Storyville has long provided must-see documentaries – and Dogs of War, the astonishing tale of David Tomkins, a mercenary and arms dealer (“legal and illegal”), is yet another. For 40 years, Tomkins fought other people’s wars for money. His career, which began in Angola in the 1970s, took him to almost every global conflict hotspot of the late 20th century.
This is such an extraordinary tale that even the brief montages that flash up the countries in which Tomkins operated – Kuwait in 1981, Nigeria in 1982, Lebanon in 1983, Iraq, Iran, Syria and beyond – are thrilling, a time capsule of geopolitical manoeuvring. The film asks questions about justice and repentance, the mercenary industry in general and Tomkins’ moral compass.
Much of it seems so far-fetched that you would roll your eyes at a dramatisation; it lands firmly in “you couldn’t make it up” territory. Most of the film is carried by frank, occasionally combative interviews with Tomkins, who exhibits the charm that carried him through his eventful career.
Tomkins was born in the blitz and had a troubled upbringing. He was a “problem child” at school, eventually joined the merchant navy, then found himself in prison after assaulting a police officer. Prison, he says, is where “I decided to become a criminal”. He studied his trade and learned how to become a safe-cracker, using what sound like terrifyingly dangerous explosives, a fact of which he remains proud. He once broke into a prison to blow up its safe. “It was an exciting way of life,” he says, with some understatement.
What matched this thrill was war. A television interview from the 1970s shows Tomkins talking about why he became a mercenary. He says it was to fight communism. Dogs of War’s director, David Whitney, asks him if that was true. He went for the money, he says now, but he talks about war as if it was his great romance; he also went for the buzz of it. In Angola, he became the “explosives man” for the notoriously bloodthirsty mercenary leader Costas “Colonel Callan” Georgiou. This spell alone would give other documentaries more than enough to go on for 90 minutes.
For Tomkins, though, this was one of life’s many interludes. After Angola, he spotted opportunities for selling and trading arms and services. He reels them off like a shopping list, including coups d’état and assassinations; he refers to purchasers of these services as “customers”. In Togo, he is hired to arrange the assassination of the president, but is double-crossed; he spots an opportunity to make money by debriefing his target on the plans he had drawn up.
By the 1980s, as conflicts raged across the globe, he had transformed himself into a big-time arms trader, spotting gaps in the system and exploiting them. It was a bad time for the world, he says, which was good for him.
His luck begins to run out in the 1990s, when an attempt to buy a fighter jet in Miami for a Colombian cartel – and that is only to skim the surface of a story so outlandish that I did a double take – sets off a chain of events that culminate in his downfall. The film is fleshed out with some reconstructions (which are on the cheesy side), interviews with experts, who point out the catastrophic human cost of the arms trade, and Tomkins’ footage of his mercenaries in action. Like Tomkins, his soldiers talk of the thrill of war – and they talk about killing. One former mercenary says that “to kill a man was just business”.
This is a remarkable, fascinating film, a portrait not just of Tomkins’ life, but also of the unseen forces that operate beyond the understanding and knowledge of most civilians. Eventually, inevitably, morality intrudes. Tomkins bats away any question of a moral choice, shrugging it off with uncharacteristically lazy reasoning. He argues that he didn’t start the wars; if he wasn’t getting rich from selling weapons, someone else would be.
To Whitney’s credit, he lobs questions at Tomkins that most viewers would want to ask him themselves. Tomkins, now an old man, has cancer and money troubles. Does he deserve what is happening to him? He veers between contemplation and irritation. “I’m getting fucking angry,” he says, finally, his charisma morphing into something else, steel‑plated and chilling.
• Dogs of War aired on BBC Four and is available on BBC iPlayer
