Fidel
Castro Ruz (left) and Francisco Franco Bahamonde.
It was ironic that Francoist Spain enjoyed good relations with
Castroist Cuba.
Francisco Franco was more concerned in promoting the concept of Hispanidad -forging close relations with
Spanish-speaking and Spanish-descended nations to combat the Anglosphere- than
following a strictly anti-communist foreign policy.
So when Castro's left-wing government was ostracized by the
United States through diplomatic isolation and a trade embargo Franco, who
headed a right-wing authoritarian regime since he led the Nationalists to
victory in the Spanish Civil War, refused to join in the U.S.-led sanctions.
A song by Carlos Puebla titled Saludo a Españacelebrated Cuban gratitude to Spain.
It is worth noting that both Castro and Franco were kinsmen of
sorts. Castro's father had migrated to Cuba from Galicia, the north western
region of Spain where Franco was born. Castro visited his ancestral home of
Galicia in 1992 when he attended the 2nd Ibero-American Summit in Madrid - his
only official visit to Spain.
My latest appearance on CrossTalk the flagship programme of RT.
The topic was “Trump’s Escalation”.
Preamble:
"Trump has the habit of suddenly changing his
mind. His 50-day ultimatum directed at Russia to end the Ukraine conflict is
now up in the air. Why the change is anyone’s guess. However, it is fair to
assume Trump wants to divert attention from his transparency problems."
CrossTalking with Adeyinka Makinde, Daniel Lazare, and Drago
Bosnic.
It was recorded on Tuesday, July 29th, 2023, and broadcast the
following day.
"As for
(German Chancellor) Mr. Merz, he has repeatedly said amusing things, including
that his main goal is to once again make Germany the leading military power in
Europe. He didn't even choke on the word 'again'." -Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, July 11th, 2025.
On Wednesday, May
14th, 2025, the German Chancellor Friedrch Merz made a statement
in the Bundestag asserting that he was intent on transforming the Bundeswehr
into “the strongest European army”. But while this policy announcement was
welcomed by the United States administration led by Donald Trump which insists
that its European partners within NATO take on more of the burden in military
spending, as well as by most of the political leaders in the EU who remain
steadfast in their resolve to weaken and destroy the Russian state, others, not
least the government of the Russian Federation, have responded with concern. Fears
that a militarisation of the German mindset would likely accompany the
implementation of the Merz plan are not without foundation given the end
results of two eras of German rearmament during the 20thcentury.
Both disasters were foretold by the German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In his time Goethe had a relationship with the German people which transcended
a reverence for his literary genius. As was the case with many other giants of German
culture who operated in the spheres of philosophy, literature, poetry, art and
music, he was greatly inclined to examine the German soul.
A defining point in his relationship with his people came at the time of
the War of Liberation in the early 19th century when Napoleon Bonaparte
was reeling from the defeat of the Grande
Armée in Russia. A
coalition of armies which included the German states of Austria, Prussia, Mecklenburg-Schwerin,
Hanover, Bavaria, Saxony and Wurttemberg took up arms to expel the French.
But Goethe, a child of the Enlightenment and an admirer of Napoleon who
he believed embodied Enlightenment values, remained indifferent and cautioned
his people about their embrace of nationalism and militarism. He felt that
Germans could not be trusted to exercise restraint and rationality when
energised by military ambition because of what he understood to be the psyche
of a landlocked, 'claustrophobic' people. If they were stimulated to compete
with other powers in the arena of international politics and war, they would,
Goethe reasoned, seek to extend their frontiers and become embroiled in
militaristic endeavours that would lead to overreach and eventual, predictable disaster.
Thus, Goethe called on Germans to invest in "culture and the spirit".
What he meant by this was that they should focus on conquering the world with
their talents across the spectrum of music, philosophy, commerce and the
sciences.
But his people were uncomprehending. They interpreted his
anti-nationalist stance and renunciation of war as a form of betrayal. Goethe
himself felt aggrieved at their lack of understanding which also negatively impacted
on the well-being of his family. August,
his only child to survive to adulthood suffered from the accusation of
cowardice because his father took steps to discourage him from undertaking
military service.
Goethe was seemingly proven wrong when four decades after his death the
rise of Prussia provided the impetus for the near total unification of the
German-speaking people, and the creation of the German Empire at the time of
the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. But the subsequent
destruction of Germany in two consecutive world wars during the 20th century
provided strong validation of Goethe’s fears.
These fears persisted after the Second World War. The Morgenthau Plan,
which was drawn up in the latter stages of the war but later abandoned,
proposed to de-militarise and de-industrialise those parts of Germany that
would come under Allied control. Although the West created the Bundeswehr and
incorporated it into NATO, Lord Ismay’s often quoted raison d’être for the
North Atlantic Alliance being “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in
and the Germans down” reflected the belief among its European allies of the
necessity of having German military power circumscribed.
Still later, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opposed German
reunification because she believed that Germany would not continue to accept
the Oder-Niesse line as the border between Germany and Poland.
The present aspiration to build a powerful army is set against the backdrop
of a NATO-backed proxy war which pits Ukraine against Russia. In addition to
the anti-Russian sanctions regime in which Germany has participated as an EU
member state, the Germans have provided the Ukrainian military with weapons and
equipment including Leopard tanks. In 2024, several senior officers of the
Bundeswehr including the head of the Luftwaffe were recorded discussing
potential attacks in Crimea including one directed at the Kerch Strait Bridge.
Belligerent remarks by the German Minister of Defence Boris Pistorius
and Chancellor Merz have rattled the Russians. Pistorius claimed that German
troops were ready to kill Russian soldiers “if deterrence doesn’t work and
Russia attacks”, while Merz told the Bundestag in July that the “means of
diplomacy are exhausted.” And further to the announcement of plans to increase the
German military budget to €153 billion by 2029
was a call for a national debate on the introduction of universal conscription
by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
This state of affairs has led to a decision by Russia in July 2025 to
withdraw from the military-technical agreement it signed with Germany in 1996.
Today, there are few German philosophers who examine the German soul as
did the likes of Goethe, Friedrich Holderlin, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann and others.
Indeed, Thea Dorn (the pseudonym of Christiane Scherer), who co-wrote Die deutsche Seele (The German Soul) in 2011, bemoaned the present day lack of German thinkers soon after the publication of her book.
Yet, one need not rely on philosophical prognosis to understand the
implications of Foreign Minister Lavrov’s comments in May 2025 about Germany’s
direct involvement in the prosecution of the Russia-Ukraine conflict when he
warned that “Germany is sliding down the same slippery slope it already
followed a couple of times in the last century.”
Salim Hatum was a Druze military officer and member of the Ba'athist
Party who played a prominent role in Syrian politics in the 1960s.
Born in the village of Dhibin in Sweida in 1934, he enrolled at Homs
Military Academy in 1955 and was commissioned a Lieutenant in 1957.
He was a key participant in the coup which overthrew Lieutenant General
Amin al-Hafiz on February 23rd, 1966. Hatoum, who was the Commander of the
Thunderbolt Battalion, secured key radio and television buildings where he read
out Statement No. 1: his announcement that the Ba'ath Party had overthrown the
military regime and the proclamation of a state of emergency.
He was promoted to Major and became part of the ruling Military
Committee.
Prior to the coup, he was the Commander of a commando unit and added to
this the command of the army garrisons situated near to radio and television
stations. However, Hatum felt that he was not properly rewarded for his role in
the coup and sought to overthrow the regime nominally headed by President Nureddin
al-Atassi whose deputy, General Salah Jadid was effectively the power behind
the throne.
But the insurrection which he began in the Druze heartland (Hatum detained both al-Atassi and Jadid in Suwayda and considered executing both) was put down
by air and ground action organised by Air Force Major General Hafez Assad, the future long-term leader of Syria.
Hatum fled to Jordan where King Hussein gave him refuge. Back home in March 1967 he
was convicted of treason and sentenced to death in absentia.
Hatum returned to Syria in June 1967 just after the end of the Six Day
Way. He had made a statement published in the Lebanese An-Nahar newspaper that he was returning to fight the Israelis and
may have thought that the defeat by Israel had weakened the government to the
extent that they would ignore the death sentence handed down against him.
However, he was apprehended and the death sentence confirmed by the Supreme
State Security Court.
Major Hatum was executed by firing squad in the early hours of June
24th, 1967 at the Mezzeh Military Prison.
N.B.
. Hatum had been friends with "Kamel Amin Thaabet", the
character played by Mossad spy Eli Cohen. He sat as part of the panel of
officers of the Special Military Court which tried and convicted Cohen of
espionage.
. Hatum's disagreement with his colleagues after the overthrow of
Lieutenant General Hafiz was set against the backdrop of sectarian tensions
within the Ba'athist movement between Alawite officers on the one hand,
and those like Hatum who were of Druze origin. In Jordan he told a press conference that Alawites outnumbered non-Alawites by five to one in the Syrian Army. This, he argued, perverted the Ba'athist motto of "One Arab nation with an eternal message" to that of "One Nusayri state with an eternal message", Nusayri being a derogatory word for Alawite.
. Both Jadid and Assad considered Hatum to be reckless when charged with arresting Hafiz during the coup in February because of the amount of property damage caused and mass casualties sustained.
Images: Lieutenant Commander
James Rawe pictured in 1958; Map depicting the area between the mouth of the
Cross River Estuary and the Island of Fernando Po; and Royal Nigerian Navy
Masthead Pendant.
James Rawe, a veteran of the Normandy
landings during the Second World War, was a Royal Navy officer who later played
an important role in the development of the Nigerian Navy. Although a
specialist in the field of hydrography, he went on the perform the duties of a
combat and staff officer, the former of which led him to plan the amphibious
landings during the Nigerian Civil War. He was also charged with organising
traditional naval routines geared to maintaining organisational discipline,
morale and cohesion. His earlier role as a sea captain had not been confined to
that of a survey vessel named Penelope. He was given charge of HMNS Nigeria,
an Algerine-class frigate which had served the Royal Navy as HMS Hare, a
minesweeper, during the Second World War. This ship did not only participate in
ceremonies associated with visiting dignitaries, but was also, under Rawe,
charged with policing Nigeria’s territorial waters in the cause of disrupting
smuggling activities emanating from neighbouring Cameroon and the then Spanish-controlled
island of Fernando Po.
James Rawe: “HMNS Nigeria was
ordered to take over from some smaller craft on the anti-smuggling patrol
between the Cross River and Fernando Po, a Spanish Island in the Bight of
Biafra. We picked up the smugglers on radar, started an ARL (Average Run
Length) plot and when in range, fired a star shell to illuminate the area.
These new methods came as a shock to the smugglers, and we captured huge
quantities of contraband and took many prisoners. The Spanish navy seemed a bit
upset by our activities, as they were taking place on the high seas, as opposed
to Nigerian territorial waters and this was not strictly legal. The Spanish
sent out a frigate, which ... illuminated us with her searchlight. I responded
by sounding action stations and invited them to identify themselves. Possibly
seeing our larger gun, they switched off their searchlight, replied
"Spanish Warship" and headed back to Fernando Po.”
-Excerpt from That Reminds Me, the privately published memoir of Captain
James Rawe.
James Rawe was born on July 14th, 1925. He died on April 15th, 2023.
The painting Die wilde Jagd(The Wild Chase), a work in
the symbolism genre by Franz Stuck, depicts the German god Wotan (Odin) on
horseback leading a spectral procession in a seemingly frenzied pursuit.
In Germanic and Norse
mythology Wotan doubles as a god of war who received soldiers who died in the
battlefield in Valhalla, and as a hunter who embodied the ability to
control life, death and the elemental forces of nature.
It has often been remarked
that the central figure in Stuck’s work bears an uncanny resemblance to Adolf
Hitler who was born in 1889, the year the painting was completed.
And it is claimed that Hitler,
who first saw the painting as a 13-year-old, modelled his adult appearance on Wotan’s
depiction.
Von Stuck became his favourite
painter.
A great believer in
providence, Hitler often spoke of his coming to power, his survival from assassination
attempts and his military victories as manifestations of his worldly destiny.
Some believe that Stuck’s
painting prophesized the rise of Hitler. Mythology had a deep-seated hold on
the German psyche, and this formed the basis of many examinations and prognostications by its philosophers, musicians and writers.
For instance, Heinrich Heine, the German
poet and thinker, felt that the Christian religion only kept a tenuous lid on
the darker aspects of the German soul. He feared that the veneer of relative German
pacifism could be broken by the rise of a Germanic demagogue-thinker who would
be able to use his primitive powers to summon up the demonic forces of German
pantheism.
He was perhaps like Stuck’s
painting prophesizing the rise of Adolf Hitler.
NB.
. Stuck was ennobled in 1906 . He died on August 30th,
1928, at the age of 65 . He is buried in the Munich
Waldfriedhof . Die wilde Jagd resides
at the Lenbachhaus Museum in Munich
The English writer Frederick
Forsyth who died recently had a close association with the civil war fought in
Nigeria between federal and secessionist protagonists from 1967 to 1970. At first, he started off
as an observing journalist, covering the conflict as he had done Cold War
politics as a Reuters news reporter earlier in the 1960s. His coverage of the
famous attempt on the life of French President Charles de Gaulle at
Petit-Clamart in 1962 by the renegade O.A.S. inspired his breakthrough novel The
Day of the Jackal. It was initially thought that a subsequent novel The
Dogs of War, which was published in 1974, was a composite of his
observations of European mercenaries he had encountered as a freelance reporter
in Biafra. But the suicide of a former mercenary four years later after a siege
in London’s East End unearthed a fascinating story which provided a more
accurate source of the book’s inspiration. This was that Forsyth had financed an
attempt to overthrow an African dictator through a mercenary force. Moreover,
the plot of the novel appeared to insinuate the extraordinary motive of
resurrecting the fallen state of Biafra on an island in the Gulf of Guinea and
replacing the overthrown dictator with Biafra’s exiled leader Chukwuemeka
Ojukwu.
The Siege
The discovery of Frederick
Forsyth’s alleged role in masterminding a plot to overthrow the government of
Francisco Marcias Nguema, the dictator of the West Central African state of Equatorial Guinea, began on the Saturday afternoon of March 11th,
1978. Two nine-year-old girls had been invited to play a game of “truth or
dare” in a small bedsitter in Goldsmith Row in the East End district of Bethnal
Green. While inside the girls had been horrified to have seen a gun. They reported
this to the police who sent two officers to interview the tenant, 43-year-old Alan
Murphy.
Detective Constables Ernie
Pawley and Russell Dunlop were walking up Roman Road in the company of the
girls when Murphy was spotted in a car. They approached him and told him they
wanted to search his flat. Murphy consented and was cooperative until Dunlop
began rummaging through a bottom drawer. He placed his left hand on Dunlop’s
shoulder and said: “This is far enough.” Dunlop looked up to find Murphy
pointing a Mauser pistol at his head.
Both constables immediately
sought to reason with Murphy. Dunlop, who was on one knee, asked Murphy of he
could sit on the floor, but Murphy chillingly replied: “No, this is it. This is
the end. I’m going to kill you and, then him, then I will probably kill
myself.”
Thirty seconds elapsed when as
Murphy began to pull back the gun catch, Pawley, who was standing three feet
away, dived at him. Murphy adjusted himself and at point blank range fired at
Pawley, injuring him in the chest. Dunlop scrambled out of the room as Murphy
fired several shots which missed. He then turned his attention to Pawley who
had crumpled to the floor. He shot once but missed and the heavily bleeding Pawley
was able to crawl his way out of the room, tumbling down a set of stairs to make
good his escape. Murphy continued firing at them and miraculously missed.
Dunlop reported the incident
and within minutes the road was cordoned off and a siege commenced by 50
policemen who were backed by the anti-terrorist squad who brought with them a
large quantity of heavy artillery. But there was no further shooting. Nor was
the standard tactic of police calling for the surrender of the gunman through a
loudhailer. More than an hour passed when a gunshot was heard. The police burst
in and found Murphy lying in a pool of blood. He had shot himself in the heart.
The Anatomy of a Coup Plot
In the ensuing investigation
the police discovered that Murphy, known locally as a delivery driver and described
by one neighbour as “very quiet and softly spoken”, had been a professional
mercenary. He had served as a “dog of war” in several theatres which included
the Congo and Biafra.
While as was expected, the
police found a cache of guns and ammunition in the bedsit, it was the
unearthing of a trove of documents which included a diary of Murphy’s mercenary
exploits in Africa and many letters, which startled. One of the letters from
Forsyth revealed the connection between Forsyth and a coup plot which had germinated
in 1972.
But while the plot was
centred on engineering the overthrow of the Nguema regime in Equatorial Guinea,
its motivation led back to Forsyth’s association with the short-lived
secessionist Republic of Biafra.
Forsyth was sent by the BBC
to cover the troubles in Nigeria which led to the secession of the Eastern
region of the country under the leadership of the region’s military governor
Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu. It is claimed that the BBC found
Forsyth’s reporting to be biased towards the secessionist side, and he was
recalled to London. Soon after, Forsyth resigned his position and returned to
Biafra as a freelance journalist.
While in Biafra Forsyth
became close to Ojukwu and also got to know many of the mercenaries who fought
for the Biafran’s including Rolf Steiner, the German ex-French Foreign
Legionnaire who commanded the Biafran 4th Commando Brigade.
Steiner’s observations of Forsyth made him reach the conclusion that Forsyth
was working for the British state. He said the following in an interview:
Forsyth was clever and
discreet. He kept his distance from visiting colleagues. He went wherever
Ojukwu went and was familiar with all of Biafra’s political and military
problems.
Steiner proved to be correct.
In 2015, Forsyth admitted that he had been an “asset” of the British Secret
Intelligence Service, MI6, from 1968 to 1988. While British foreign policy
outwardly supported the Federal side, it was keeping a close look at the
Biafran side whose initial territory covered much of Nigeria’s oil-rich areas.
Forsyth proselytised the Biafra cause through newspaper articles, television interviews
and a Penguin book titled The Biafra Story, which was published in June
1969, seven months before the collapse of Biafra.
But
Biafra’s capitulation apparently failed to dampen Forsyth’s hope for a revived
Biafran state. A few short months after his return from Biafra in 1970, Forsyth
was in a small flat in Camden, north London, already plotting the coup which he hoped would
provide a new homeland for the Biafrans. Along with Alexander Ramsay Gay, a
Scottish bank clerk turned mercenary who he had met in Biafra, he decided that the
designated homeland would be the island of Fernando Po, a part of Equatorial
Guinea which Nguema based himself.
Fernando
Po (now Bioko), which is 100 kilometres off the coast of Nigeria, had
functioned as a staging point for flights to and from Biafra. It also had a
large population of Igbos, the dominant ethnic group of Biafra, who since the
1920s when it was under Spanish colonial control had come to the island as
contract labour on its coffee, cocoa and timber plantations.
The
major hurdle which Forsyth and Gay faced, that of finance, was removed when
sales of The Day of The Jackal made Forsyth a millionaire. In Spring of
1972, Forsyth requested that Gay embark for Fernando Po on a reconnoitring
mission. Gay obtained a visa to Cameroon and flew to the island’s capital Santa
Isabel (now Malabo) where he explored possible landing sites and scrutinised
the amount of defences around what was often referred to as Nguema’s palace,
but which in fact was the old Spanish colonial governor’s mansion.
When
he got back to Forsyth, by now a tax exile who divided his residences between
Ireland and Spain, Gay informed him that a dozen mercenaries backed by 40 to 50
former Biafran soldiers could take the island. The operation he estimated would
cost approximately $80,000. Gay then proceeded to sorting out the
preliminaries: acquiring false passports, opening bank accounts, contriving
fake end-user’s certificates and searching for arms dealers. Gay had two
passports issued in the names of Greaves and Muir. They were based on death
certificates in the style that Forsyth had written into the storyline of The
Day of the Jackal. He used the name Henry George Greaves to open a bank
account number 47009081/93 at the Kreditbank, Ostend.
Gay
then proceeded to Hamburg where an arms dealer agreed to supply arms including
Belgian-made automatic rifles, light machine guns, mortars, bazookas and other
arms which would be released to him in Spain by an official of the Spanish
Ministry of Defence who was bribed. The end-user certificate which indicated
that the arms were destined for Iraq was signed by an Iraqi diplomat who was
also bribed. Gay paid the arms dealer a deposit of 120,000 Deutschmarks
($32,000) as the first of several instalments. He also left a telephone number
for his principal, named as “Mr. Van Cleef” whom the arms dealer could contact
in case of any problem. “Van Cleef” was the pseudonym for Forsyth who was
identified in Murphy’s diary as having been present at meetings with the arms
dealer in Hamburg.
Gay’s
next objective was to bring together a group of gunmen, a sea vessel and a
workable plan. He hired 13 mercenaries: nine French and Belgian; three
Englishmen and a Hungarian. One of the Englishmen was Murphy. A converted
64-foot fishing vessel named the Albatross was found in the Spanish
resort of Fuengirola and Gay chartered it for three months at a cost of $3,200
per month. The reason given to the owner was that it was to be used for an oil
survey expedition off the coast of Africa.
The
chronology of the plan to seize the island would, Gay envisioned, start in the
middle of December when the arms would be sent from Madrid to Malaga where they
would be loaded onto the Albatross. And after obtaining further supplies
and equipment at Gibraltar, it would sail on to the Cape Verde Islands where
fresh food and water would be purchased. Then it would journey around West
Africa and stop at Cotonou, Dahomey (now Republique de Benin), the embarkation
point of the 50 Biafran veterans. From here the vessel would time its arrival
at Fernando Po for the dead of night.
The
amphibious assault, consisting of all the mercenaries and half of the Biafrans,
would proceed to the landing site on motorised dinghies with silent motors. The
force would then scale a low cliff before heading to the president’s mansion
where the presidential guard would be eliminated. Once inner sanctum of the mansion
was penetrated, Nguema was to be assassinated. The communique announcing the
overthrow of Don Francisco Marcias would express regret at either his
“accidental death” or his “suicide.”
Success
would guarantee a bonus payment of $30,000. This would partly compensate for a
“no looting” policy, but Gay planned to ransom the contents of the Soviet
embassy to the CIA for one million dollars.
But
things did not go to plan.
Although
advised to keep a low profile, the mercenaries, who had begun to arrive in
southern Spain in late October 1972, stood out from the usual crowd of
tourists. It was reported that one of the mercenaries was spotted walking
around the deck of the Albatross while dressed in military fatigues. Suspicions
regarding the true nature of the enterprise were raised by the cargo being
loaded which included three landing craft, over 10,000 litres of diesel fuel,
and 75 army uniforms. Weaponry such as light machine guns, bazookas and
mortars, along with ten tons of ammunition were smuggled from Yugoslavia to the
port of Valencia where they were stored in a dockside warehouse before being
transferred to Las Palmas in the Canary Island where the cargo would be loaded
onto the Albatross.
Then
in the second week of December, Gay’s plans began to unravel. The corrupt
Spanish official refused to issue the arms export licence because the Albatross
was a private, wooden-hulled craft and not a freighter. So when the vessel
arrived at Malaga on December 16th, 1972, there were no arms to
load. Also, the arms dealer who had bribed the Spaniard refused to refund
Forsyth’s down payment.
Not
giving up, Gay arranged for the Albatross to sail down to Lanzarote in
the Canary Islands while he travelled to Hamburg to arrange for the arms to
leave Spain by another route so that the Albatross could be loaded at
sea. But this was to no avail. He returned to the Canaries on January 15th,
1973, and informed the mercenaries that the operation would be abandoned for
the time being. The next day, orders were sent from Madrid to the Policia
Canaria to seize the Albatross and arrest all the mercenaries on board.
The
unravelling of the mission had been the handiwork of the British Special
Branch, the famed counter-terrorism unit which had been formed in 1883. Its
officers had been tracking Gay’s activities because they were fearful that the
arms shipment he had been arranging was destined for one of the paramilitary
groups in Northern Ireland. When they discovered its actual purpose, they
tipped off their Spanish counterparts.
The
Spanish authorities initially based the arrests on drugs offences which did not
stick. Disinterested in mounting an investigation into the coup plot, they
decided to put each mercenary on a plane flight back to his homeland. Gay was
questioned by Spain’s equivalent of the Special Branch but allowed to leave for
Paris.
The
operation had ended before it begun.
The Dogs of War and Biafra
In April 1972, Forsyth told
the London Evening Standard that he would be flying off to “West Africa
and then on to South Africa to research for his new thriller The Dogs of War”.
The paper reported that like his two previous novels, it would be “part
documentary based on his journalistic experiences, and part fictional.” The
reference to his journalistic experiences pointed to a Nigerian subtext, and he
reflected this when remarking that “I don’t think that I would be exactly
welcome in Lagos.”
It was around this time that
Gay embarked on his reconnoitring mission to Fernando Po and it is likely that
Forsyth was referring to him as much as to himself when speaking of his
impending travels. He had delivered the manuscript to his publisher in the
first months of 1973, and the plot of the resulting book was identical to that
of the planned anti-Nguema mission, apart, that is. from Forsyth turning its
failure into a success.
When the book was published,
both Forsyth and his publishers stressed that the story was about the world of
illegal arms and mercenaries and that his work in Biafra had brought him into
contact with the sort of characters portrayed in the book. He had evidently begun
work on the book while the operation was being planned, and it is clear that
the “Republic of Zangaro” was a representation of Fernando Po and “President
Jean Kimba” the incarnation of Marcias Nguema.
But what of the connection to
the resurrecting of Biafra?
The beginning of the novel
clearly draws upon the fall of Biafra with a group of mercenaries saying their
goodbyes to a general who has just lost a war in West Africa and is flying into
exile with a number of his acolytes. This mirrored the flight into exile of
Ojukwu, a Lieutenant Colonel for most of the war, who was promoted to “General
of the People’s Army” in May 1969. On January 9th, 1970, Ojukwu and a
few others including his army chief Alexander Madiebo embarked on a plane at
Uli Airport destined for the Ivory Coast.
The book ends with the
character “Dr. Okoye”, an academic with an Igbo name who happens to be the
representative of “The General”, assuming power in “Zangaro”. Whereas the
motivation for effecting regime change in this fictional country is for the
coup’s sponsors to take control of Zangaro’s valuable platinum reserves, the
economic benefits of taking over Fernando Po (and the impoverished Equatorial
Guinea) had no discernible long-term benefit. The country was more than a
decade away from the discovery of oil deposits.
And while the plan set out by
Gay clearly provided for Nguema’s assassination, no mention was explicitly made
as to who would succeed him. The Sunday Times which wrote a detailed exposé
pressed the issue that Ojukwu was the person whom Forsyth intended to install
as the ruler of Fernando Po if the operation had succeeded.
What followed were a series
of adamant denials. Charles Clark, the managing director of the book’s
publisher Hutchinson’s responded by saying that a source who he could not name
assured him that if there had been a plot, Ojukwu had not been involved in it
and that he would have “strongly disapproved” of it. Forsyth’s London-based
solicitors, Harbottle and Lewis wrote to the Sunday Times -they claimed
on Ojukwu’s behalf- to state that Ojukwu strongly denied that he “inspired or
was the intended beneficiary” of “the activities of a group of mercenaries” in
a certain West African country.
It should ne noted however,
that after Gay was given a suspended sentence for the illegal possession of
arms and munitions at a November 1973 trial in which Forsyth had given evidence
on his behalf as a character witness, he slipped out of the country and
reportedly headed to the Ivory Coast where he joined Ojukwu who was running a
transportation business.
Would Forsyth have been
inspired to have undertaken such a risky endeavour on behalf of Ojukwu and the
Biafran cause? There is much evidence to suggest that he carried with him an
enormous amount of bitterness at how interests in Britain had, from his point
of view, sabotaged the Biafran project, and it would have given him a great
deal of personal satisfaction to have resurrected in some measure the dream of
Biafra.
When ruminating over whether
Ojukwu had been the intended beneficiary of the coup, the Sunday Times
referred to the former Biafran leader as “Forsyth’s hero”. This was not an idle
description. While being interviewed at his Spanish estate in 1974, Wilfred
De’Ath, who was writing for the Australian newspaper The Age, asked
Forsyth what he thought were the most important human qualities that a man
should possess. Forsyth grabbed De’Ath’s ballpen and wrote the following on a
piece of note paper:
Strength without brutality,
Honesty without priggishness, Courage without recklessness, Humour without
frivolity, Humanity without sentimentality, Intelligence without deviousness,
Scepticism without cynicism.
Then Forsyth added:
The only man I have ever
known to possess all these qualities in full measure was Emeka Ojukwu.
But if Forsyth as the
mastermind of an endeavour with the objective of establishing an Igbo homeland
just a hundred kilometres from the Nigerian coastline, he and Gay had not
reckoned on the backlash that would have inevitably flowed from the deposing of
Nguema. The threat posed to Nigerian security of a hostile government led by
the leader of the Biafran secession would almost certainly have led to a
political and military campaign to bring down such a government.
For many years, public
concern in Nigeria over the treatment of Nigerian labourers on the island had
even led to calls for the country to annexe Fernando Po. A pro-Igbo coup would
also have likely led to inter-ethnic conflict between Igbos and the indigenous
Bubi people and even among other Nigerian-origin peoples from Calabar and Ogoja
who as minorities within the breakaway former Eastern region had been hostile
to perceived Igbo domination of that region and were consequently largely
resistant to Biafra. The taking of Fernando Po would also have provoked
hostility in Rio Muni, the mainland enclave of Equatorial Guinea.
In 1975, thousands of
Nigerian contract works were subjected to continual harassment and beatings. A New
York Times article in January 1976 pointed to the root cause as anti-Igbo
sentiment. It noted that Nguema belonged to the Fang tribe, “which doesn't get
along with Nigeria's Ibos (sic), who traditionally make up the bulk of the
contract labourers.” The Nigerian government acted to evacuate 45,000 workers
between 1975 and 1976.
A mercenary takeover two
years earlier, which would likely have increased anti-Igbo and anti-Nigerian feelings,
would have been a recipe for disaster.
Forsyth consistently denied
any knowledge of a coup being planned and that he had attended the meetings in
Hamburg as part of his research into what he described as “the weapons
(procurement) side” of the mercenary business. He repeated his denials to Adam
Roberts, the author of The Wonga Coup, which was about the failed
attempt in 2004 to overthrow President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, Nguema’s
nephew and successor. He admitted to Roberts that aerial photographs of Fernado
Po had been brought to his flat but that the money he had handed to the
plotters was for information which he required to write the book.
But Forsyth became more
equivocal as the interview progressed, saying that a “still-born attempt” at a
coup had occurred and that he had spoken to several participants including
Alexander Gay. He was also unsure about whether the plot of his novel inspired
the coup or vice versa: “It was a chicken and egg situation.”
In the end, Forsyth admitted
that Scotland Yard contacted him at his Ireland residence and told him never to
try it again.
He did not. But while his
involvement has for long been beyond dispute, questions still linger as to his
motive. For instance, while Equatorial Guinea was not at that time an oil-rich
state, prospecting for oil deposits had begun under Spanish colonial rule in
the mid-1960s. It is possible that a seizure of power would have placed the coup’s
orchestrators in a position to profit from future oil discoveries. This is of
course speculative. It leads back to the audacious motive of resuscitating the
dream of Biafra, which was clearly hinted at in The Dogs of War.
And if one word defined the life
of Frederick Forsyth, it was his audacity.
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer
based in London, England.
Select sources:
Roberts, Adam. The Wonga
Coup: A Tale of Guns, Germs and the Steely Determination to Create Mayhem in an
Oil-rich Corner of Africa. Public Affairs, 2006.
De’Ath, Wilfred. “All A Book
Can Buy,” The Age, October 5th, 1974.
Akinyemi, Bolaji. “Nigeria and Fernando Poo, 1959-1966: The Politics of Irridentism”, African Affairs, July 1970, Volume 69, No. 276, pp. 236-249. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal African Society.
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