toward this pilot. Some declared Nellis an “unperson.” Though Orwellian and ridiculous considering the circumstances, it was still of some concern. How could people think like this given what Sierra Leone was experiencing? Moreover, some of these people lived barely a stone’s throw from where we did in Aberdeen. Just about everybody was aware that quite a few of them sympathized quite openly with the rebels. We also knew they were probably acting as conduits to some of the more influential rebel fellow travelers in town.
The rationale of people who thought this way seemed to be grounded in the belief that as long as Nellis remained part of the Sierra Leonian military equation, there could never be peace. This kind of cockeyed logic made Nellis the cause of war, rather than a consequence of the fighting. It seemed a bit like listening to a group of historians discussing the origins of World War II without referencing Hitler.
One of the results of this friction was that some of these do-gooders believed that if they ignored Nellis long enough, his persona would eventually evaporate or, more seriously, someone might assassinate him. Others wrote nasty letters to the newspapers, cranking themselves up into high dudgeon. Quite a few expressed the opinion that Nellis was evil incarnate, a bloody murderer who should be handed over to the RUF. Of course it was also obvious to clear-thinking individuals that it was Nellis’ actions that made it possible for these same people to stay on in Sierra Leone and keep their jobs. He and his boys actually prevented more barbarism from taking place.
Listening to what some of the rebels’ victims went through might have been a bit of a corrective for those so powerfully opposed to the conflict, but that wasn’t the end of it. Unless you were Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), Caritas, or one of those rare ministrants prepared to help the unfortunate, few members of the expatriate community ever took the trouble to lift the covers and look up close at conditions for themselves. Some actually went to a lot of trouble to avoid having anything to do with the military struggle, including some of its pathetic and utterly helpless victims. This surprised me because the refugee camps were right there in Murraytown, squarely in your face.
In fact, the Amputee and War Wounded Camp in that suburb was open to visitors at all hours. I went there several times and though I’d seen many things in my travels around the world, my visits there unsettled me—sometimes for days afterward. It’s tough trying to communicate with a four-year-old with no arms, or a fat old lady who had had both her legs chopped off above her knees with machetes, something that couldn’t have happened in a hurry because this was a very large woman.
Few of the pacifists made any effort to acquaint themselves with the consequences of rebel actions. Had they done so, they would probably have met a Swiss national by the name of Randin who lived nearby. A qualified prosthetic mechanic, Randin spent most of his days working with amputees, building limbs for those who had been brutalized. It was a slow process, he admitted, but he was finally getting somewhere by the time I went through his place the last time.
“We’re sorrowfully short of cash and that kind of limits our output,” he confided to me in the tin shack where he and his clutch of half a dozen Sierra Leonian assistants put in their eight-or ten-hour stints. It’s salutary that they did so for next to nothing, day after day, in that soporific heat. There was no air conditioning within the confines of that awful place, and no complaints from his tiny band of volunteers either.