Licensed to Kill (40 page)

Considering the circle-the-wagons impulse of the industry, George's continuing response to the mention of Tim Spicer is remarkable, even given Spicer's obvious faults. “Tim is a scurrilous wanker, a lightweight. He has never succeeded as an adult. His impact on our industry has been profound.” He shakes his head in disgust.

The gentlemanly Richard restrains his comments on Spicer but still expresses disdain at the media's reporting that Spicer was a member of the SAS. “Tim had failed selection for the SAS, and although well-respected in the UK military, was not considered someone who did well in the field.”

Richard's more forgiving view of Spicer perhaps comes from his past acquaintance with the man. “He is a hard-working fellow. When Spicer was asked to join Executive Outcomes and Sandline, he talked to me. I warned him that once you go down that path, you cannot come back.”

Erik is enamored with the mystique of mercenaries, private military corporations, and men like Richard and George—men who have chased pirates in Somalia, advised potentates in Oman, fought terrorists on the streets of Belfast, and guarded the royal family. For their part, Richard and George like Erik's boundless enthusiasm and unabashed American patriotic zeal, a stark contrast to the cool, reserved style of former SAS commanders. Richard and George are fascinated by the massive amounts of American money being spent in Iraq to reinvent the wheel. They see the Americans trying to fight a counterinsurgency, protect the reconstruction of infrastructure, and keep foreign workers and government employees alive while advancing the nation's business interests—something soldiers, colonial administrators, and privateers of the former British Empire did for hundreds of years.

The British historical memory of the use of mercenaries and privateers is very different from the Americans'. The English tradition of private military companies reaches as far back as the Crusades, when wealthy patrons raised private armies to fight for the Holy Land. Later, heroic, colorful privateers like Sir Francis Drake and royal charter companies would employ indigenous soldiers to open up new territories for the British Empire. In the English tradition, “mercenary” evokes a dashing “boy's own” aura. In America, the term has an ugly feel to it, recalling the brutal reality of Angola, Nung tribesmen, Contras, and Latin American death squads. The irony of America and their new partner Britain hiring privateers in Iraq and Afghanistan does not escape those within the private security industry. While the American government does have a limited history of employing mercenaries abroad on an ad hoc basis through the CIA, the war in Iraq has introduced a modern justification for formalizing the system—something the Brits learned generations ago.

One of the reasons for this meeting between HART and Blackwater is that the two groups want to see what kind of synergy they can develop. HART hopes to integrate the long British historical experience and conservative style of using indigenous talent commanded by first-world officers with Blackwater's aggressive American entrepreneurialism. Their first joint venture ended up a success with the client choosing HART as the lead contractor. Now Erik is looking to expand utilization of his company, and HART is looking to export its low-key SAS culture of assimilation into the brash, almost xenophobic, Navy SEAL–oriented Blackwater culture.

Erik mentions that he wants to create a peacekeeping and intervention force for Africa, particularly focusing on the Darfur region of southwestern Sudan. George and Richard express frustration at the complete lack of interest by governments and aid organizations in utilizing the experience of a private army to solve major security and stability problems in Africa. George's new focus is the Congo, a place where millions have died without attracting much meaningful attention from the international community and where a long-running UN peacekeeping mission has made little difference in the suffering of the people.

“The Congo contains all that is evil about social disintegration—AIDS, child soldiers, disease, warfare, crime, the list goes on. Everything in every segment of scientific and human studies is abused in this massive region. Yet a small peacekeeping force could fully protect the tiny population per mile with little trouble,” George asserts.

Erik also sees governments and the UN renting armies as the ultimate evolution of his corporate investment in Blackwater, a rapidly growing organization that is fully prepared to capitalize on the Bush administration's privatization of the War on Terror. Lest I forget Blackwater's mantra, Erik reminds me again: “We are ready to field a battalion anywhere in the world.”

As an offshore company with sophisticated financial and government contacts around the world, HART could bring much to the bold red, white, and blue culture of Blackwater. George recounts for Erik the most important lesson he learned during his years in the SAS: “To defeat your enemy, you don't have to kill. There is negative impact. Even when we did our ambushes in Northern Ireland, the aim was to arrest, not kill. The experiences of an SF soldier at that moment is critical. It's instinct. That's what we bring to this world. It's abhorrent to shoot a warning shot. It's never nice to discharge your weapon.”

Prince wants HART to help develop his knowledge and hone his skills in operating in foreign territories, something that would greatly benefit his latest business endeavor—Greystone. Greystone is a departure for Erik, since it is not an overtly American entity, but rather an offshore private military company that would employ locals in the English tradition—a foreign legion modeled after Executive Outcomes, Sandline, Erinys, and HART.

Erik is particularly excited because he's planning a big reception to roll out the idea of Greystone in a couple of weeks. The party will be held at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, DC, and Prince expects to entertain a long list of diplomats representing a broad spectrum of nations, along with oil company execs, financial experts, gun manufacturers, and others who could use the services of an armed force. Cofer Black, former ambassador for counterterrorism at the State Department, former director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, and now vice chairman of Blackwater, will give the keynote address.

It doesn't seem like a very subtle message that Greystone will be available and capable, just as EO and Sandline were, to solve security problems worldwide. For now, the immediate goal will be to provide static security when budgets do not allow for the cost of an American or Brit. Former U.S., British, or South African military can be hired for between $400 and $600 a day, but Gurkhas, Chileans, and ex-soldiers from developing nations are thrilled to make half to a tenth of that. Although the market for the high-end operators may be running short, there are plenty of rank and file available. The black-tie audience listening to Cofer Black's pitch will include government representatives from the Philippines, Yemen, Indonesia, Angola, Russia, Kenya, Tunisia, and numerous others. Their need combined with Erik Prince's love of covert paramilitary operations, his hawkish and conservative ideology, and his entrepreneurial and expansionist business philosophy may allow Greystone to push the boundaries of privatized security.

The Greystone brochure and website offer the expected services of training, security assessements, and protection options. A quick scan by a disinterested outsider might miss an innocuous but carefully worded paragraph:

Proactive Engagement Teams:

Greystone elements are prepared to configure capabilities to meet emergent or existing security requirements for client needs overseas. Our teams are ready to conduct stabilization efforts, asset protection and recovery, and emergency personnel withdrawal.

In short, Greystone will be selling the same services offered by Executive Outcomes and Sandline. EO's first operations were essentially the use of mercenaries in “asset recovery” of Tony Buckingham's oil-drilling equipment; their second job was the massive offensive campaign to push back the rebels of UNITA, masked as a training operation; and their third project was the “stabilization effort” in Sierra Leone. Depending on the contract opportunities presented to Greystone, the future may see a further blurring of the fine line between privatized security and privatized military operations. It's impossible to predict exactly where the industry may lead Prince's army, but for foreign leaders it will certainly provide a legitimate and credible enhancement to traditional military or clandestine operations.

It becomes clear to me during the meeting that there remains a very high wall between the HART's very English view of security and Blackwater's view of a brave new neocon world. While Erik's dreams of fielding a private army have yet to be realized, the principals of HART have already been down that road. Their military careers in places like Oman or Afghanistan put them in charge of large “levees” or local troops. Richard as an SAS captain and George as the regimental sergeant major for 22 SAS have developed over decades hard-won skills in dealing with insurgencies, dirty wars, and covert operations. While Prince paints a picture of a flashy, high-tech, road-warrior-style military company that could solve any client's problem by application of sheer brute force and advanced weaponry, Richard and George calmly promote the idea of low-key and culturally integrated solutions. One more time before the meeting breaks up, George repeats his mantra for Erik: “It's the application of minimum force.”

CHAPTER 12

         

The Bight of Benin Company

“We should expect bad behaviour; disloyalty; rampant individual greed; irrational behaviour (kids in toyshop type); back-stabbing, bum-fucking and similar ungentlemanly activities.”

—S
IMON
M
ANN IN HIS
B
IGHT OF
B
ENIN
C
OMPANY PLAN

“It may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga.”

—S
IMON
M
ANN IN LETTER FROM PRISON

The afternoon attack on the northern Liberian town of Voinjama begins with the booming sound of RPGs being fired from the surrounding jungle followed by the dut-dut-dut of AK-47s. The LURD rebels grab their weapons and begin running toward the sound, while the tattered child soldiers of the Small Boys Unit jump around singing and chanting. The terrified villagers quickly bundle up their goods up in colorful fabrics and start to flee the village.

My security man, Niek du Toit, a forty-six-year-old mercenary and ex–32 Battalion colonel from South Africa, is annoyed at the disturbance interrupting his leisurely reading on the veranda of our dilapidated house. The broad-shouldered hulk of a man with light brown, shortly cropped hair and crooked nose looks necessarily imposing as a bodyguard should, but his appearance contrasts with his easygoing nature and quiet demeanor. Seeing me head toward the action with my camera, Niek begrudgingly puts down his book and picks up his AK to follow. As we reach the contact point, the LURD rebels are cheering over a prone body. They thrust the freshly severed head toward me, mocking the fate of the poor man and making faces for the camera. It didn't faze Niek to watch the rebels celebrate their victory, since he had probably seen much worse in his more than two decades of bush wars. Later that day, the rebels show up at our house and offer us the head as a souvenir, now fitted with a wire handle conveniently attached to the ears. Niek doesn't even look up from his book this time.

That evening in the summer of 2002, Niek would tell me about an upcoming gig—something big. The candlelight of our electricity-free house gave our conversation a conspiratorial air as he described a plan to lead a hundred men by boat across a lake from Bujumbura, Burundi, into the eastern Congo to start a war with the Rwandans who had occupied the region. The flare-up would give the Congolese government army justification to enter the UN-controlled area and take back the lucrative diamond fields. Niek was to bring out a stash of diamonds and share the proceeds with the junior Kabila, the U.S.-backed president of the Congo. Under different circumstances, the story could be written off as the delusions of an aging mercenary, but we were in the jungles of Africa, and this was Niek du Toit.

Niek had his coming-of-age, so to speak, as a commander in the South African Defence Force (SADF) and its 32 “Buffalo” Battalion, running long-range missions into Angola to fight against Communist-backed insurgents from the midseventies through the eighties. Niek had gone on to become a professional mercenary, working a variety of different gigs, including time with Executive Outcomes. I casually mentioned that he should contact me if his gig ever got off the ground. When I left Liberia, I wasn't sure if I would hear from or ever see Niek again, but his turn of fortune eventually had me seeking him out four years later. In March 2004, Niek was arrested, tried, and convicted for attempting to overthrow the president of Equatorial Guinea. In the spring of 2006, President Obiang finally granted me permission to visit him.

Obiang has had the old, infamous Black Beach prison on the island of Bioko destroyed and has built a new higher-security facility specifically for Niek and the other mercenaries arrested with him. Waiting at dusk at the gates of the new Black Beach prison on the outskirts of Malabo, I can see an emaciated, gray-haired old man in shackles shuffling up the hill toward me. I recognize the broken nose and thick Afrikaner accent, but this is a very different Niek. The shackles around his ankles that have become a permanent fixture have chunks of foam rubber to prevent the skin from being rubbed raw. He says it's the first time he has been out of his cell in six months. One of his men, Gerhard Mertz, has already died in captivity—reportedly of cerebral malaria—and “Bones” has prostate cancer. The rest all have malaria. At age fifty Niek has thirty more years of his sentence to serve out in this fetid prison, but from the way he looks, it's unlikely he will last that long. His capture in Equatorial Guinea brought an inglorious end to his career and taught me sobering lessons in my exploration of the crossover between privatized security and mercenary actions.

In the current debate over whether security contractors are mercenaries, those left of center typically insist that “private security contractors” in places like Iraq are mercenaries, while the political right insists that “mercenary” is a pejorative term and only applicable in the most obvious use of ex-soldiers for hire in foreign conflict. The more simplistic dividing line is simply offense versus defense, but the contractual nature and financial need for ex-soldiers to earn a living makes the concept of moving in and out of both worlds not only feasible, but increasingly common. Niek has jumped back and forth between the two separate, but not very distinct, career choices. He was my private security contractor while planning to lead a phantom army into the Congo. He also reportedly had worked on a contract training the Equatoguinean military before trying to overthrow the government. Niek du Toit shows that mercenary and contractor can be one and the same.

One interesting facet of the coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea is that the conspirators involved clearly saw a parallel between their plans, hatched in early 2003, and the invasion of Iraq. After all, the claims of the looming threat of Iraq's alleged WMDs had fallen apart, and the Bush administration fell back on the argument that Saddam was a brutal tyrant who tortured and killed his own people and needed to be stopped. Like the Bush administration, the backers planned a public relations campaign that would spin the coup as the elimination of a tyrant who'd brutalized his own people, playing down the embarrassing questions of impartial evidence, international legality, and popular support. The backers of the coup in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea espoused a high purpose, though it would eventually be exposed that they sought money, not the protection of humanitarian ideals, and viewed the violent, illegal overthrow of a dictator as the most expedient way to control the country's petrodollars.

Equatorial Guinea

The minuscule country of Equatorial Guinea (EG) consists of two separate pieces of land tucked into the armpit of West Africa. The mainland is a rectangular chunk of fetid coastal mangrove and jungle sandwiched between Cameroon and Gabon, while the government and business center occupies the volcanic island of Bioko.

Equatorial Guinea gained independence from their Spanish colonial authorities in 1968, and the first ruler, the self-proclaimed “Unique Miracle” Macías Nguema, quickly assumed the mantle of a stereotypical brutal African dictator. In the eleven years of Ngeuma's rule, fishing was banned, slavery was reintroduced to keep the cocoa plantations producing, foreigners like the Spanish and Nigerians were expelled, and a long list of members of his government were executed after failed coups and suspected plotting. During his reign, fifty thousand of his subjects were estimated to have been killed and over a hundred thousand fled the country, further weakening any attempt at creating a viable economy.

In 1979, thirty-seven-year-old Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, then the governor of Bioko Province and Nguema's nephew, overthrew his uncle's regime. Obiang's new administration only took four days to try, convict, and execute Nguema. Obiang inherited what was then the poorest country in Africa, but the change in leadership seemed initially cause for optimism as he set about stimulating small-business growth and bringing back foreign investors. Obiang's treatment of his people was an improvement over the brutality of his uncle, but he did preserve absolute control over the country's anemic economy and ruled with a tight grip through his own family and tribal group.

Under pressure from the international community, Obiang offered a referendum in 1991 to see if his loyal subjects wanted a multiparty system. Only eighteen hundred of the one hundred forty-eight thousand who voted were against it. The new pluralist constitution in 1992 conceded to allow political organizing, though Obiang has resorted to regular crackdowns on opposition parties to maintain his tight hold on power. EG was subsisting on handouts from aid organizations and sympathetic nations, until one by one they all abandoned the country because of the rampant theft by Obiang and his cronies. In 1993, even the World Bank stopped giving money to the rapacious dictator.

EG's first major resource find was in 1984 when the natural gas was discovered offshore. The Alba field went into production in 1991, marking the beginning of a change in fortunes for the cash-strapped nation. The Zafiro offshore oil and gas field was discovered in March of 1995. Output from the Zafiro and other fields exploded over the next decade from 17,000 barrels per day to 371,000, ultimately capped at 350,000 barrels today. EG has 1.28 billion barrels' worth of proven reserves with more exploration under way. The current leases expire in 2007, at which point the oil companies will have been reimbursed for their development costs, putting EG in a position to negotiate a higher percentage of future earnings. The country will also begin to sell its own oil, dramatically adding to its wealth. Its current oil-related revenue is $1.5 billion per year and is only expected to increase. Although geographically small, Equatorial Guinea is slated to be the next big oil and gas powerhouse in Africa after troubled Nigeria.

The oil industry knows the potential of the vast unexplored subterranean world under the Gulf of Guinea in EG's EEZ, or Exclusive Economic Zone. Oil-starved European nations like Spain and France understand the benefit of controlling oil-rich nations, but Obiang has chosen to look to America and not its former colonial master, Spain, to develop its fields. It is not surprising that the U.S. market consumes three-quarters of Equatorial Guinea's output, and thus should have a vested interest in the country's stable output of this precious resource. In the early 2000s, U.S. oil companies kept finding new offshore fields. Houston-based Hess and Marathon Oil as well as Triton Energy, Exxon-Mobil, GE Petrol, and a smattering of resource companies from other nations are quickly turning Equatorial Guinea into the “Kuwait of West Africa.”

To understand the relative scale, EG has one-fiftieth the population of Iraq and consumes the minuscule amount of two thousand barrels a day, though it produces roughly a quarter of the crude that Iraq does. The oil that flows from the offshore rigs is also sweet crude—making it easily refined—and takes a shorter distance to transport to the East Coast of the United States. Today, oil fields in West Africa (EG, Nigeria, and others) provide roughly 15 percent of America's oil and are expected to exceed imports from Saudi Arabia in a few years.

As it became clear that EG sat on huge untapped resources, the country's rapidly enriched leadership became a more valuable target for overthrow. Not surprisingly, Africa is the most volatile continent on earth—a place where it is actually more likely that a government will change by coup than by any other means. Between 1956 and 2001, the continent saw 80 coups, 108 known failed coups, and 139 reported coup attempts. Only three countries have not experienced a coup: Botswana, Cape Verde, and Mauritius. In 2003, France allegedly backed an attempt in EG to further the interests of French energy company TotalFinalElf, and to bolster a dispute over French-backed Gabon's claim to Mbagne Island and the associated oil leases. Today Obiang employs a Moroccan praetorian guard to lessen the chances that his enemies will infiltrate his personal ring of security, but they would be a minor barrier if outside intervention was intent on Obiang's demise.

The Conspirators

Fifty-eight-year-old Eli Khalil understood the value of West African oil. Born in Kano, Nigeria, as part of the great Shia diaspora from Lebanon, Khalil knew the ways of West Africa and had made big money as a middleman—a type of post-colonial bagman who makes introductions, pays bribes, and closes deals between Western businesses and African rulers. A healthy percentage of the payments would also stick to the fingers of the middleman, making people like Khalil very wealthy men. Though customary in Africa, the practice smacks of corruption to Western sensibilities, and in 2002 Khalil's profession landed him in trouble. TotalFinalElf (TFE) had hired Khalil to handle oil contracts with former dictator Sani Abachi of Nigeria. In 2002, the French government arrested Khalil in Paris for his oil lease kickbacks between Nigeria and TFE. Though the French released Khalil while the investigation proceeded, they froze his assets, making money tight. Flagged as a dirty dealer and with his lucrative deal with Nigeria under pressure, Khalil turned to a bigger, more insidious way to make money.

The plan sounded simple: overthrow President Obiang and install an acceptable ruler who would give Khalil access to riches without the responsibility of running a country. To enact his plan, Khalil needed three basic elements: a pliable and acceptable ruler, a small, disposable army, and the quiet influx of funds from big-player investors interested in reaping the wealth of Equatoguinean resources. Khalil found the first ingredient in Severo Moto Nsa, a former seminary student and Fang tribesman from EG.

Moto had been living in exile in Madrid for almost a decade, hiding out to avoid punishment for his first attempt to overthrow Obiang. Specifically, Angolan authorities had picked up Moto off the coast of northern Angola in a Russian fishing trawler loaded with weapons and mercenaries and headed toward his homeland. After being ejected from Angola, Moto fled to Spain and applied for political asylum to keep himself safe from imprisonment. In 1995, an Equatoguinean court sentenced Moto in absentia to 101 years in jail for high treason and plotting to kill the president.