More secret stuff from a public newspaper:
Dogs of war walk into carefully set trap
By Gavin du Venage
27mar04
ACCUSED mercenaries facing life in prison on charges of trying to topple the President of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea may have been lured into a trap carefully set to bring the dogs of war to heel.
Within the swirl of conspiracy theories that surround the arrest in Zimbabwe of British mercenary Simon Mann and the 69 men under his command, as well as ex-apartheid era South African special forces soldier Nick du Toit caught with 14 others in Equatorial Guinea, a picture is emerging of a complex plan to bring down the mercenary groups who have plagued Africa for years.
"There's been a lot of steam building up against mercenaries for quite some time," says Theo Neethling of the Faculty of Military Science at Stellenbosch University.
Professor Neethling believes the arrests are meant to signal that soldiers of fortune will no longer be able to operate on the continent.
The South African Government was reportedly aware of the group's plans to stage a coup and allowed it to go ahead, confident they would be caught red-handed in a country that would show little mercy.
Mann and his band are accused of accepting a $US5million ($6.7 million) contract to overthrow the Government of Equatorial Guinea. They were arrested when their Boeing 727 landed at Harare international airport on March 7 and are being held in Chikurubi prison.
The men claim they were on their way to take security jobs at mining operations in eastern Congo. Du Toit, filmed by his captors giving a confession in which he laid out details of the planned coup, and his 14-member force are detained in Equatorial Guinea. One of his men has since died of cerebral malaria.
Latest reports suggest the men may also have been seeking exiled Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, who has a $US2 million bounty on his head. Taylor went into exile in Nigeria last year after a deal South African President Thabo Mbeki helped set up.
A significant number of the men offering themselves as guns for hire across Africa learned their skills in the apartheid war machine. The South African Government has banned its citizens from acting as mercenaries, but this has achieved little other than to force companies like Executive Outcomes, once the primary recruiter of ex-apartheid military personnel, to move its activities to Britain.
With the establishment in 2002 of the African Union, based in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, a pact was signed by most of the continent's governments to outlaw military coups and settle conflicts through diplomacy.
Mr Mbeki is particularly resentful of outside interference in African affairs, as his support for Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has demonstrated.
South Africa has been waiting for a chance to put an end to mercenary operations once and for all. And when South African intelligence learned of the apparent plot against Equatorial Guinea, led by key figures in the mercenary trade, they seized their chance.
Several events point to a set-up. One is the hasty removal from Chikurubi prison of three former apartheid soldiers -- Phillip Conjwayo, Kevin Woods and Mike Smith -- who were captured in the late 1980s after placing a bomb outside a guerilla safe house in Zimbabwe.
At first it was believed they were to be released but it now seems possible they were moved in anticipation of the mercenaries' arrival, a month before the men were even arrested.
Local analysts have asked why the South African Government, which tipped off the Zimbabwean authorities, allowed the planeload of mercenaries to take off from a Pretoria airfield when its own legal system could have successfully prosecuted them.
The answer being proposed is that the men will be tied up for months by the creaking Zimbabwean legal machine and could ultimately face life behind bars. Mr Mugabe's own paranoia against foreign overthrow is also likely to play a role in their trial.
As the men's predicament becomes increasingly grim, their fate is likely to deter others from joining similar ventures in Africa. Even if they are eventually set free Mann, du Toit, and the rest are now public figures and unlikely to win any further business conducting covert actions in Africa.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...5E2703,00.html