Plane Did Stop At Grantley Adams - Mercenaries' 727 flew from USAF base

Seized 727 allegedly flew from USAF base in North Carolina

Grantly Adams is the name of the international airport in Barbados West Indies. The Barbados Nation News reported today that the mercenary aircraft which was seized in Zimbabwe stopped off to refuel in Barbados before heading across the Atlantic over to Africa, but what's really interesting the paper reports the origin of the flight was "Hope" Air Force Base in North Carolina. I tried googling for Hope Air Force Base and didn't pull up anything under that name, but I did find a "Pope" Air Force base in NC. Can North Carolina or USAF Duers fills us on whether or not there really is a Hope AFB? Perhaps it's a misprint on the Newspaper's part.


Informed sources told the DAILY NATION yesterday that the aircraft, a Boeing 727 (100 series), with registration number N4610, landed in Barbados shortly after midnight for refuelling before leaving around 6:30 a.m.

Sources also indicated that the aircraft, which Zimbabwean officials alleged also carried military equipment, had arrived from the Hope Air Force Base in North Carolina, United States, before its stop-over in Barbados.

Plane Did Stop at Grantly Adams Barbados, Nation News March 11

There is, as you said, Pope AFB in North Carolina...

.

or if anyone mainstream North American news sources pick up on this possible USAF connection.

I believe the official US State Dept. position was that the plane, it's passengers and cargo had no connections with the US gov't. However, if it did fly out of a US military facility, you could be forgiven for wondering just exactly who or what is behind it all. Note that the newspaper also claims that the plane was being operated by the "American Air Force."

We are the world's most dangerous and arrogant rogue nation. Who will stop us? We may not know right now but as history tells us, we will be stopped. It has happened to every imperialist nation in due time.

Adjacent to Fort Bragg.
John
Former Communications Center Specialist. Dealt with military addresses all the time.

US hires mercenaries for Iraq role

By Jonathan Franklin
Santiago
March 6, 2004

The US is hiring mercenaries in Chile to replace its soldiers on security duty in Iraq.

A Pentagon contractor has begun recruiting former commandos, other soldiers and
seamen, paying them up to $US4000 ($A5300) a month to guard oil wells against attack
by insurgents.

Last month Blackwater USA flew a first group of about 60 former commandos, many of
whom had trained under the military government of Augusto Pinochet, from Santiago to a
970-hectare training camp in North Carolina.

From there they would be taken to Iraq, where they were expected to stay between six
months and a year, the president of Blackwater USA, Gary Jackson, said. "We scour the
ends of the earth to find professionals - the Chilean commandos are very, very
professional and they fit within the Blackwater system."

Chile was the only Latin American country where Mr Jackson's firm had hired commandos
for Iraq.


more
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/05/1078464637030.html?from=storyrhs


Maybe they just took the wrong plane?

:evilgrin:

I heard on CNN international, in the middle of the night, the plane was headed to that country. And that country is the third largest oil producer in Africa. That fits with your story about guarding oil wells.

or at least coordinated with the Air Force? Or something like that?

Interesting.....

Even I think this looks fishy and matches other rumours of US involvement.

,...did I miss the identity of the "mercenaries"? Have they been fully identified yet?

This whole thing is so weird. I suspect that, like all weird stuff, it will be peeled back like layers on an onion, eventually.

highjacker's ID within that time (eventhough some of them are still walking around alive and well).

from Fort Bragg.

I will check....

a week ago. I thought WTF? It was just one of those throw-away stories so I don't have any details and I can't find anything about it anywhere else. The newsperson was like, "There's a local connection to that plane of mercernaries. The plane was purchased from a person in Ottawa, KS." They gave the name but I didn't catch it.

Has anyone else heard this because I swear I had my coffee already. Ottawa KS is a small town so not sure why someone would have a 727 for sale. Maybe there's an aircraft business down there. Anyone from Ottawa KS?

This gets stranger and stranger....

Web site is here: www.dodson.com

It's actually SE of Ottawa- in Rantoul.

They purchased the plane from the US Air Force, and claim that they sold it to a South African company last week.

Don't bring him up- I'm on a dialup connection and the thread will explode to where I can't read it anymore! :)

Truthfully, I don't know.

was last seen in South Africa.

This is getting weirder and weirder

But you'd have to get out your Rand-McNally road atlas to find it-- the last time I was there, it consisted of a cafe and a grocery store.

:dunce:<------ME

Must've been one-heckuva cyclone...

Been wondering about that news report I heard. I swear, I can't keep up with all the news these days. Thanks to everyone here at DU who do such an outstanding job of finding and posting news and information. Don't know what I'd do without this resource.

Most of the questions they ask Rumsfeld are so 7th grade.:eyes:

EXECUTIVE OUTCOMES - Planned coup against oil-rich African nation by US and Britain falls apart .. Reuters

After Zimbabwe catches mercenaries in route

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=4539361
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ZIMBABWE - Mystery plane registered to Dodson Aviation in Kasnsas .. The Star
Illegally left South African airport
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=68&art_id=vn20040309140940220C383988&set_id=1

has anyone posed the theory that this group of Hessians was a hit team commissioned to shut Aristides mouth? Just a thought.

Jay

CONSPIRACY: Zimbabwe state media said 64 people arrested on Sunday were on their way to Equatorial Guinea to attempt to overthrow the government there

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
Friday, Mar 12, 2004,Page 6

Zimbabwean authorities said 64 men on a plane seized Sunday at the airport in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, were mercenaries on their way to sow conflict in Equatorial Guinea, and threatened to execute them.

The Herald, Zimbabwe's state-owned newspaper, reported that 20 of the men were South Africans. There were also 23 Angolans, 18 Namibians and two Congolese, the newspaper reported, and one Zimbabwean with a South African passport.

The president of Equatorial Guinea, a county whose recent oil discoveries have made it one of the continent's biggest oil producers, said the group was part of a quest by "enemy powers" to overthrow his government. The president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, said South Africa and Angola had alerted him to the plot, in which countries and multinational companies hostile to his 23-year rule had conspired to replace him with a politician now living in exile in Spain.

An executive with the company that operated the plane, an aging Boeing 727, said it had been engaged to transport security guards hired by mining companies to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/03/12/2003102144

I mean it is, but it isn't. 83-4610 is a C-22A, a military staff transport version that seems to do better on shorter runways.

Like that statement that the plane had no connection whatsoever to the U.S. military. I mean, that's technically false, since it was in USAF active (ANG) duty as recently as 2001. So there's a "connection".

But not nearly as interesting a connection as if it picked up gas at an AFB on the way to Zim. Now THAT's a "connection". :D

Update.

She said Section 61 of the Defence Act says, "No citizen may
without the written permission of the Minister of Defence serve
or apply to serve in the main force or the reserve force or
any auxiliary force of any other country other than Namibia."

...

Angola is also reported to have sent messages to Equatorial Guinea
to tell them to be vigilant. Reports from the Associated Press in
Harare say Angolan Foreign Minister Joao Miranda said his government
believed those arrested belonged to the former Buffalo Battalion,
a disbanded South African army made up of foreign soldiers, which
fought in Namibia and Angola during the 1970s and 1980s.

However, during a press briefing in Harare on Wednesday, Minister
of Home Affairs Kembo Mohadi said that one of the captured men,
Simon Mann, had revealed that the British Secret Intelligence Service
(M16), America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Spanish
Secret Service supported the group.

...

Analysts in Zimbabwe see the story as a plot to tarnish the human
rights record of the country, where it would be portrayed as a
conduit of terrorism, since the weapons used in the coup would have
been supplied by Zimbabwe.

AllAfrica

Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg)

March 12, 2004
Posted to the web March 12, 2004

Sam Sole And Stefaans Brümmer


The men behind the alleged Equatorial Guinea coup plot represent a who's who of South Africa's mercenary market - but key players also have links to the American and British security establishments.

In Harare, where 67 suspected mercenaries were arrested last Sunday, Zimbabwean Home Affairs Minister Kembo Mohadi claimed later in the week that Britain's MI6 intelligence service, the United States's CIA and the Spanish secret service had been involved.


This, Mohadi said, had been confessed by Simon Mann, one of the mission's principal planners. Mann was arrested in Harare alongside his "troops", who had arrived separately by Boeing 727 from South Africa.

Mohadi's claim should be taken with a pinch of salt, as the Zimbabwean government has made a habit of implicating the United Kingdom and the US in latter-day colonial plots. But it is intriguing that both Mann and his alleged principal co-conspirator, Nic du Toit, do have direct or indirect links with the security establishments in these countries.

Here are some of the key players:

Simon Mann

Mann has a long association with private military companies, including the trailblazer in the genre, South Africa's Executive Outcomes.

Zimbabwe's Mohadi claims Mann was promised a cash payment of £1-million and oil exploitation rights in Equatorial Guinea for his part in arranging a coup against President Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

Mann was one of the founders of Sandline International, a London-based private military company that worked closely with Executive Outcomes, the company formed in 1989 by former apartheid special forces operatives.

Executive Outcomes and later Sandline played a key role in major private military interventions, first in Angola in support of the MPLA government against Jonas Savimbi's Unita rebels and later in Sierra Leone, in the latter case allegedly with the tacit support of the British security services.

Mann's background made him the perfect intermediary for the negotiation and conduct of private operations in support of British military, diplomatic or commercial interests. A member of a prominent British brewing family, he attended Eton before joining the Scots Guards and later the elite Special Air Service. After leaving the SAS Mann specialised in computer security systems.

In the early 1990s Mann linked up with another ex-military man, Anthony Buckingham, who had oil interests. The Angolan government reportedly approached Canadian company Ranger Oil, with which Buckingham was involved, to help protect the country's oil installations.

That led to the comprehensive contract Executive Outcomes clinched to shore up the MPLA government and turned the tide against Savimbi's rebels.

Nic du Toit

Du Toit is understood to be a former SADF special forces operator, who later also worked for Executive Outcomes.

According to a 1999 paper by researcher Kareen Pech, Military Technical Services (MTS), the company represented by Du Toit in the alleged coup plot, was set up in 1989 under retired Major-General Tai Minnaar to procure Soviet-issue helicopters and provide private military support services.

Pech wrote: "Although some companies, like MTS, have the same business interests, cross shareholdings and even shared personnel, Executive Outcomes directors denied that they were associated with these companies."

Minnaar died in mysterious circumstances - allegedly due to poisoning - in September 2001. His attempt to export to the US a so-called stockpile of biological warfare agents, developed under apartheid South Africa's chemical-biological warfare programme, was revealed by the M&G in 2002.

That attempt was made in conjunction with two former CIA operators and with the knowledge of the FBI - which apparently blew the plan and shopped Minnaar before it could be carried out.

Niel Steyl

Steyl was the pilot of the Boeing stopped in Harare, and is under arrest there.

More is known about his brother, Crause Steyl, who has also been implicated - by documentary evidence suggesting that his company, an air ambulance service, was at least an intended partner

http://allafrica.com/stories/200403120716.html

'Enraged' that deal scuttled'

The Afrikaans daily, Beeld, reported that the arms for the alleged coup would have been supplied by ZDI. Dube was reportedly "enraged" that the aircraft was impounded and the $180 000 transaction scuttled.

The paper identified the pilots as Niel Steyl, a South African commercial pilot and Hendrik Hamman, a Namibian. Both had in the past worked for defunct mercenary outfit Executive Outcomes.

Logo executive Charles Burrow, speaking from London, called the incident a "misunderstanding".

The aircraft, flight planned to Bujumbura in Burundi, were taking personnel to the DRC. What appeared to be military items aboard was mining equipment, he claimed.

The company's cryptic website listed operations in places as diverse as China and Pakistan, Venezuela and Guyana and African countries such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, the two Congos, Angola, Zambia and Mozambique.

http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_1496029,00....

Corporate Mercenaries - Executive Outcomes Leads to Bush

Executive Outcomes is the most infamous mercenary company in operation today. Unlike traditional mercenary companies, it operates as the heavy partner in a web of related companies. Sandline international is such a sister company: 170 elite South African dogs of war were hired to crush the Bougainville freedom Fighters for $22m. Just another job for the likes of Sandline international? Paul Vernon investigates...

Set up in 1993 by Tony Buckingham and Simon Mannl <1>, Executive outcomes (EO) has worked in Asia, Africa and South America. Most of it's personnel are hired from South Africa.

Buckingham is the chief executive of Heritage Oil and Gas, which is now registered in the (tax-free) Bahamas. When EO was hired by the Sierra Leone government to crush people's revolt, Heritage received much of the payment in the form of mining rights. Sir David Steel MP happens to be a director of Heritage as well as a close friend of Buckingham. Recently Sierra Leone was thrown back into chaos with another military coup.

Eeben Barlow, the present CEO of Executive Outcomes, is a veteran of the Civil Co-operation Bureau, which allegedly assassinated antiapartheid activists. Barlow is the frontman for the group he told Newsweek (2) in February: "I'm a professional soldier. It's not about politics. I have a job to do. I do it." EO is thought to have a annual turnover of more that £20 million.

The South African government, with help from officials from the United Nations, has begun to draft proposals of legislation aimed to counter what officials called "the increasing frequency with which our soldiers-of-fortune are operating overseas".(7)

http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/magazine/issue4/cw4f8.html

Executive Outcomes ties lead to London and Bush
Executive Intelligence Review January 31, 1997, pp. 42-43
by Roger Moore and Linda de Hoyos

Exposes appearing on both sides of the Atlantic on the mercenary group Executive Outcomes, threaten to blow the lid off the British intelligence nexus already identified as responsible for the February 1986 murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, and for the current cataclysmic destabilization of Africa on behalf of circles associated with the Queen of England's Privy Council and Sir George Bush.
The exposes appeared in the French daily {Le Figaro} on Jan. 16, the {London Observer} on Jan. 17, and the February issue of the American magazine {Harper's.}
Executive Outcomes is the mercenary arm of a vast
network of British-South African corporations dealing in gold, diamonds, and oil, primarily, but not exclusively, in Africa, that come under the umbrella of Strategic Resources Corporation, headquartered in Pretoria, South Africa. Described universally as an ``advance guard of a corporate network that includes mining, oil, and construction companies,'' Executive Outcomes is active in 13 African countries, including Uganda. For its services, it demands a lien or franchise on the exportable raw resources, particularly mineral wealth, of the client country--in the same fashion as the British East India Company of the 18th and 19th centuries, which in turn functioned as the ``advance guard'' of the British monarchy.
Executive Outcomes was incorporated offshore, on the Isle of Man, in 1993, by Anthony Buckingham, a British businessman, and Simon Mann, a former British officer, the {Observer} reported, based on a leak to it from British intelligence. Buckingham is also chief executive of Heritage Oil and Gas, which in turn is linked to the Canadian firm Ranger Oil. Other firms operating out of the same headquarters in Chelsea Plaza 107, London, include Branch International Ltd. and Branch Mining Ltd.
Preliminary investigation by {EIR} has further determined that Executive Outcomes lies at the heart of the British monarch's raw materials cartels and secret intelligence operations, in conjunction with Bush's rogue apparat:
Through Sir David Steel, a former leader of the Liberal Party, Executive Outcomes and, presumably, its deployment, is a subsumed operation of the Queen's Privy Council. Steel is a close friend of EO's Buckingham, and is on the board of directors of EO's sister firm, Heritage Oil and Gas, according to {Le Figaro.} In 1977, Steel was inducted into the Privy Council, making him the youngest member of Britain's highest-level policy-making body.
The links between Executive Outcomes and Ranger Oil point to operational ties with the Bronfman family of Canada, whose scion, Edgar Bronfman of Toronto Broncorp, sits on the board of directors of Ranger. Recently, the Bronfman family merged its mammoth real estate firm, Trizec, with Barrick Gold, whose senior advisory board includes Sir George Bush. Barrick Gold is deeply involved in northeastern Zaire, where it has purchased 83,000 square kilometers of land. Zairean sources report that the so-called Zairean rebel Laurent Kabila is no more than a mercenary for Barrick and Anglo American Corp., sponsored by the British Crown-backed Ugandan and Rwandan militaries. Executive Outcomes, {Le Figaro} and other sources further verify, is deeply entrenched in Uganda, the key British marcher-lord state in the region.

http://www.aboutsudan.com/action/geopolitical/executive_outcomes.htm