Andy McNab on Anti-Terror, The Politics of War

Tell me about the James Brabazon book.

This is James’s personal story of going to West Africa as a journalist covering the war in Liberia. He hired a protector and fixer to look after him and the fixer turned out to have been involved with Simon Mann and Equatorial Guinea so James just became immersed in the story behind the coup. It’s a fantastic view of the whole thing – and of the midnight phone-calls with people telling him what they knew.

The picture we get is that there was the coup plot led by Simon Mann and thankfully it was stopped. But the politics behind it is fascinating! There was a lot of dodgy dealing. There would have been some hands-off approval from outside governments for the coup to happen but somebody obviously changed their mind about that approval.

The way it works is this: you’ve got your face-workers, the guys on the ground who will actually do the job, and a lot of those involved with Mann, the South Africans, are still in prison in Equatorial Guinea. When there’s a change of government they’ll probably get out. That’s one of the theories about why Simon Mann has been so quiet since he was freed – there are still people in prison that they’re trying to get released and Mann doesn’t want to jeopardise their future. I met Simon Mann’s son last year and he said he used to get these phone-calls when his father was in prison saying: ‘Give me a million dollars and I’ll get him out.’

Would they have done it?

No. It’s all a stitch-up; it was better to wait for the system to work, and he was released. But ‘mercenary’ is a good word for a book title. Really, it’s all about money. The planned coup was business. Mark Thatcher thought he was buying…what? An air ambulance? What a load of rubbish. Mann would have done a deal to finance the coup – and the money men supporting him would get something out of it, like rights to some mineral mines or first refusal for a power station.

That kind of ‘White Man Guns’ activity all stopped in the late 70s really – I got involved in it a bit in the 80s with the regiment when the guys coming to power weren’t the good lads government thought they were and we’d go in and redirect things, but Equatorial Guinea was really a throwback to the old days, to the old way of doing business. ‘White Man Guns’ doesn’t work any more. Simon Mann was a well-known private security contractor based in South Africa – he had his moment. But it’s more suits than flak jackets now and it’s all done in London and Washington. Lots of business is actually done at Lloyds – people need insurance, training, security. Every time the government talks about withdrawing troops the private security business is all ‘Oh, come on! Give war a chance!’ – isn’t that a P J O’Rourke quote?

There’s a Ministry of Defence white paper now about making use of private security firms. But Mann did it the old way. Even so, he’d have needed a tick in the box. There would have been some talk with the countries that had a vested interest in the outcome but then something changed.

Why wouldn’t someone have told them things had changed?

Well, there was a change of policy somewhere and, quite frankly, the politicians probably thought, fuck ’em. Let’s make an example of them. Fighting for the private military is illegal in South Africa now – technically, South African soldiers fighting with the British could be arrested when they get home.

But they would have been told directly to go ahead with the coup at some point?

No. It’s always a question and never a statement. More like: ‘What would be the advantage of X, Y and Z being dead?’ ‘It would probably be good.’ That kind of thing. It’s a business. People don’t do this kind of thing thinking: ‘Yee haa! This is fun!’ They ask: ‘What will I get out of this?’

Crusades. Terry Jones and Alan Ereira.

I watched that Terry Jones documentary about the crusades ages ago and it was quite funny. You’ve got old Pope Urban in the 11th century who got up and said: ‘We’ve got to go do it.’ And the spread of Christianity – it was all about business, power. And all of a sudden the crusaders were getting absolution. There was a crusade in the south of France and the Pope said: ‘Just kill them all. God will sort it out in Heaven.’ And you’ve got the Knights Templar who invented the first cheques and who were there when the Magna Carta was signed saying: ‘We are the king-makers.’ They thought they were stopping the spread of the evil Islam…

One thing that struck me was when Bush was making his early speech on the War on Terror and he referred to it as a crusade. I really don’t believe that was a mistake. He was playing to the neo-con, Baptist lobby. It was exactly what they wanted to hear – a crusade! His speech writers are smart people – they wouldn’t have been ignorant of the implications. And if it was ad lib then he got it exactly right. It lit the touchpaper.

In Islam they know more about our history than we do. Bin Laden will refer to things in antiquity and we don’t know what he’s on about. But the extremists do. Read the Terry Jones book and you can just see that nothing changes.

You say that people go to war for money and politics, but what about bloodlust? Don’t young men just want to get out there killing people?

During the Crusades that was definitely part of the whole thing. They had these young men and they were guaranteed a place in heaven and all the booty they could grab. The Pope got them out there and they even hit and destroyed Constantinople which was a Christian city but by that point, no one gave a shit. Now we are a liberal society and people find it very uncomfortable that there is a part of the population that wants to go to war, that wants to fight. I give talks to the military and I was speaking to some boys just back from Afghanistan – they take pride in fighting, they like what they do!

They like it until they get hurt or until they get traumatised though. Isn’t it just the idea they love?

No it isn’t. I think if you look at our army, we’re remarkably resilient. In the US 15 per cent of serving soldiers get post-traumatic stress disorder and in the UK it’s four per cent. There are variations, of course – infantry soldiers, for example, experience higher rates than the rest of the services because they are more exposed to the bang bang. For the people who do suffer PTSD it generally begins to impact 10-13 years after serving and then it becomes more of a social problem than a military problem. It is a very real issue but not everyone’s running around traumatised. I was with 2 Rifles in Basra and some of them were signing up to stay on another six months after their tour ended because they were saving up for a new Ford Focus.

James Fergusson, A Million Bullets.

Fergusson was a journalist in Afghanistan with Herrick 4 – the campaign has gone on so long we’re now on about Herrick 14. Fergusson had done all the big interviews with the Defence Secretary and got all that standard block information on the war, but then he started to talk to the soldiers, asking them, ‘What do you think? Why do you think you’re here?’ John Reid was saying the operation in Afghanistan could be achieved without a single shot being fired and yet the soldiers were in the middle of this big fight. How did that happen?