The Wonga Coup - James Brabazon tells of his part in the downfall of Mann and Thatcher

A man is hanging naked from the ceiling by a meat hook. His feet are bound, but his mouth is open – screaming a confession. He is surrounded by half a dozen soldiers in ragged uniforms whose fists are caked in his blood. Unsatisfied, they taunt him in a language he doesn't understand, as a rifle butt is thrust into his groin. His name is Nick du Toit. He is a South African mercenary, and one of my best friends.

In his final bout of punishment, the air fills with the bitter-sweet tang of roasting meat. It's his own flesh that's burning. Under the flames that spring from the soldiers' cigarette lighters, the fat on the soles of his feet spits and crackles. Opened wide by pain, his eyes gulp in the horror of the concrete cell he's strung up in. Men he has known for years dangle moaning, broken and bleeding. One old friend is already dead. He no longer knows, nor cares, what he is confessing to. After uncounted hours of torture, he is left to the mercy of the rats and the sea. The cell floods at high tide, nearly drowning him, encrusting his wounds with salt.

This is how, in 2004, Nick began his 34-year sentence in Black Beach Prison, Africa's most notorious gaol. Along with Simon Mann, who was sentenced to 34 years in prison yesterday, he was arrested trying to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny West African nation fabulously rich in oil. But there is one person missing from the scene. What Nick doesn't see, when he opens his eyes, is me. Had all gone according to plan, I would be hanging next to him: I was supposed to film the coup.

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One afternoon, two years earlier, Nick – a man I hardly knew then – saved my life, twice. Filming in rebel-held Liberia, I was making a documentary film about the vicious civil war there. Like many journalists working in war zones, I decided to employ a security adviser. Unlike most journalists, I hired a mercenary. Having fought as a gun-for-hire in the region, Nick seemed a natural, if unorthodox, choice for a travelling companion. I asked him how he felt about being labelled a mercenary. Speaking English with a thick Afrikaans accent, he grinned and asked me if I knew any soldiers who weren't paid to fight.

Nick hadn't always been a mercenary. For many years he had been part of a Reconnaissance Commando unit in apartheid South Africa's elite Special Forces, seeing action across southern Africa. I found it hard to identify this quiet, measured man as a racist assassin. "That was the past," he said. "And anyway, we lost."

Despite his history, I trusted him instinctively, his careful humour inoculating us against the unrelenting barbarity that would consume our days. As my protector, he would carry a rifle, but never use it. His medical skills were employed on a near-daily basis.

By late July, we had witnessed combat continuously for almost a month. What was supposed to be a three-week trip lasted for nearly three months. We walked for 300 miles into the heart of a brutal war in only the clothes we stood up in. For nine weeks we ate nothing but rice and stewed vegetable leaves, drank nothing but water. I lost two stone in weight. I filmed executions, torture and even ritual cannibalism.

Nick was always there at my side. Forgetting my misgivings about Nick's past, I began to realise that people are not good or evil, only that people do good or evil things. In our shared intimacy of survival, his past had become an irrelevance to me. All that mattered by then was his sheer will to live that pulled us through. I was exhausted, malnourished, and at the edge of my sanity. And then came that afternoon.

We'd edged our way towards the frontline of the battle that engulfed the town we were trapped in. Fat machine-gun rounds droned overhead, while the rebels' AKs replied in a staccato chatter, tearing up the ribbon of tarmac ahead of us. Thirty yards away, government troops stood up and engaged us openly. We stopped – me filming, Nick squinting into the bush. "We have to go – now." I shrugged his advice away. I hadn't crawled for two hours to turn back without pictures. "No man, now. These guys can't hold them."

I carried on filming, as a rebel soldier crumpled in front of me, shot through the legs. "Two minutes, OK?" But then Nick's hand was on my wrist, pulling me across the street. Whoosh-thump. As the ground moved beneath my feet he dragged me sideways, down, rolling clear as the earth sprang away from me like a dirty fountain. Our party had taken a direct hit – by what? An RPG? A mortar? I found my feet and stared mute at the bloody remains of the soldiers I'd been standing with only seconds before. Deafened by the blast, I stood transfixed as Nick mouthed commands at me. A high-velocity rifle bullet passed between our faces, punching a hole in the wall beside us. Nick was dragging me to safety as we were strafed by machine-gun fire, the searing lead licking up the dust about our heels, harrying us down the street.

Nick had saved my life. As the desperate retreat began, we kept each other sane through a mounting tide of bodies, violence and degradation. Whoever I had been when I met Nick was a stranger to me when I returned to London. I could wash the dirt out of my hair, rub ointment on my broken skin, but I could not forget the screams of the dying or the obscene stench that had nearly suffocated us.

In order to survive, Nick had helped me navigate to a place inside myself so dark that I could no longer find my way back to normal life. Without him to talk to, it seemed as if I was completely alone. None of my friends at home could comprehend what it was like to watch a man butchered and eaten in front of you; my attempts to confess the horrors I had seen were dismissed with embarrassed silence.

Eventually, Nick came to Europe. We met in Brussels to discuss the progress of the Liberian war and hatch a plan to get back in. But Nick had bigger ideas and confided in me the chilling details of his next job. A business associate had asked him to help plan the overthrow of the government of a small oil-rich West African country. He explained that the current president, alleged to be a psychotic cannibal whose secret police are renowned for abhorrent human rights abuses, was not co-operating with the oil industry. He would be toppled by force, and his exiled arch-rival installed in his place. The pay-off would be lucrative oil contracts for the plotters.

I told him it all sounded like a Frederick Forsyth novel. In fact, he corrected me, it is the plot to a Frederick Forsyth novel: a real-life version of The Dogs of War. Had anyone but Nick suggested it, I would have dismissed them as a fantasist. But knowing Nick's history and experience, what he was describing seemed eminently plausible and strangely compelling. He was not a man prone to exaggeration. And then he dropped another bombshell. He promised me a place on the operation, and another scoop – on one condition.

If the exiled president's new government was to gain international recognition, the coup would have to look like a heroic local uprising. Nick was going to recruit black African troops for the operation, led by a small vanguard of notorious white mercenaries. I would be flown in ahead of time, to be on the ground before the main contingent landed, where, he informed me, my job would be to film the arrival of the new president, flanked by black mercenaries, in such as way as to make them look like rebellious local soldiers – and not the remnants of an apartheid-era Special Forces unit. This footage – the only television pictures that would exist – would be released to the world's media, buying the new regime time while it took over the institutions of state. In return, I would have exclusive access to film every aspect of the coup for my documentary that I could release once Nick had been paid by the new president.

He was asking me a favour, and offering me an opportunity. After the months we had spent together, he had learnt as much about me and my profession as I had about him and his. He understood that a war reporter is as opportunistic as a mercenary, which is why we'd become friends. I needed a war; Nick needed a war. I protected us with the quest for truth my cameras represented; Nick protected us with an assault rifle. And now he was offering me the chance to direct the movie of his own private war – an opportunity that, on the face of it, no sane journalist could refuse.

More than just an opportunity as a journalist, he wanted to co-opt me as a conspirator, making me a propagandist, the Leni Riefenstahl of what he called his "African adventure". It didn't matter how I phrased it to myself; one of my best mates had just asked me to help him conspire in robbery with violence, which would involve tacitly agreeing to murder. At the very least, the soldiers guarding the airport control tower were likely to be shot. Simply put, he was planning a spectacular bank job and wanted to cut me in.

Staring at him as my mind vaulted through a dizzying turn of mental gymnastics, I weighed up my options. Could I convince myself that agreeing to be involved was justified by the access it would give me to tell the "real" story of what would happen in Equatorial Guinea? I would have to sweep aside the moral complexities of what I was doing, and, more to the point, what I would be asked to do. I knew that I would not be able to refuse their demands to broadcast propaganda. And then there was the coup in its own right, not just as a story but as a political event that could shape the lives of thousands. The president of Equatorial Guinea is a monster, I reasoned. Removing him might possibly, though not definitely, lighten the burden on his long-suffering citizens. That was good enough for me – the ends excused the means. And besides, the chances of Nick financing the operation were almost nil. I agreed.

Nick had a friend he wanted me to meet, the associate he was working with on the coup. In an anonymous village outside Paris, I sat down to supper with Nick and his friend – Simon Mann, legendary professional soldier and former member of the SAS. Simon founded the private mercenary army Executive Outcomes in the early 1990s, and was behind their military interventions in Sierra Leone (dramatised in the film Blood Diamond). I was astonished, actually momentarily lost for words. Nick, it seemed, was serious.

They hinted at governmental backing from the US and UK; the list of financiers and backers of the coup was an A to Z of international money-men, oil barons and politicians which at times verged on the downright ridiculous: even Mark Thatcher had (apparently unwittingly) coughed up for a spot of DIY regime change.

Over the following months, Simon and I kept in contact. Nick sent his men to Equatorial Guinea to conduct a reconnaissance of the capital, and then began establishing a cover business there to serve as an operational base. Everything was in place – Nick and Simon had arranged the supply of the necessary weapons and ammunition for the coup from a government arms dealer in Zimbabwe and Nick was on location, ready. I packed my cameras. I would be given 48 hours' notice to travel. And then things fell apart.

My cellphone was stolen and I lost Simon Mann's number. I called Nick and asked for the number – but he became uncharacteristically evasive. They had fallen out. Unknown to me, the apparently watertight plans for the operation had dissolved into farce of epic proportions. I learnt later that at exactly the time I'd called, Phase One of the operation had been launched – and then abandoned in what could only be described as an undignified shambles.

Sixty-seven of Africa's most well-known mercenaries had embarked on two Dakotas at a civilian airfield in South Africa in broad daylight, while planespotters had taken pictures of them and written down the aircraft's ID numbers. They flew to an airstrip in the Congo – which was supposed to have been secured by a local rebel group – to cross-load the weapons and ammo being brought up from Zimbabwe. Except, of course, that in time-honoured African tradition the rebels failed to show up. The mercenaries hot-footed it to neighbouring, law-abiding Zambia before the Congolese army could turn up in force. Here, they waited for seven hours at a commercial airport before flying back home again, where all 67 of them were promptly installed in a cheap hotel – next door to the headquarters of the South African National Intelligence Agency. In a separate example of extraordinary timing, the aircraft that was plying the weapons run from Equatorial Guinea to Zimbabwe and then Congo was crippled shortly after take-off – and forced to make an emergency landing after its nosecone was struck by a goose.

At this point, Nick walked. With Nick off the scene, the tail began to wag the dog. Overall military planning was handed to another operator – who turned out to be an informer for the South African government. In fact, the team of mercenaries had been so thoroughly infiltrated by different intelligence agencies that there were now more spooks organising the plot than genuine conspirators.

Panicked by the prospect of losing their investments, different financiers began demanding refunds, or selling details of the operation on the commercial intelligence market. Now an open secret, Simon Mann feared the plan (and his future) was doomed. He paid Nick a final visit and persuaded him to sign up again, claiming that the coup's financiers would kill Nick, and his family, if he didn't rejoin. Reluctantly back in the game, Nick fell foul of his own adventure. A jet airliner would be brought in from the USA by an ex-CIA pilot, collecting the mercenaries and weapons in one flight. The President of Equatorial Guinea would be taken out in a small operation. Crucially, Nick had failed to realise that the President had given orders to liquidate local army commanders likely to be sympathetic to the coup. Our movements were scrutinised.

There was proving to be little honour among this gang of thieves; at least one of the architects of the coup was working as a double agent for the Equatorial Guinean government. My conversations with Nick were tapped by African and Western intelligence services – transcripts of my calls to his satellite phone were shown to me many months later. Everyone had sold out everyone else, and no one seemed able to pose the only question worth asking: what could possibly go wrong?

In nervous ignorance, I was told to wait, uncertain what would happen next. What happened next was that, in late February 2004, my grandfather – a war hero who raised and educated me – died after a short illness. I emailed Nick in Equatorial Guinea to tell him I would be attending to the funeral and family arrangements and would be unable to travel until 14 March, in two weeks' time. Nick sent condolences, but no word of what was to come.

On 7 March, Simon Mann was arrested at Harare airport in Zimbabwe with 69 other men, many of them infamous mercenaries, attempting to purchase weapons. Eighteen hours later, Nick and his men in Equatorial Guinea were rounded up. Two days later, Nick gave a televised confession, admitting his guilt, giving sketchy details of their plan.

He subsequently retracted this confession, claiming it was extracted under torture. International observers confirmed that one of his colleagues, Gerhard Nershz, was tortured to death shortly after being arrested. Simon served four years in Chikurubi maximum security prison in Zimbabwe – and was later extradited to Equatorial Guinea. Meanwhile, Nick has another 30 years to serve in the squalor of Black Beach prison – a sentence described by Amnesty International as a slow death sentence. His only chance of release rested with Simon – and the possibility that he would have negotiated a plea bargain for them both.

Unlike Nick, I had my choices made for me; no final fears to conquer, no ultimate decision to make on the steps of the plane, no last-minute doubts to overcome. I cannot say honestly why I would have gone: to expose the truth, or help a friend. The two would ultimately have become incompatible, a paradox I never had to try, and inevitably fail, to reconcile. The only thing beyond doubt is that had my grandfather not passed away, I would have been jailed myself. And neither my cameras, nor Nick, could have protected me.

Nick lived by taking risks, steeped in a profession deemed immoral by many, and not without reason. Yet I cannot find it within myself to condemn, or even judge him. When he was sentenced, I broke down in tears. He was my mate when we limped out of the war in Liberia, and he's my mate today. The unpalatable truth is that adversity breeds friendships that transcend moral judgements. In the end, Nick made his choice – which took moral and physical courage – and is paying the price for it.

The consequences of his African adventure have been far-reaching. I didn't film a coup, but I did make a documentary about his role in the plot. At the premiere in Soho – while Nick spent another interminable night shackled in his cell – I met my future wife. Our daughter has just turned one. The truth is that I don't just owe my own life to Nick, but my child's life, too. There is no greater debt of friendship than that.

© James Brabazon, 2008. A version of this article appears in this month's Arena magazine