WAR IN THE LAND OF CHOCOLATE - PART 2

My story continues . . . Part 1 is HERE - S.L.


Africa is tribal. I saw this in the Ivory Coast – le Cote d’Ivoire – when I was there as a military advisor in 1999. I would tell the Ivorian officer where & when I needed his men, or where to go to next; he would turn around and give a command and half the platoon would tighten up and look alert like proper soldiers. The other half would look down at the ground and shuffle their feet, a lot of attitude and body language. I figured it out real fast; half the platoon was his tribe, Ashanti, the “shuck-and-jive” crowd was of the other tribe; Twee, or Ibo.

On 24 December 1999 what started as a pay mutiny by these same disaffected troops morphed into a coup d’etat, and by 2002 had become a full-blown civil war. At that time my unit was sent in to get 2700+ Americans and other nationalities out of the rebel-held north. What we saw last week - French and UN helicopters firing missiles into the President’s residence in Abidjan - was the culmination of events that kicked off in 1999.

French helicopter attack sortie toward the Presidential Residence in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, April 2011.

The current set of circumstances Cote d’Ivoire relate directly to national elections held in October of last year. Despite losing the election, Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down, never mind the fact that his term in office expired five years ago; he simply refused to leave.

His opponent, Alassane Ouattara, has the support of world leaders, but not of Ivory Coast's military. And so associated himself with the rebel faction, which slowly but surely made its way toward the capital in an almost symbolic combat that claimed less than 500 lives.


Road to War:

In the years leading up to the coup of ’99, the government of President Bédié had drifted toward a xenophobic policy described as “Ivoirité”: the exclusion of immigrant workers from Mali and Burkina Faso, some of whom had been in the country for generations. Ouattara’s father’s side of the family is from Burkina Faso – a fact that confounded Ouattara’s earlier political activities - and so much of the exploited underclass was able to identify with him and the rebel forces that emerged since the civil war of ’02. Another complication in this conflict is the cultural fault line between Muslims in the north, and the Christian majority of the economically prosperous south.

In North America it is difficult to fully appreciate these kind of issues, of course, and all this past month the thing in Libya has eclipsed the situation in West Africa. Oil is important, despite the fact that we could straight up buy the oil from the Libyans if we wanted to – or anyone else - any day of the week, or we can drill for it ourselves. But Cote d’Ivoire has something unique that can’t be found in deserts, arctic regions or at the bottom of the ocean.

Carrying cocoa beans in the port of San Pedro, Ivory Coast; much of the 

nation's economy depends on the exports. (Jane Hahn / New York Times)

Cote d’Ivoire produces almost 50% of the world’s supply of cocoa beans, and the beans have been piling up in the warehouses. There is coffee there as well, and rubber plantations. The rebels say they are fighting for their national identity, but their cause was financed by the power of the beans.


Autumn Return

In September of 2002 my outfit got the word we were going down to the Ivory Coast to evacuate Americans. Normally for this sort of thing the phone rings in the dead of night, you roll over, “Honey, I’m going to be out of town for a couple of weeks.” She says, “Whatever,” and you get a little break from each other’s company.

This time “the balloon went up” at ten in the morning. We immediately went into mission prep, dragged our kit bags, drew our weapons and blew out of there – phone calls to mama-san were out of the question; OPSEC. My wife and kids – ALL the wives and kids – didn’t know where we were for the better part of two weeks.

We flew into Yamousoukro and established ourselves in the airport firehouse – a cement lean-to at the drainage end of the runway. The place was infested with mosquitos. I have lived and worked in the tropics most of my life and I have never seen mosquitos that bad; at one point I looked down at my exposed forearm and it looked like I had black fur. I wiped the insects away and my skin was dripping red with blood.

American Special Forces at Yamassoukro Airport, Cote d'Ivoire, September 2002.

The American refugees assembled at the International Christian Academy in Bouaké. The rebels were having a firefight with the Loyalists; the French Foreign Legion were pulling security in their LAVs (Light Armored Vehicles) and their gun jeeps. The Loyalists would fall back through the Legion’s lines, the Legion would open up on the rebels, the rebels would fall back and the Loyalists would advance; rinse and repeat.

The people we evacuated were mostly missionaries who’d lived there for years. They left everything behind; they were allowed one bag each. We rolled up there in our “GunVees” (modified HumVees bristling with belt-fed weapons), pulled security while the Americans loaded up in school buses, then escorted them back to the airport at Yamoussoukro.

American refugees escorted by American Special Forces, Ivory Coast, September 2002.

(That's me you can see through the windshield of the bus.)

The scene at the airport was equally sad; I saw a Frenchman roll up in his Renault, hop out and say to an African standing nearby, “You want a car?” Then he simply handed over the keys.

At one point I was interviewed by an American intelligence officer. “You’ve been here before? You trained the rebels?”

“That’s right.” I told him about our activities in Akuedo, in 1999.

He asked me what kind of troops they were, their capabilities. I told him that if ever you come under fire from them, the safest place to be is right out in the middle of the road.

“HUH?”

“They can’t hit the broad side of a barn, from the inside.”

He opened up a laptop and showed me photographs of the rebels taken in Bouaké and Korhogo. “Do you recognize any of these guys?”

“Well, they all look the same, but yes I do. That guy’s name is Valere.”

“YOU KNOW HIS NAME?”

“We used to drink beer and play cards together.”

Valere

“What about this guy?”

“That’s Ironman.”

Like all military operations, there was a lot of “hurry-up-and-wait”. I spent an afternoon in an air-conditioned van with an older American gentleman and his wife. She had a strange accent I couldn’t quite put a finger one. To fight boredom I started impersonating the French officers – in French; the wife was going into hysterics, ringing out peals of laughter. Turned out she was Québécois, which explained a lot of things, and he was the “OGA” station chief, which explained even more.

Later, after we returned to Stuttgart, I learned from an Ivoirian I’d stayed in touch with that my buddy Valere was indeed with the rebel forces. It turned out he was killed in action - in Bouaké, the day of the evacuation.


Epilogue:

In February of 2003 I attended a briefing at Special Operations Command, Europe (SOCEUR), in Stuttgart. The officer opened the briefing with, “It’s coup season again down in Africa.” A small team was put on alert to go down to “CDI”, to perform reconnaissance tasks, prepare assembly areas for an evacuation, etcetera. We were told to pack our bags and be ready to launch; the specific guidance was: “Be within one hour of sobriety.”

While waiting for the balloon to go up, my journalist brother emailed me that he would be passing through Frankfurt, headed for an embed slot with the 3d Infantry Division for the then-anticipated invasion of Iraq - could we meet up?

At first I told him I couldn't make it – I was on a one hour string. Then it occurred to me that I was instrumental in my brother’s circumstances - in January I'd made a phone call that got him into the embed program – and if something terrible happened, I would never forgive myself, not seeing him when I had the chance. I had to go, so I called the officer over at SOCEUR. “Can you be back here within one hour?” Sure thing, I told him; normally it’s an hour and a half ride up there, but you can fly over those German autobahns. Never mind the fact there was about an inch of ice all over everything.

My brother and I linked up in the airport - he finagled his way through Customs to get out of the transit lounge. We had a good German breakfast of sausages and beer and joked about how it would be his last beer for a long time. Afterwards we strolled through the side of the airport which is like a giant shopping mall, and I pointed out the escalators to the S-bahn, the trains that go everywhere in Germany. It was still dark outside when my phone went off; all my brother heard was me saying, “Yes sir . . . uh-huh . . . yes sir . . . I’ll be there. I’m enroute.”

I looked up and my brother was grinning from ear to ear; he’d just seen me get THE PHONE CALL. We said our goodbyes and he went his way and I went mine. Two brothers, linking up in Europe, heading in two separate directions to two different wars, on two different continents. Much later my brother described the scene: “It was like being in London, 1942.”

My brother went to the Sandpile and took part in the Great and Glorious War on Terror; I parked my car in front of a gray, non-descript building in a military compound in Stuttgart, went inside and grabbed my kit bag, got on a C-130 and made my way back down to an obscure little war in Africa, in a country most people can’t even find on a map.


SEAN LINNANE SENDS

MMB HERE


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WAR IN THE LAND OF CHOCOLATE

Source: CIA World Factbook


Cote d’Ivoire was in the news cycle this past week, a six month West African power struggle culminating with French and UN attack helicopters firing rockets on the Presidential Residence in Abidjan, economic capital of Ivory Coast, a West African nation of 21 million. But the war goes back further than the past six months; I was there for the beginning & early stages of that war, back in the late nineties / early ought-oughts.

It actually began as a military pay mutiny, at Camp Akuedo on the outskirts of Abidjan. I know this because I helped train the soldiers who became known as the rebels.

One of the guys we trained in peacekeeping duties, seen here as a part of the rebel force in Bouaké, Cote d'Ivoire.


We were there as a part of a U.S. State Department program – the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI) – teaching peacekeeping skills to company-sized elements from five battalions of the Ivorian military. At the beginning of the program we issued new uniforms, equipment, boots, everything – to the soldiers, many of whom had arrived from their remote bases in uniforms that were rags falling off their bodies, their web gear was held together in places by threads.

At the end of our four-month training program, the soldiers once again appeared in their rags. “What happened?” I asked one of the troops. “Where are your new uniforms, the ones we gave you?”

“The officers, they took them all back, put them in the warehouse.” Good old Third World corruption; we give them foreign aid, the guys in charge rip it off and use it to line their pockets. Your tax dollars at work.

This guy's nom de guerre was Ironman, because of his great physical strength. I still have the heavy steel bracelet he gave me in 1999.


One of the Ivoirians asked me for some money so he could take the train back to his base up north. He was a brother paratrooper, so I shelled out ten bucks – probably a month’s pay for him. This was telling, because later that night, it was the pay thing that kicked off the whole mess.

Third World Armies are paid peanuts. Actually, if they were literally paid in peanuts they’d probably be better off than the puny salaries they make. That’s where things like UN peacekeeping duty come in; UN pay is worth triple what they make, and this is crucial because their retirement scheme is practically non-existent.

Well, President Henri Konan Bedie was on TV that night, giving a big speech about how great things were going. The trouble was, things weren’t going all that great, and hadn’t been in the twelve years since the great Houphouët-Boigny – founding father of Ivory Coast – had died. The troops clustered in the dirt-floored canteen were yelling at the screen, ”Oh YEAH? Well if things are going so good – WHERE’s OUR UN PAY???”

What happened next - after they got enough beer in them - was they went down to the arms room, busted in and secured the firing pins for their rifles (that’s how much their own officers trusted them). Then they rocked on down to the Minister of Defense’s residence – about five miles down the road – and made known their grievances.

The security element at the Minister of Defense’s place returned fire, so the mutineers pulled back and went over to the President’s residence. There was no return fire this time, so the troops took the place down, and the whole country with it.

This was in December of 1999; the wealthiest, most stable nation in West Africa had just experienced its first coup d’etat.


TO BE CONTINUED . . .


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . S.L.


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A HUNDRED THOUSAND MILLION MILES FROM HOME

This took place in 2000, the last year of the twentieth century; the last year of our child-like naïveté - the year before the buildings came down. A tasking came down and somebody up at battalion said "Linnane is the guy for this!" and that's how I ended up doing the better part of a year living large and in charge out in the Middle of Nowhere:

" . . . . I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I'd never want another . . ."


My mission statement said something about patrols, so I took it to heart and I started going deep into the interior for a week at a time. I kept a patrol log, sent in coordinates of features not on the map; wells, oasis, cleared areas suitable to land fixed-wing aircraft. I always took a local with me - this turned out to be good planning on more than one occasion.


On this particular occasion I was in Choum, headed north to F'derik. We waited in Choum during the hottest time of the day. There was a whitewashed mud hut - it was a sort of caravanserai; the only furniture was Moroccan carpets. Everybody lounged around, sat with their backs up against the wall, and passed around this wooden bowl full of camel milk yoghurt, which isn't bad; it's the thick black line of flies all along the rim that are the bad part.

When it cooled off to a bearable 95°F everybody went outside to the trucks - a caravan had assembled - and made ready to make movement. You travel at night in the desert, part of the reason is it gets so hot in the middle of the day, the tires pop. One day I had to fix five flats - and that included breaking the tire off the rim, pulling the tube out and patching it, then putting the tire back on the rim and pumping it up - by hand - popping the bead and all - in the middle of the Sahara Desert in the middle of the day.

Anyway we were rolling across the desert track - there aren't any roads out there; it's all track - all these trucks full of Moors all over the place, it looked like a North African re-make of The Road Warrior.

The trick is to stay on track. The other trick is to constantly be checking your navigation. I was doing the dead reckoning thing and keeping an eye on the stars just to be sure we were heading in the right direction, but I wasn't too worried about it because everybody knows the Arabs have this uncanny sense of direction, right? It's like they always know where Mecca is, right?

WRONG. Turns out I was the only one doing any kind of nav checks out there. Around about the time I noticed we'd made a big circle about twice I called a halt to the Great Migration. Everybody dismounted and that was a LOT of everybody - there were at least twenty trucks in our convoy and each truck held between ten to thirty Moors. The leaders all assembled and I said in a mixture of French and bad Arabic, "Look, we've lost the track and we're going in circles."

What I picked up from them as they mumbled amongst themselves was, "This guy is the weirdest Frenchman ever been around these parts," and "He isn't French, can't you tell he's Egyptian?" That's the kind of Arabic they teach at Fort Bragg.


I said, "This is my good idea - let's just stop here and rest for a couple hours." It was already 0230. "Then when the wolf's tail comes" - the early, early morning pre-light just before dawn - "then we'll go on the track again, and this time we'll be able to see it, and we'll be in F'derik before it gets hot."


Everybody agreed to this, then split up to report back to their individual crowds. I pulled out my trusty poncho liner and threw my bag up against the tire of my truck and leaned against it, pulled the poncho around me to help beat the wind and try to get some shuteye. All around me there were clusters of people, making tea, having conversations, a group of them would get together and do a sort of line dance where they were all doing their prayers - "Allah-wuh-Allah-wuh-ak-b-a-a-a-r . . ."


It was like the Tribes of Israel in the Wilderness; there were hundreds of people all around me, huddled in little clusters all about me in the darkness, and it was dark as Sin. Suddenly it occurred to me that NOBODY KNEW WHERE I WAS; not the embassy, not the guys up at SOCEUR in Stuttgart or back at Bragg, none of my friends, my family . . .


. . . NOBODY . . .


I was out there - WAY out there - my life was in the hands of these strangers who were all around me . . . and not a SOUL I knew had any idea where on Earth was Sean Linnane.


If a snake had bitten me, I'd have been done.


I looked up at those stars - in the desert night the stars look like diamonds on black velvet - then the vast solitude of it all, and the reality of my situation - it all hit me all at once: my home & my people might as well be way out there beyond those stars, and I started feeling . . . SO . . . . . . ALONE . . .

The sensation of being out there - all by myself - surrounded by strange strangers . . . Stranger in a Strange Land . . . I felt SO . . . ALONE . . .



. . . I never felt . . . SO . . . LONELY . . . IN . . . ALL . . . MY . . . LIFE . . .





. . . . . . . . . . . . . SEAN LINNANE SENDS

PHENOMENAL FRENCH MISSILE

. . . WITH PIN-POINT ACCURACY ! ! !


We've made fun of the French military for too long. The accuracy of their missiles are second to none. You won't believe how proficient their soldiers are! Remarkable . . . and brave, too.

TODAY IS SAINT CRISPINs DAY

On this day, 25 October 1415, King Henry V of England, and his tiny army of nobles, men-at-arms and English and Welsh longbowmen, left the Flower of French Chivalry laying face down in a muddy field in Northern France, near the village of Agincourt.




At Agincourt Henry Monmouth - King Henry V, England's greatest warrior monarch - deployed his troops against a larger French army on a muddy field near Agincourt, in northern France. Henry personally led his troops into battle and actually participated in hand-to-hand combat. The French were commanded by Constable Charles d'Albret and various prominent French noblemen of the Armagnac party.

This famous battle is notable for the use of the English longbow, which Henry used in very large numbers, with English and Welsh longbowmen forming the vast majority of his army. The Battle of Agincourt has been celebrated in literature, song and film ever since; it is quite possibly the most significant English victory in that tiny island country's glorious history.









Henry V
King of England, Prince Regent of France; Lord of Ireland, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Lancaster









Prelude to Combat

Henry's army had landed in northern France on 13 August 1415 and besieged the port of Harfleur with an army of about 12,000. The siege took longer than expected - the town did not capitulate until 22 September, and the English army did not leave until 8 October, by which the English had suffered many casualties through disease.

The campaign season coming to an end, Henry decided to move most of his army (roughly 7,000) to the port of Calais, the English stronghold in northern France, where they could re-equip over the winter.

During the siege, the French had raised an army which assembled around Rouen. This was not a feudal 'serf' army, but rather an army of paid professionals very similar to the English. The French hoped to raise 9,000 troops, but the army was not ready in time to relieve Harfleur. When Henry V marched to the north, the French moved to blockade them along the River Somme. They were successful for a time, forcing Henry to move south, away from Calais, to find a ford.

The English finally crossed the Somme south of Péronne, at Béthencourt and Voyennes and resumed marching north. Without the river protection, the French were hesitant to force a battle. They shadowed Henry's army while calling a semonce des nobles, calling on local nobles to join the army. By October 24 both armies faced each other for battle, but the French declined, hoping for the arrival of more troops.

The next day the French initiated negotiations as a delaying tactic, but Henry ordered his army to advance and to start a battle that, given the state of his army, he would have preferred to avoid. The English had very little food, had marched 260 miles in two-and-a-half weeks, were suffering from sickness such as dysentery, and faced much larger numbers of well-equipped French men-at-arms.

However Henry understood that his longbowmen greatly outclassed the French crossbowmen and he needed to get to the safety of Calais. He knew that if he waited, the French would get more reinforcements.


Battle

Situation

The lack of reliable and consistent sources makes it very difficult to estimate accurately the numbers on both sides. Modern estimates have the French forces at Agincourt numbering between 12,000-15,000, the English at approximately 9,000.

It is estimated that the French army consisted of about 2,250 crossbowmen, and 11,250 heavily-armored, dismounted knights who were "immobile and poorly equipped for the muddy terrain".

English effectiveness and readiness was questionable as a result of their prior 20-day march across 250 miles of hostile territory under constant harassment. They were suffering from dysentery and exhaustion. However, the English and Welsh longbowmen (approximately 6,000) were extremely adept at firing deadly volleys over long distances, and were believed to have outclassed the 1,000 French crossbowmen they faced.

Both sides were hampered by inclement weather, which contributed to the muddy terrain which provided a decisive advantage for the nimble and lightly-armed English versus the heavily-armored and immobile French.

The battle was fought in the narrow strip of open land formed between the woods of Tramecourt and Agincourt (close to the modern village of Azincourt). The French army was positioned by d'Albret at the northern exit so as to bar the way to Calais. The night of 24-25 October was spent by the two armies on open ground.





Early on the 25th, Henry deployed his army (approximately 3000 men-at-arms and 6,000 longbowmen) across a 750-yard part of the defile. It is likely that the English adopted their usual battle line of longbowmen on either flank, men-at-arms and knights in the center, and at the very center roughly 200 archers. The English men-at-arms in plate and mail armor were placed shoulder-to-shoulder four deep. The English and Welsh archers on the flanks drove pointed wooden stakes into the ground at an angle to force cavalry to veer off.

The English may have feared that they would not escape alive. One English account describes the day before the battle as a day of remorse in which all soldiers cleansed themselves of their sins to avoid Hell.





By contrast, the French were confident that they would prevail and were eager to fight. The French believed they would triumph over the English not only because their force was somewhat larger, fresher and better equipped, but also because the large number of noble men-at-arms would have considered themselves superior to the large number of commoners (such as the longbowmen) in the English army. The English army contained approximately 2,000 men-at-arms.

Provided they could close with the English army, the French may have been confident that their somewhat larger number of heavily armored troops would prevail in hand-to-hand fighting, were it not for the deep mud into which they were marching. Many French troops had fathers and grandfathers who had been humiliated in previous battles such as Crécy and Poitiers, and the French nobility were determined to get revenge. Several French accounts emphasize that the French leaders were so eager to defeat the English that they insisted on being in the first line; "All the lords wanted to be in the vanguard, against the opinion of the constable and the experienced knights".

The French were arrayed in three lines called "battles". Although modern research suggests the following accounts of the size of the French army are greatly exaggerated, Chronicler Jehan de Waurin says there were 8,000 men-at-arms, 4,000 archers and 1,500 crossbowmen in the vanguard, with two wings of 600 and 800 mounted men-at-arms, and the main battle having "as many knights, esquires and archers as in the vanguard", with the rearguard containing "all of the rest of the men-at-arms".

The French appear to have had thousands of troops in the rearguard, containing commoners who the French were either unable or unwilling to deploy. Many French archers and crossbowmen were unable to deploy as the site was so narrow that there was only enough room for the men-at-arms. A historian known as the Monk of Saint-Denis wrote: "Four thousand of their best crossbowmen who ought to have marched in the front and begun the attack were found to not be at their post and it seems that they had been given permission to depart by the lords of the army on the pretext that they had no need of their help."

The rearguard played little or no part in the battle; English and French accounts agree that many of the French army fled after seeing so many French nobles killed and captured in the fighting.




French accounts state that prior to battle, Henry V gave a speech reassuring his nobles that if the French prevailed, the English nobles would be spared, to be captured and ransomed; however, the common soldiers would have no such luck, and he told them that they had better fight for their lives.

Shakespeare gives us a better account; the great St. Crispin's Day Speech, given by King Henry V on the morning of battle:


This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,

And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

He that shall live this day, and see old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,

But he'll remember, with advantages,

What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,

Familiar in his mouth as household words-

Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-

Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered-

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.



The French suffered a catastrophic defeat at Agincourt, not just in terms of the sheer numbers killed, but also because of the number of high-ranking nobles lost. After several years more campaigning, Henry was able to fulfill all his objectives and was ultimately recognized by the French in the Treaty of Troyes (1420) as Regent and heir to the French throne; this was cemented by his marriage to Catherine of Valois, the daughter of King Charles VI.

BIRTH OF A LEGEND

At 5 a.m. Paris time, on this date in 1917, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle — better known to the world as Mata Hari — was awoken at Saint-Lazare Prison to news that it was her last day on earth.




Prior to becoming an espionage legend, Mata Hari presented herself as a Hindu dancer. The truth is she was just a needy adventurer, a pretender with enough intuition and sensitivity to take advantage of the Parisian orientalist fantasies at the beginning of the XX Century.

There, her scanty, exotic costumes were enough; she never was genuine oriental dancer but, avant la lettre, an exotic dancer. Shot by firing squadron on a muddy drill field outside Paris, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle died, but the romantic myth of Mata Hari the femme fatal was born and lives amongst us to this day.


She died as she had lived: self-possessed, mysterious, facing the firing squad eyes open - she refused a blindfold.


She was already pushing 30 when she got into dancing, with a failed marriage behind her and two children. In Paris in the belle epoque, there were assuredly dancers younger, prettier; Margaretha, who here debuted the show name by which history would know here, surpassed them with showmanship.

Her exotic olive-toned looks — there were rumors of Javanese or Jewish blood even in her childhood - combined with her willingness to push boundaries of eroticism made her an instant sensation. Naturally gregarious and unprudish, she segued into the courtesan biz on the side with dashing officers and wealthy industrialists.


Not bad for a thirty-something mother of two. Nowadays they'd call her a MILF.


Sensual postcards and posed photos of Mata Hari were at once her pitch and her product.





14 years after her death, she’d be portrayed by silver screen femme fatale Greta Garbo:




I've always had a hard time figuring out my sympathies here; Mata Hari was a whore who spied on the French . . . for the Germans . . .





. . . yet whether or not she was really a German spy has never been determined — she seems to have been approached, or to have been set up by either French or German intelligence . . .





. . . sort of an anti-hero, I suppose . . . kind of hard to be against her . . .





So the French shot a whore - bravo les grenouilles! If it had been the British who had caught her, they'd have turned her against the Germans.

As a British correspondent reported, Margaretha Zelle owned her role to the very last:

The first intimation she received that her plea had been denied was when she was led at daybreak from her cell in the Saint-Lazare prison to a waiting automobile and then rushed to the barracks where the firing squad awaited her.

Never once had the iron will of the beautiful woman failed her. Father Arbaux, accompanied by two sisters of charity, Captain Bouchardon, and Maitre Clunet, her lawyer, entered her cell, where she was still sleeping - a calm, untroubled sleep, it was remarked by the turnkeys and trusties.

The sisters gently shook her. She arose and was told that her hour had come.

"May I write two letters?" was all she asked.

Consent was given immediately by Captain Bouchardon, and pen, ink, paper, and envelopes were given to her.

She seated herself at the edge of the bed and wrote the letters with feverish haste. She handed them over to the custody of her lawyer.

Then she drew on her stockings, black, silken, filmy things, grotesque in the circumstances. She placed her high-heeled slippers on her feet and tied the silken ribbons over her insteps.

She arose and took the long black velvet cloak, edged around the bottom with fur and with a huge square fur collar hanging down the back, from a hook over the head of her bed. She placed this cloak over the heavy silk kimono which she had been wearing over her nightdress.

Her wealth of black hair was still coiled about her head in braids. She put on a large, flapping black felt hat with a black silk ribbon and bow. Slowly and indifferently, it seemed, she pulled on a pair of black kid gloves. Then she said calmly:

"I am ready."

The party slowly filed out of her cell to the waiting automobile.

The car sped through the heart of the sleeping city. It was scarcely half-past five in the morning and the sun was not yet fully up.

Clear across Paris the car whirled to the Caserne de Vincennes, the barracks of the old fort which the Germans stormed in 1870.

The troops were already drawn up for the execution. The twelve Zouaves, forming the firing squad, stood in line, their rifles at ease. A subofficer stood behind them, sword drawn.

The automobile stopped, and the party descended, Mata Hari last. The party walked straight to the spot, where a little hummock of earth reared itself seven or eight feet high and afforded a background for such bullets as might miss the human target.

As Father Arbaux spoke with the condemned woman, a French officer approached, carrying a white cloth.

"The blindfold," he whispered to the nuns who stood there and handed it to them.

"Must I wear that?" asked Mata Hari, turning to her lawyer, as her eyes glimpsed the blindfold.

Maitre Clunet turned interrogatively to the French officer.

"If Madame prefers not, it makes no difference," replied the officer, hurriedly turning away.

Mata Hari was not bound and she was not blindfolded. She stood gazing steadfastly at her executioners, when the priest, the nuns, and her lawyer stepped away from her.*

The officer in command of the firing squad, who had been watching his men like a hawk that none might examine his rifle and try to find out whether he was destined to fire the blank cartridge which was in the breech of one rifle, seemed relieved that the business would soon be over.

A sharp, crackling command and the file of twelve men assumed rigid positions at attention. Another command, and their rifles were at their shoulders; each man gazed down his barrel at the breast of the women which was the target.

Inevitably, a story got around that she’d opened her funereal coat to the firing squad, revealing no clothing beneath it - she did not. She did not move a muscle.

The non-commissioned officer in charge had moved to a position where from the corners of their eyes they could see him. His sword was extended in the air.

It dropped. The sun - by this time up - flashed on the burnished blade as it described an arc in falling. Simultaneously the sound of the volley rang out. Flame and a tiny puff of greyish smoke issued from the muzzle of each rifle. Automatically the men dropped their arms.

At the report Mata Hari fell. She did not die as actors and moving picture stars would have us believe that people die when they are shot. She did not throw up her hands nor did she plunge straight forward or straight back.

Instead she seemed to collapse. Slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head up always, and without the slightest change of expression on her face. For the fraction of a second it seemed she tottered there, on her knees, gazing directly at those who had taken her life. Then she fell backward, bending at the waist, with her legs doubled up beneath her. She lay prone, motionless, with her face turned towards the sky.

A non-commissioned officer, who accompanied a lieutenant, drew his revolver from the big, black holster strapped about his waist. Bending over, he placed the muzzle of his revolver almost - but not quite - against the left temple of the spy. He pulled the trigger, and the bullet tore into the brain of the woman.

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was surely dead . . .

. . . and the Legend of Mata Hari was born.

A DARING ESCAPE

A French security agent held captive by insurgents in Somalia escaped last Wednesday, 26 August. Although Somali officials alleged that Marc Aubriere escaped by killing three of his captors, French Foreign Ministry officials initially had no comment and could not even confirm the hostage’s escape.

Marc Aubriere and his colleague were kidnapped by Hizbul-Islamin rebellion on 14 July and after a month in captivity, Mr. Aubriere was able to escape and make his way to the presidential palace, where he found solace. "I escaped at midnight last night. The guards were very tired and sleepy. I didn’t kill anyone or injure anyone while escaping," Mr. Aubriere is quoted as saying. “Of course I feel better than one day ago. Yes I feel very well. I’m happy and I will soon see my family,” he added.

French security consultant Marc Aubriere told of how he sneaked past his Somali kidnappers while they slept then walked by night for five hours across Mogadishu, at one point coming under fire, according to RFI radio. "I'm doing OK and, even if my month and a half in detention was horribly long, I was well treated. There was no torture, nor fake execution," Aubriere told Radio France International. "On Tuesday, around midnight, I took advantage of my jailers falling asleep, tired out by Ramadan. I saw that my cell was badly closed and so I was able to make off without any violence," he said, according to a transcript provided by RFI. "In any case, if I'd fired a shot, other guards would have killed me. Then I walked through the night for almost five hours, guided by the stars to get to where I wanted to go," he said. "Mogadishu is deserted at night and the only men I saw were armed. I was shot at. I ran. I hid and by chance they missed me," he said.



French officials have not formally identified the former hostage beyond describing him as a government employee who was part of a two-man advance team in Mogadishu to help set up a Somali presidential security detail. He has identified himself in interviews with several media outlets since his apparent escape as 40-year-old Marc Aubriere, although it is thought possible that he gave a fake name. Official sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP that "Aubriere" is an agent with the French overseas intelligence agency, the General Directorate of External Security or DGSE.

An Islamist official in Somalia claimed that a ransom was paid for the freed hostage, but both the French government and the agent himself have denied that and insists he escaped through his own means.


Team STORMBRINGER wishes "Bon Chance" to fellow adventurer Marc and of course our prayers are with his (unnamed) comrade - still missing and understood to be in the hands of a second Islamist group, the Shebab, which on Wednesday said that an Islamic Sharia court would decide his eventual fate.

WHERE THE CAJUNS CAME FROM

Deportation of Acadians order, read by Winslow in Grand-Pré church, painting by C.W. Jefferys.

June 16 is the anniversary of the Great Expulsion of the Acadians from their home in the Canadian Maritime Provinces.

The Great Expulsion of 1755-1763 took place during the French & Indian War (known as the Seven Years’ War in Britain and Europe, and in Quebec as the War of the Conquest (la Guerre de la Conquête) British colonial officers and New England legislators and militia deported more than 14,000 Acadians from the Maritime region. Many later settled in Louisiana, where they became known as Cajuns.

Les Acadiens are the descendants of the seventeenth-century French colonists who settled in what is now the Canadian Maritime provinces — Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, and in the US state of Maine

More than 14,000 Acadians (three-quarters of the French population in Nova Scotia) were expelled, their homes burned and their lands confiscated. Families were split up, and the Acadians were dispersed throughout the British lands in North America; thousands were transported to France. Some managed to make their way to Louisiana, creating the Cajun population and culture after mixing with others there.

Since 1994, Le Congrès Mondial Acadien has united Acadians of the Maritimes, New England, and Louisiana.

Acadians speak a dialect of French called Acadian French. The Louisiana Cajun descendants mostly speak English but some still speak Cajun French, a French dialect they diversified in Louisiana.