Mercenaries aimed to topple oil-rich despot
The inside story of the ties that bind President Obiang and powerful
American interests
By Paul Lashmar
14 March 2004

The tale of the 67 men of assorted nationalities now in a Zimbabwe jail
accused of being mercenaries continued to unfurl yesterday like the plot of
a lurid airport novel.

A bit too much like fiction, in fact, involving as it does a cast that
includes the despotic leader of a little-known West African state, the
Eton-educated son of an English cricket captain, fake passports, and a
shadowy company registered in the Channel Islands that is linked to SAS old
boys. All this, plus talk of CIA, MI6 and Spanish secret service activity,
and a plane now impounded at Harare airport that contained equipment more
suited to burglary than seizures of power.

Officially, it was announced yesterday that the men will be formally charged
on Monday. Unofficially, The Independent on Sunday has been told by security
sources that the men were intending to mount a coup in Equatorial Guinea and
were in Zimbabwe to buy the arms that would help accomplish that. But then
on Tuesday, tipped off by South African intelligence that the team led by
Briton Simon Mann was landing to pick up arms bought from Zimbabwe Defence
Industries, the Harare authorities arrested them.

But if who paid whom for what services has not yet been revealed, the
intended target is not in doubt: President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo,
leader of a country whose lack of renown belies its strategic significance.
And for "strategic" read oil. Not for nothing is this land known in US
government circles as the "Kuwait of the Gulf of Guinea". Not without reason
has President Bush welcomed President Obiang, a confirmed if not convicted
corrupt despot, to the White House. He may be a despot, but as presider over
an oil-rich state, he is their despot.

The sight and smell of oil is everywhere palpable in the port of Malabo.
From here you can see the flames shooting into the night sky from the
offshore oilrigs. Every day tens of thousands of barrels are extracted from
huge crude oil reserves underneath the seabed off Equatorial Guinea. It is
one of the oil-rich sub-Saharan countries that now supplies 15 per cent of
American oil. Experts predict that the amount of oil the US receives from
the prolific fields of Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and Angola will double in
the next five years. Hence the succour that American companies - and, since
9/11, the American government - have given to Obiang. Vice President Dick
Cheney has said: "Along with Latin America, West Africa is expected to be
one of the fastest-growing sources of oil and gas for the American market."

Marathon Oil, Chevron Texaco and ExxonMobil control most of the country's
oil production with an investment of about $5bn (£2.8m). All this was
negotiated by Mr Obiang, 63, who has run the continent's only
Spanish-speaking country for a quarter of a century. His predecessor was the
dictator Francisco Macias Nguema - his uncle - who, over Christmas 1975,
called Malabo's population to the football stadium and had 150 political
opponents killed by his troops to the accompaniment of "Those Were the Days,
My Friend". Within a short time, two out of three of the elected assembly
had disappeared and a third of the population was either dead or in exile.

In 1979, Teodoro Obiang, then governor of Bioko province, overthrew his
uncle and had him tried and executed. President Obiang has always been noted
for his corruption, and the sudden rise of oil revenues has hardly changed
that. Little of the wealth seems to have trickled down to his people, whose
average income is a little over $2 a day. Most of the revenues stick in the
pockets of Obiang family. One son runs the country's oil interests, another
the forestry interests (selling off timber from ancient rainforests). A
brother runs the army, another the security service, while most of the
generals come from President Obiang's village.

Lest the inequalities inspire the 450,000 population - with or without
mercenary help - to rise up, the Obiang family have been buying into the
real estate market in the US, spending millions of dollars on properties in
Washington and Los Angeles.

President Obiang is also protected by a guard of some 350 Moroccan soldiers.
He runs a ruthless secret police and has attracted the attention of human
rights campaigners. Amnesty International has accused him of the murder,
torture and locking up dissidents.

The US State Department has, in the past, condemned his human rights record.
But the US is quick to respond to changing circumstances. When President
Obiang visited Washington in spring 2001, the highest-ranking official
prepared to meet him was an assistant secretary of agricul- ture. But his
status changed dramatically after 9/11. When he visited the US as it marked
the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks, the President was one of 10
African leaders to meet George Bush.

Whoever else wanted President Obiang removed - and leader-in-exile Severo
Moto is a prime candidate; last week he told Spanish radio that the
President was "an authentic cannibal" who wanted "to eat my testicles" - it
is unlikely to have been the Americans.

How 'Dogs of War' author turned coup into bestseller

Attempted coups in Equatorial Guinea have not always been successful for the
politically ambitious, but they certainly have been for thriller-writers. It
was one such in 1972, for instance, that produced Frederick Forsyth's The
Dogs of War, not least - according to some - because Forsyth himself was
behind the attempt to depose the current President's uncle.

As a reporter, Forsyth had covered the bloody Biafran War of the late 1960s.
He became a convert to the Biafran cause, and, according to one newspaper,
plotted to overthrow Equatorial Guinea's dictator to set up a Biafran base
to continue their fight.

In 1978, the diary of East End hard man and mercenary Alan Murphy, who took
part in the coup plot, was obtained by the Sunday Times. It identified
Forsyth as being present at meetings in Hamburg where guns were obtained for
the coup. The paper contacted some of the mercenaries involved. It learned
that Forsyth financed a former Scottish bank clerk called Alexander Ramsey
Gay, who fought as a mercenary in the Congo and then Biafra, where he
commanded a brigade of 3,000 men. In 1972, Mr Gay reconnoitred the island
segment of Equatorial Guinea for a coup attempt. He reckoned a small number
of soldiers could overthrow the government.

As Forsyth recounted it in The Dogs of War, the planning was complex,
meticulous and brilliant. The reality fell a long way short, but it did have
a certain Forsythian style. Mr Gay had two false passports in the names of
Greaves and Mair obtained by using the identities of dead people, a method
used in Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal.

Mr Gay hired European mercenaries and charted a fishing boat called the
Albatross in Fuengirola, Spain. But things started to go wrong. The
mercenaries stood out in the Spanish port, and an official who had been
bribed refused to issue a certificate that would have allowed Mr Gay to move
the arms from Hamburg to Spain. While the boat sailed for Lanzarote in the
Canary Islands, Mr Gay went to Hamburg to sort out the weapons. But back in
the Canaries, the boat was impounded, the crew arrested and the coup attempt
aborted.

At the time, Forsyth refused to comment on the claims. Yesterday he admitted
that he was at the Hamburg meetings but said he was not involved in a coup.
"A coup may or may not have been planned, I don't know, but I was not
involved. I attended the meetings in Hamburg as part of my research for The
Dogs of War. I had lots of knowledge about Africa from my time in Biafra but
I didn't know how the weapons side would work. I persuaded some people to
let me attend these meetings, but I promised not to talk and that's why I
did not comment to the Sunday Times.

"Alan Murphy had not realised that I had been at the Hamburg meetings until
years later, when he saw my picture on a book cover. He put this in his
diary. When the Sunday Times read it they made two plus two equal 73."

Whatever the truth, the exercise proved lucrative. Dogs of War was published
in 1974, applauded for its vérité, and became a bestseller. 


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© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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