Dirty Combat: Secret Wars and Serious Misadventures

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This situation broadly reflected his time in Angola as a whole, with the mercenaries being underequipped for the opposition. Unfortunately for Dave, the plan went wrong when the helicopter crashed into a mountain during cloud. The pilot died in the crash, while it took three days for Dave and Peter to escape the jungle. He added: “We were the most poorly equipped army that you could possibly imagine, without any real aim.” Costas Georgiou ( Greek: Κώστας Γεωργίου; 21 December 1951 – 10 July 1976), also known by his alias Colonel Callan, was a Cypriot-born British mercenary executed in Angola following the Luanda Trial for activities during the civil war phase of the Angolan War of Independence. My Dad used to film everything when my sister and I were growing up, so there were always cameras around and one day I asked him if I could borrow it to make a film.

A third contingent of similarly inept mercenaries was recruited in the US by an American PMC. [ citation needed]Thanks to continuing recruitment in England, a somewhat larger mercenary contingent was formed, but a full battalion was never realised. The enlarged force was still rather small relative to MPLA/Cuban forces, and many of the men were civilians with no military experience, and often refusing to submit to military discipline. This, combined with the foreign origin of most of the core leadership, (Georgiou, Christodoulou and the Portuguese), created a deep gulf between the officers and the British other ranks – to say nothing of the native Angolans recruited as infantry and support troops. Most of these had no military experience and many knew no English, or even Portuguese (then still the language of government and the native elite.) The Columbian people are incredibly friendly and approachable, they are like Boltonians but with a Latin vibe! Documentary telling the incredible true story of Scottish mercenary Peter McAleese, who was hired to kill Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in 1989. With unprecedented access to Peter and other members of his team, this is the first full account of that fateful mission and the dark consequences for those involved. The men received a prompt reply from "Dr." Donald Belford, a former British Army medic who had volunteered for a humanitarian aid group in Africa some years before. While there, he had treated several Angolan fighters wounded in the struggle against the Portuguese, earning their friendship and trust. One of his friends was Holden Roberto, leader of the FNLA. After independence, Belford became Roberto's official emissary in the United Kingdom. Interviewing Nangas in Medellin was interesting," David said. "He was Pablo Escobar's chief bomber, responsible for killing hundreds of people. He went to prison but made a deal and is out now and lives in hiding.

A British mercenary who conspired to buy a fighter jet and kill a Colombian drugs baron will face a US jail term. Of the locations Tomkins sought to find, 45 were swiftly discovered. He then set off to retrace his grandfather’s steps in person. From Florence to Hong Kong, Sydney to New York, he zigzagged the world recreating each of the shots with a Voigtländer camera, just as his grandfather had used in the mid-1960s.Tomkins became addicted to war. During the 1980s, this suave, blond-haired mercenary, who never went anywhere without his sunglasses and gold chain, had branched out into the arms trade, supplying weapons to various military forces. He was once asked to put together a team to assassinate the president of Togo and the Ugandan leader, Idi Amin, although neither contract came to anything. An investigation by The Observer has pieced together Tomkins's astonishing story. It shows how he graduated from being a professional thief to become a mercenary in a brutal conflict in Africa before becoming embroiled in a plot to kill one of the world's most notorious drug barons. DT: (Overlap) No, I personally did not see Cubans, no. At the time of the last... There was no confrontation - this is the strange thing. We're talking about only a matter of a few short weeks. Our CO, Callan, for whatever reason, decided to separate the first group, which... there were several strong characters in that group with a lot of military experience - one being Peter McAleese. I think he saw them as a threat to his position. He sent about six of those down to San Antonio do Zaire, which is near the coast, to protect that area - I mean, what half a dozen guys can do, I've no idea - with a few FNLA guys that were apparently there. So our numbers, which at that time were 21, were now denuded by another six or seven, so there was no threat to Callan in terms of military proficiency, if you like. And we carried on like that for... it was going on day by day. We were then told, that tanks had arrived in Damba, which was the nearest, town, I suppose one could call it, from us, which was some way away. And we organized ourselves to go and repel these tanks - I mean, this is the laughable aspect of it, I suppose - with our meager equipment. We cobbled together vehicles, robbing Peter to pay Paul, s-spares-wise, and.. set off for Damba. We had a base at a town called Maquela, where later the massacres took place. And the action - if there was any - was on that road, but it was very limited. Tomkins, whose friends have said he is addicted to adventure and excitement, went to the US to attend survival training courses in Texas and planned to go to Iraq. Tomkins, David (2008), "Chapter 9: Retreat without Honour", Dirty Combat: Secret Wars and Serious Misadventures, Mainstream Publishing, ISBN 9781780570778

I didnt understand what was going on, but my parents would always put the news on and I remember sitting there watching Michael Burke during the Ethiopian famine in 1984, the Cold War, apartheid and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Kennedy, Bruce, "Soldiers of misfortune: Mercenaries play major roles in 20th-century conflicts", 1989 Cold War series, CNN, archived from the original on 11 March 2007 , retrieved 22 January 2008 Georgiou was born in Cyprus in 1951, when the island was a British Crown colony. His family moved to London in 1963. Among those interviewed for the documentary is the man who was Escobar's bomber, a man linked to the deaths of hundreds, Luis Fernando Acosta Mejia, aka Nangas. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison in Columbia, but was released after serving 15.Axelrod, Alan (2013), Mercenaries: A Guide to Private Armies and Private Military Companies, Washington: CQ Press I was, and am, a huge fan of Norma Percy, the great documentary filmmaker who made 'The Death of Yugoslavia''Iran and the West' and so many other great series." Read More Related Articles I love Grandpa’s original shot of this photo so much, I felt I just had to try and re-enact it a tiny bit. The Peak lookout was totally rebuilt after Grandpa took the original photo so I had to just accept that the new one would be different and enjoy the view.’ Photographs: Stephen Clarke and David Tomkins Once, when asked why he went, he said: 'It sounded like a good idea at the time ... [the man who offered me the job] could have said "Mars" and I would have said "yes". Within 48 hours I had a gun in my hand and I was in Angola.' Tomkins became one of the infamous 'Dogs of War' in Angola. He became the explosives expert under the notorious, bloodthirsty mercenary leader, 'Colonel Callan', described as a 'man of despotic power and Satanic terror'.

Tomkins then went about recruiting a team of mercenaries with a former colleague from the Angola campaign, the SAS officer, Peter McAleese. Tomkins told McAleese of his plans in the Booth Hall pub in Hereford. DT: Right. It's been put to us that it was a dirty war. And, yes, it was a dirty war. Certainly, our small part of it made it even dirtier. I mean, all war is dirty, but in our particular context of the FNLA in northern Angola, with Europeans or British soldiers working under Callan, it was particularly dirty, in so much as we - and I use the word "we" collectively - committed what would be crimes, and in that respect the Angolan Government got the wording right: "war crimes". We did kill when we had no particular reason to. We tortured to achieve information that they probably didn't have, and this was not captured enemy soldiers: these were probably just local civilians. And that atmosphere permeated its way through the whole unit, where there was an air of lawlessness there. We had some Portuguese mercenaries, if you like, and we collectively recognized that there was no real command structure, that we were just a loose band of bandits with a very dangerous leader and a few associates, and we just went along for the ride and hoped it would improve, which of course it didn't. DT: Yes. It seemed to suit certain parties there to question people with very brutal violence - I mean, and these would be ... somebody would maybe inform that somebody who is a local character is a spy. He would be arrested, for want of a better word, and he'd probably be the local greengrocer who knew absolutely nothing, and would be questioned as to his links with the MPLA, was he a radio operator? All nonsense questions. They were trying to achieve something, but really weren't going to do any good. The guy, probably as innocent as the day he was born, would answer in the negative, that he knew nothing. Questioning would then become more brutal, with physical beatings, escalating into use of knives or whatever it took to extract... until it was quite obvious that he knew nothing, and he would then be executed. McAleese described Tomkins as a man who had been wounded in Angola and showed 'a lot of guts'. Tomkins was a 'picture of studied elegance, tall, lean, tanned, his hair very grey and fashionably long'. Following the disintegration of the FNLA, Dave became involved in a variety of conflicts across the world, and in the late 1980s, was approached with an offer to kill Pablo Escobar – the most wealthy criminal in history.Lawyers for the defence and prosecution agreed Tomkins, from Basingstoke, faces a 33-month prison term when he is sentenced on September 21. David Tomkins confessed in a Miami court to trying to buy the Vietnam-era plane to bomb a prison housing Pablo Escobar. Tomkins, who sports a trademark gold medallion and sunglasses, was indicted in 1994 on charges of attempting to buy an A-37 Dragonfly fighter plane from undercover federal agents.