Dirty Combat: Secret Wars and Serious Misadventures

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After being in and out of jail for most of the 1960s he was offered the chance to fight as a mercenary during the 1970s, in one of Africa's bloodiest civil wars. With no job, no money and an addiction to an adrenalin rush, he left for northern Angola in 1976. So I had to sit in an interview with a mass murderer whose crimes were utterly repugnant, yet we all had to remain professional and polite, make small talk about football and the weather and then listen to him talk about torturing informants. It was an interesting experience." Tomkins evaded capture by the US authorities after a tip-off and fled Miami. In 1994 he was indicted before a federal court in Southern District of Florida for conspiring to illegally export arms. According to Michael Barcia of US Customs, Tomkins was a "key player ... in the ranks of international arms dealers." Tomkins, whose friends have said he is addicted to adventure and excitement, went to the US to attend survival training courses in Texas and planned to go to Iraq.

INT: So, Callan and three others were executed later on by Angolans in the official trial. Why, if they actually never took part in real...? He added: “We were the most poorly equipped army that you could possibly imagine, without any real aim.” DT: Right. It's been put to us that it was a dirty war. And, yes, it was a dirty war. Certainly, our small part of it made it even dirtier. I mean, all war is dirty, but in our particular context of the FNLA in northern Angola, with Europeans or British soldiers working under Callan, it was particularly dirty, in so much as we - and I use the word "we" collectively - committed what would be crimes, and in that respect the Angolan Government got the wording right: "war crimes". We did kill when we had no particular reason to. We tortured to achieve information that they probably didn't have, and this was not captured enemy soldiers: these were probably just local civilians. And that atmosphere permeated its way through the whole unit, where there was an air of lawlessness there. We had some Portuguese mercenaries, if you like, and we collectively recognized that there was no real command structure, that we were just a loose band of bandits with a very dangerous leader and a few associates, and we just went along for the ride and hoped it would improve, which of course it didn't. After university David started working as a runner on TV commercials around Manchester, working his way up to being a director before branching into drama in 2005. Costas Georgiou ( Greek: Κώστας Γεωργίου; 21 December 1951 – 10 July 1976), also known by his alias Colonel Callan, was a Cypriot-born British mercenary executed in Angola following the Luanda Trial for activities during the civil war phase of the Angolan War of Independence.Tomkins then went about recruiting a team of mercenaries with a former colleague from the Angola campaign, the SAS officer, Peter McAleese. Tomkins told McAleese of his plans in the Booth Hall pub in Hereford. He was always such a vibrant, vivacious guy, I thought talking to him about them would be a great thing to do. So I did a big reveal at the nursing home and I was really excited, but in a strange way he really wasn’t very interested. He looked at them and went ‘ah yeah, that’s good Dave, I don’t really remember’.” Kennedy, Bruce, "Soldiers of misfortune: Mercenaries play major roles in 20th-century conflicts", 1989 Cold War series, CNN, archived from the original on 11 March 2007 , retrieved 22 January 2008 She said: 'He believed this was his last chance for adventure and he could do something worthwhile. He believed his expertise would be very helpful to those helping to reconstruct Iraq.'

The "battalion" fought several more dramatic engagements, including successful ambushes of minor MPLA detachments. However, given his limited resources and the fact that many of his men – European and native alike – were untrained, increasingly demoralised amateurs, Georgiou's campaign was ultimately a failure. According to mercenary David Tomkins, the group spent most of its time foraging for food, usable weapons, and ammunition. Much of this foraging consisted of "raids" on villages, where the men would casually walk into town brandishing their weapons, searching for anything of use. Anyone who offered physical resistance would be shot. Having returned to Basingstoke, Dave’s spirit of adventure hasn’t left him. He told The Sun: “If somebody came up with something tomorrow, like overthrowing a small country, I’d be there in a heartbeat.”It was always going to be the toughest. It depicts little more than a canal bending away from the camera and appears to have been shot from a moving train or car. Tomkins thinks it may have been taken somewhere in Switzerland, though he’s a little perturbed at the prospect of finding out for sure. As a young man born with a taste for adventure, he soon specialised in blowing open safes in Britain and Europe. He once even broke into the safe of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. This situation broadly reflected his time in Angola as a whole, with the mercenaries being underequipped for the opposition.

It was only after his grandfather died that Tomkins quit his job and began the hunt. He enlisted the help of the public after realising that local knowledge would be critical in deciphering the little clues hidden within each photo. Among those interviewed for the documentary is the man who was Escobar's bomber, a man linked to the deaths of hundreds, Luis Fernando Acosta Mejia, aka Nangas. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison in Columbia, but was released after serving 15. My first effort was a cop thriller starring some friends and my nan. She was game for helping out and didn't mind getting shot in the story and putting ketchup down her face." Unfortunately for Dave, the plan went wrong when the helicopter crashed into a mountain during cloud. The pilot died in the crash, while it took three days for Dave and Peter to escape the jungle. I imagined this one was somewhere out in the hills, isolated, on someone’s rooftop. Maybe overlooking what is now probably a defunct amusement park. When I was in Australia, the idea of finding it felt semi-impossible. I had no idea. But numerous people pointed out that it was Tibidabo amusement park in Barcelona.’ Photographs: Stephen Clarke and David TomkinsDavid said: "I read Peter McAleese's book in the 90s. Then when I got into this industry and became a director, I pitched the idea to Channel 4, who were interested but it didn't go anywhere. I'm grateful to them for passing, as I was too young and would have botched it. But I kept in touch with Peter and in 2015 I optioned the rights to his book and we committed to get it made this time.