Shackled: the diamond dog of war Times (UK) Date posted:Tue 27-Apr-2004 Date published:Tue 27-Apr-2004
Back to previous page		Murderous world of cash, guns and private jets in the diamond lands of Angola By Mattthew Hart Old Etonian mercenary Simon Mann is the leader of 70 foreign soldiers accused in Zimbabwe of plotting to topple an African tyrant. Our correspondent describes his last encounter with the former SAS man amid the murderous world of cash, guns and private jets in the diamond lands of Angola. I met Simon Mann on a blustery night in Johannesburg seven years ago, a night with enormous piles of dark cloud toppling across the Rand. We were staying at the Hilton and I sat on a terrace adding cigarette smoke to the humid air and gazing at the turmoil of the sky. Mann came out and leaned on a low wall, not exactly joining me. He was of medium height, tight and trim, with a short-sleeved military-style shirt and chinos with a knife-edge crease. He had a perfect poker face. I never saw anything register on it but surmise. I thought of this when I saw Mann’s picture in The Times last month, shackled and handcuffed to another prisoner as he and 70 other mercenaries shuffled through the yard at Chikurubi prison in Harare. They had been caught in a trap after Mann had apparently tried to buy weapons. Zimbabwean troops snatched them from their Boeing jet and imprisoned them for a supposed “dogs of war” plot to overthrow the tyrant of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. Mann had hoped to trick the Zimbabweans into allowing him guns and passage, claiming that he aimed to back a rebel Congo group whose success would help Robert Mugabe to gain access to diamond revenues, badly needed by his impoverished regime. The Zimbabweans hadn’t fallen for the story, and Mann and his troops were arrested when they landed at Harare. “They were imbeciles,” Colonel Des Burman told me from his home near Cape Town. Burman served with the Buffalo Battalion, a commando unit of the old South African Defence Force. Several of the men arrested with Mann were Buffalo veterans. Burman himself had worked as a mercenary, earning $10,000 a month for running security for oil companies in Angola. “Mann broke every rule,” he said. “He was in Zimbabwe to buy weapons; you never buy weapons in Africa. You buy everything offshore and have it delivered to your theatre. Second, always operate from a safe country. Zimbabwe’s not safe, and neither is South Africa. The South Africans are embarrassed by all the mercenaries operating here, and they’ve been trying to catch them. The South African security forces set Mann up.” In the photograph, Mann looked much as he had when I’d met him seven years earlier - in possession of himself, somehow outside his immediate circumstances. He had a scraggly beard and crumpled prison shorts, and yet transcended them. Things were as bad as they could be for him, and he must have known that the blunder was his own. (Life in prison is not likely to be easy for him. Last week 12 Zimbabwean prison officers were charged with assualting some of the 70 men with whom Mann is detained.) Mann was already famous when I met him, his name linked to the bloody diamond-rich milieu of Southern Africa, but he stood out from that world’s usual run of thugs. An Old Etonian, he was the fifth member of his family to attend the school. His antecedents were brewers and sportsmen; his father and grandfather had both captained the England cricket team. But other sirens were calling Mann. He passed from Eton into the Scots Guards, and then the SAS, and finally into that ocean of cash and guns, of jets that land without running lights in the diamond lands of Africa. That night at the Hilton we talked about the little diamond company that he and his friends were promoting. DiamondWorks was then a small Vancouver firm with some mining rights in northeastern Angola, then the great dream-cake of the diamond world, gushing some $600 million a year in diamonds from its rivers. Most of it flowed from the insurgent Unita army. The diamonds were run out of Angola in hair-raising operations on Ilyushin cargo jets that landed on dirt strips in the middle of the night. Off came Russian tanks and on went the goods. The warring parties in the interminable civil war were in a fragile truce, and Mann’s job was to convince a group of stock-market analysts that if they invested in DiamondWorks, of which he was then Operations Officer in Africa, they would get diamonds, and not ruin. (Mann has not had any involvement with DiamondWorks since 1997.) The following morning, Mann and I were going in to have a look. “Bit of a risk for an investor,” I said to Mann. “That area? Pacified,” he replied. On a speckless, blue morning in 1997, DiamondWorks’ chartered jet circled out over the Atlantic and landed at Luanda. Once a ravishing city, the Angolan capital had been reduced to tatters by 20 years of civil war. We taxied past rows of Antonovs and battered Ilyushin freighters. A white pickup came tearing across the runway. Mann got in and sped away. In those days clearing Luanda airport could take hours. To avoid forcible inoculation or “tests” for Aids, it was wise to fold US dollars into your vaccination document before presenting it. But when Mann returned, we were whisked straight through. A man in his forties joined us, an affable character in loafers and Docker chinos. He was the governor of Lunda Sul province, and Mann was giving him a lift back to his capital, Saurimo. In return he supplied us with resolute assurances that the region we would later visit was as peaceful as a hamlet in the shires. “The people are eager to return to their villages,” he said. “Which people?” I asked. “The Unita fighters.” “And are they actually returning?” “They are eager to.” At Saurimo we transferred to a cavernous Russian Mi6 helicopter and went racketing north across the rolling bushveld, a landscape dotted with villages of straw-topped huts and laced by footpaths. We crossed into Lunda Norte province. Soon the brown serpentine of the Chicapa River hove into view, and we clattered into the DiamondWorks camp. The place was called Luo, from the name of a stream that joins the Chicapa there. I had wanted to visit since a pair of South Africans with a suction pump had hoovered a 24-carat pink diamond from the riverbed two years before. They took it out of Saurimo in a Lear jet and sold it on the diamond bourse in Johannesburg for $4.8 million. One week later the stone was resold in New York for $10 million, sawn in half and polished into matching pears. The Sultan of Brunei’s younger brother paid $20 million for them. This stone was the talk of the diamond world, and diamonds then were my single focus. I wanted to meet the men who had found it, and one summer’s day in Johannesburg I drove to a walled subdivision of pink concrete houses. Brian Attwell had been a security policeman and Piet Cronje had fought in the Buffalo Battalion, harassing Namibian guerrillas by raiding their Angolan bases. Attwell was quiet and watchful, Cronje a massive Afrikaner with a pistol in an ankle holster and one hand mangled by an exploding grenade. “In the diamond business,” Cronje told me, “people must understand one thing about you. They must understand that they cannot .... with you.” And I guess they did understand it, because when Attwell and Cronje arrived on the Chicapa their equipment included heavy machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. By day they ransacked the riverbed and by night they traded fire with Unita. “Only at night, though,” Attwell said. “During the day we were both too busy digging diamonds.” Cronje and Attwell took $60 million of gems out of the Chicapa in a single year. Into such rich if perilous terrain a certain kind of person longs to rush, and one was Simon Mann. The DiamondWorks camp was set among trees and ruled by a slovenly South African. He was recovering from malaria, for which the treatment seemed to be a tumbler of whisky, never out of his sunburnt paw. He took great pride in the feast, including prawns flown in from in the coast, that he had spread beneath the thatch for the visitors. In the heat, a high smell came off the tables, and we mostly kept to beer. It was a pretty stretch of river; trees sagging with white blossoms drooped into the water. DiamondWorks had a barge in the middle of the current, tethered by lines to either bank. Divers descended into the murk and raked through the swirling sediment with suction hoses. Although miners had worked this stretch of the Chicapa since colonial times, there seemed to be plenty left. A 106-carat high-colour white had come out of the river only weeks before, and while we were there they found a 50-carat stone worth $150,000. Upriver from the barge, DiamondWorks had diverted the channel to expose the floodplain gravels, which they trucked to a small recovery mill. But their ambitions were larger. They had identified a promising diamond target at Yetwene, 60 miles away, and we boarded the helicopter again and went rattling down the Chicapa for a look. At Yetwene they had cleared a broad swath of riverbank and started to erect a mill. We circled the site for ten minutes, peering through the open hatch while Mann’s geologist, shouting above the engine noise, poured out statistics about grade and throughput. As we flew back along the Chicapa to Luo, I surveyed the banks. That stretch of river had fed a lot of money into Unita’s pockets, and I doubted that they had abandoned it. There was evidence of mining. “Who’s working the river here?” I bellowed at Mann. He shook his head. “Nobody. They’ve been cleared out.” Yetwene opened, and six months later Unita came out of the bush and stormed the mine. Mann’s troops set up a fierce resistance, and the firefight lasted for an hour. Five DiamondWorks people died; Unita took captives and vanished into the bush. All through the region diamond miners shut down their operations and pulled out. Mann’s diamond faucet coughed a few last times, then quit. Investors flattened DiamondWorks’ share price. (That was seven years ago, of course. A spokesman for the company points out that is now under new management and a new shareholder register, including a number of prominent UK and European Institutions, and has a market capitalization of $230 million. It is now involved predominantly in oil and gas, and has only one project in common with the old DiamondWorks.) I heard no more of Mann until his capture at Harare. “He’s luckier than the other guys,” Des Burman told me, referring to a group of men arrested in Equatorial Guinea and charged with being part of the plot to overthrow the President. “Those guys will hang. The Zimbabweans will lock up Mann and the others for five or ten years, get as much publicity as they can, then let them go.”