The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

No massive humanitarian tragedy, save those inflicted by nature herself, is possible without two kinds of contributors. Hitler could never have carried out the holocaust that he did if he had relied only on the uniformed sadists of the SS. Behind them had to stand another army of organizers, administrators, and bureaucrats—the enablers.

Someone had to constantly supply the uniforms and the boots, the guns and the ammunition, the wages, the rations, and the barbed wire. Someone had to oversee the supply of instruments of torture and of gas pellets. Someone who never pulled a trigger or turned on a gas chamber. But these people enabled it to happen. It is the difference between the doer and the desk doer.

Starting with Sir David Hunt’s biased and flawed analysis, which was adopted by the Commonwealth Relations Office, taken over and intensified by the Foreign Office, and cravenly endorsed by Harold Wilson and Michael Stewart, what happened could not have happened without the wholesale and covert contribution of the Wilson government. I remain convinced of it to this day.

Nor was it necessary to protect some vital British interest, and what interest merits a million dead children? Britain could have used its huge influence with Lagos to militate for a cease-fire, a peace conference, and a political solution. It chose not to, despite repeated opportunities, pursuing Hunt’s conviction that Biafra must be crushed no matter the cost, but without ever explaining why.

That is why I believe that this coterie of vain mandarins and cowardly politicians stained the honor of my country forever, and I will never forgive them.

A USEFUL CERTIFICATE

The plan was to march many miles through the Nigerian lines to blow up a bridge that formed a major supply route to one of their most advanced salients into Ibo territory.

To be frank, there were no “lines” in the sense of fortified trenches across the landscape. The media liked to draw lines on maps by linking Nigerian advance points, villages they had reached and where there was a Nigerian army presence. But in that rain forest, there were myriad narrow tracks known only to guides from the nearby villages, along which it was possible to march through the “lines” and into the bush hinterland behind them. To reach the target bridge, such was the plan.

The mission was to comprise three mercenaries and twenty of the best-trained Biafran “commandos,” along with a couple of local guides who knew the tracks in the bush. I elected to go along, suspecting a good journalistic story.

On the first night, we were halfway there. We camped because even the guides would not march at night. It was not just dark in the forest; it was pitch-black. So we camped and built a small fire. After a pretty basic dinner, the group settled down to sleep, as ever consumed by mosquitoes and amazed at how noisy the jungle is at night.

There was Taffy, the South African with the Welsh name; Johnny, the Rhodesian with a South African name; Armand, a Parisian with a Corsican name; and me, an Englishman with a Scottish name. And the Biafrans, who were all Ibos. Out of the darkness Taffy suddenly spoke.

“I’m prepared to bet I am the only person around this campfire who can prove he’s sane.”

We all lay there slowly working out that the only way you can prove you are sane is if you have a certificate to say so. And the only way you can be issued such a certificate is on release from a lunatic asylum.

I lay there thinking: I am miles from bloody anywhere. If I disappear tonight, no one will ever know what happened to me, or even ask. I could simply vanish. So I am lying next to a giant who is armed to the teeth and joking that he is half mad. I stayed awake.

There are moments when the question “What the hell am I doing here?” simply will not go away. The next day, Johnny, the explosives wizard, blew the bridge and we marched back through the bush into the Biafran heartland. I made a point of marching behind Taffy in case he had forgotten about his certificate.

MR. SISSONS, I PRESUME

The plan was to motor by Land Rover to the last known Biafran position, then march on to a point far down the road from Aba to Owerri, and mount an ambush. I agreed to go along, even though this would be an all-Biafran affair with no white mercenaries involved.

I was always quite chary of going with an all-Ibo patrol, because if things went seriously pear-shaped, they could simply vaporize into their native rain forest, whereas I would be lost within ten yards and quite likely to walk into a Nigerian army unit mistaking one for the other. The faces were the same, the uniforms similar, and the forest bewildering.

But everything went smoothly. We knew Aba had fallen and was a new Nigerian strongpoint. Owerri was still being contested. The road might carry Nigerian convoys of troops and supplies; hence the night ambush. It never occurred to me that some fool on the Nigerian side might send up a party of visiting journalists.

So the commando officer picked his spot on a grassy bank above the road and we settled down to wait. After an hour, there was the low rumble of engines coming up from the south, then the wash of dimmed headlights.

We were invisible in the long grass and under the trees, but the road, with no tree cover, was visible by moon and stars. The lead Nigerian Land Rover stopped several bullets and drove itself straight into the rain ditch, blocking the road for the convoy and preventing escape forward. The lorries behind panicked, stopped, and began to shed the dim forms of the men inside them. The Biafrans kept firing and the Nigerians started shouting and screaming.

Then, above the noise, I heard a single voice shouting in perfectly accented English: “I’ve been hit, oh, my God, I’ve been hit.” That was the first indication there were any Europeans down on the road.

Peering into the gloom, I discerned the shouting figure on the road and the voice made plain it was a fellow countryman. Next to me, a Biafran soldier also spotted the target and raised his FAL rifle to complete the job. Journalistic rivalry may occasionally become tense, but never that bad. I reached out, eased his barrel upward, and his shot went off through the treetops. He turned and I could see the whites of his eyes glaring at me. Then the ambush commander blew his whistle—the signal to shimmy backward off the bank, into the forest, and run like hell.

The Englishman on the road had taken a bullet in the thigh. Months later, I learned that he was Independent Television News star Peter Sissons, who was evacuated and flown home, and made a full recovery.

Years later, at a fancy-dress charity ball of all things, and being somewhat in my cups, I let it slip. He and his wife were there. Peter took the news with appropriate dignity, but his wife gave me a big wet kiss.

WORTH A LARGE ONE

A dozen years after the Biafra War, I found myself in a London bar with a long-term veteran of the SAS regiment. Out of the blue, he remarked, “You owe me a large one.”

If someone like that tells you he is owed a drink, do not argue. Just go to the bar and buy him a double. So I did. When he had taken a deep draft, I asked him why.

“Because,” he said, “I once had your head in the crosshairs of my scope sight, and I didn’t pull the trigger.”

I reckoned that merited an entire bottle. It also confirmed something I had long suspected. The Special Air Service specializes (among many other things) in deep penetration into target territory, information gathering, and withdrawal unseen. Rumors had long persisted that part of London’s extensive help to Lagos had been the presence of our Special Forces. Political