CHAPTER 35
A Jackal Speaks: The Seychelles Conspiracy
I have been a martial artist for much of my adult life and, by 1999, had studied for about fifteen years under a Korean master, Chung Young Lee, near my home in South Florida. One day, just before the afternoon class, a stranger walked into our dojang. He was about six feet tall and moved with athletic agility. He smiled in a friendly sort of way, yet there was a certain air about him that seemed threatening. He said his name was Jack.1 He was a black belt and would like to consider signing up with our school. Master Lee invited him to put on his uniform and join the class.
As the senior black belt, I was responsible for sizing up this stranger by sparring with him at the end of class. While he was suiting up, Master Lee approached me. “Be careful.” He patted my shoulder. “Defense.”
As soon as we began the standard drills, it was obvious that Jack was fast and skilled. When the time came for us to spar, we lined up opposite each other and bowed. Master Lee gave the signal. Jack immediately came at me with a roundhouse kick. I blocked it and responded with a back kick. He sidestepped and sent me sprawling to the floor with a front kick to my chest.
My intuition — and Master Lee’s — had been accurate. I’d learned my lesson. Jack was not an adversary I wanted to aggravate.
After the class ended, the three of us chatted. Jack mentioned countries where he had served as a “security consultant” — all of them political hot spots. He was short on details, but Master Lee and I kept exchanging glances. He signed up to join the dojang.
Over the next months, I made a point of getting to know Jack. We sometimes met for lunch or a beer. There was little doubt in my mind that he was a jackal waiting for his next assignment. The prospect of learning more about his life excited me. We circled each other in a sort of verbal sparring. Then, one day he mentioned that he had paid a short visit to Seychelles, back in the 1970s. I could hardly believe it.
In the late 1970s, Chuck Noble, a MAIN senior vice president and retired US army general, told me to prepare to go to Seychelles. This island nation in the Indian Ocean is located close to Diego Garcia, home to one of the Pentagon’s most strategic military bases. Seychelles’ president, France-Albert René, was threatening to expose facts about Diego Garcia that Washington wanted to keep secret, facts that could have forced the United States to close down a facility that was essential to its operations in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia. My job would be to bribe and threaten René into changing his mind. Very quickly, however, things happened that altered the situation.
An undercover agent who had gotten close to René concluded that, like Roldós and Torrijos, the president would not be corrupted. I was called off the job, and in 1981, a team of jackals was sent to assassinate René. They were discovered when their chartered plane landed in Seychelles. A firefight broke out. The jackals — surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned — hijacked an Air India 707. Six of them, who believed the plane would be shot down as soon as it took off, opted to remain behind and try to escape by blending in with the local people. The rest forced the 707 crew to fly them to South Africa.
The six who remained were caught and imprisoned. Four were sentenced to death; the other two drew long prison terms. As soon as the 707 landed, it was surrounded by South African security forces. The jackals were arrested and imprisoned.2
I stared at Jack, wondering . . .
“I almost went there in the late seventies,” I said. “To work with the president.”
His eyes held mine. “Albert René?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“I tried to kill him.” He gave me a disarming grin. “But it’s not something I want to talk about.”
I understood his reticence. It was enough to know that he had in fact been a member of the jackal team. Later that day I went back to my files. His name was there; as one of the 707 hijackers, he had made the newspapers during the trials in South Africa.
I never asked Jack about Seychelles. I knew that prying would merely earn his mistrust. Instead, we talked about his more distant past. He had grown up amid the violence of Beirut, the son of a corporate executive. He was a US citizen, yet his life had been far removed from that of the teenagers hanging out on the streets of US cities during the love-in years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Instead of watching flower children dancing through fountains, Jack watched as a mother was raped in front of her son and AK-47s spewed death across city streets. Soon after his eighteenth birthday, Jack was kidnapped by the Palestine Liberation Organization, accused of spying for Israel, tortured, and threatened with execution. Eventually they released him; nevertheless, it was an experience that changed his life.
“Those bastards didn’t scare me,” he explained. “They pissed me off, showed me that I was meant to be a fighter.”
He headed to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Its army was notorious for its effectiveness and brutality, and for being the number one training ground for mercenaries. Jack excelled and was selected to join the elite South African Special Forces Brigade. Popularly known as the “Recces” (reconnaissance commandos), its fighters were considered to be the most lethal in the world. By the time he graduated from the Recces, Jack had gained a reputation that appealed to the CIA.
Jack would disappear from our dojang for extended periods. He was an avid surfer, and he brought back surfing photographs. Still, Master Lee and I commented to each other that violent things happened in countries where he went surfing — a bombing in Indonesia, riots in Lebanon, an assassination in South Africa.
Then came 9/11, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Jack accepted an assignment to go to the Middle East. All he would say about it was “It’s my type of job. And it’ll be a reunion of old friends, like the guys who went to the Seychelles with me.”
I did not see him again until after my operation, in 2005, when he was back in the States for a month of vacation. He visited me just about every day and forced me to take longer and longer walks. “Got to get you back to kicking ass at Master Lee’s,” he would say.
He did not talk much about his job. Instead, he shared photographs he’d taken: artful ones of the Iraqi people working in their fields, children riding on camels, and beautiful sunsets; and ones that told the story of bombed-out buildings, wrecked military vehicles, and men running from exploding cars.
I gave him a copy of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Twenty-four hours later, he had read it all. “You’ve told the real story,” he said. “I hope you’ll write more, go deeper.” When I expressed surprise at his desire for transparency, he responded, “We got nothing to hide.”
At that point, I broached the subject I’d avoided for so long. “What did you guys intend to do after you assassinated René?”
He paused, but only for a moment. “Get the hell out of there fast, turn into ghosts — spooks.” He laughed at that last word. He went on to explain that the Kenyan army had an aircraft loaded with paratroopers standing by in Nairobi. After the jackals had killed René, the Kenyans would immediately arrive to accept credit for the coup. Jack and his team would take commercial airliners to other countries.
“So,” I asked, “no one was supposed to know that a bunch of white mercenaries had staged this coup?”
He nodded.
“You’d simply vanish into thin air, and the world would be told that an army of Africans had swept in from the continent, killed René, destroyed his government, and reinstated the former president?”
“That was the plan.”
“The CIA, South Africa, Diego Garcia. They would all be left out of the news.” I whistled softly. “What a scam!”
“Clever, huh?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t bother to mention that it was a direct assault on the foundations of the American political system, that democracy is a farce when voters are intentionally deceived. “Except — you got caught.”
“Yes.” He looked off wistfully, then brightened. “But you know what? It all worked out in the end. The South African security forces and the government were our buddies. After the Air India plane landed, we were tried and found guilty — and then a couple months later quietly released.” He gave me a knowing grin. “And our so-called failure turned out to be a success. The South African government paid René a $3 million bribe to free our six guys imprisoned there. No one was executed. No one stayed jailed for long. After that, René cooperated, never exposed the Diego Garcia secrets, and became a friend to the US.”
I mentioned that the undercover agent who’d concluded that René was not corruptible — the reason I’d been pulled off the job — had been wrong.
“Or perhaps,” Jack said, “René saw the light. Remember, he’d come this close to death.” He held his hands up and moved them together. “Our attempted assassination convinced him the CIA was serious.”
I considered his words for a moment and thought about Roldós and Torrijos. “The CIA had killed the presidents of Ecuador and Panama only a few months before you went in, because they wouldn’t play our game.”
“Exactly.” He smiled. “Don’t think for a moment those deaths didn’t make a big impression on Mr. René.”
“Where is he now?”
“René? He just retired as president. Two decades later! And Diego Garcia’s been the launching pad for US forays into the Middle East, Africa, and Asia all these years.”
The story of the jackals in Seychelles says so much. On the surface, it seemed like a failure, but in fact it ended up accomplishing everything Washington could possibly have wanted. Better than actually killing a president, it had scared and bribed him into cooperating. He became a docile servant of empire. Key operatives had been caught — but they were soon back in business. And anyone who happened to read or hear about the raid on the Seychelles airport or the hijacking of an Air India 707 believed it was the work of terrorists — Communists — out to overthrow a legitimate government. The public had no idea that it was a CIA plot gone sour.3