PROLOGUE
1. “How Hired Guns Succeed Where the United Nations Failed,” Al J. Venter, Jane’s International Defense Review, March 1998, pp. 23–26.
2. The Audacious Admiral Cochrane, Brian Vale, Casemate Publishing (US) and Conway Maritime Press (UK), 2005.
3. “Oil and Insurgency in Nigeria”: Al J. Venter, Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor, September 23, 2003.
4. The Economist, London, August 9, 2003: “Obituary—Foday Sankoh,” p. 69.
CHAPTER 1
1. Before leaving the United States for Sierra Leone, Richard Davis of Second Chance Body Armor specially made for me a fine camouflage battle jacket complete with high collar and quarter-inch steel “hard corps” inserts which would stop most rounds, including a NATO 7.62mm. Though I took it with me to Freetown, I never got to wear it on ops. The vest was just too bulky and confining for the tropics. And anyway, under the Hind’s front bubble, I needed space, not more constraint.
CHAPTER 2
1. Anton la Guardia: War Without End: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for a Promised Land, Thomas Dunne Books, London, 2002.
2. In late 2001, during the UN-mandated cease-fire, Nellis’ original Hind did come down after its main engine seized while on a sortie in the interior. It crashed in a clearing and a British Army major was killed on impact. Nellis and crew had to revert to using the Sierra Leone Air Wing’s “semiserviceable” reserve Mi-24 with its 80mm underwing rocket pods. Without air conditioning in the tropics it was a bind for those who flew in her.
3. Major Phil Ashby: Unscathed: Escape From Sierra Leone, Pan Macmillan Publishers, London, 2002.
4. Al J. Venter: The Chopper Boys: Helicopter Warfare in Africa, Greenhill Books (UK), Stackpole Books (US), and Southern Publishing (South Africa), 1994.
CHAPTER 3
1. Ivory Coast has since plunged into a succession of brutal civil wars that have involved both mercenaries and several neighboring states including Liberia and Burkina Faso. Despite efforts by France and the US, hostilities are likely to go on for the foreseeable future, if only because of totally intractable problems between the Christian/Animist south and the Muslim north of this fairly large society of twelve or fourteen million people. By 2005 both sides were hiring Liberian “child fighters” because of their fearless reputation for killing, often indiscriminately.
2. Much of the planning involved in the operation to rescue the squad of captured British soldiers held by a gang of rebel dissidents who called themselves the West Side Boys rested on the shoulders of one of Colonel Symonds’ colleagues, Lt. Col. Richard Van der Horst, formerly commanding officer of the Royal Marines Special Boat Service. Tragically, Van der Horst died in a diving accident off Norway in March 2005. He was 38 years old.
3. According to Ellis, the Sierra Leone government actually paid for it. Britain later provided ammunition and spares for the helicopter flown by a mercenary crew.
CHAPTER 4
1. The Nigerians are still at it. A late intelligence report out of West Africa disclosed that an arms shipment that reached Liberia in the summer of 2002 was actually routed to Monrovia through Lagos and orchestrated by Nigerians. Considering that country’s history in the struggle, first against Taylor’s revolutionaries in the mid-1990s, and later the number of Nigerian lives that were lost in three successive wars against Sankoh’s Liberianbacked rebels, this is a serious indictment. Nigeria’s role throughout the war was supposed to have been neutral, but that premise, it seems, was flawed from the start.
CHAPTER 5
1. Known as Manpads (man-portable air defense systems) there are a lot of them out there these days. Jane’s Air Defence Systems currently shows the CMPIEC HN-5A/B Sakr Eye, Kolomna KBM Strela-2/Strela 2M (SA-7 “Grail’) and Strela 3/Strela 3M (SA-14 “Gremlin’), Short’s Missile Systems “Blowpipe” and the Raytheon FIM-92 “Stinger” as being in service with some irregular Third World forces including Hizbullah in South Lebanon as well as with some Chechnyan guerrilla units. China has its own version of the SAM-14; significantly, it includes a proximity fuse.
CHAPTER 6
1. “Dogs of War Come in From the Cold,” Al J. Venter, Jane’s Defence Weekly, July 12, 2000.
2. Patrick Allen: RAF Yearbook: “Defence Helicopter: At the Drop of a Hat,” Aug/Sept 2000.
3. “America’s African Rifles,” Robert Kaplan, The Atlantic Monthly, April 2005.
4. Not to be confused with the eminent Nigerian politician and diplomat Major General Joseph Garba who unseated President Yakubu Gowan in a coup d’etat after the Biafran war and who died in July, 2002.
5. Major General Vijay Kumar Jetley, Commander of UN Mission in Sierra Leone: Interview with Al J. Venter, Jane’s Defence Weekly, July 12, 2000.
6. Jane’s Defense Weekly, Ibid.
7. A motor tire with gasoline in the wheel cavities is placed around the neck of a victim and set alight. Thousands were killed like this in South Africa during the transition period.
CHAPTER 7
1. At the end of the war, Chief Normal Hinga, head of the Kamajors was indicted on war crimes, a matter that still hadn’t been settled by the time we went into print.
2. Situation Report—standard operational jargon used by all military forces.
3. In Vietnam and one or two other wars of recent times, it wasn’t always that easy. Several times in Southeast Asian “last ditch stands,” journalists in the line-of-fire retaliated simply to avoid the squad being overrun. As some of these scribes commented afterward, it was that or be killed. Similarly, while in jungle operations in Angola and Sierra Leone, I carried an AK-47. It would have been pointless to flash a press card at somebody who has just emerged from the undergrowth clutching an automatic weapon. Under the circumstances, I thought it was the sensible thing to do, though some of my colleagues might not agree. But then, they didn’t have one of their good buddies killed and eaten by rebel forces.
CHAPTER 8
1. Since then, there have several verified reports that Nigerian interests have routed Libyan arms shipments to Liberia through Lagos. This is a remarkable development considering that ECOMOG—which fought long and hard in both Liberia and Sierra Leone, was composed largely of Nigerian troops. Nigerian Air Force Alpha jets provided top cover for many of these West African operations. It’s axiomatic that, as a consequence, Nigerian intelligence sources haven’t been quite as forthcoming about information of arms running in the region as they might have been in the past.
2. 2. Early into the new millennium, a Parisian front group hired South African mercenaries in Johannesburg to fight in the Ivory Coast, then undergoing some serious domestic problems, most of which had been fostered from neighboring states that included Liberia and Burkina Faso. The fighting that took place in this once lovely Francophonic colony involved South African pilots like J.J. Fuentos, Brian Hogan of Durban and Carl Alberts. Another South African, Willem van Deventer—more recently working for ICI Oregon out of Khartoum—said that while flying Mi-24 Hind gunships for the Abidjan crowd, he notched up four hundred hours of combat in the critical five-month period that ended in stalemate. That included ninety-seven strikes against northern, mainly Islamic positions in this embattled West African state.
CHAPTER 9
1. The colloquial name given to the cockpit audio warning systems failure device onboard all Russian helicopters.
2. Dana Drenkowski provided more background to the Ed Wilson case in an e-mail in March, 2005. One of the CIA people who originally testified against Wilson has since retired and admitted that both he and the CIA deliberately lied during the case. The judge reviewing the evidence said that the five attorneys handling the case knowingly and purposely presented perjured evidence related to Wilson’s role in certain CIA operations. Interestingly, three of the five went on to become federal judges.
3. I’d spent time with McGrady on one of his bounty hunts along the Gwai River north of Bulawayo in the late Seventies. We came within an ace of getting ourselves killed by a tough squad of Joshua Nkomo’s ZIPRA guerrillas who later ambushed a Rhodesian African Rifles platoon that came looking for us.
4. “Yellow Rain” was a chemical defoliant the US government clandestinely used in Vietnam to clear the jungle. It had a severely debilitating effect on people and the after-effects were still being manifested years afterward. The issue became one of the most controversial of the war since the Pentagon always denied that chemical agents had been used in Southeast Asia.
CHAPTER 10
1. In early February 2002, almost as an afterthought, Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel expressed “sincere regrets” for his country having been morally responsible for Patrice Lumumba’s death. It came after a lengthy debate in the Belgian Parliament on whether or not Brussels should accept responsibility for what happened in its former African colony. Lumumba was the only democratically elected leader the country has ever had and it was Europeans and Americans who were instrumental in finally having him murdered. A Belgian commission of inquiry heard testimony that Lumumba could not possibly have been assassinated without the complicity of Belgian army officers backed by the US Central Intelligence Agency.
2. It was about this time that Ché Guevara and a group of “volunteers” is known to have visited the rebel front. Recent disclosures have indicated that they were sponsored by Moscow, but nothing ever seems to have come of it.
3. Gerry Thomas: Mercenary Troops in Modern Africa, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1984.
CHAPTER 12
1. Pamwe Chete: The Legend of the Selous Scouts, by Lt-Col. Ron ReidDaly, CLM, DMM, MBE, Covos Day Books, South Africa, 1999. Literally translated, Pamwe Chete in the Shona language means “All Together!”
2. Morocco had originally supplied Zaire with a number of missile defense systems and the intention was to return them all to Casablanca before Mobutu’s government fell. It never happened.
CHAPTER 13
1. ‘The Jackals of War: How Zimbabwe (mis)used Army Sacked the Congo,” June 2003, by Adam Geibel.
2. Reports out of Zimbabwe in mid-2005 indicated that Mugabe had bought six K8 advanced jet trainers at a purported $19 million each. This is the Chinese version of the British Aerospace BAE Hawk. Zimbabwe was also given three MiG-23s by Libyan leader Gadhaffi.
3. In a trial that lasted a year, twenty-four people were sentenced to death in January 2003 by a Kinshasa court for involvement in the assassination.
4. Zimbabwe Standard, Harare, May 20, 2001. See also Reuters report by Finbarr O’Reilly: ‘Zimbabwean Tanks Still Ring the Muddy City, Where Diamonds are Sold Openly on the Streets like Bags of Expensive Candy,” November 14, 2002.
5. Final Report of the Panel of Experts on “The Illegal Exportation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” UN Security Council—S/2002/1146, October 12, 2002.
CHAPTER 14
1. Shadows: Airlift and Airwar in Biafra and Nigeria 1967–1970, Michael I. Draper, Coombe Corner, Awbridge, Hants SO51 OHN, 1999
2. The Making of a Legend: Frederick Forsyth, Penguin Books, London, 1977.
3. Only after the end of the Biafran war did Abuja replace Lagos as the Federal capital.
4. Shadows, Ibid.
CHAPTER 15
1. Private Armies and Military Intervention, by David Shearer, Adelphi Paper #316: International Institute for Strategic Studies/OUP, London, 1998.
2. Forcas Armadas de Angola.
3. Linked in this venture to Ranger Oil of Canada.
4. Uniao Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola (National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola).
5. There is a considerable difference of opinion whether or not the earlier EO recruits were warned that there would be no death benefits for the members’ families, or that there would be medical insurance, something that became standard with all EO personnel later. In fact, after Phil Smith was killed at Soyo, it took a long time and “a little unconventional pressure” on the part of some of his buddies to get a settlement made to his wife Fiona. Smith—like Eeben Barlow—was a former 32 Battalion operator. The two had not only seen action together, but were also good friends and knew each others’ families well. This blatant lack of family support by an organization making millions was regarded by many of those involved at Soyo as reprehensible.
6. The Angolan Army (FAA) during the EO period was previously called FAPLA (Forcas Armadas de Popular de Libertacao de Angola), or the military wing of the ruling MPLA.
7. Soviet tracers are green. The standard-issue RPG-7 rocket grenade selfdestructs at 900 meters.
8. Special Report: “The New Gods of War: Enhanced Blast Weapons” (Thermobarics/Fuel-Air-Explosives): Analysis, by Christopher D Kondaki, Global Information System (GIS). Defense and Foreign Affairs Daily, Washington DC, January 18, 2002. In this document Angola is listed as one of the countries in possession of thermobaric weapons. So, too, is Zimbabwe.
CHAPTER 16
1. “Mercenaries Fuel Next Round in Angolan Civil War,” Al J. Venter, Jane’s International Defence Review, March 1996.
2. Duncan Rykaart was previously OC of 52 Commando of 5RR, and thereafter acting OC of 5RR after the death of Corrie Meerholz.
3. Though relocated to Conakry in Guinea because of the civil war in Liberia, Robertsfield retained its original name for ease of recognition by the international aviation community.
4. At about the time I went into Angola with EO the first time, the company was negotiating a contract with Mexico to send some of its men in to quell Chiapas unrest. The CIA apparently got wind of it and the project was shelved, if only because American taxpayers would have ended paying for it from monies Mexico received as aid from the US. A scandal would undoubtedly have resulted had they gone through with it.
5. That still didn’t prevent me from getting an AK shoved in my face and arrested for taking photos after I touched down with an EO contingent at Saurimo Airport. It took Blaauw and Rykaart half a day to extricate me from a situation that at one stage got ugly. In a prior confrontation between EO and the “Ninjas,” there was a twenty-minute exchange of fire before the issue was settled.
CHAPTER 17
1. Peasants/people.
2. For years, Savimbi relied on foreign companies to fly planes into some of the strips under his command in remote parts of the country. While most of these came from Zaire (Congo), others filed false flight plans and entered Angolan air space from Zambia, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Congo (Brazzaville), Morocco and several destinations—including one or two in Europe—that have been not been confirmed. In the end, very few of these flights were apprehended by FAPA, the Angolan Air Force. The pilots involved were paid mainly from the proceeds of Unita’s illegal diamond diggings such as those around Cafunfo.
3. When the countryside or the jungle is too overgrown or too mountainous to land safely, a helicopter will hover over the men on the ground. Then they would either be winched up or climb up ropes lowered for the purpose. As the term implies, the positions from which they were snatched were indeed “hot.” There were times when these soldiers came onboard with only minutes to spare.
4. “Sticks” were usually four-man groups.
5. A popular word used by some South Africans; in Zulu, it means “time to go home.”
CHAPTER 18
1. Angola has been run along the lines of a Soviet-style Comintern state almost from the time that the Portuguese left Africa in the mid-1970s. Much of it came into play during the incumbency of the last Portuguese military governor, Admiral Rosa (Red) Coutinho, a notorious communist. And what a legacy he bequeathed this sad state. As one Angolan politician was heard to comment when his duplicity was finally exposed, “A pox on his house and all his children!”
2. Both times they came at the behest of a much-beleaguered Mobutu Sese Seko.
3. “Angola: New Mines, What Ban?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Al J. Venter, Volume 55 #03, May/June 1999, pp. 13–15.
4. Following Dr Savimbi’s death in the spring of 2002 (after being trapped in the bush by what a Luanda report said was a “Special Forces” squad) there was much speculation about who was responsible. Everything points to him having been betrayed. There have been several groups mentioned as perpetrators, including the Israelis, former Portuguese military associates, and most unlikely, a squad of North Vietnamese militias (Hanoi did assist the MPLA during hostilities against South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s). This writer was in South Africa at the time Savimbi was killed and reliable sources indicated that a group of South Africans—all former military SF types with close links to both the NIA and Military Intelligence—were responsible. Savimbi, it will be recalled, had been lured to a meeting with people he knew and was shot nineteen times.
5. Ditrich was to die in a bizarre accident near Saurimo two months later. While at the wheel of a BMP-2 and crossing the Lauchimo River to the immediate east of the city, it veered off a bridge and landed upside-down in the water. Though his colleagues did what they could, Paul was dead before the machine could be righted. His passing is commemorated with the dozen or so others who were killed in company service on the granite plinth that stood in the grounds of the house in Raslouw Street in a Pretoria suburb.
CHAPTER 19
1. Notes, articles, papers, e-mails and personal interviews with Sibyl MacKenzie.
2. Cole, himself a British national, had served in the SAS with MacKenzie in the Rhodesian War. Like the American, he was part of a troika that called itself “The Three Knights” and eventually published a book about their exploits. Titled The Elite: The Rhodesian Special Air Services, it detailed some of the events in which they were involved.
CHAPTER 20
1. Patterson was an old hand in Sierra Leone, having originally worked in the Kono region for many years. His job was to look after diamond concessions granted to one of the subsidiary companies because Freetown paid in part for EO’s services in mineral rights. Among the most valuable assets was an extremely productive Kimberlitic pipe which local residents referred to as Monkey Mountain. They believed it was inhabited by voodoo phantoms, and had consequently never been commercially exploited.
2. Two versions of South African-produced APCs used extensively during that country’s Border War period. Some versions like the Casspir, Buffel and Mamba have since been since sold to countries like India, Sri Lanka and for use by United Nations in peacekeeping operations. I saw a lot of them deployed in South Lebanon with Unifil during my last visit to Naqoura.
3. Case in point was a former Parachute Regiment officer with EO, “Pine” Pienaar, who trained recruits at the Benguema Training Center in Sierra Leone. After EO had left the country, he stayed behind on a government contract and was later shot and killed by one of his own men during an operation at the Bumbuna Dam. This officer is not to be confused with the EO pilot of the same name who took part in company operations in Angola.
4. A reading of James Lucas’ The German Army Handbook provides a good insight to many of these tactics where, in essence, the objective is paramount and the means to achieve success is adaptable to circumstances or deployment. Being Special Forces, the majority of these operators would have spent a lot of their own time studying other wars, WWII and Southeast Asia especially.
5. Anti-personnel (as opposed to anti-tank mine). In other contexts, such as with artillery shells, AP can be used to indicate armor-piercing capability.
6. It was a sloppy procedure. In any difficult night operation where those involved are under direct threat, operators like to sleep within touching distance of each other to avoid unnecessary movement when changing watches etc.
CHAPTER 21
1. Colloquial term among Rhodesian and South African fighting men for terrorists.
2. See the author’s The Chopper Boys: Helicopter Warfare in Africa written in conjunction with Neall Ellis and Dr. Richard Wood: Stackpole Books: (USA) and Greenhill Books (London).
3. Lisbon’s Salazar-created secret police, Independent Police for the Defense of the State, or PIDE.
4. Human intelligence as opposed to Sigint, or signal intelligence
5. The Honoris Crux in gold might be regarded as the rough equivalent of Britain’s Victoria Cross or the US Medal of Honor. The HC was awarded in gold, silver and bronze, the first being the ultimate decoration because during twenty-one years of war in Namibia and Angola, only four or five HCs in gold were ever awarded and Arthur Walker got two of them.
6. High-explosive anti-tank.
CHAPTER 22
1. For the purpose of Executive Outcomes’ Sierra Leone operation, Colonel Sachse had the rank of brigadier-general.
2. “Sierra Leone’s Mercenary War: Battle for the Diamond Fields,” Al J. Venter; Jane’s International Defense Review, November 1995 pp. 65–68.
3. The British take a dimmer view of weapons being fired “by accident.” In the British Army an AD is classified as a CD: Criminal Discharge and the perpetrator is charged under military law.
4. The Kamajors are traditional hunters in Sierra Leone and they know the interior like none other. A tough and independent group, they suffered much at the hands of the RUF and there wasn’t a family among them that didn’t have a score or six to settle. Unlike the RSLMF, this was a committed bunch of fighters. Until the end of the war they dominated many of the areas in the interior. Opponents of the government and RUF sympathizers sometimes deprecate the actions of the Kamajors; the media often depicted them as a bunch of ill-disciplined savages. In fact, of all the combatants, they were arguably the most committed.
5. “An Army of One’s Own,” Elizabeth Rubin: Harpers Magazine, New York, February, 1997, pp. 44–55.
6. Nic du Toit was one of the ringleaders of the abortive attempt to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea in 2003. He was on the island waiting for the rest of the invasion force to arrive when he and others were betrayed by some well known individuals within South African intelligence. He remains in jail under the most appalling conditions. Things are so shocking in the island’s notorious Black Beach prison that even Amnesty International has taken up his case; at one stage they tried to starve him to death.
CHAPTER 23
1. The Fabric of Terror: Three Days in Angola, by Bernardo Teixeira with an introduction by Robert Ruark, The Devin Adair Company, New York, 1965.
2. Many of the African soldiers fighting with EO were former insurgents from the Border War days. Quite a number were Ovambos; others were Portuguese-speaking former guerrillas who had become disenchanted with Luanda’s phony Marxism.
CHAPTER 24
1. “Private Security Firm Repelled Iraqi Attack,” Dana Priest, Washington Post, April 6, 2004.
2. Private Armies and Military Intervention: IISS, London 1998 (see Chapter 15).
3. “Regulated Private Military Firms Have a Role,” Defense News, Washington DC, March 11-17.
4. 2002CEP20011127000310 Kiev ICTV Television in Russian 2125 GMT November 26, 2001.
5. The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands, Aidan Hartley, The Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003.
6. Nor did it prevent the US Department of Defense rushing through an order to buy one hundred-and-forty-eight RG-31 mine-protected armored personnel carriers in 2005.
7. Regarding items 3 and 4: All personnel, including locally recruited troops receive the same rations and medical treatment as expatriates.
8. “Contingency” fee is nothing other than a euphemism for a bribe: Those who have never experienced the continent must accept that lofty ideals apart, very little is achieved in Africa without some kind of tangible or convertible incentive. A fistful of $100 bills can sometimes change the course of battle or dislocate the most powerful of political allegiances.
9. Elizabeth Rubin, Harpers, New York, February, 1997.
EPILOGUE
1. Cheating Death: The History of Concealable Body Armor, Al J. Venter, Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia, Summer 2006
2. Check out on-going investigations on “Custer Battles.” Lovett also referred to the “Smoking Gun” Website that covers some PMCs/PSCs together with implications of possible fraud charges being leveled against some of these organizations from the US.
3. European Societies, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2003, p. 259.
4. Singer, Corporate Warriors, op cit, p. 18.
5. Dr. Steven Metz, Armed Conflict in the 21st Century, The Information Revolution and Post Modern Warfare, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, April 2000, p. 21.
6. See for example, Brendan O’Neil, “Is it mercenary to join for perks, not war,” The Christian Science Monitor, June 1, 2004, p. 9, and comments by Professor William Douglas of John Hopkins University, quoted in Jim Fisher-Thompson, “Contracting for Peace is Rational Approach” U.S. Department of State, International Information Programs, November 28, 2003.
7. See Barry Yeoman, “Need An Army? Just Pick Up the Phone,” New York Times, April 2, 2004.
8. Jeremy Lovell, “Privatized Military Wave of the Future, Firms Say,” Birmingham Post, May 12, 2003, p. 11.
9. Stephen Fidler and Thomas Catan, “Private Military Companies Pursue the Peace Dividend,” The Financial Times, July 23, 2003.
10. The Washington Post, September 25, 2005.
11. August 1, 2005 (unpublished).