Introduction
In the last decade or so, I’ve written five full-length books. Along the way, I’ve also self-published several shorter works, most of which have expanded on articles I’ve written that I felt warranted more space than was possible in newspapers or magazines, but which didn’t deserve full-length treatments.
This book collects all these shorter works and a few other pieces that haven’t previously appeared in book form, including some of my early journalism. In creating this compilation, I wondered what motivated me to write about some of these topics, many of which I researched over the course of several years. Most of the time, I think, I simply wanted to find answers to questions that intrigued me, and then doggedly (or perhaps stubbornly) pursued them. Sometimes this has seemed like a distraction, a way to let off steam when wrestling with writing my ‘main’ books. Sometimes it has been as a result of my research for my novels (mercenaries in Africa, for example) or fed into them: my interest in Antony Terry and Sarah Gainham led to the creation of Sandy Harmigan and Rachel Gold in my novel Spy Out the Land, and eventually resulted in Agent of Influence.
The section titled Blunt Instruments is part of a much longer abandoned work in which I aimed to look at some of the forgotten influences of Ian Fleming. I abandoned it for a few reasons, one of which is that it became increasingly unwieldy and I despaired at how long it would take me to research fully: I had pencilled in chapters examining in detail the penny dreadfuls, Biggles, American pulps and much more besides. Another reason was that my research into Dennis Wheatley’s work had convinced me that his was the most striking forgotten influence on Fleming, and that eventually became A Spy is Born.
This collection comes full circle with Cabal, the first piece of fiction I wrote that I felt had any value. Rather than taking a strictly chronological approach, I’ve tried to arrange the material in an order that makes sense – but this probably isn’t a book to read sequentially anyway. I hope you find something in it of interest.
Jeremy Duns
Mariehamn, December 2020
Belgian Angles
The following eight articles are all from my early years as a journalist, when I was writing for The Bulletin, an English-speaking magazine in Brussels. It was here I got my first taste for throwing myself down rabbit-holes in search of arcane pieces of information—the goal was always to find an unusual story with broad appeal that also had a ‘Belgian angle’, however tangential that might be. I interviewed Jean-Claude Van Damme about his early life as a ballet dancer, Alan Moore on Hollywood and pornography, Marti Pellow about his heroin addiction, and tracked down unreleased music by soul legend Marvin Gaye. During these years I was also researching my first novel, Free Agent, and some of my fascination with spies, mercenaries and assassins seeped into my day job. I wrote dozens more articles in this time, but I think these few stand up well enough to be aired again all these years later.
The Scientist Who Knew Too Much
It was a cold wet evening in the Brussels suburb of Uccle, and Jerry was glad he was nearly home. His assistant had given him a lift to Avenue François Folie, and as he stepped through the gates of the Residence Minerve he was still smiling at the story she had told him about a female colleague asking her out on a date…
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
It was a cold wet evening in the Brussels suburb of Uccle, and Jerry was glad he was nearly home. His assistant had given him a lift to Avenue François Folie, and as he stepped through the gates of the Residence Minerve he was still smiling at the story she had told him about a female colleague asking her out on a date.
He took the lift up to the sixth floor. He was 62 now and the stairs didn’t appeal. Besides, he was carrying his large black canvas bag. Today, it was even heavier than usual: as well as the usual documents from the office, it also contained $20,000 in cash. Jerry came out of the lift and turned left and left again, until he came to number 20: his apartment. He took out his keys, registering the sound of footsteps further down the corridor. That was nothing unusual—it was a busy building. Then the footsteps stopped.
Three shots were fired into Jerry’s back, forcing his body into the door. Although he was dead, the killer didn’t flee. Instead, he leaned over and placed the pistol—a 7.65-millimetre automatic with a silencer—against the back of Jerry’s neck. He pulled the trigger twice more, spraying the corridor’s carpet with blood and fragments of bone.
The job was done.
The above is not an excerpt from Frederick Forysth’s latest thriller, but a reconstructed account of real events that took place on March 22, 1990. Jerry was Doctor Gerald Vincent Bull, and the story leading up to his assassination in Brussels encompasses Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and several of the world’s intelligence agencies. It’s the story of the downfall of the greatest gun designer of the 20th century and how it ended here, less than 15 years ago.
Gerald Bull was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1928, the second youngest of 10 children in a middle-class family. When he was three, his mother died of complications following the birth of his younger brother. His father suffered a nervous breakdown as a result, and Bull found himself living on a farm with his uncle and aunt. At 10, they sent him to a nearby Jesuit college, where he studied until he was 16.
After receiving two model aircraft kits for Christmas, Bull became interested in aeronautics, which he went on to study at the University of Toronto. By 24, he was working at the university’s Institute of Aerophysics. Largely funded by Canada’s Defence Research Board, the institute was investigating supersonic aerodynamics. In a 1953 interview with the Canadian magazine Maclean’s, Bull enthused about the possible civilian applications of the work he was doing: ‘It can provide us with safer and faster air travel. It will help us conquer space, man’s last frontier. Some day, guided missiles will carry mail instead of a warhead, and a letter mailed in Vancouver will be in Halifax an hour later.’
Bull’s idealism would not last long. In 1949, the Canadian government gave the Institute funding to create a tunnel capable of producing winds travelling at seven times the speed of sound. The project would lead to breakthroughs in supersonic science—and allow Canada to develop new kinds of aircrafts, rockets and missiles. The Cold War was hotting up, and Bull was to take a leading role in the arms and space races.
In 1951, he started working for the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment, where he helped design an air-to-air guided missile codenamed Velvet Glove. Mixing with leading scientists in his field from around the world, Bull soon realised that Canada did not have the funding or vision of the superpowers. He cultivated contacts in the American military who, in 1961, co-sponsored a project called HARP in the island of Barbados. HARP—High Altitude Research Project—was Bull’s brainchild: its result was a massive space-cannon that fired projectiles into the ocean.
In 1967, Bull set up his own company, Space Research Corporation. As a result of discoveries he had made working with missiles, conventional artillery weapons now had greater range and accuracy. SRC began to provide the Pentagon with long-range shells for use in Vietnam. Bull’s work was so important that he was made an American citizen by an act of Congress, something that had only happened twice before, to Winston Churchill and the Marquis de Lafayette.
Gerald Bull, Charles Murphy, Clifford Roy Baker, and Carlton Brathwaite at the Space Research Institute, McGill University, Montreal, 1964. (Wikimedia Commons)
SRC quickly expanded: at its peak, the company had a staff of over 300 people. It sold cannons capable of firing ammunition over great distances, to Britain, Egypt, Israel, Thailand, Italy and others. Bull was now a player in the world of international arms-dealing.
In 1980, he was arrested in the US for selling arms to South Africa, and was imprisoned for seven months. He felt he had been made a patsy, and became embittered. He relocated to Brussels, then one of the capitals of the international arms trade. It was here that he became involved with the Iraqis. Saddam Hussein was using Soviet-supplied Scud missiles to attack the Iranians, but was frustrated by their limited range and accuracy. Through other countries, Saddam had bought cannons designed by Bull; their effectiveness had impressed him. So in 1988, Bull was invited out to Baghdad to discuss cooperation. He convinced the Iraqis that, to gain real power, they would need the capability for space launches. He offered to build a cannon that could do the job: a ‘Supergun’ 150 metres long, with a bore of one metre.
Bull built a prototype, nicknamed Baby Babylon, at a secret site in Jabal Hamrayn in central Iraq. It blew up on its first test, but he kept trying. However, word started to get around intelligence agencies that SRC was developing a ‘doomsday weapon’ with the Iraqis. The Supergun could dump a nuclear bomb, or nerve gas, on any Middle Eastern city. Even if never used, it would be a powerful propaganda tool for Saddam.
Sections of the Supergun were being built in the UK, Spain and the Netherlands. In Brussels, Bull’s apartment was broken into several times. On one occasion, his drinking glasses were replaced by a new, very obviously different, set. He was convinced his phone was being tapped, and his post being opened. He told friends he felt he was being sent a warning. Then, on March 22, he was silenced forever. The studious boy obsessed with model aircraft had ended up dead in the corridor of a Brussels apartment block, three bullets in his back and two through his head.
~
So who killed him? There’s no shortage of candidates: over three decades, Gerald Bull had worked for and sold arms to several dozen countries. Was it MI6, because Bull might have revealed that the British government was involved in shady arms deals with Saddam? That revelation did come about, after his death, creating an enormous scandal in the UK. And just one week before Bull was gunned down in Brussels, Farzad Bazoft, a journalist with The Observer, was arrested in Baghdad, charged with being a spy and hanged in Abu Ghraib prison. Bazoft had been discovered by Iraqi secret police near one of SRC’s Supergun test sites.
Or perhaps it was the work of the CIA, who some thought Bull had worked for in the ‘60s. Others still think the Iranians may have killed him, in the hope of stopping the Supergun project. It could have been the Iraqis themselves—had they fallen out with their star scientist?
Nobody has yet been brought to justice for the killing, but the Belgian authorities’ prime suspect has always been Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. Three months before Bull was murdered, two men rented an apartment opposite his and paid three months’ rent in advance, only to vanish 10 days later. However, to get the electricity connected in the apartment, one of the men had had to present identification at the utility company’s offices. Tracing this back to his entry into the country, the police discovered that the other man had entered with a false passport, and was an Israeli. That said, it seems unlike Mossad to have left such an obvious trail, and many assassins-for-hire during that time were Israeli.
Last year, the state prosecutor revealed that they had new information from ‘a reliable source’ who had identified a Mossad agent as one of Bull’s assassins. According to the source, the killer took a piece of jewellery from Bull’s body, which he still wears. In January, the same source apparently alleged that a Western intelligence agency helped with the killing, and the signs pointed to the British. The case is now at the Brussels’ public prosecutors’ office. The next step is ‘recquisition’—the drawing up of a list of charges. ‘We don’t have the name of the killer,’ says spokeswoman Estelle Arpigny, which suggests that the charges will be against ‘persons unknown’ and will continue to languish unless new information is uncovered.
At the moment, it seems unlikely we will ever know for sure who killed Gerald Bull—the scientist who perhaps knew too much.
First published in The Bulletin, July 2004
Being Jean-Claude
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
‘You’re going to be a very good father,’ Jean-Claude Van Damme tells me. ‘Better than lots of people.’ Thanks, I say. ‘Worse than lots of people, too,’ he continues. He puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘But you’re going to be on the high side.’ He pauses dramatically. ‘And you’re going to have more than one kid.’
My wife is eight months pregnant and I’m chatting about it with the Belgian action star, father of three and part-time prophet as we sip espressos on the balcony of his room at London’s Philippe Starck-designed Sanderson Hotel. It’s taken me three weeks to arrange the meeting: I’ve spoken to Van Damme’s agent, assistant, sister and mother, and followed him by phone and fax from California to Moscow to Cannes.
Van Damme has been getting around: in recent weeks, he’s announced that Kylie’s buns of steel are a result of the exercises he taught her on the set of Streetfighter (this is, after all, the man who once claimed he could crack walnuts between his buttocks); been reported as under consideration for a starring role in an English National Ballet film of Swan Lake; and said to be considering an offer to spend a week in the French version of the Big Brother house.
But, despite the publicity, things haven’t been going too well for the self-proclaimed ‘Fred Astaire of karate’. A decade ago, he was one of the planet’s biggest stars, commanding $6 million a film. But now, like Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone and Stephen Seagal, Van Damme is discovering that his kind of testosterone-laden action flick is no longer in fashion: his last three have gone straight to video.
He wasn’t always the muscleman, of course. The boy who was born Jean-Claude Camille François Van Varenberg in 1960, in the Brussels commune of Berchem Sainte-Agathe, was, by all accounts, shy and sensitive. He liked to read comic books, and would admire the physique of superheroes like the Silver Surfer. When he was 12, his father Eugène, a florist, took him along to the nearest karate school. ‘He was weak, short and wore glasses,’ says Claude Goetz, a burly man in his sixties who still runs the school, ‘But he was keen to learn.’
Goetz put the boy onto a rigorous regime that set him on his way to a pumped-up physique. But Van Damme wasn’t all brawn. While working in his parents’ shop, the teenager had noticed an attractive older woman who came by regularly. She ran a ballet school around the corner; he enrolled.
‘When he turned up at my school,’ says Monette Loza, ‘I had no idea he was the Van Varenbergs’ boy. But he was extraordinarily flexible—he could do the splits, which is quite rare in a man. I said to him “Finally! Someone comes into my school who I can really make into a dancer.” “I don’t want to be a dancer,” he replied. “I want to make lots of money.”’
Loza, who had had a brief career as a singer and performed on French TV with Jacques Brel, says he made the right decision. ‘Dancers’ careers don’t last long,’ she says. ‘Jean-Claude was clever—he was ambitious, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He would come to my class, do what he had to do, then head off to the gym.’
Van Damme kept up the ballet for five years and, according to Loza, could have become a professional. But his sights were set on America: after a karate contest in Florida and a visit to California’s famous Gold’s Gym, it was all he could think of. He left school and, with his father’s help, set up his own gym in Brussels, the California. He was 18. An admirer of Chuck Norris, who had parlayed his job as a martial arts instructor to the stars into a successful film career, Van Damme would tell people who visited his club that, one day, he too would be a movie star.
In 1979, he went to Hong Kong to try to break into the burgeoning martial arts film industry there. Nothing came of it, so in 1981 he moved to Los Angeles with $2,000 in cash. He worked as a chauffeur, carpet-layer, bouncer and pizza delivery boy, sleeping in a rented car and showering at the gym, before a chance meeting with Norris led to a bit part. In 1983, he adopted the surname Van Damme, after a family friend. Shortly after, he landed a small role as a gay martial arts expert in Monaco Forever but, five years after leaving Belgium, he still wasn’t much nearer his dream. He’d regularly call his parents and Goetz to update them on his progress. ‘If things didn’t work out,’ says Goetz, ‘we were going to open a chocolate shop in Brussels.’
But Neuhaus and Godiva were not to have a new rival. In 1986, Van Damme made a move that was to become Hollywood lore: spotting the influential action film producer Menahem Golan leaving a restaurant in Beverly Hills, he aimed a 360-degree kick at him, stopping just a hair’s breadth from his face. Golan gave Van Damme his card, and told him to come by his office the next day. The meeting led to Van Damme’s breakthrough: Bloodsport, in which he played real-life underground martial arts champion Frank Dux. The film was a surprise hit, making $35 million from a budget of just $1.5 million. A string of others followed, and Van Damme started earning serious money: a million dollars for Universal Soldier in 1992, $3 million for John Woo’s Hollywood debut Hard Target in ‘93, and over $6 million for the following year’s Streetfighter. The puny boy with the glasses had become one of the world’s biggest movie stars.
Yet even as his career was sky-rocketing, Van Damme was in trouble. His first marriage had ended in 1984: before long, he had two other failed marriages behind him, and had wed former model Darcy LaPier. In 1996, Van Damme admitted he was addicted to cocaine, and checked into the Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital in LA: he checked out after a week. LaPier filed for divorce, claiming that Van Damme had physically abused her under the influence of the drug, and had threatened to kidnap their son Nicholas and leave the US.
Van Damme’s annus horribilis was 1998: he was back on cocaine, was beaten up by one of his former stuntmen in a topless bar in New York, and was ordered by a Californian court to pay LaPier $27,000 a month in child support and an additional $85,000 a month in alimony. In 1999, he remarried his second wife, Gladys Portugues, a former bodybuilder. He was fined for drunk driving in 2000, but he seems to have settled down, shooting four movies in the next three years.
Which brings us to today. Van Damme has promised on the phone he will tell me things about his life he hasn’t told anyone before, so I’ve prepared a list of questions covering everything from his childhood to his struggle with drugs.
Things don’t go quite as planned. As I enter his suite, his assistant, an attractive American in her early thirties, is about to leave. He kisses her goodbye on the lips, then turns to me and grins.
‘Do you fuck around?’ he asks.
I shake my head.
‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘You shouldn’t. I fuck around.’ He laughs. ‘Not really, of course.’
‘Nice way to start the interview, Jean-Claude,’ says the assistant.
Van Damme smiles boyishly, and asks her to order some coffees for us on her way past reception. ‘And cookies.’ He points at me. ‘This guy’s too skinny.’
We head to the balcony. Sporting a crew-cut and tan, he looks in good shape, and younger than 42. He’s wearing a grey sweatshirt, dirty white trainers, and a pair of stonewashed jeans with the number 7 down one leg—part of his own ‘Dammage 7’ collection, launched in 2001.
Then he lights a cigarette and tells me that he doesn’t want to discuss ‘anything physically real’.
It’s hard to describe what happens next. Van Damme loves to talk, but it’s stream-of-consciousness stuff, and his English is often hard to follow. For much of the time, it feels as if I’m not there.
‘You know, I have to be very aware of what I say to you,’ he begins, with an ironic smile. His emphasis is deliberate: Parlez-vous le Jean-Claude?, a book of carefully chosen extracts from 20 years of interviews with him, is a runaway best-seller in France. The word that crops up most in it is ‘aware’, and it has made him an object of ridicule in the French-speaking world.
‘A guy like me, when I say something to people, I’ve got nothing to gain,’ he says. ‘I get into trouble, because I speak too fast and I don’t explain myself too well. But now I became better. It took me a long time because, you know, when you leave school at sixteen and you have your own way of talking…’ He tails off.
Van Damme claims that the media has misrepresented him. ‘They cut me, left and right,’ he says. ‘Like butchers. Why butchers? Because butchers are killers.’
I can see his point: his sentences sometimes go on for 10 minutes, making him hard to quote. As he winds up a long monologue on the ‘speed of thought’, I decide to risk a question on the physically real. ‘I spoke to your former ballet teacher…’ I begin.
‘The problem is—I’m gonna cut you—all those people I met in my life, they’re past. The present is all that counts. Those people you spoke to met me when I was 15. But let’s say something happened to me. Something wonderful. And since then, the man changed, okay? Wow. But he was educated that way. But he remembers stuff. And, in fact, even when he wants to remember something now it doesn’t come until it’s supposed to come.’ He slaps his head. ‘Now I knew it.’
So you’ve changed, I say.
‘Completely. And I wrote a script.’
The script is called either The Choice or The Tower, and it’s Van Damme’s obsession. ‘It’s what keeps me alive,’ he says. It’s about a professional motorcyclist who has a crash and slips into a coma, where he discovers himself inside a seven-level tower he has to move his way up. Van Damme has been working on the project for six years, and plans to direct and star in it. After a long, abstract explanation of the plot, he gives me a broad grin. ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘Profound. You see, if you want to do an interview with me, you have to spend three, four days. Because then you start to know a person. After this meeting, we can go on the street and talk normal. Listen, sometimes I smoke, I train every day, I go three hours to the gym. My favourite ice cream is vanilla. I can say that—it’s more nice for the people, because it’s more about the physical, here. But I’ll prove it to you. I’m on paper here. I believe in my stuff.’
He returns to the plot of his script, and there are some interesting thoughts beneath the twisted grammar and leaps of logic. I’m especially struck by his idea that any moment from our past can revisit us to guide our actions. I tell him it reminds me of the Russian-Armenian mystic Gurdjieff’s explanation of vivid childhood memories as ‘moments of consciousness’. Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em… Van Damme is fascinated by this. Gurdjieff was right, he says: our past is the key to our evolution.
‘Look, I’m still on a huge process of learning. Life. Myself. Remembering. You. Love. Bigger. Faster. Smarter. But everything what you’re doing in life, what I do in life, is also attached to what we call our past life. I was born skinny, and I was laughed at in school, you know—I was with glasses and I didn’t speak well. I was having a lithp. Big lithp—I was talking like that.’ We laugh at his joke.
‘Plus I lost my few first girlfriends. I was so much in love with them, only with a kiss. And you know, at that time, sex was not existing—strong Catholic family. So I was waiting, waiting, afraid to do, and nothing happened. And I was hurt, big time. So karate came to my life. And I became very good. Very strong. And guess what? Ladies came at me! More than enough. Too much! Then I go to America, with this package called muscles,’—he hunches his back in the classic body-builder position—‘Carapace, the turtle, you know? It’s my cover. And I show that to people, and with that I become a star. But now I’ve got to say ‘Wait a second—what else can I do in my life? I show and show and show, but it’s still on the low shakra, on the primal way.’’
He started having these thoughts while using cocaine. Instead of using the drug to party, he sat at home in his room, contemplating suicide. He quit coke, he says, because he realised that he hadn’t yet created anything. ‘You just created an illusion,’ he says, recounting his dialogue with himself. ‘What you think is real, it’s not real. You have to create inside you, JC. You have to go inside and ask the question to yourself ‘What do you want in life?’ You cannot talk to yourself, JC. You’re scared to think you’ve got something powerful inside you who can tell you what to do, who knows every answer in the universe? But you have to believe in the question, knowing the answer is already in your head. So I take a different stage to create a movie where I’m gonna try to do something very special.’
Understandably, he’s worried how his fans might react. ‘My people are from the street,’ he says. ‘Those people made me. So if they hear me talking about the universe, this and that, they think ‘This guy is fucked up.’’ This is why, he says, the film will start from the mundane and gradually move to the mystical. ‘I will take them through different levels. Then if they don’t like it, they can walk back. But they cannot refuse me, Jean-Claude Van Damme. Those are my people and I am your people, guys! I’m still the guy if I see a person crossing the street or a young guy getting hit for his lunch box at school who’s skinny like I was, I will go and fight the group and say ‘Guys, give back the food!’ Because I’m still a hero. A real hero. I mean, somebody gets attacked—I’ll protect. I’ll do my best. I’m for real, okay? I’m not made of cable.’
I tell him that perhaps a spiritual action movie is just what his fans want. Look at The Matrix. He doesn’t like the comparison.
‘The background of The Tower will not be sci-fi,’ he says. ‘It will be made of wood, stone, trees, water: elements. Earth elements. And lots of wisdom. We’ll have a gnome in the tower. An old person. A gnome.’
I notice he says ‘we’ a lot. At one point, he proclaims ‘The most important people are the gurus’, and I ask him if he has one. ‘Of course. My guru is someone very close to me, someone I speak to every day. But if I say that in your newspaper they’re going to think we’re having sex or something.’
I assure him I can avoid that insinuation. The good thing about having a guru, he continues, is that he has someone who can listen to him ‘from the heart’—and who can correct him. ‘I make notes like this,’ he says, showing me a pad of paper. ‘I have something to add to them now, in fact. Today, because of you, I just saw something.’ He’s talking about Gurdjieff. ‘This guy doesn’t know shit about the script, but he remembers his destiny,’ he says, pointing at me. ‘He told me the answer without knowing it! How did you give me the answer?’ I have no idea, I say, already imagining my name on the film’s opening credits. ‘We all have a path. The path is perfection. We’re all here to search for perfection, to be able to cry without tears. Being able to compress your emotion to one point.’
Monette Loza told me that she found you very self-contained, even as a teenager.
‘What does that mean, “self-contained”?’
I tell him, and he starts writing down my definition. ‘A very beautiful word,’ he says. He tells me he was in love with Loza. ‘I was 16, 17, and she was 40. But to be as in shape as an 18-year-old at her age, it’s very sexy. Also, when a woman is that age, you can talk with them. You can have dinner for two or three hours before love-making. And talk about life. And the wine.’
As we’re clearly now in physically real territory, I ask him about his plans. He says he’s yet to be approached by English National Ballet, and that he’s now too old for ballet, anyway. Hell, which has also been titled The Shu and The Savage at various stages, and The Order, which features Charlton Heston as his father and was shot in Israel, have both been released on video and DVD, but his agent has told me that The Monk, in which Van Damme—rather implausibly, I’d thought prior to meeting him—plays a Shaolin monk, may not see any kind of release. Van Damme admits he’s done ‘a few shitty movies’—he tears into last year’s Derailed, in which he played a secret agent battling terrorists on a train—but says he’s excited about upcoming projects: After Death, a revenge thriller directed by Ringo Lam (Maximum Risk, Replicant), and Lone Wolf, ‘a cool story—very commercial’, which he won’t discuss more for legal reasons. After that, it’s The Tower/The Choice. What about the remake of The Great Escape he’s mentioned in several interviews? His plans to make a Jacques Brel biopic? Or the long-rumoured sequel to Streetfighter, which both Holly Vallance and Dolph Lundgren have been connected to in recent weeks? His eyes harden: ‘The plan is what I just told you.’
Eventually, his publicist appears by the table, and I realise we’ve been talking for nearly two hours. Van Damme looks like he could carry on for a few more, but I feel drained. He wishes me luck with fatherhood, which brings me back to earth. As we shake hands, I start worrying about how I’ll break the news to my wife: we’re going to have more than one child.
First published in The Bulletin, May 2003
The Healing Years
It’s Wednesday afternoon: schoolchildren out for the holidays careen along the promenade in cuisse-tax buggies, while pensioners buffeted by the biting North Sea wind struggle to keep hold of tubs of shellfish bought from seafront stands. Gulls circle overhead, and there is an inescapable fishy smell in the air...
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can read on this website or download here.
Twenty years ago, a Belgian coastal resort became the unlikely residency of one of the world’s greatest soul singers. Jeremy Duns went searching for the spirit of Marvin Gaye
It’s Wednesday afternoon: schoolchildren out for the holidays careen along the promenade in cuisse-tax buggies, while pensioners buffeted by the biting North Sea wind struggle to keep hold of tubs of shellfish bought from seafront stands. Gulls circle overhead, and there is an inescapable fishy smell in the air.
Ostend is not a sexy town. And yet it is in this faded coastal resort that one of the 20th century’s sexiest songs was written—a song that sold over a million copies and won a Grammy on its release in 1982, and that has since been the soundtrack to countless midnight trysts the world over. Its plaintive evocation of longing and lust has entered the pantheon of great soul classics. The song is, of course, Sexual Healing by Marvin Gaye.
The singer’s life reads like a Hollywood script: the rapid rise to fame in the 1960s, when he had a string of R&B hits for Motown, including the blistering I Heard It Through The Grapevine; the broken marriages, drug abuse and financial problems in the 1970s; the self-imposed exile in Europe; the comeback; the murder.
In 1980, Gaye was living in London, partly to escape the US tax authorities. Partying with aristocrats and overdoing the cocaine, Gaye’s life was spiralling out of control until, in September that year, music and boxing promoter Freddy Cousaert stepped onto the scene.
Cousaert, a flamboyant Fleming in his early forties (like Gaye), was best-known for having arranged a Belgian tour for the young Cassius Clay. A huge fan of R&B since the mid-Sixties, he had once owned a nightclub in his native Ostend.
In London to talent-scout, Cousaert heard that Gaye was in town, and down on his luck. He immediately sought out the singer and the two became friends. Then, after Gaye raved to Cousaert about a recent trip to Brighton to escape the pressures of London, the Belgian invited him, and his 24-year-old Dutch girlfriend Eugenie Vis and five-year-old son Bubby to Ostend. Gaye agreed, and on February 15, 1981, the trio boarded a Sealink ferry.
Gaye’s 18-month sojourn in Belgium was to be a pivotal period in his life. Ostend’s windswept promenade would become the backdrop to a multi-million-dollar record deal, set in train the disintegration of three relationships and trigger an internal battle. The trip would rekindle Gaye’s career, but would also lead him toward madness and a violent death.
On his arrival in Ostend, Cousaert loaned Gaye $30,000 and set him up in a fifth-floor apartment (77 King Albert Promenade) with a sea-view. Cousaert owned a small hostel nearby, which he ran with his wife Lilliane. Gaye was a frequent visitor, soon becoming integrated into the Cousaert family.
Cousaert planned to relaunch Gaye’s career from Ostend; Gaye, imagining himself as a general regrouping, also viewed the trip as an opportunity to cool his heels after the chaos of the preceding months.
The first task was to divorce Gaye from Motown. After 20 years with the label and a bitter dispute over previous album In Our Lifetime, Gaye wanted out. His lawyer Curtis Shaw contacted Larkin Arnold, who had been responsible for luring Michael Jackson from Motown to CBS. Arnold headed for Ostend, where he brokered a deal: CBS paid off Motown to the tune of $1.5 million, and agreed to give Gaye $600,000 per album. Gaye immediately turned his attention to producing new material for CBS, and regaining a normal life.
*
Gaye was no recluse in Ostend. He strutted down the promenade, made friends and gave interviews. But perhaps the most revealing document of the time is a half-hour film shot by Belgian director Richard Olivier, Transit Ostende.
I met Olivier in his spacious flat in Brussels. An elegant man with carefully-coiffed grey hair and an ever-present cigar, he was keen to talk about his collaboration with Gaye. ‘This is a story that has been with me for twenty years,’ he told me. ‘And it isn’t finished yet.’
Olivier had read about Gaye’s arrival in Ostend in Tele-Moustique magazine. ‘It was just three lines, but I knew it was big news. It was like Frank Sinatra turning up in Chaumont-Gistoux.’ He immediately called a friend at the magazine and asked for Gaye’s contact details.
With the agreement of Cousaert and Gaye for the project, Olivier put up most of the cash and the film was shot in a matter of days. The spontaneity paid off: Olivier’s film contains some of the most candid footage of the singer in existence. In one scene, Gaye chats and plays darts—badly—with some regulars in an Irish pub. ‘He had nothing to lose, but he knew how to present himself,’ says Olivier. ‘Every take was good. Freddy hated the pub scene, though, because he thought it belittled Marvin. But Marvin loved that scene.’
The film opens with Gaye’s mellow voice-over, drawn from a long interview Olivier recorded in the singer’s flat: ‘My father was a minister...’ he says, going on to talk about how happy he was growing up. The unedited version reveals a more confused perspective: when asked what he remembers of his childhood, Gaye’s first response is: ‘Being alone.’
Gaye is also shown rehearsing with his band in the basement of Ostend casino—Cousaert had set up a date there for July, 1981—in which the singer lies back on a bench and languidly ad-libs through I Want You. Another scene shows him walking into a church in Middelkerke in his Adidas running gear and breaking into an extraordinary a cappella rendition of The Lord’s Prayer. ‘That was a strange day,’ says Olivier. ‘The moment Marvin finished singing, this guy came running into the church to tell us that the Pope had been shot.’
Gaye liked Olivier’s film: a note thanking the director for ‘making me imortal [sic]’ is conspicuously displayed in his flat. The film has never been released, due to the prohibitive cost of paying for song rights, but it is often shown on TV—channels only pay a one-off fee for the broadcast rights. Olivier has recently been negotiating to release a record of Gaye singing The Lord’s Prayer, which is not covered by copyright. He plans for Gaye’s voice to be accompanied by ‘other famous names’. Olivier also showed me a book he has taken 15 years to complete, a 60-page semi-fictionalised account of Gaye and Cousaert’s relationship, with illustrations by Louis Joos.
‘This is a story that has been with me for twenty years. And it isn’t finished yet’
As Olivier’s film shows, Gaye liked hanging out with the locals. His keyboard player, Odell Brown, had come to Ostend to work on some new material, and was staying with the Cousaerts. After befriending a local couple Donald and Maggie Pylyser, Brown ended up staying with them for three months. He introduced them to Gaye, and they became great friends. ‘We didn’t really know who he was,’ Donald Pylyser says today when I visit the couple’s apartment. ‘I was only twenty. I was vaguely aware of his Motown stuff, but in those days it was hard to find his records in Belgium.’
The couple were charmed by the singer. ‘He was very charismatic and good-humoured,’ says Maggie. ‘We knew nothing about his problems. He rarely talked about his past.’ Despite the age difference, the Pylysers seem to have had an easy relationship with the singer. ‘Marvin was young at heart,’ Maggie says.
The couple remember visiting Gaye in his flat and watching him tinkering around on a synthesizer. ‘He asked for requests,’ says Donald. ‘So I said the only song of his I knew—I Heard It Through The Grapevine.’ Slightly taken aback, Gaye struggled to remember the opening chords.
Donald played guitar with various local bands. Soon, Gaye, Pylyser and Brown were regularly jamming. ‘Marvin was a great improviser,' says Donald. ‘It was just magic.’ He reels off a list of six or seven songs he recorded with Gaye and Brown on a Portastudio. I ask if he has by any chance kept any of them, and after some rummaging he finds a tape and puts it on the stereo. A few chords on a keyboard ring out, and then that unmistakable voice appears.
In the demo, titled Rubato, Gaye takes Pylyser's sheet music as a prompt for his lyric, working the denotations into a metaphor in which he suggests to his lover that they take things fortissimo or pianissimo. On the last track on the tape, Gaye embarks on an extended romantic litany, crooning:
‘It’s all right to make love tonight
It is good to love you like I should
It is correct
To get your feet soaking wet...’
Is it a classic Marvin Gaye song? No. But it‘s exhilarating and somewhat eerie to hear that pure voice echoing through the apartment. Gaye’s tone is as astonishing as it ever was, as is his seemingly effortless gift for making one believe anything he sings. This was a man, after all, who on Sexual Healing would bring a yearning urgency to lines like ‘I’m hot just like an oven/I need some lovin’.’
When the music wouldn’t come, Gaye wound down by watching television, mostly the BBC on cable, as he spoke no Dutch and hardly any French. He also loved to cook—the Pylysers fondly remember his lamb chops and moussaka. Vis says that, after the maelstrom of life in London, they both savoured the domesticity. ‘It was great,’ she says. ‘Marvin could finally breathe fresh air and spend time with his son.’ Bubby attended a local school, and Vis also taught him at home, reading him Mr Men books with Gaye.
'Marvin was hiding out,’ says David Ritz. ‘He wanted to kick the drugs and get clean.’ Ritz was a 38-year-old journalist who had worked for Rolling Stone. He had been approached by Gaye after the singer saw Ray Charles’ autobiography, which Ritz had co-written. The two had talked extensively in Los Angeles a few years previously, but had fallen out of touch. Ritz decided to go over to Belgium ‘to see what was going on’.
He arrived in Ostend in March 1982. When he visited Gaye at his apartment, he was shocked. ‘Marvin had huge bags under his eyes. He had aged ten or fifteen years since I had last seen him. He looked like a man who had been through hell and back.’ Seeing that Ritz was disturbed, Gaye leaned over and whispered in his ear: ‘Don’t worry—the worst is over.’
*
On the surface, that seemed to be true. Gaye spent his mornings running on the beach, visited local churches, and grew to love the work of Ostend’s most famous son, Belgo-British painter James Ensor. ‘He used to hang out at the (Ensor) museum a lot,’ says Ritz. ‘The irony and the sexual ambiguity appealed to him.’ Gaye was particularly fond of Ensor’s Self-Portrait in a Flowered Hat—like his father, Gaye had a predilection for cross-dressing.
According to Ritz, the singer had a love-hate relationship with Ostend. ‘Marvin liked being a big fish in a little pond, and he loved the calmness. He liked the open expanse of sea, which seemed to symbolise hope at a time when his world had been very closed in and claustrophobic. But, at the same time, he felt restricted by the bourgeois, provincial feel of the place: he complained that everybody walked their dog at five o’clock.’ Not surprisingly, Gaye could hardly go incognito in the city. ‘He once told me that he felt like a raisin in a bowl of milk,’ says Ritz.
Gaye wasn’t out of trouble yet. Although his drug use was more sporadic, he never managed to kick his habit entirely. A visit by his ex-wife Janis Hunter in the summer of 1981 also upset his new rhythm. ‘Marvin was still holding a torch for Jan,’ says Ritz. ‘He was hoping for a reunion.’ When her visit ended in yet more recriminations, Gaye sunk into depression. His relationship with Eugenie Vis had become increasingly strained, and she left to study in Amsterdam, returning to Ostend at weekends. ‘I didn’t want to get between Marvin and Jan,’ she says, ‘but I was hooked on him.’
Meanwhile, Ritz was getting the scoop of his life. The proud Gaye had started to resent having to live off Cousaert. Now, he had a new record deal, and a new listener. He talked to Ritz extensively.
‘It was a biographer’s dream,’ says Ritz. ‘To have your living subject isolated in this little town with nothing much to do—it was a gift.’ Ritz was enamoured of his subject: ‘Marvin was an enormously charismatic individual,’ he says. ‘Everybody loved him. He was sweet, good-looking, smart, spiritual. You just wanted to be with him all the time.’ Ritz accompanied Gaye on trips to Bruges and Brussels, and the two would discuss art and poetry. ‘We would talk until two am about Dante, Jackson Pollock, John Lennon, John Keats.’
Like Keats, Gaye was himself ‘half in love with easeful death’. His father’s sect, which mixed Pentecostal rigour with Old Testament fury, had given him a unique perspective on the subject, and he had witnessed violence at home throughout his childhood. On his 1973 album Let’s Get It On, he sang: ‘If I should die tonight...’
In the original tapes for Olivier’s film, Gaye mentions his desire to come back to Ostend later on, to ‘revisit the scene of the crime’. ‘Of course,’ he adds, ‘there hasn’t been a crime yet.’
Gaye was torn over his religious beliefs and his sexual appetites; he felt under pressure to live up to his self-created lover-man image, but was ashamed of his lifestyle. He also suffered from premature ejaculation. To combat his loneliness, Gaye immersed himself in hard-core pornography and visited prostitutes. A sequence in Transit Ostende has him cruising the city’s red-light district, while his voice-over proclaims: ‘I love women, but I hate womenkind.’
One day, in Gaye’s apartment, Ritz found some misogynistic cartoons in a book of illustrations by Georges Pichard. In a moment that would change both men’s lives, he suggested to Gaye that he needed ‘sexual healing’.
Gaye had been trying for months to fit lyrics to one of Odell Brown’s rhythm tracks—a catchy, reggae-tinged number—with little success. Taken with Ritz’s phrase, he asked the journalist to write words to go with the song. Ritz’s lyrics—the first he had ever written—reflected Gaye’s tortured soul at the time, referring to waves building and threatening to capsize the singer. Ritz says that Gaye never fully understood the lyrics’ positive message, although his improvisation toward the end of the recording, when he sings ‘Please don’t procrastinate/ If you do, I’ll have to masturbate,’ shows at least partial recognition of his own problems.
*
Ritz says that he never knew if Gaye would use his words. ‘I thought that at least I could tell my grandchildren that I had once given lyrics to Marvin Gaye.’
Gaye set about fitting the new lyrics to the track, trying many different approaches. ‘It looks like we’re going to put the ‘Get up’s at the beginning,’ he says at one point on the tapes the Pylysers have kept of him working through the song by himself.
Sexual Healing would become Gaye’s biggest hit, but would signal the end of his friendship with Ritz. When the song was released with Gaye and Brown listed as the writers and Ritz merely thanked in the linernotes for the title, the journalist sued for a lyric credit, eventually winning the case after the singer’s death.
Cousaert also fell out with Gaye. Dreams of being the man who would resuscitate his idol’s career were dashed when he was sidelined by the music moguls. When Gaye’s old mentor Harvey Fuqua arrived at the studios in Ohain, outside Brussels, where Gaye was recording the new album, the writing was on the wall.
Cousaert’s problems were compounded by a mix-up over a Swiss bank account that left Gaye thinking his friend was trying to rip him off. And Gaye and Brown were both forced to leave Belgium a couple of times during their stay, because neither was registered there. At one point, Interpol turned up at Cousaert’s home looking for Gaye in connection with a drug shooting in Denmark. Belgium was becoming a hassle.
Then, Gaye heard that his mother was due to go into hospital for a kidney operation. The singer, who had a classic Oedipal complex, rushed back to the States. Freddy Cousaert was not in Ostend when he left, but Gaye told Lilliane Cousaert that he would return in a couple of weeks. He probably meant it—he and Eugenie Vis had just bought a 21-room mansion in Moere, outside Ostend, which had been a Nazi headquarters during the Second World War. ‘But as soon as he left Belgium,’ says Ritz, ‘that was it.’
In a brief detour to Rotterdam, Gaye fell out with Vis. She returned to the house in Moere, cleared out all the new furnishings, and left for Amsterdam. She never saw the singer again. Gaye arrived in the US in the autumn of 1982, his career reborn, but his life falling apart.
He toured to support Sexual Healing and its accompanying album Midnight Love, but soon slipped into his old ways: backstage, he had a preacher in one room and a stash of drugs in another. Eventually, he moved in with his parents, and retreated into paranoia. On April 1, 1984, after a petty argument over a lost insurance form, Gaye’s father shot him twice in the chest at close range with the .38 calibre handgun his son had given him for protection. The singer would have celebrated his 45th birthday the following day.
Eugenie Vis is now a clothes designer in Amsterdam.
Freddy Cousaert went on to promote acts like Isaac Hayes and Rufus Thomas. He died in a car crash in Bruges in August 1998.
Donald and Maggie Pylyser still live in Ostend. Donald ‘does lots of different things’, including teaching music.
Richard Olivier continues to make films, and is currently trying to find a publisher for his book.
Odell Brown worked with Curtis Mayfield and Muddy Waters, among others, but suffered from depression and panic disorder in the 1980s and 1990s, and was homeless for a while. The Veteran’s Association helped him get back on his feet—he had been in the army in the early 1960s. He is now married and lives in Richfield, Minnsesota.
David Ritz’s conversations with Marvin Gaye in Ostend became a central part of his book Divided Soul, widely recognised as the definitive biography of the singer. Ritz also co-wrote the autobiographies of Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin, and has written lyrics for Smokey Robinson and the Isley Brothers. ‘Ostend was a particularly important time in Marvin’s life,’ Ritz says, ‘It was where he should have got it together.’
Richard Oliver agrees. ‘You can’t ignore Marvin Gaye’s time here,’ he says. ‘It would be like a history of Napoleon without Elba.’
First published in MOJO, February 2002
Extraordinary Gentleman
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
The Palais des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi is a fitting place for an exhibition on Alan Moore. Belgium, after all, is the home of the comic strip, with Tintin, Lucky Luke and The Smurfs all originating there. And, like Moore’s hometown of Northampton, Charleroi is a former industrial hub not far from the capital. Alan Moore: Les Dessins du Magicien is part of the city’s ongoing campaign to shed its image as a cheap but uncomfortable coach journey from Brussels, and reinvent itself as an art-lovers’ destination. Put together by Paul Gravett, an internationally renowned expert on comic-book art (he also curated last year’s Comica festival at the ICA), the exhibition features a mass of original, rare or never-seen-before art created for Alan Moore works over the last 25 years, as well as previewing The Mindscape of Alan Moore, an 80-minute documentary on the writer.
‘It’s an enormous honour,’ Moore says of the show. ‘Even if it makes me feel like I’m almost dead.’ Fans from around the globe will flock to the exhibition, but Moore admits that he probably won’t get to it himself unless it transfers to London (as Gravett hopes). ‘I don’t even have a passport,’ he says, and points out that in today’s political climate anyone looking like him (ie, Old Testament prophet/Motörhead roadie) probably wouldn’t even be allowed on the plane.
Moore is famously eccentric, and one can’t help feeling that he relishes the reputation. On turning 50 last year, he announced that he was retiring from mainstream comics to devote himself to magic. He converted to gnosticism in the mid-1990s, and is fond of stating that he worships the Roman snake-god Glycon. More recently, he claimed to have had information that the world will end between 2012 and 2017. He has also written and starred in his own magick extravaganzas, one-off mixed-media stage performances such as Birth Caul (Shamanism of Childhood) of 1995, a spoken-word piece dealing with the death of his mother. In 1999, he took part in Ananke, a London event billed as a ‘symposium of real magick and global ritualism’—Moore took his audience on a wild tour of the capital’s secret past—themes he would also touch on in From Hell. More recently, in his extravagantly illustrated series Promethea, he attempted to provide an overarching diagram of occult lore.
The Charleroi retrospective has fun with Moore’s image, presenting the stands in a cabbalistic pattern, and placing a single lit candle on one of his old computer keyboards (which he accurately remembers as being filled with ‘hair, dust, hashish and ash’). He’s delighted that the Charleroi show takes on a cabbalistic pattern. ‘That shows real care,’ he says, admiringly.
Regardless of the Aleister Crowley persona, Moore is a towering figure on the international comic-book scene. His best-known work, Watchmen, of 1987, was a 400-page deconstruction of the superhero myth that revitalised the comics industry and brought us the phrase ‘graphic novel’. For the first time, comic books were taken out of the clutches of adolescent boys and into the homes of adults.
Moore discovered comics pre-adolescence, but it wasn’t until he fell ill and his mother bought him a copy of The Fantastic Four by mistake (he’d wanted Blackhawk) that he became truly obsessed. During his teens, he devoured copies of Mad, Oz and the works of Robert Crumb. By his twenties, he was writing and drawing strips for Sounds and the NME (some of which are on show in Charleroi).
He soon realised that he was never going to be a great artist, and so devoted himself to writing scripts for 2000AD and, later, Warrior. There he wrote MarvelMan and V For Vendetta, among others, before being hired by DC, one of the two American giants in the field, which asked him to reinvent its moribund Swamp Thing series. Groundbreaking work on Superman (‘The Man Who Has Everything’ and ‘Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?’) and Batman (‘The Killing Joke’) followed, before the graphic novel Watchmen rocketed him into the stratosphere.
Moore eventually fell out with DC, became a hired hand, and finally set up his own company, rather ironically titled America’s Best Comics. His recent successes have included From Hell, his re-examination of Jack the Ripper, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which brought together characters from the works of Bram Stoker, Conan Doyle, H Rider Haggard, and others. Both of these have recently been filmed, the former with Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, the latter with Sean Connery and Peta Wilson. From Hell transformed Moore’s layered text into Grand Guignol, while LXG (as it was marketed) added explosions and a new character, Tom Sawyer, to gratify American audiences. Moore still hasn’t seen either film, but has clearly heard enough about them. His initial attitude towards adaptations was neutral: he wouldn’t take the credit or the blame. Now he’s changed his mind.
‘I thought that by not getting involved, I could keep a distance between the books and the films,’ he says. He now realises that this was naive, as most film-goers would presume any film to be reasonably faithful to his work. Having ‘learnt his lesson’, he has told his agents to reject any proposals to film his work, and in the case of work he no longer owns, to insist that his name be taken off any adaptation and his share of the money be divided among the artists.
Moore may have had enough of Hollywood, but it hasn’t had its fill of him. Constantine, based on a character he created for Swamp Thing, is due out before the end of the year, with a woefully miscast Keanu Reeves in the title role. Moore didn’t grant his permission for the adaptation: he doesn’t own the rights to the character, so he had no say either way. Neither does he have any control over Watchmen, which is due to start shooting in Prague this year, from a script by David X-Men Hayter. (A screenplay that the Wachowski Brothers wrote for V For Vendetta around the time they were writing the first Matrix film may be a few years off, however: its hero is a terrorist.)
With his name removed from these and any other projects Hollywood might like to develop, Moore relishes being able to speak his mind. ‘I won’t have to do what most writers do, which is either keep quiet about it or try to sound enthusiastic.’ He certainly doesn’t mince his words regarding the casting of Depp, or the ethos of Hollywood as a whole, which he classifies as being a giant firework show. ‘If I write a crappy comic book, it doesn’t cost the budget of an emergent Third World nation. When you’ve got these kinds of sums involved in creating another two hours of entertainment for Western teenagers, I feel it crosses the line from being merely distasteful to being wrong.’ His decision seems to have been prompted in part by repeated exposure to critics deriding films for their ‘comic-book plots’. ‘To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate—unlike most films.’
A case in point is Lost Girls, Moore’s 240-page graphic novel illustrated by his partner Melinda Gebbie, to be published in December. Having reinvented the fantasy, science fiction, crime, superhero and other genres, in Lost Girls Moore turns his attention to pornography. ‘All of us have got some kinds of feelings and thoughts about sex, but the only genre connected to it is this grubby, shameful one,’ he says. ‘That’s a real pity. Sex is glorious, it’s how we all got here, and it’s most people’s favourite activity—I felt it deserved something a bit more elevated than Anal Grannies.
‘I saw no reason why you couldn’t create a work of pornography that adhered to all the same standards as the best art or literature. The big difference between art and pornography is that art, at its best, makes you feel less alone. You see a painting or read a piece of writing that expresses a thought that you had but didn’t express, and you suddenly feel less alone. Pornography, on the other hand, tends to engender feelings of self-disgust, isolation and wretchedness. I wanted to change that.’
In the event, Lost Girls has been 15 years in the making. It sees The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy, Peter Pan’s Wendy and Lewis Carroll’s Alice meeting in a hotel room in Europe in 1913 and discovering their sexuality. The fun Moore had with out-of-copyright characters eventually led to him thinking up The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, perhaps his most inspired idea, and one to which he says he hopes to return. In the meantime, he is frantically working to finish up his various series for America’s Best Comics (notably Promethea and Tom Strong).
And after that? He may write another novel, get back into music (he has been in two bands, The Sinister Ducks and The Emperors of Ice Cream) or even take up his ‘wretched drawing’ again. Alan Moore may have retired from mainstream comics, but we certainly haven’t heard the last of him.
Moore magic: Highlights of Alan Moore’s career
V FOR VENDETTA
Begun in 1982 but not completed until 1988, this is a bleak futuristic thriller about Britain under a fascist dictatorship, featuring a vigilante in a Guy Fawkes mask stalking the streets. David Lloyd’s wonderful chiaroscuro artwork is one of the high points at Charleroi, with 80 original panels on display, as well as several of Moore’s typewritten scripts. Moore marks this as a turning-point in his career, and credits Lloyd for encouraging him to write the script without sound effects or thought balloons.
FROM HELL
More than a decade in the making, Moore’s masterful investigation of the Jack the Ripper story pulls no punches. ‘I looked at several other famous murders, but Jack had everything: London, royalty, Freemasonry...’ Twenty-four panels from Dance of the Gull-Catchers are on show in Charleroi.
WATCHMEN
Beautifully complemented by David Gibbons’s artwork, this is arguably Moore’s best work: a dense, many-layered deconstruction of the superhero myth, set in an alternate Cold War. Watchmen was partly responsible for a renaissance in comic strips. Terry Gilliam was interested in adapting it into a film, or possibly a mini-series; it now looks as though David Hayter has taken on the challenge.
BIG NUMBERS
Set in Northampton and influenced by chaos theory, this unfinished work was even more troubled than Moore’s other grand schemes—the artists Bill Sienkiewicz and Al Columbia both dropped out of it. A panel from the unpublished third issue, and some of Moore’s script, is on show in Charleroi.
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN
Having used out-of-copyright characters in Lost Girls, Moore moved on to a more elaborate game. ‘Many superheroes have their origins in the fantasy and adventure fiction of the late 19th century, and I saw the potential of that.’ Queen Victoria asks the head of British intelligence, Mycroft Holmes, to gather the likes of Allan Quartermain, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the Invisible Man to combat a new threat to Britain. Moore has completed two volumes so far, with the illustrator Kevin O’Neill, and says he would like to do more.
Published in The Independent, March 2004
Dry Dry Dry
Some songs invade your subconscious and refuse to budge. You find yourself humming them on the way to work without even realising it. In 1994, the Scottish band Wet Wet Wet’s cover of the Troggs’ hit Love Is All Around, recorded for the soundtrack of Four Weddings and a Funeral, was such a tune…
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Some songs invade your subconscious and refuse to budge. You find yourself humming them on the way to work without even realising it. In 1994, the Scottish band Wet Wet Wet’s cover of the Troggs’ hit Love Is All Around, recorded for the soundtrack of Four Weddings and a Funeral, was such a tune. But after going to number one in 15 countries and staying at the top slot in Britain for an astonishing 15 weeks, the song finally—and, for some, thankfully—faded from view.
Two albums later, the group collapsed. After selling 15 million albums (must be their lucky number) and notching up 25 UK top 40 singles, singer Marti Pellow announced that he was leaving. A heavy drinker for years, Pellow had become increasingly depressed and isolated. In 1997, he had turned to the darkest substance he could think of: heroin. He was hooked in a week. After collapsing in a hotel room in London in 1999, he sought treatment for his addiction, and today he is off drink and drugs and relaunching his career.
I met him in a hotel in downtown Brussels last week. Sporting t-shirt, jeans and a tan, he looked relaxed and contented. He had reason to be: Close To You, the first single from his solo album Smile, had just entered the British charts at number 9, and he was booked to perform on Top of the Pops two days later. Although the album is not a million miles away from the sound of his former group, there’s an undeniable maturity to the songs. I asked him if leaving Wet Wet Wet had loosened him up.
‘Well, I was in the band for nearly twenty years,’ he replies in his Glaswegian burr. ‘And I was part of the writing team. But the beauty of going solo was that there were a lot of people willing to work with me who could take me in different directions.’
Chief among these was Chris Difford, guitarist and singer with Squeeze, who had written a track on the Wets’ Picture This album. Now Pellow, a huge Squeeze fan, asked Difford to write lyrics for his new material. He lived in Difford’s house for about a year and a half, during which time they wrote over 150 songs together.
The singer also returned to Memphis, which he had visited early on in his career, and worked with legendary band-leader Willie Mitchell, who had produced work by his idol, Al Green. Going clean gave Pellow renewed energy. ‘I had been in a very dark place,’ he says. ‘But when I left behind the drinking and the drugging, I rediscovered my passion for music. I became a maniac for creating songs: the structures, the arrangements, even the producing.’ As he talks, his eyes light up like the proverbial schoolboy’s in a sweet-shop.
The resulting album is a mix of songs recorded in various studios, mostly mellow piano-based pop with the occasional Memphis flourish. I ask if he’s pleased with the way the first single has been received. ‘Enormously,’ he says. ‘I’m very proud of the whole album—if it was up to me, I’d be delivering it to the shops myself—so naturally I’m happy if others like it. But I understand that I don’t have a God-given right to the same kind of success I had with Wet Wet Wet.’
Nevertheless, Pellow hopes to be around for some time to come. ‘I just love singing,’ he says. ‘And as long as there’s a place in the market square for me, I’ll continue to do it.’ He reveals that an entire album of country songs is waiting to be released, and that he and Difford are working on a pet project entitled London Life, a musical set in contemporary London. ‘I’m thinking of asking [Trainspotting author] Irvine Welsh to do the story,’ he tells me. ‘Just throw it at him and see if he likes the idea.’
Pellow says he spent years worrying about Wet Wet Wet’s lack of credibility. ‘You know, a lot of people thought, ‘Oh, there’s that band with the pretty-boy singer—why the fuck is he always smiling?’ Perhaps it would have been better if I was the Elephant Man: “Such a beautiful voice, isn’t it a shame…?” He catches my expression and laughs. ‘But I’m over that now, honestly.’
We chat for a little more, and he tells me why he loves Tony Bennett, the Eagles, Destiny’s Child and Limp Bizkit. He’s modest, articulate and very charming. After the interview, I go home and give some songs from his album another listen. And now I can’t get the damn things out of my head.
First published in The Bulletin, June 2001
A Cry in the Dark
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
On October 12, 1915, a British nurse called Edith Cavell was shot by a German firing squad at the rifle range in Etterbeek. Her crime: helping Allied soldiers escape from behind enemy lines.
Her execution shocked the world and, along with the sinking by a German submarine of the ocean liner Lusitania, was instrumental in bringing the US into the war. Brussels has a street named after her, and a statue of her stands in London’s St Martin’s Place, just off Trafalgar Square.
Now, 88 years after her death, Edith Cavell’s secret service file has been declassified. For the first time, the dramatic story of the urgent message she tried to send her mother—and how its delivery was held up by bureaucracy until it was too late—has been revealed.
Born in 1865 in Swardeston, six kilometres south of Norwich, Cavell was the daughter of the local vicar. At 26, she travelled to Brussels to work as a governess. She stayed for five years, before returning home when her father fell ill. In caring for him, she found her vocation, and moved to London to study at the Hospital Nurses’ Training School. After qualifying, she worked at infirmaries in St Pancras and Shoreditch.
When a Belgian surgeon, Dr Antoine Depage, invited her to run a new nursing school in 1907, Cavell returned to Brussels. Depage and his wife had set up the Berkendael Institute in Rue Franz Merjay after becoming frustrated with local medical practices. The doctor had been inspired by the methods of British nurse Florence Nightingale, and wanted to introduce them to Belgium.
By 1911, Cavell was training nurses for three Belgian hospitals, 24 schools and 13 kindergartens. But while visiting her by then widowed mother in Swardeston in August 1914, she heard that Germany had invaded Belgium. ‘I am needed more than ever,’ she is reported to have said. She left for Brussels immediately.
Although she was an enemy national, the Germans allowed Cavell to continue as matron at the Institute, whose teaching school was converted into a Red Cross Hospital. But by the autumn of 1914, Cavell had a new, secret role—helping more than 200 Allied soldiers trapped behind the advancing German front escape through northern France to neutral Holland.
The Institute became the Brussels safe house for an underground lifeline that began at the château of the Prince and Princess de Croy in Mons. Cavell and others sheltered the soldiers, provided them with false papers, and escorted them to Place Rouppe to meet the guides who were to lead them to the border.
But the Germans were closing in on Cavell. On July 20, 1915, her friend the Count de Borchgrave visited her home in Rue de la Culture. He was greeted by a man with ‘a reddish face, fair, short military moustache and a very Cockney accent’. The man was a German plain clothes policeman, and he and his colleagues were searching the house for documents that might incriminate the nurse.
De Borchgrave got a message to Cavell about this, and she recognised his description of the man—she had met him before, when he had told her that he owned a florist’s shop in London’s Forest Hill, and that he could travel to England whenever he wanted. De Borchgrave was then approached by a ‘friend of Cavell’s’ who asked him to deliver a message to the nurse’s mother, warning her not to speak to anyone about her daughter’s activities in Brussels.
De Borchgrave’s wife lived in Reading, so he immediately sent her a letter, and included a description of the mysterious red-faced Cockney. ‘If [Mrs Cavell] talks to people about her daughter, it might get known to the Germans and there would be no telling what her fate might be,’ he wrote.
On July 28, the Countess de Borchgrave sent her husband’s letter on to the police at Reading, asking them to forward it to their Norfolk colleagues.
But the Reading chief constable instead sent the note to the Berkshire Constabulary, whose Major Mills was mystified by it. Mills sent a memo to his superintendent Goddard the same day: ‘Would you please ascertain from the Countess de Borchgrave, a Belgian subject residing at Crowthorne, further particulars in regard to the enclosed, which has been sent to me by the Chief Constable, Borough Police, Reading, as I do not quite understand what she means.’
Goddard interviewed the countess on August 1, and sent a report to his chief constable that essentially repeated the contents of the original message. On August 3, Mills sent the letter to Vernon Kell, the head of the War Office’s Directorate of Military Operations and Intelligence, otherwise known as M.0.(I).5, soon to be renamed MI5, Britain’s internal security service.
Kell didn’t send the letter to the Norwich constabulary until August 10. In the meantime, he instigated an investigation, with the help of Scotland Yard (MI5 having no powers of arrest at the time), into the ‘alleged German in a florist’s shop in Forest Hill’.
The investigation was a wash-out: there didn’t seem to be any florist matching the description known in that area of London, and MI5 concluded that the information had probably been false.
On August 19, Chief Constable Finch in Norwich finally wrote to Kell to report that Mrs Cavell had been handed the letter by Detective Sergeant Plumb, and that she had agreed to contact the police if anyone asked for her daughter’s address in Brussels. Of course, the ‘Cockney florist’ already knew where Edith Cavell lived—he had searched her house a month before. But, like Chinese whispers, the message had become diluted.
It’s not known if Mrs Cavell spoke to any strangers about her daughter while the letter from Brussels was being sent around England. But by the time she received the warning, it was already too late: her daughter had been arrested on August 5.
After being interrogated in Saint-Gilles prison, Cavell was tried in early October, along with Philippe Baucq, an architect who had also helped Allied soldiers escape. The trial lasted just two days. They were both sentenced to death and, despite vigorous protests from the Spanish and US ambassadors in Brussels, were shot at the National Firing Range in Etterbeek, at 02.00 on October 12.
The outcry over the execution of a female nurse was immense. In Britain, The Times printed letters about the noble Englishwoman spared no mercy by the monstrous Germans, and the Manchester Guardian headlined its account ‘Heroic Spirit Unshaken To The Last’. Public sentiment in the US was also aroused. The New York Herald wrote: ‘The official report received today will cause a wave of horror to sweep over the world at the possibility of a nation which will perpetrate such a terrible thing as a mere matter of military routine succeeding in this war and dominating Europe.’
The Allies successfully exploited Cavell’s death for propaganda: recruitment doubled in the two months following it. Posters of Cavell bearing the simple legend ‘Remember’ were particularly effective.
But MI5 took a more cold-blooded attitude, concluding that the Germans had been right to shoot her, and that Britain should alter its policy to do the same. On October 16, just four days after Cavell’s execution, MI5 opened a file entitled ‘Women Spies, Sentences on’. A Major Drake noted that a lenient sentence on a German spy the previous year meant that Britain was now threatened with ‘an influx of German women agents’. He added that Cavell’s case showed that the enemy had no such reluctance—and she hadn’t even been accused of espionage.
‘I agree,’ wrote Kell the next day. ‘It is high time we put aside all false sentimentality. A spy in war time wherever caught, and of whatever nationality, should be tried by Court Martial and dealt with expeditously... The employment of women as German spies in this country is on the increase, and one must consider the fact that the class of information they can acquire is very often of more value than the ordinary male spy can obtain, and just as effective.’ He concluded: ‘I am advocating no vindictive methods, but in a clear case of female espionage, we should not hesitate to apply the full penalty.’
Some of the other documents in Cavell’s file are equally gripping.
In December 1915, MI5 put out feelers about the Count de Borchgrave. It is unclear whether this was as a result of the public interest in the case or because they distrusted his story. It was established that he was about 55, had greying hair and wore a pince-nez, but nobody seemed to be able to vouch for or condemn him.
‘There are many counts of this name,’ one agent reported. ‘Some of them have turned out badly.’ Another added: ‘Agree there is so little to go upon. We shall probably hear no more about him.’
But they did eventually track him down—he was in Reading, with his wife—and seemed satisfied he had told the truth. He also revealed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the acquaintance of Edith Cavell who had asked him to deliver the message to her mother had, in fact, been the nurse herself.
The file then jumps forward to November 24, 1917, when Capitaine Béliard of the Grand Quartier Général des Armées du Nord et Nord-Est in Folkestone wrote to MI5. ‘Dear Colonel Kell, I am sending you herewith two photos, one showing the Tir National at Brussels used by the Germans as an execution ground, and the other showing the graves of several victims, notably that of Nurse Cavell.’
Béliard said he had been sent the photos from Brussels, and asked Kell to send them on to Mrs Cavell, ‘to whom they will doubtless prove a sad but precious souvenir’.
After making inquiries to see if Cavell’s mother was still living at the same address, Kell sent the photos on December 4. ‘I have been directed by the French Authorities to forward you the enclosed photographs which, they consider, you would like to possess in memory of your daughter,’ he wrote. He also included copies of the photographs.
Mrs Cavell replied to thank him, saying that she had sent the copies to her other two daughters, but would keep the originals for herself. ‘I very much appreciate your kind expressions of sympathy with me in my great loss.’
The file ends there. After the war, Edith Cavell’s body was exhumed and returned to Britain. A memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey, attended by the King. Cavell was then reburied in Norwich Cathedral.
The popular perception of Edith Cavell remains that of a young, patriotic nurse who had little idea of the danger she was facing. She certainly served her country courageously, although she is famously reported to have said minutes before her execution: ‘As I stand here in the presence of Eternity, I find that patriotism is not enough.’ She wasn’t that young, either: she died two months shy of her 50th birthday. And we now know that she was well aware what might happen to her if she were caught.
But perhaps even more fascinating is the glimpse into the workings of the British police force and fledgling secret service during World War One—and their bungling attempts to help a resistance fighter in peril.’
First published in The Bulletin, January 2003
Point of Honour
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Paul Anspach at the 1912 Summer Olympics (Wikimedia Commons)
Of all the stories of heroism in World War Two, one of the strangest is that of Paul Anspach, the fencing champion who defied the Third Reich on a matter of principle.
Anspach was born in Brussels on April 1, 1882, of good stock: his uncle had been mayor of the city and his grandfather governor of the national bank. Paul, who qualified as a lawyer, was a keen footballer and tennis player until he discovered the sport that would dominate his life: fencing. After becoming national champion, the 26-year-old travelled to London for the 1908 Olympics, where his team won bronze. But it was at the Stockholm Games in 1912 that he secured his place in fencing history, winning gold medals in both the individual and team epée events.
Some fencing nations had not taken part in the Stockholm Games, because they applied slightly differing rules. Anspach realised that for the sport to progress, it needed its own governing body: the fact that he was the best epée fencer in the world and spoke fluent French, German and English helped him make contacts across the continent, and in 1914 he became Secretary General of the newly-formed International Fencing Federation (FIE). Five years later, he and the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat set down the rules of the sport—their document remains the basis for all competitive fencing today.
Anspach competed in a further two Olympics, winning silvers in both, before deciding to concentrate on his law career and the administrative side of the sport. He rented a house in Brussels’ Rue de la Victoire and moved in with his second wife and their six children. In 1939, he was elected president of the FIE for a second time: his tenure was due to run until the end of 1940, but the war suspended the organisation’s operations.
On May 27, 1940, Belgium surrendered to the Nazis. In the preceding days, several Germans had been murdered near Brussels, and the occupiers rounded up suspects, including Anspach, who was a military prosecutor. He was imprisoned for a week, and cleared of any involvement in the murders. However, his position as head of the FIE was noted and included in the report sent to Nazi Party headquarters in Berlin.
Reinhard Heydrich
The report reached Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Head of the Sicherheitsdienst, the internal security section of the SS, Heydrich was widely considered Hitler’s likely successor. He had won the Iron Cross for 60 flying missions, and was a brilliant swimmer, sailor, tennis-player, equestrian and concert-level violinist.
His greatest passion, however, was fencing. With its carefully controlled violence, elegant costumes and rigid code of honour, the sport appealed to many Nazis and fascists: Benito Mussolini and Oswald Mosley were also fanatical about it. Heydrich was an outstanding saber fencer—but not quite good enough to make the German Olympic team, despite several attempts. When he realised he would not succeed at the highest level as an athlete, he turned his attention to the governing of the sport. As war raged across Europe, Heydrich was spending much of his time finagling to become president of the German Fencing Association. When he read the report on Anspach, he saw the chance to grab a greater prize—and made his first move. He sent the Gestapo back to Rue de la Victoire.
The only person in the house was the nanny, Edith Neufeld: Anspach’s wife, Marguerite, was visiting her mother in Aachen and the children were at school.
Neufeld was a 22-year-old half-Jewish German who had fled Berlin for Brussels in 1937. ‘There were three or four of them,’ she says. ‘They were in plain clothes, but I recognised them from when they had arrested Monsieur Anspach the week before. Gestapo. They said they needed everything in the house to do with fencing. What could I do? They went into his study and took everything. Then they left.’
As president of the FIE, Anspach was keeper of all the organisation’s records, archives and diplomas. The entire collection was now transported to Berlin. On hearing of the theft, Anspach, still in prison, immediately wrote a letter to Hans von Tschammer und Osten, the Reich’s sports minister, to demand that the files be returned. Von Tschammer und Osten sent a reassuring reply—but nothing happened.
In December, Heydrich achieved his ambition and became head of the German Fencing Association. This prompted his next move, which was to send the Gestapo back to Anspach, requesting that he come to Berlin. ‘His friends warned him not to accept any cigarettes Heydrich offered him,’ says Neufeld. ‘In case they were poisoned.’
Anspach arrived in the German capital in the first week of February, 1941. He took a hamper to Neufeld’s mother, who still lived in the city, and she drove him to the Kaiserhof, a luxury hotel that the Nazis were using as a base.
Anspach and Heydrich’s meeting lasted several hours. The German argued that Berlin was a better home for the federation’s documents, as the city was the communications centre of Europe, and pointed out that Anspach’s tenure as president of the FIE should theoretically have expired two months previously. The Belgian replied that the federation’s activities were in suspension because of the war, and that he would remain the leader until it was over, after which a new leader could be appointed. Heydrich parried by suggesting that Anspach do the decent thing and hand over the reins to him.
Not many people would dare say no to the Obergruppenführer’s ‘invitation’, but Anspach did just that, and for good measure reiterated that the organisation’s archives should be returned to him.
Although Heydrich was one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich and could easily have had Anspach either imprisoned or executed, he agreed to let the Belgian return to Brussels, on the condition that he was accompanied by two SS officers. Why Heydrich did this is a mystery, but perhaps he was saving harsher measures as a last resort: if he could ‘honourably’ take over the fencing world, so much the better.
On February 17, one of the SS officers turned up at Anspach’s house in Brussels, armed with a letter stating that he would relinquish his presidency of the FIE to Heydrich, and asking him to sign it. Anspach asked the SS officer for 24 hours to consider his reply. The next day, he wrote an extraordinary letter that is now in the Fencing Museum in Brussels. ‘As I am mandated by thirty-seven national fencing federations,’ Anspach wrote, ‘nothing can permit me to abdicate my powers to one affiliate.’
Heydrich immediately counter-attacked, inviting the head of the Italian federation, Giulio Basletta, to Berlin. At a gala dinner on March 6, 1941, Heydrich told Basletta he thought it was time they took over the running of the FIE. In a letter written to FIE members after the war, Basletta claimed that he tried to counter Heydrich’s proposal, but that his German had been too weak.
Heydrich then wrote to Anspach. ‘I agree with Giulio Basletta,’ he wrote, ‘that during the war it is I and he who will protect the FIE’s interests. The question of the next presidency can be resolved after the war.’
But once again, Anspach refused to give up his post, and cleverly used Heydrich’s argument against him, pointing out that as he did not have any of the official documents of the federation, he was hardly in a position to hand over the reins. Heydrich did not reply, perhaps because he had more pressing matters to attend to: a month later, Hermann Goering authorised him to make preparations for the implementation of the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’. Heydrich was responsible for everything from the mobile death squads to the transport of Jews to the camps. Ten months later, his car was ambushed by Czech agents in Prague, and he was assassinated.
After the war, Anspach bought the house in Rue de la Victoire, divorced Marguerite and married Edith Neufeld. She was 35 years younger than him, ‘but it never felt like that,’ she says. ‘We grew close as a result of what happened during the war. It’s true that he could be sharp, but he never was with me. He was only ever kind.’
Anspach tried to recover the federation’s archives, but the building they were housed in had been burned to the ground during the war. He was re-elected president of the FIE, a post he held until 1948, and the organisation awarded him its highest honour, the Challenge Chevalier Feyerick, for ‘defending the interest and prestige of the FIE during the war’. A servant stole his gold medal for the team epée, but the individual gold, his other Olympic medals and all his certificates are intact. Later on, Anspach became an Olympic referee, and at the age of 90 attended the 1972 Munich Olympics. He died, five months short of his 100th birthday, in 1981.
‘He rarely spoke about what happened between himself and Heydrich,’ says Pierre Raes, curator of Brussels’ fencing museum. ‘I think because he found it tragic that someone in the higher echelons of the fencing world was so dishonourable.’
‘It’s very difficult to outlive him by so many years,’ says Edith Anspach, who inherited the house in Rue de la Victoire and is now 87 years old. ‘But he was an extraordinary man, and I have some magnificent memories.’
Paul Anspach was an extraordinary man: in the most surreal but frightening contest of his life, he held his head high—and did his sport proud.
With thanks to Edith Anspach and Pierre Raes
Further reading
Books
The Life and Times of Reinhard Heydrich by G.S. Graber (Hale, 1981) Heydrich by Charles Wighton (Odhams, 1962)
By the Sword by Richard Cohen (Macmillan, 2002)
Websites
‘Genocide in World War Two: Who Were the Guilty?’ (Article discussing Heydrich’s role in the Holocaust:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/genocide/guilt_identity_02.shtml
The International Fencing Federation: http://www.fie.ch
PDF document of Anspach and Chasseloup-Laubat’s rules:
http://www.fie.ch/download/rules/fr/RINTRO.pdf
First published in The Bulletin, January 2005
The Real Dogs of War
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Dozens of books and films have told the stories of mercenaries in Africa. Jeremy Duns looks at the reality behind the myths
On November 30 1968, Paris Match published a story titled ‘Biafra: Final Mission’. Dramatic black-and-white photos by Gilles Caron showed a group of Nigerian soldiers carrying a large white man across a river. The man, who had been shot in the stomach and heart, was Marc Goossens, a Belgian mercenary. When the soldiers reached the other side of the river, Goossens' fellow mercenaries searched his pockets and found his last pay-check – 4,000 US dollars – and a photograph of his girlfriend back in Ostend
Goossens was one of several Belgian mercenaries in Africa in the 1960s. As a colonial power and home to one of the world's most prestigious arms manufacturers, Fabrique National, Belgium was a natural recruiting ground for mercenary operations – some say it still is. In 2005, Mark Thatcher, son of the former British prime minister, pleaded guilty to breaking anti-mercenary laws in Equatorial Guinea, following accusations that he had financed a coup attempt in the oil-rich West African state. Newspapers focused on Thatcher and other high-profile British establishment figures alleged to have been involved, and on the background of the mercenaries' leader, Simon Mann, an Old Etonian and former member of Britain's special forces.
Few reports mentioned that the coup attempt had been a shambolic affair: the 'mercs' had flown into Harare in a plane that still carried the markings of the American Air National Guard, and had compounded the error by travelling with their weapons. Within minutes of landing, Mann and his associates were arrested by Zimbabwe's security forces. Many of the plotters were imprisoned.
The exploits of 'soldiers of fortune' have been told in countless books and films, but rarely do the accounts linger on the manacled, humiliated mercenary rotting in a jail cell, or the half-naked corpse being dragged through the bush.
Many of the myths of the modern mercenary started in the Congo. In the days after its independence from Belgium in June 30, 1960, the country rapidly spiralled out of control. Following a mutiny in the army, the local leader of the province of Katanga, Moise Tshombe, declared independence from the rest of the country. In February 1961, the country's first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated with the complicity of the American and Belgian governments.
Patrice Lumumba, shortly before his death in 1961
In 1964, Tshombe became prime minister, only to be deposed by General Joseph Mobutu the next year. Friends of Tshombe planned a second secession of Katanga, and on July 5, 1967, a 36-year-old Belgian plantation owner-turned-mercenary, Jean 'Black Jack' Schramme, who had been involved in the first secession, took 11 white mercenaries and around 100 Katangans to Stanleyville, where they fired on a Congolese army camp, killing troops and their families.
The Congolese army retaliated by killing 30 Katangan mercenaries (who had not been involved), after which Schramme's private army, nicknamed the Leopard Battalion, grew to around 1,000, 160 of which were foreign fighters. The Congolose army was around 30,000 strong. After weeks of fighting, the Leopard Battalion retreated to Bukavu, a coastal resort that had once been favoured by the Belgian colonisers.
Frederick Forsyth
Schramme set up a headquarters in the city's Royal Residence Hotel and issued an ultimatum to Mobutu in Kinshasa, giving him 10 days to negotiate peace. His terms included a return to democratic rule in the country and to appoint Tshombe – who was imprisoned in Algeria on treason charges – to his cabinet.
Mobutu refused, saying he would never negotiate with assassins (an ironic charge, considering that he is likely to have smoothed the way for the Americans and Belgians to assassinate Lumumba). Schramme warned that he might attack Kinshasa. 'We have shown that the Congolese National Army is incapable of defeating us.'
Schramme's men held Bukavu for seven weeks, after which Mobutu sent in paratroopers, followed by 15,000 regular troops. Frenchman Bob Denard had his own brigade of mercenaries – the infamous 'Affreux' – in Angola and tried to cut across to help Schramme, but was driven back by air strikes. On October 29, the Congolese army moved into Bukavu; a week later, the surviving members of Schramme's 'white giants' fled over the border to Rwanda.
*
While Schramme and his men were taking on the Congolese army, mercenaries were also flying into Nigeria. In May, the eastern region of the country had formed a breakaway state called Biafra. In the ensuing civil war, both sides recruited foreign mercenaries. There were about a dozen on the Biafran side, including Frenchman Denard, Briton 'Mad Mike' Hoare, 'Taffy' Williams, a South African of Welsh origin, and a German, Rolf Steiner. The Nigerians had Egyptian pilots loaned to them by the Russians, and John Peters, a Brit who had also been in the Congo.
It was an unusual situation: groups of mercenaries hadn't fought on opposite sides since the Carlist wars in Spain in the 19th century. The fear of killing old friends sometimes led to stalemates, and some commentators feel that the use of mercenaries helped prolong the civil war: more decisive action from them might have meant an end to their monthly salaries (transferred into Swiss bank accounts).
From 1968, Steiner, a former member of the Hitler Youth who had fought in Indo-China and Algeria, led the Biafrans' 4th Commando Brigade, which adopted a skull and crossbones insignia. The brigade was 3,000-strong at one point, and 'Big Marc' Goossens was one of around a dozen mercenaries serving in it. He had never planned to go to Biafra, but after a row with his girlfriend had left Belgium on an impulse.
In September '68, the 4th Commando mercenaries went on strike over outstanding salaries; according to the memoirs of Major-General Alexander Madiebo, who was commander of the Biafran Army, the transfer of fresh funds was negotiated by Steiner's interpreter at the time, former BBC and Reuters journalist Frederick Forsyth. Two months later, in an assault on Onitsha, Goossens met his end. 'One good thing about this war is that we're fighting the English on the other side!' he was reported to have said just hours before his death, seemingly forgetting that several Brits were also on his 'side'.
'Black Jack' Schramme never reappeared after the Congo, although rumours about him continued to be spread through books and films: one was that he fled to South America. Forsyth wrote a non-fiction work about the Nigerian civil war, The Biafra Story, before turning his hand to fiction. In 1978, after the worldwide success of his thriller The Day Of The Jackal, an article in The Sunday Times claimed that in 1973 Forsyth had helped fund an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea by mercenaries who had previously worked in Biafra.
Forsyth denied the allegation, but he had already written The Dogs of War, which featured fictionalised versions of Steiner and the other mercenaries he had met in Biafra attempting to take over a mineral-rich West African country; Goossens was the inspiration for the character 'Tiny' Marc Vlaminck. Forsyth had written and researched much of the novel in Equatorial Guinea, and in 2006 he admitted that he had played a small part in the aborted coup attempt, posing as a South African arms-dealer to attend a meeting of gun-runners in Germany – his cover was apparently blown when one of the arms dealers saw his photograph in the window of a Hamburg bookshop promoting the German edition of The Day of The Jackal.
No books or films will be made about Marc Goossens – all that remains of 'Big Marc' from Ostend are a few photos in an old issue of Paris Match.