Part Two: The Dumbest Coup In World History

Robert is joined again by Bridget Todd to continue to discuss the Wonga Coup.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's the part of the second to Now that's not
how we should introduce a podcast. Welcome back to Behind
the Bastards. This is a podcast about terrible people. And
this is part two of our series on the Wonga Coup,
which started as an episode about a coup, but the
first part was really just a more general description about
the history of coups in Africa as both a literary

(00:24):
tradition and as a real attempted thing, ending with the
terrible story of the dictators of Equatorial Guinea. My guest
on part two, as with part one, is Bridget Todd.
I get that. I get the fake airhorns. I love it.
There's a national here. Yeah, sadly there's a national airhorn shortage,

(00:46):
so we were out of the real ones. But when
when those come back in stock, I will I will
force our editor to put them back in. Please do.
I I will only go on podcasts where I am
introduced the plot with airhorn, so please please do. Yeah,
I think it should be illegal to introduce people any
other way, to be honest, Like, can you imagine if

(01:07):
that's how like like first dates always went, and just
like anytime you're out at the bar, you just randomly
hear you like because like two people are meeting on
tender or something. I love it. My people are Caribbeans,
so we love a good airhorn. Oh yeah, yeah you do.
I would really like some sort of sound effect to
let me know if it's like a cute meat or

(01:27):
if it's like this guy is or this person is horrifying,
Like I would like to know that. I would like
some sort of sound of what to happen. What would
be your horrifying sound effect for a for a date?
What's the what's the theme song of Hannity? I'm Sean
Hanny dy I eat man at Tease. I think that's it.

(01:51):
I'm pretty sure that's that's basically it. Yeah, yeah, Bridget,
you are the host of a new podcast launching next
month h called There Are No Women on the Internet. Right,
that's true. Uh, it's not mostly true. It launches on

(02:11):
July seven, and it's called there Are No Girls on
the Internet. But you got the broad stroke? Oh wait,
June is after Okay, yep, sorry, well I got the
broad strokes. And speaking of broad strokes, let's get the
broad strokes of this coup, right, Um. Yeah, I'm a
master of transitions. Thank you. Uh. So, yeah, we we

(02:33):
ended our episode talking about the dictators of Equatorial Guinea
and this attempted coup that didn't turn into a coup
but did turn into a successful book, which is, Um,
I don't even know what level of privilege that is,
where you like attempt to overthrow a sovereign nation in
order to make a profit and fail but still get
rich off of the book. Like that's that's like I

(02:55):
feel like there's another level of white privilege that's like, yeah,
I don't even know how to describe that. That's like
platinum white privilege that it's like yeah, like yeah, that
is some like ultra uncut pure white privilege. Yeah, that's
the kind of white privilege you need the Costco card
to take advantage of, right, Like you gotta pay an

(03:15):
extra sixty five dollars. There's a yearly subscription that you
have to pay into for that. So yeah, so yes, um,
and now we're going to start So, so we're gonna
go back in time again. And now that we've explained
all of these coups and mercenaries in the situation in

(03:36):
Equatorial Guinea, we're going to go back in time, um
to talk about another mercenary before we get back to
Equatorial Guinea, and this mercenary's name is Simon Francis man
Uh Now Simon was born on June nineteen fifty two.
His family were British as all hell, I think they're
Irish British so like British people who became part or

(03:58):
Irish people who like did all enough to become part
of the British aristocracy and got to be a lot
less Irish as a result of things. Anyway, I don't
really know. Um. The man family wealth came from brewing,
and right around the same time Simon was born, his
family sold their family business to a big company in
return for a pile of cash and a seat on
the board. This meant that Simon grew up very comfortable,

(04:19):
but it also meant that he would need to find
a new career for himself when he grew up. Taking
over the family business would not be an option. In
the grand tradition of all fancy English people, his parents
sent him the funk Away to spend his childhood and Eaton,
which is frequently referred to as the nursery of England's
gentleman uh Eaton, is probably the most prestigious high school
on the planet. Boris Johnson went there, as did David Cameron,

(04:43):
Prince William, Prince Harry, Tom Hittleston, and in general about
thirty of all of the famous British men who have
ever lived like it eatens where you go if you're
a fancy British boy. Now this is like some like
very fancy British white guy shit. I feel yeah, yes,
this is like this is this is the peak of

(05:04):
fancy British white guy ship like it does it doesn't
get I would say the whitest thing it is possible
to be is a British person who went to Eaton.
Like that's that's like like top tier of of white dude.
Like very few of us are that white mm hmm. Now,

(05:25):
Eating currently cost fifty two dollars a year in tuition,
and the cost was broadly similar when Simon went there.
Only students from age thirteen to eighteen are accepted, and
the application process starts at age ten. Eating students each
get their own separate room. Students are split up into
fifty person houses where these boys are watched over by
a full time staff supervised by what a Business Insider

(05:47):
article I found calls a hired dame. Yeah, yeah, I
wouldn't imagine having that on your resume. Yeah, I was
a hired dame for about four years in the nineteen nineties. Yeah,
and they also couldn't they couldn't just call it like
an r A like here, like familiar with It has
to be a hired dame. Poor people have r a's

(06:09):
bridget Rich people have hired dames. And I do think
like your r a's job is just to make sure
nobody burns the building down. Really like a hired dame.
They're doing a lot. More so, like she's managing this
whole staff of people who like adults, So all these
kids when the eighteen are living alone in little apartments
and having an entire staff of adults clean for them,

(06:31):
um clean their clothing, like, launder their clothing, cook food
for them, and like this woman whose job it is
to manage all of the people who manages their lives,
like it's this kind of imagine what that does for
you as a little kid growing up, Like it's yeah,
I feel like it would really fuck me up to
have an adult woman doing all this ship for me,

(06:53):
and I'm a little kid. I feel that there's no
way I can come out of that being well adjusted. Yeah.
I think that's probably the case with Etonians, as they're known.
So after rich Boy High school, Man joined the military
and went into officer training at the Royal Military Academy
at Sandhurst. In addition to being Brewers, the men and
his family had a long history of military service. Simon

(07:14):
graduated and followed in his father's footsteps by accepting a
commission in the Royal Scots Guards. He was good at soldiering,
and after a few years he applied to join the
Special Air Service, Britain's equivalent to the Navy Seals. He
eventually became a troop commander in the s A S
and specialized in counter terrorism and intelligence gathering. Both of
those specialties will become powerfully ironic as we go along,

(07:36):
but for now. Simon did his three year rotation and
then returned to the regular Army, where he was stationed
in Northern Ireland. He bounced around Cold War era Europe
in Central America until the early nineteen eighties, when he
grew bored of army life and retired. Man immediately moved
to the private military sector, joining a company run by
S A. S founder David Sterling, who was pretty close

(07:56):
to just being a straight up fascist. Uh. And in
general Old Man's friends during this period were members of
like a trend in British conservatism that started in the
early nineteen seventies when the Labor Party won control of
the government and right wingers began ranting about communist infiltration.
In the early seventies, Sterling, his boss, had solicited volunteers
to join what he called a strike breaking army to

(08:19):
destroy the unions in Britain violently. Um. This put him
ideologically right in line with Margaret Thatcher's political mentor airy Neive,
who urged a right wing coup against the Labor government.
Oddly enough, this also put Sterling and his fellows right
in line with David Bowie, who openly supported an extreme
right wing government and stated in the early seventies that

(08:40):
Britain needed a dictator. Yeah, but you know that about
David Bowie, did you. Yeah, when like in the seventies,
when unions got super powerful in England and uh, the
Labor government started winning a bunch of David Bowie, an
extreme right wing government and a coup and a dictator. Uh.

(09:04):
You know this is like when you're presented with, like
when you know, the idea of a problematic saves, when
you're presented with some unfavorable information about somebody that you
love and you're like, I pretend I do not see it.
I feel like that's like I'm like, ohs it Sylvie
with your Lager's jersey. Of course. Exactly, yeah, exactly, yeah.
I mean, as much as we may try to be here,

(09:25):
we all have someone like that. I love what I
love Bill Shatner, and he's objectively a monster. Yeah. So
the talk of coups on the British right wing mostly
died down in nineteen seventy nine when Margaret Thatcher was
elected Prime Minister, but Simon Mann's social circle in the
early eighties was made up almost exclusively of folks who

(09:47):
were unabashed supporters of violently suppressing the left. He worked
with David Sterling's company as a rent a mercenary and
hobnobbed with high society. But a desk job didn't suit Man,
and he was already getting restless by the time his boss,
Guy in trouble for misusing funds donated to this to
a charitable foundation. Lucky for him, by this point, Saddam
Hussein had invaded Kuwait and the British military was suddenly

(10:08):
involved in something interesting again. Man re enlisted and joined
British Army staff in Saudi Arabia. The war didn't last long,
and in its wake, Simon Mann was left more bored
and restless than ever. He got involved with an oil
firm that was investing in the newly emerged oil industry
in Angola, and as luck would have it, just as
Man started sniffing around Angola in nineteen ninety two, the

(10:29):
nation found itself in the midst of a civil war.
Now Angola's second largest political party, UNITA, had started out
as a left wing organization supported by the People's Republic
of China, but during the nineteen eighties UNITA had pivoted
to the hard right under the command of Jonas Savimbi.
Thanks to our old buddy Paul Manafort, it received piles
and piles of money and guns from the Reagan administration

(10:50):
during this period. In nineteen ninety two, UNITA troops overran
several oil pump thing of a jigs near a town
called Soyo. The Angolan army failed to retake the will field.
Now this was a threat to Man's investments in the area,
but more than that, it was an opportunity. He and
his business partner, an entrepreneur named Tony Buckingham, approached the
government of Angola and said, Hey, we're pretty sure we

(11:12):
could put together a mercenary army to take care of
this rebel problem for you, and Angola said, yes, it
really is that easy, or at least it was in
the early nineties too. Get your own army. Yeah, that's cool,
totally cool. Like, wouldn't it be cool if you could
just like a master or own army with that amount

(11:32):
of ease, welcome back come about. Yeah, I mean that's
what I'm trying to do with this whole fd A thing.
But um, it's it's it's harder than I thought to
amass your own army, to be honest, frustrating. What would
what would your the what would your army be called?
I don't know, I think I don't know. I I uh,

(11:55):
maybe you're right. Maybe that's why I haven't gotten an
army yet, is that I haven't figured out the branding
for it. Yeah, that's a shame. I'll have to think
about that. Bridget So the whole, the whole, Yeah, so
Simon Mann and his partner Buckingham got to follow in
the grand tradition established by Bob Dinnard in myke Cory.

(12:16):
Only unlike those men, they were helping to keep a
ruler in power and actually fighting against far right militants.
So you might call this a promising start, or at
least as promising a start as any mercenary outfit can have. Um,
you know, broadly. Um. It doesn't end well, though, As
Adam Roberts notes, Quote Man, however, was a little different.
He was as likely to wear a crumpled business suit

(12:37):
as riomless spectacles and rimless spectacles as camouflage or chest webbing.
He was an early example of a new sort of mercenary,
the type familiar with company law, bank transfers, and investor agreements,
as with the workings of a browning pistol. In other words,
Simon Mann was probably the first example of a modern
mercenary leader, the prototype for men like Eric Prince so
before him. Mercenaries are like these, like really hard bitten people,

(13:01):
like guys who go to war in their youth and
never escape it, and like you know, like Bob Dinnard
in My Corey, like those those dudes saw heavy, heavy combat,
and it just like they were just fucked up in
a way that this was all they could do, and
all of their men were kind of the same way.
Simon Mann is someone who is perfectly capable of succeeding
in the non shooting people world, and in fact has

(13:24):
been very successful in that, but he likes the excitement
of war, so he's like he gets involved in this
mercenary company as a business um, and he's really the
first example of that. He's the Eric Prince type, right, um,
where he's a good he's good at running a corporation,
and he also just thinks it's cool to have an army. Um.
And that's that's kind of the sort of dude that

(13:45):
man is. And he blazes a trail. Yeah, I feel
like that's really a dangerous recipe, that kind of that
kind of dude who thinks it's it's cool to have
an army. Yeah. Yeah, because he's gonna use it. You know.
There's something to be said. Like Mike Horrer, as we
talked about, was a monster, like killed a ton of people,
super racist, but at least he got shot at a lot.

(14:07):
Like he and his men like they like he he
he didn't. He wasn't just like sitting in a boardroom
while people committed murder on his behalf like he was.
He was out there, and I guess that's something Simon
Mann is going to be the sits in a boardroom
while people get shot kind of leader. Um yeah, so yeah,
he was not really an adrenaline junkie um in the

(14:30):
in in the traditional way, Like he wasn't addicted to
like running into combat and getting shot at directly. He
was happy staying behind the lines and basically playing. Like
you get the feeling that running a mercenary army for
Simon Mann is like what a lot of people get
out of playing real time strategy video games. Like that's
kind of what he likes about it is it's like
the stakes and stuff. Um so yeah. He hires a

(14:51):
bunch of South African and British mercenaries to fill out
his army. These are white and mostly black men who
had worked in counter terrorism, which counter terrorism within the
South African context in this period meant that they had
been supporting the apartheid government of South Africa and fighting
against like Nelson Mandela and his crew. Um So, for
the sake of having a corporate structure and all the

(15:11):
legal permits necessary to buy guns and stuff. Man somehow
wound up in control of a private security firm called
Executive Outcomes. We'll talk about them a little bit later.
The bulk of his soldiers were veterans of the thirty
two Battalion, which is a veteran South African unit who
had fought in Angola before, and they've been fighting on
the same side as Jonas Savimbi then because the apartheid

(15:33):
government backed this far right militia. But since the apartheid
government had fallen, you know, they just wound up on
the other side, fighting against these guys that they fought
alongside before, which actually works out great because they know
all their tricks. Um thirty two Battalion had a reputation
for toughness and for viciousness. Their nickname was the Terrible Ones,
and in February of nineteen three they got a chance

(15:55):
to prove they deserve the name. Man's Little Army launched
an assault to retake the oil fields of Soil, supported
by the Angolan Air Force and army. The core of
their force was just twenty five men, but these were
hardened veterans, and they had the assault skills necessary to
act as the tip of the spear for the undisciplined
and largely amateur and Golan army. The Unita rebels were
forced to retreat and the end Goolan Army to established

(16:17):
a beachhead on the Soyu oil field. The success so
You earned Executive Outcomes a reputation for ferocity and competence.
The England government offered Man an eighty million dollar contract
if his firm would help them continue the war against
Unita and train the regular Angolan army. More battles followed,
and Executive Outcomes expanded into a much larger force, eventually
reaching more than a thousand regular employees, and Goalie even

(16:40):
let Man help run their air force. In nineteen nine four,
they carried out what Man claimed was the largest combined
arms attack in Africa since World War Two, forcing UNITA
out of the Soyu oil fields entirely. So he it
seems like it's working out so far. Uh in The
mid nineties were in general probably a pretty happy time
for Simon Mann. He expanded his little army into a

(17:01):
medium sized army, complete with planes and helicopters. From nine
to nineteen ninety six. They fought numerous battles in Angola
and other African countries. Twenty one Executive Outcomes men were
killed in various clashes, but they racked up a much
higher death toll among the rebels they fought. Unita was
largely funded by diamond mines, and Man's contract specified that
he got a cut of any diamond mine freed by

(17:24):
his men. So this is really interesting because it leads
to they don't just get like a percentage of the profits.
Executive outcomes like as part of like a web of companies,
and it's almost impossible. I don't think anyone has ever
really done a good job of unraveling all of them.
But Simon Mann and his business partners create like multiple
different companies, including a mining company that they have actually

(17:47):
like they get a contract to run these diamond mines
that they liberate with their soldiers, and then the mining
company that Simon Man owned starts mining the diamonds, so
they get money from the diamond mining. UM. He creates
a subsidiary called branch in g which does a lot
of the oil extractions. And this is where things start
to get really fucking complicated. UM and In fact, things
have been complicated from the beginning because at this point

(18:09):
in Africa, all of these different fucking mercenary companies and
mining companies are all like like it's it's it's shady
fucking corporate ship. Like where you you'll have like twenty
different companies that are all really the same company run
by the same three or four guides, but they're different
companies on paper. Um. So, like Executive Outcomes had started
as a front company for a South African war criminals

(18:31):
that he could evade international arms embargoes. And I don't
really know how Man wound up running it, but like
Man wound up basically using this as like the face
for his company, even though like the real company actually
doing most of the fighting for Executive Outcomes was another
company Man had founded called Sandline. Like it's all fucking

(18:51):
stupidly complicated. Um And to make matters even more complicated,
a bunch of other shady companies that we all know
and love were involved to for so, for example, that
big first deal that Executive Outcomes brokeren with Angola to
have their their their fucking mercenary army liberate those diamond minds.
It was brokered by de beers, so like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(19:13):
we all know to beers. Yeah, this is like tail
as old as time when it comes to fucking like
rich gas companies, like shell companies, you know, it's like
this is tales all the time, like companies where it's
all like, oh, these different companies with like crazy names
and it's all one company, but they were actually like
five companies. All you need to know is that, like

(19:34):
somebody is getting fucking paid and shady shit is happening, right, Yeah.
All you really need to know about this in particular
is that like Simon Mann and a handful of his
friends at the top, who are all white dudes, are
getting paid millions of dollars and all of the fighting
and dying is being done by mercenaries sixty or seventy
percent of whom are black guys. Um, And they're not

(19:57):
getting paid so much like it's good money for them.
It ain't Simon Man money, um, because the real moneys
and the diamonds in the oil um. The mercenaries are
just a way to get at the diamonds in the
oil um. Yeah, and you'll hear a lot of like
libertarian types talk about how good a job Executive Outcomes
did here um, and they did a great job at
fighting Unita, but they didn't really care about stabilizing Angola.

(20:19):
They cared about stabilizing the mines and oil fields of
Angola and the roads that lad those two distribution centers UM,
which is why they didn't actually achieve any long term
security for the region. UM. So yeah, by nine, Executive
Outcomes was effectively a giant web of companies, all more

(20:40):
or less run by Simon Mann and his buddy Buckingham,
with interest in mining, oil, security, air transport, and everything imaginable.
In nineteen the government of Sierra Leone went to Executive
Outcomes begging for their help and suppressing a brutal insurgent
group called the RUF. Now, the RUF had been formed
by a disaffected army corporal and they basically gone from

(21:01):
fringe political armed group to violent psychopaths. Their trademark tactic
was severing the arms of their victims. Depending on how
pissed they were, ore UF men would either give short
sleeves where they amputated just the hand, or long sleeves
where they took the whole arm. So yeah, these guys
are bad uh and they're kicking the ship out of
the government to Sierra Leone, and a big part of
why is that they're receiving money in arms from Liberian

(21:23):
President Charles Taylor. And so in short order, Sierra Leone
is near collapse and Executive Outcomes gets hired. They come
in and they effectively changed that. They pushed the rebels
back and focus heavily on retaking diamond minds the RUF
had occupied. This was a decent tactic, but it was
also very profitable. The Sierra Leonese government had awarded a
lucrative diamond mining contract to Branch Energy, a subsidiary of

(21:45):
Executive Outcomes UM, and the Executive Outcomes war against the
r u F went well enough that in nineties seven
seven ninety seven, Sierra Leone was able to hold elections. Now,
the story that comes next is really complicated. The story
the site you usually here is like again kind of
the libertarian mercenaries are good story, which is that like
Executive Outcomes comes in, they stabilize Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone

(22:08):
has their first independent elections that are like decent, and
then the I m F and the UN pressure the
new president to sign a peace deal with the r
UF that includes them forcing out executive outcomes. And as
soon as that happens, the r u F goes on
the offensive again and the co countries drawn into war.
And if you know, these mercenaries have been allowed to
keep doing their job, Sierra Leone would have stayed peaceful.

(22:29):
And it's the fault of the the u N and
the i m F. There's certainly blamed for the u
N and the i m F in here, but also
documents that have been released more recently show that the
President of the United States actually pressured or sorry that
the president of Sierra Leone went to UH, the United
States and was like, I want to kick these mercenaries
out because I don't think they're good for the country.

(22:51):
Will you demand that I kick them out so that
I have an excuse to say that I've like that,
like the international communities forcing me to force these guys out.
It's actually much more complicated than people who just want
to make this into a pro mercenary story want to see. Um, yeah,
it's fucking it's it's a whole mess. This this, this
whole story is a mess. And if it was true

(23:12):
that like mercenaries were good, and if they've been allowed
to do their thing, Sierra Leone would have stayed in peace. Um.
Then Sierra Leone probably wouldn't have had a civil war
that lasted for years, because mercenaries continued to be a
part of the fighting in Sierra Leone for the entirety
of the nineties and into the early two thousands. And
in fact, the government of Sierra Leone, after kicking Executive

(23:33):
Outcomes out, hired Sandline International, which was a subsidiary of
Executive Outcomes, to back the Nigerian Army and its peacekeeping there.
And things were still bloody for years. So it's just
like a big fucking stupid mess. But the point of
the matter is that mercenaries were good at capturing minds
um and fighting rebels. They were not good at actually
developing a stable society in any of the countries in

(23:54):
which they were active UM and Yeah. In spite of
their protestations that they to bring peace to Africa, Executive
Outcomes made the bulk of its money by getting poor
countries to sign over mining rights to branch energy UM. Yeah.
In nineteen ninety eight, Sandline International breached a u N
embargo on weapons sales to see ear leone. The company
also got in trouble in Papua New Guinea UM and

(24:17):
Man was flown out of the country under shady circumstances
for trying to help them put down a rebellion. It's
just a whole fucking complicated, messy story. Now. The end
of it is that by nineteen ninety eight, Africa was
filled with countless competing mercenary firms and nearly all of
them were either based in South Africa or mainly employed
South African soldiers UM. And the Mandela administration got really

(24:42):
fucking angry at this and was like, all you guys
are doing is perpetuating violence and all these countries and
like adding fuel to the fire and making a shipload
of money for yourselves. Fuck this. So in nineteen South
Africa passes the Foreign Military Assistance Act, which makes it
illegal for South Africa is to offer military aid to
foreign country companies. And this means that in nine executive

(25:05):
outcomes goes out of business um because they can't really
operate anymore. So South Africa shuts a lot of this
stuff down very effectively. So that's good, Yeah, it is good.
One thing I want to say is can we just
I know this sounds kind of silly. Can we talk
about the name executive outcomes? There are more? Is there

(25:25):
a more? Sort of like it's not clear what we do,
but you like, no one involves somebody getting rich and
fucking shady business dealings name than executives outcomes. Yeah, executive outcomes. Yeah.
It it is like the name you would give a
mercenary company in like a Paul Verhoeven movie. Like that's
what it's like, a RoboCop sounding fucking name. Yeah, it is.

(25:48):
It totally is yeah, yeah, yeah, and they are out
of business by and again this is heralded as a
tragic thing by a lot of folks. Um. I have
somewhat different opinions. Um, but yeah, it is a complicated
as hell story. And the fact that like there's all
these companies that are on paper even sometimes like competing
with each other, but also a lot of them are

(26:09):
owned by the same people. It's a big fucking mess.
But you know what's not a mess, Bridget tell me
what's not a mess? The products and services that support
this podcast. Oh, I want to hear all about them.
Is there some avenue where I can do that? No,
just just kidding that Avenue is now all right, we're

(26:35):
back bridget So, yeah, that's executive outcomes. They're they're they're
gone in Man in Buckingham sell off their interests in
most of their subsidiary companies and they get they're both
super fucking rich. We don't know how rich Man gets.
He claims Buckingham made a lot more money. Buckingham went
up with something like a hundred and fifty millions. Simon
Mann did very well for himself though. They're both millionaires,

(26:56):
and he was already rich. So yeah, good ship um. Now.
Interestingly enough, the men who actually did the fighting for
his companies did not get rich. Most of executive outcome
soldiers were black men, veterans of thirty two Battalion or
Nigerian Special Forces. Many of them were left destitute when
the company folded, forced to take on menial work as

(27:18):
security guards and live in Squalor in northwest South Africa.
They had not benefited from the network of mining companies
and airlines that filled Man's pockets for the better part
of a decade. Simon, though got to retire, he competed
in car races, married a much younger woman, and had
several kids. He should have been happy, but retirement didn't
suit Simon Mann, one of his friends, later recalled, I've

(27:40):
never seen anyone looks so bored. Man's fiftieth birthday came
and went. He tried to make peace with the fact
that his exciting youth as a war profiteer was behind him,
but he just couldn't do it. It's a sad story.
It is sad. You know, lots of money, younger wife,
how sad? I mean, you know, I feel bad for

(28:02):
the guy. Yeah, I mean he has a lot of
things that you might consider hallmarks of success, but he
doesn't get to profit off of a war. He doesn't
get to order men into battle anymore. Well, this is
like what you were saying, is like how much of
the bad ship that men do is out of kind
of boredom or just like wanting to like mix it

(28:23):
up and have a little fun. And like, you know,
I do think that that, like evil is definitely part
of it, But I do think another part of it
is like just like wanting to do something that is
exciting and kind of fun, even if it kills people
and like fox up their lives kind of especially if
it kills people and their lives, because then there's stick bonus.
Yeah again, this is why turning Florida into just a

(28:48):
walled off, open air war zone is such a good
business idea. I think, and look, nobody has to wear
masks there. It's it's what's fine. That's COVID nineteen is
gonna be at least your problem in war Uh yeah, Warida.
You've already got a name, You've got a Brandon. I
think I think we gotta do this. I thinks it's
the fast track. We gotta get this. I bet Governor

(29:10):
de Santis could get on board with this, you know
so um. In two thousand three, this aging former mercenary
board and in need of a challenge, had a fateful
meeting with a fellow named Eli Khalil, a Lebanese businessman
and financier with strong ties to the oil and gas industry.
Now Khalil's eyes had recently turned towards Equatorial Guinea. He

(29:33):
couldn't help but notice that Exon was paying the nation's dictator,
Oh Bong just three dollars a barrel, while nearby Nigeria
got eight dollars a barrel for their field. A savvier
head of state could negotiate much better terms, opening up
huge amounts of money to flow into the coffers of
a guy like Eli Khalil. He started talking to folks
members of Parliament in the House of Lords who might

(29:54):
be interested in funding such a venture. In January two
thousand three, he talked to sign and Man for the
first time. The two met in London and their talk
quickly turned to Equatorial Guinea. Now Man knew nothing about
the country, but Khalil told him he was friends with
an exiled Guinea and politician, Severo Moto Nasa. Now Moto
had been a mid level politician and Equatorial Guinea and

(30:16):
had fled for his life to avoid being murdered by
the dictator oh Biong. He'd wound up in Madrid, where
he'd charmed the Spanish Prime Minister and collected a small
circle of exiled fellow Guineas to him. Moto had become
the most vocal opponent of Obiang's regime, and Eli Khalil
later admitted to providing him with modest financial support to
make his exile comfortable. Now we are talking about very

(30:38):
powerful men and very serious crimes here, and I cannot
tell you precisely what happened next. A lot of this
is just like, this is the likeliest way things happened,
because nobody who actually knows is talking, or if they're talking,
they're lying, because again they're talking about overthrowing a government
and violating international arms embargoes. So again, all of this
is kind of me putting together from research I've done.

(31:00):
In the research, primarily Adam Roberts did like what seems
like the likeliest chain of events that actually occurred, And
from what I've read, it seems like Eli Halil, basically
on behalf of himself and other rich guys, found this
mercenary who was bored and started just talking to him
about all the terrible things this dictator Obian was doing

(31:21):
to his people, and also how weak the military there was,
and how they had this wonderful exiled opposition leader would
be a great leader in Obion in stead and kind
of let man put two and two together in his
own head, like, yeah, you just sort of like lay
out the bones of the crime, but don't suggest the crime.
And then this guy Simon Man is like, what if
we overthrew him? And Eli Halila is like, that's a

(31:43):
great idea, Simon, that is like how rich guy cry.
How it happens like where it's like you suggest it
to someone who like you suggest it and then they
think it's their idea. That is like t's oldest time
when it comes to like rich guy crime. If you've
seen Tiger King, you know what the I'm talking about.
That is how it goes down. Yeah, that this is

(32:07):
this is like not like a rare story in history.
So um yeah. Uh. In his career as a mercenary,
Man had always worked before for nations. He'd never gotten
involved in the kind of skullduggery that men like Mad
Mike Corey got famous for doing. But he'd grown up
reading the same kind of books as Mad Mike. I'm
I'm sure he read King Solomon's mind, being a British

(32:29):
child of that era. Uh, And he'd come into adulthood
hearing the stories of mercenaries like Cory and Denard. The
idea of sailing into some horribly oppressed little African country,
installing his own chosen king and making a big pile
of lute was deeply appealing to Man, so he started
to do his own research, and of course he came
across horror stories of Obiang's cannibalism and all the terrible

(32:50):
things that he'd done, and he also learned that the
leader was sick with cancer. This all convinced him that
to fly to Spain and meet with Moto, just to
see what he thought of the man. The two had
a couple of conversations and eventually Motto asked Simon, straight up,
will you help me take power in Equatorial Guinea. Man
later recalled that this was the moment he realized he
was getting involved with a serious game. So Man began

(33:13):
reaching out to his old friends, including Greg Wales, who
had worked as a an accountant for executive outcomes, and
they did enough research to learn that Obiang's army was small,
usually drunk, and easy pickings for an elite team of
veteran fighters. In recent interviews, Wales too refers to the
attempted coup as a game and starts states his belief

(33:33):
that the government of Spain supported from the beginning. And again,
all of like the white guys behind this, It's very
common for them to talk about like this is a game, um,
because I think that's really how a lot of them
see it, Like they want to get rich off of this.
But they also it just it's it's a game. Um. Yeah.
And you know it's not a game though for the
Spanish government. They want Equatorial guineas oil um. And you

(33:54):
get the feeling that you just kind of pissed that
they decolonized the country before they knew it had incredibly
rich oil fields. Um. So there's a lot of talk
about the fact that a Spanish oil and gas company
would have been given access to Equatorial guineas rich fields.
And if this is true, it means that the Spanish
government got involved as a way to stealthily recolonized part
of Equatorial Guinea. So Simon Mann began collecting soldiers, starting

(34:17):
with a handful of trustworthy white veterans. They tended to
be executive outcomes men. One of them, Style had flown
from man in Angola. He transitioned to a peaceful and
lucrative career as the private pilot for a billionaire. So
Style is and again he's a white guy. He's doing
incredibly well. He's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
He's like getting to live in luxury hotels and party
with a billionaire all the time. He doesn't need the money.

(34:40):
But his old friend comes out to him and says, hey,
do you want to fly a bunch of men into
battle to help overthrow this dictator? And style is like
fuck yeah, and he's like fun, yeah, because it sounds fun.
Like that's the reason he gives is that it sounds
like it'll be a neat time. Um. Yeah, this is
my favorite thing about like like people who do shitty

(35:01):
things when they don't need the money, they just like
are kind of reckless and like are up for up
for like a good time. Do you know. It's like
it's like you didn't need to do this, but you're
just like kind of a reckless person and you were bored. Yeah, yeah,
and that's why you did it. As another mercenary who
was approached to the job told the author of the

(35:21):
book the Wonga Cou quote, you can see why this
is tempting. It's fun, it could work. You trust the leaders.
Some of the guys did it for the kicks because
life is boring. Wow, exactly. At least they're at least
they're open about it. Where it's like like this boring,
they're very open about it. Yeah, it's it's awesome. Actually,

(35:41):
I mean no, it's not it's horrible but interesting. Yeah.
So the bulk of the men who were recruited by
man Um, the guys who were like the cannon fodder
for this operation, were of course Black soldiers. Buffalo soldiers
is the term you'll hear for these guys, the veterans
of the thirty two Battalion in South Africa. And these
men's stories were saturday. They were not doing it for fun.

(36:02):
Most of them lived in a place called Pomfrey, which
had been the military base they'd been bunked in when
they'd been in the South African military and was now
when old asbestos filled slum that they lived in with
their families in horrific squalor Adam Roberts rights quote. Families
told of husbands and fathers who scrabbled at the chance
of well paid work, no questions asked. At one house,

(36:22):
a wooden carving on the wall shows a lion eating
a man with a gun. Cecilia Chimoisha says that her father, Edwardo,
fought as a buffalo soldier for the South Africans for
nearly two decades. He received a small army pension and
took a job as a security garden Pretoria, leaving his
family behind because there's no jobs in Pomfrey. Pomfrey is
only full of humans, there's no jobs. He was working

(36:42):
in Pretoria, his contract had finished, and he came home
for Christmas and New Year. When he returned to Practoria,
he met a guy at an association for people who
were in Battalion thirty two, a hostel. Then he phoned
us and said that he was going to Congo, And
most of the accounts of the black men, who again
are the majority of the fighting for it here, are
the same. There offered jobs that paid more than their

(37:03):
current work and offer maybe the possibility of an escape
from poverty while still being a pittance of what Eli
Khalil and Simon Mann planned to make in the operation quote.
Friends recruited each other, cousins urged relatives to join, hoping
to bring more wages into the family. The signs of
misery and palm frey, broken windows, sandy Street strewn with
litter all help explain the readiness of men to border

(37:24):
plane for an ill defined military job. Many of the
foot soldiers and their families later claimed ignorance of the
coup plot. Perhaps they were not told, at least not
early on. And there's a good chance that most of
these men, up until like the day they were supposed
to carry out this coup, didn't really know what they
were being brought in for. Um. So recruiting these black soldiers,
who were again expected to do almost all of the

(37:46):
fighting and killing, was basically an after thought thought for
Simon Mann. He devoted most of his pre coup efforts
to recruiting rich white guys to provide funding for the
whole escapade. He did this by throwing a series of
fancy parties that is Johannesburg home. According to an attendee
at one of these parties, interviewed by The Sunday Telegraph, quote,
it was a casual conversation at a drinks party around

(38:07):
a swimming pool about a security project in an African mind. Yeah,
First of all, I love this accent you're doing, and
I say that. Um. Also, this sounds terrible and they
did terrible things. This Johannesburg pool party sounds kind of lit.
I'm not gonna yeah, I I have. I have gone

(38:28):
drinking at parties that are heavily mercenary, attended a couple
of times, and you drink a lot. Yeah, yeah, you
drink a lot with private military contractors. Although the drunkest
people at the party were the U n UM. They
actually like fucking parked illegally and we were going to
get the party busted and we had to like find
the drunken U n guys and steal their keys to

(38:50):
move the land rover. It was fucking night. Wait, why
is this not a podcast episode? You're doing story? It's
a fun tale. You are you got up? We got
you can get up to some ship in Iraq? Yeah
so um yeah. So he hosts these these pool parties
where he talks to people. They're just having drinks and

(39:11):
he's like, you know, we're having a project to mine.
You know, it'll be a quick profit if you're willing
to invest some money. And then, you know, most people are,
you know, as soon as he mentions that the project
is an equatorial guinea, most reasonable people are like, oh fun, No,
I have no interest in getting involved in business in
that company, Like it's way in that country, it's way
too unstable. Um. But the people who are interested. Man

(39:32):
then has like private one on one conversations with Um
and he asked him to put up a hundred thousand
dollars in seed money and promises them a million dollar
return inside of ten weeks. Now, I'm not an investment guru,
but I know some people who are good at investments,
and one thing they'll all say is that if anyone
is offering you returns like that really returns an excess

(39:55):
of like five, ten, maybe fifteen percent, um, Like, that's good.
If someone's offering you ten times return in ten weeks,
that's a scam. They're either going to steal your money
or they're committing some sort of horrible crime. And this
is the horrible crime type thing, right Like, somebody either

(40:15):
either somebody is getting scammed or there's a terrible fucking
like a legal thing going on. For sure, it's either
heroin or a coup, right Like, if they're not just
going to take your money and run, it's heroin or
a coup. Yeah. So, um, a number of people invested,
but a much larger number wound up spreading rumors around
town about the coup that man was planning. Because again,

(40:37):
he tries to stay secret about this, but he's bad
at it, and he just starts like telling anyone who says, yeah,
I might invest money, like yes, we're gonna overthrow this government.
So like he's simultaneously these black soldiers that they're expecting
to do the fighting don't know what they're getting involved in.
And like every random white dude that Simon man gets
drunk at here's about his plan to overthrow the government
of Equatorial Guinea. Like it so funny, Like this actually

(41:03):
reminds me of when we were at that when we
were talking about like Nazis, how I was so surprised
by how many of them had. Like we're taken down
by personal messiness that you think you would be some
like a dictator or like someone who is committed to
threading awfulness and like shittiness in the world, and then
you get taken down by your own messiness. It's like again,

(41:27):
like you got drunk and told everybody like that that
really tells you all you need to know. Don't you
think that that is what separates the bad people who
are terrible but ultimately just foot soldiers, to the really
danger The really dangerous people are people like Eli Khalil,
like the guy at the top of all this who
was smart enough to be like this Simon guy is

(41:47):
going to try to do this, and he's going to
be incompetent and messy. But as long as I like
steer clear just enough that I can't be legally tied
to him, this might work out. If it does, I
make a bunch of money. If it doesn't, I'm out,
what you know, a hundred grand or two. He's the
one gathering most of the funds anyway, Like, those are
the people you have to fucking watch out for. Is
that you like Halil's like the Simon Man's funk up

(42:10):
a bunch of ship, but they're usually too dumb to
get most of what they want because they're just they're
they're messy. Yeah, Samon Man is messy. Listen, if you're
gonna be if you're gonna be involved in like like
dirty ship, don't get drunk and tell everybody that's Like
that's like a number one rule. Yeah, Like, if you're
gonna be a dealer, don't smoke your own stash. And

(42:31):
if you're going to plot coup's stay sober until the
coup's done. That's what fucking Bob Denard did, right, They
brought the champagne. They didn't drink the champagne before the coup.
Mike Corean is men did and they got into an
airport gunfight. Drinking getting wasted before the coup means an
airport gunfight. Getting wasted after the coup means a fun evening.
Like it's not hard. I almost I almost feel like

(42:55):
you're like giving people the recipe, like launch a successful coup,
get drunk after those Venezuelan guys who got busted, they
were on a boat, you know, they were getting drunk
on that boat, like, yeah, fucking idiots. And of course
it was like most of the actual dying was done
by like these local Venezuelans who just wanted to be
freed by a shitty dictator. These white guys wanted to

(43:18):
be heroes. It's fucking bullshit. It's so frustrating. I don't know,
maybe they'll suffer real penalties for what they did, because
funk those guys, Uh, Like, it's so such bullshit. It's
always such bullshit. So man was not secretive about what
he was proposing to do. Obviously, he slipped up constantly
in the drinking parties. Um. And you know, while a

(43:39):
small number of people invested, a much larger number of
the people that he talked to wound up just spreading
rumors around town that Simon Mann was planning a coup.
South African intelligence found out about it almost instantly and
wrote out multiple different reports about the Button coup in
the months before it was attempted. So like South African
authorities like right away know what's going on. Um Now,

(43:59):
it's like really that Simon Mann himself was well aware
that the gist of his plan was known to local authorities,
and he doesn't seem to have cared much. There's debate
as to why, but the likeliest explanation is that he
just didn't think anyone would bother to stop him. He
thought that Obiang was such a bad dictator and international
law was so lax that nothing would happen um. And
he had good reason to think this. Um. His partner Wales,

(44:22):
had reached out to an American lobbyist, Joe Sala, who
advised them that a four day program of introductions to
US officials could be arranged for Motto, the guy they
wanted to put in place as the new dictator, for
just forty grand And we don't know exactly what kind
of deal Whales worked out with Sala for Motto, but
the two talked regularly for months and when man purchased
a former Coastguard Boeing seven for the United States to

(44:45):
use in his coup. The whole process of buying this
former military aircraft and shipping it to South Africa went
really smoothly, like weirdly smoothly, and there are there's no
hard evidence, but there's a lot of people who think
that someone, if not a US government at the top level,
people in the US government knew about this button coup
and wanted to kind of help it along a little

(45:06):
bit by letting them get access to this plane more easily. Again,
there's a good chance that people at the top did
know that. George Bush was like, yeah, funk it, let's
see what happens. Who knows. Yeah, I honestly wouldn't put
it past him, like that does sound like something he
would do and what it also might have been due
to the Spanish government asking the US government to help
things out here because Spain again had a massive financial

(45:30):
interest in this. The Spanish government did because they wanted
to get access to Equatorial Guineas oil, and Spain had
backed the U S and the invasion of Iraq, which
was like the Spanish leadership had backed the U S
and the invasion of Iraq, which is a very politically
dicey decision, to say the least, and there's suspicions that
basically the Prime Minister of Spain was like, look, George
w Bush, like, when you wanted to go to war,

(45:50):
we helped you out. Now I want to overthrow a
dictator and take some oil, Like let's get some quid
pro quo going up in this bitch. Um. So you
know you can't I can't say enough. This is two
thousand three and two thousand four, like yeah, so um.
Wales was responsible for also putting together most of the

(46:13):
non military aspects of the scheme. He set the day
of the actual event for a Thursday or a Friday,
because those were the days that most ministers would be
in the capital in Malabo and Equatorial Guinea. The coup
plotters would then have the weekend to consolidate their power
and reopen the country on Monday. So that's kind of
the was the goal is, like we overthrow the government
on Friday, we like work through the weekend, and then

(46:34):
by Monday we got the whole new country set up.
I mean, I like the way they think it seems
it sounds very efficient and that within the way the plan.
Yeah sure, yeah, that makes sense. That scans um. So
he had plans to get the National press such as
it was in line and put together and quote impressive
plans for social, political, medical, and economic improvements for the

(46:56):
general populace um that he was going to have motto
announced on the monday he took power. Now, none of
these plans would actually be implemented, but that would get
like just talking about it would get the world off
of their backs long enough to suck Equatorial Guinea dry.
And I'm gonna quote now from the book the Wonga Coup. Quote.
By the turn of the year Wales, his ideas and
presumably Man's, had expanded to something grander and Equatorial Guinea.

(47:20):
He proposed forming a company controlled by Man and his
closest plotters to run Equatorial Guinea, with Moto as a
puppet leader. The English accountant had long liked to dream
up plans and models for how to run failing countries.
He says he has written other proposals for other companies
modeled on the old buccaneering firms that underwrote British imperial
expansion in India and Africa. He thinks Somalia and Gabon

(47:40):
should be run by boards of directors, not by governments
or warlords. So he wrote a lengthy document, the Bite
of Benin Company Document, describing how such men such a
company could take power and run the oil rich West
African state. John Smith believed the document shows how the
coup plot was pure neo colonialism. To put Motto in
place so they can remove him in any time. Simon

(48:00):
would have been the president's security advisor and his company,
the Bite of Benin Company, would have controlled it all. So, yeah,
that's the plan. That's suck up. It's super fucked up. Yeah,
it's real bad. You shouldn't do that, shouldn't shouldn't do
that at all. By the way, the name the Wonga
coup comes from a letter that I believe it was
Mark Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher's son um was one of the

(48:24):
backers of this plan, and he got He got in
legal trouble for it eventually, and again the exact dimensions
to which he was involved aren't known. It kind of
looks like he just gave them some money, knowing vaguely
that they were going to funk up some ship in
Africa and maybe make a lot of money. Um, but yeah,
so Margaret Thatcher's kid like h Simon Mann writes him
a letter when he needs more money and refers to

(48:44):
the money that he needs as wonga, which is like
upper classs rich British kids slang for cash. Um like
it's what Etonian boys called cat like some wonga? What
of the wonga? Whatever? Fucking bullshit, fancy rich British kid stupid.
I hope that you do. I hope that you do
your like rich British kid accent A hundred more times

(49:06):
in this episode. Very happy. I'll do my best. Can
you do that voice to call to an ad Brick?
Just won? Oh? God? Alright, alright, speaking of colonialism and wonga,
speaking of wonga. He'll get this show somewhere. I went
Australian right away, like I immediately, like Beard in Australian territory.

(49:28):
I didn't want to say anything, but it's very Australian.
I know, I know, I know, I know. I could
do a pretty good Irish accent. Yeah I do what Irish?
That's a Irish boy faith? And why don't you check
out these odds? Now? Give this man a raise? Good?

(49:48):
That was so good not even please HOI you toy
t tidy Tom. We're back from the odd brick. It's
the Irish behind the Bostard's episode that really is, like,
I guess that's I don't know what kind of colonialism

(50:10):
it is when you try to make fun of rich
British people but you're bad at the accent, so you
just make fun of another colonialized oppressed people, the Irish. Instead.
You're like, I wanted to make fun of them, but
now the Irish are getting pulled into it somehow. I
don't know. I'm so sorry Ireland. Um, you didn't deserve that.
You're a wonderful country. So the Bite of Bening company

(50:32):
document shows the plotters fretting that oil firms may not
play ball after the coup. They were worried that, like, um,
basically that some of these international companies would be like,
you illegally overthrew a government and maybe we don't want
to do business with you, which is weird because it
means that these coup plotters had way more faith in
the morality of oil company executives than anyone on earth

(50:53):
ever has. Um. Yeah, so, uh, they were worried about
this because if oil revenue stopped flowing. You know, there
was no point in taking control of Equatorial Guinea, which
again shows that they did not care about overthrowing this dictator.
But they knew that there were regular direct flights between
Malabo and Houston, UM because you know, there was a
lot of American interest in Equatorial Guinea. UM, and they

(51:16):
didn't want to like piss off the United States because
if they messed with the oil interests at all and
like damaged the business interests of any of these companies
actively mining Equatorial Guinea, that would get the Marines in.
Like that was like literally like the writing they wrote,
like this is what gets the Marines in. UM. So
they had to assure the American government early on, and
that was something they like wrote into their plan. UM.

(51:36):
They figured that like the best way to do this
was to offer lucrative jobs to American private security firms UM.
And they decided that like one way to do this
was to offer the Military Professional Resources Incorporated mpr I
company the job of guarding the new president once the
government was overthrown. So they like are immediately thinking, how
do we bribe the US into not stopping us from

(51:56):
doing this? UM. Yeah, the bite have been in company.
Document is proof positive against any claims that humanitarian concerns
were a factor in the coup. Under its strictures, the
coup plotters would have total control over the new president's
schedule and what contracts he was allowed to sign. The
plotters were well aware of the fact that Equatorial guineas
first dictator Macias had initially been a figurehead for the
Spanish government. They would not allow this to happen again.

(52:20):
The document itself notes, quote, the two most potent general
threats are one. As it is potentially a very lucrative game,
we should expect bad behavior, disloyalty, rampant individual greed, a
rational behavior, kids in toy shop style, backstabbing, bum fucking,
and similar ungentlemanly activities too. If the result is not
seen by the outside world is noticeably better than the

(52:41):
current situation, our position there and uh in anything other
than the very short term will be hard to sustain,
and our involvement will be more likely to be the
subject of unfavorable scrutinty. So that's really the wording on
this is fascinating to me, Like because there's so number
one they call it a game again, but also because
there's gonna be so much money at stake, we should
expect everyone to act badly, Like we have to assume

(53:04):
everyone's going to be a piece of ship that's involved
in this plan that we're cooking up. Yeah, everyone's going
to act like a child at a toy store. And
then also for I do think referring to it as
a game, it really shows you, like what they were
thinking that they like don't understand this sort of steaks. Yeah,
they don't. And it's is like this is StarCraft for
rich people, Like that's what this is. Is like that, Yeah,

(53:26):
it's it's fucking wild. So the biggest issue facing the
plotters was the problem of acquiring weaponry UM and a
lot is said stereotypically about how easy it is to
acquire guns in Africa, but that's actually not as true
as people think. For one thing, there's fewer firearms and
the entire African continent than in the United States, probably

(53:47):
a lot fewer, because the US has roughly half of
all the world's guns. UM in South Africa, probably the
most heavily armed nation on the continent, roughly ten out
of one hundred people own a gun. In the United States,
there are one dred sixteen firearms for every human being.
That's just private guns too. By the way, UM, Now,
there are places in Africa where you can buy an

(54:08):
a K forty seven for cheap, generally places that have
just finished having civil wars or coups or whatever. But
that's not the case everywhere, and just being able to
buy an a K forty seven doesn't mean you can
actually get access to high quality arms. Coup plotters needed
not just random street a ks. They needed good, reliable guns,
and they needed things other than a K forty sevens.
They needed hand grenades, heavy machine guns, mortars, mortar ammunition,

(54:29):
and rocket launchers. All of this ship is necessary if
you're going to overthrow even a small modern government. Um
and that stuff is hard to fucking get, especially in
the quantities that you need. Man eventually worked at a
deal with an arms manufacturer, Zimbabwe Defense Industries z d I. Now,
he had no end user certificate, which is what you
need to arm a large group of people without breaking

(54:50):
international law, but he did have bribe money. Z d
I didn't want to just deliver weapons to Man in
his army in their own country though, because they legally
couldn't ship them to him going to handle all these
logistical hurdles. Man and the other plotters set up an
incredibly complex and stupid scheme. The short of it is
that they bought a bunch of extra guns from z
d I to have delivered for rebels that they knew

(55:11):
in the Congo, and they were going to have these
rebels attack and take an air strip from the government
of the Congo. The z d I plane would then
fly into the Congo, land at that air strip and
unload a bunch of guns to pay the rebels and
to give Man's army, which they would then fly into
Zambia to give to their fighters. So like, we're already
over complicating things, right, like every every other complication is

(55:34):
that is another way for things to fail. Like this
is like we haven't even like the steps before we
even land an army in fucking Eduatorial Guinea are such
a fucking mess. It's clearly a bad idea. So Man's
forward team would meet with these rebels and then fly
to Zambia, where the bulk of the mercenaries would be waiting.
They'd load up their arms and then fly to Equatorial

(55:56):
Guinea to carry out their coup. A separate group of
mercenaries arding future present Moto would land by boats supported
by a small squadron of Spanish frigates, which would be
there to secure naval supremacy. Now in war, as in life,
simple plans are always better than complicated ones, and Man's
convoluted coup scheme collapsed before it really got started. The
Congolese rebels failed to capture the airstrip and probably never

(56:19):
even tried to assault it. The z d I plane
had no place to land, so it flew back to Harare.
The Spanish frigates sailed off when it became clear that
no coup was going to occur, and in general, the
whole scheme diet fizzled. And in fact, even the plane
that the Man's advanced team flew from the Congo to
Zambia like it hit a bird in midflight and had
to be emergency repaired. It just it falls apart fucking immediately,

(56:44):
and most of Man's army just spends the whek getting
drunk in fancy hotels. Um. So, not not a great
first try, not a great first try. But is it
fun to get drunk in fancy hotels? It is? It
is uh and a lot of of the guys who
were getting drunk in those hotels would go on too
wish that they just stayed in the hotels getting drunk. Um. Yeah,

(57:05):
imagine if that's all they did where they were just like, oh,
I just I just went to this hotel, got drunk,
and then I like stayed there. I'm at home. Cous
are awesome. So after this inauspicious cluster fox, several of
the coup's early backers backed out, wisely, deciding that Man
and his fellow mercenaries were a lot worse at overthrowing
corrupt regimes than they'd been at propping them up. But

(57:28):
Simon Mann had the coup plotting equivalent of blue balls,
and he was not the kind of man who was
gonna let a little thing like rank failures stop him.
He committed to trying again and started pounding the ground
in search of yet more funding. This was not an
easy process, and in interviews Man's friends noted that he
was visibly uneasy by late February two thousand four. Quote

(57:48):
he looked under huge emotional pressure, recalls one who saw
him regularly. Matters were not helped by Amanda, his free
spending wife. On one occasion, he lost it. He threw
the phone ten ms at a wall and it smashed
to a thousand bits to somebody who worked in his office.
The reason, on top of the stress of finding cash
for his coup, he had to provide ever more dollars
to his wife. Man could afford it in the longer term,

(58:10):
but he lacked ready cash. His wife and children used
to luxury were running up bills just as he needed
every dollar. And it's it's a whole another level of
self absorbed when you're angry at your wife and kids
for spending money not because you don't have it, because
you need it to overthrow a sovereign nation to steal
it's oil. It's like, baby, don't you understand I need this.

(58:31):
I need this money for the coup. I need this
for the coup. That's my coup bucks. She's like you,
I'm getting a facial Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like
like normal like middle class guys who are the kind
of man Simon man is when they get old, like
spend too much money buying like a shitty convertible, Simon

(58:52):
launches a coup. That's really what is going on here. Yeah,
It's like, are you gonna buy a like midlife crisis
car or execute a Q whichever yeah one of the two.
So um yeah he uh. He starts to get desperate,
right um, because he's having trouble raising enough money, and

(59:12):
like all desperate men, he cuts corners. And the fact
that he was cutting corners in his attempted a second
attempted a coup is embodied nowhere better than the story
of how Man planned to collect his zimbabwe and weapons
the second time around. Rather than set up a drop
in another country, he just decided to fly his seven
seven loaded with mercenaries into Zimbabwe and pick up the
guns there. Now, these guns were being bought illegally, and

(59:35):
the mercenaries were also illegal. Um so. This introduced a
number of wrinkles into the plan. Now Man and his
soldiers were going to be landing in another sovereign nation
and buying illegal weapons, which is a whole new list
of people you have to bribe. Like smuggling an army
all the way across Africa is not an easy thing
to do, um so, but Man decides, fuck it, we'll

(59:58):
figure it out. On Arch fourth, a small advanced team
flew into Equatorial guineas Capital. Their role would be to
set things up for when the full army arrived. Unfortunately
for them, Obiang and his government were well aware of
what was about to happen. For one thing, the South
African government had warned them in detail that Simon Mann
was planning a coup. For another thing, before the first
coup attempt, Man had sent an advanced team into Equatorial Guinea.

(01:00:21):
They've gotten drunk in one of the capital's few restaurants
and talked openly about their plans to overthrow the government.
So there's a number of reasons that Obiang knows what's
about to happen again, like getting drunk, and like getting
drunken talkie if you're if you're planning a coup, If
you're out there listening and you're planning a coup, don't

(01:00:42):
get drunken talkie. After Bridget and I will have a
lot more coup advice in our new podcast, How to Coup,
which launches on the I Heart network this August, so
you can wherever you get your podcast, how did you Yeah?
If you're stockpiling F A L S and three oh
eight mm o in hopes of overthrowing I don't know Uruguay,

(01:01:03):
don't do it. Until you listen to our podcast, because
we're gonna have a lot of advice for you. We
should call it the A b C's for always be couping.
You gotta be learning your A b c s. You know,
if you're going to carry out a coup, the including
d don't drink um. That really is the number one

(01:01:26):
lesson I've gotten. Like that is like the undoing of
so many people in this story. It's like getting and honestly,
like these are horrible, horrible people. I want to make
it very clear, they're terrible. Fuck them all, But I
kind of I've been there where you like, have a plan,
you have a few drinks, you're feeling good. You start
talking like, I don't know how it happens. Oh, we

(01:01:50):
could call our podcast get a Coup. Oh that's good, dude,
that's a good one. That's a good one. It's gonna
be a great show. Gonna be a great show. We'll
have to have Simon man on. Thank you so uh.
When the point team flew in on March fourth, Obiang
was ready um and still the coup plotters and the

(01:02:11):
advanced team member Nicki took steps to try to conceal
the fact that we're about to execute a coup. So
Nick Deta is like the head of the advanced team
that lands in Equatorial Guinea a head of the second attempt,
and as soon as he lands, he gets the impression
that the government might be aware that they're about to
carry out a coup. And his response to this is
to send out a bunch of text messages on his phone,

(01:02:31):
which he was sure was bugged, stating, hey, guys were
canceling the coup. Not because he was canceling the coupe
because he caught that. We thought that would throw the
government off of their trail. I kind of love that
smart people here. So just as the Spanish government hoped
a successful coup would allow them to profit from Equatorial

(01:02:53):
Guineas oil, South Africa felt that stopping the coup would
help them profit off Equatorial Guineas oil. So, in addition
to warning young South Africa put in a call to
Robert Mugabe, the dictator of Zimbabwe now and they were like, Hey,
a bunch of mercenaries led by a British guy are
going to be picking up a legal arms at your airport.
Maybe do something about it. And Mugabe didn't really care

(01:03:14):
that much about Equatorial guineas sovereignty. But he was, above
all else terrified of Britain, which is the most reasonable
thing about Robert Mugabe. And he and many of them
in his government were worried that their old colonial oppressor
was plotting at coup against Zimbabwe. So when they hear
that a British mercenary is about to land in their
country and pick up a pile of guns, they're not
worried about Equatorial Guinea. They're worried that he's going to

(01:03:35):
try to overthrow his own country. So, to make a
very long and dumb story short, man lands in Harare
with the bulk of his army and they all get
arrested before they can even so much as pick up
their guns. His advanced team is also arrested. In Equatorial Guinea,
both groups of mercenaries mercenaries are thrown into horrible prisons
and tortured. One man dies under torture in each country. UM.

(01:03:58):
Now in Zimbabwe, man and his mercenaries are all tried,
convicted and sentenced to prison. Um Most of the grunts
got a year with no time served for the six
months had already been incarcerted pre trial. So all these
poor black eyes just get no money and are in
jail for eighteen months. Um. Yeah, most of the white
men got sixteen months sentences. They all get fined two

(01:04:20):
thousands Zimbabwe dollars each, which comes to about thirty cents,
so at least the fine isn't too much. But yeah,
Man himself was sentenced to seven years and forfeited both
the plane he bought in a hundred and eighty thousand
dollars in cash. He also missed the birth of his
seventh child, which happened the same month that he was sentenced.
H this was a mild penalty compared to the suffering

(01:04:40):
experience by the families of the black soldiers. Man had
led into this stupid disaster because Man's family at least
was still rich. According to Lawonga Coup quote, Viviana Chimuchi,
wife of Eduardo who's one of the men, was desperate.
We attended. We depend on people who have pity and
on the churches we get food parcels. She explains. Her
daughter Cecilia says, we heard the sentence of my father

(01:05:01):
on the radio that we were We were surprised. They
told us he would come out now tears appear in
her eyes. She blames man in the financiers. Those people
put us into trouble. We're suffering because they put our
father into problems. She once man punished. I'm happy not
to give him seven years, no to give him the
death penalty he deserves it. Wow powerful words. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(01:05:23):
And at the end of the day, like yeah, man
and his fellow white guys, they all do suffer. Like
they spend time in a really shitty prison and man,
a couple of them get tortured. Um, but the fucking
these these poor black dudes who probably didn't even really
know what they were being paid to do in detail, uh,
suffer the worst. And all of the white guys when
they do get out of prison, have our rich still,

(01:05:46):
and all of these black guys their families are poorer
than ever. It's it's some bullshit. It's so sad like that,
like what you've just described, I feel like is such
a blueprint for so many things, where white guys go
into this, they come out of it and they're fine,
and then the people that that kind of like go
along with it, who are more oft than than not

(01:06:07):
black just have nothing. And it's just it's it's it's
makes me, it's it's it's very upsetting, and I think
it's like a common thing when we talk about Yes,
it is by far the normal way for this ship
to go. So Man and his fellow whites had enough
money to pay bribes that made their lives behind bars easier.
Zimbabwe in prison is never comfortable, but they were able

(01:06:29):
to secure themselves enough food to stay relatively healthy, as
well as a few luxuries. The same was not true
for the black men that they'd planned to lead into battle.
Those men spent their year behind bars on the edge
of starvation. When they were freed, they found themselves in debt,
nursing criminal records, and tired by their toxic affiliations to
one of the most disastrous coups in history. Simon Mann, however,

(01:06:49):
was it extradited to Equatorial Guinea after four years in
the Zimbabwe in prison, and it is widely believed that
he was traded by Zimbabwe for oil. He went on
to spend another eighteen month the Equatorial guineas notorious Black
Beach Prison. Before his extradition, President Obiang had promised to
personally sodomize and skin alive the mercenary, but he didn't actually, yeah,

(01:07:11):
he didn't really do that. Um. It was bad though.
Man was tortured horribly and locked in solitary confinement. He
was beaten and starved. I'm not gonna say he suffered
a fair punishment, but he was. He was punished like
he has. He spends like years in unspeakable misery and torment.
So you know, at least there's that. Uh. Yeah. During

(01:07:32):
his time incarcerated, he was allowed to speak to journalists
provided he telled them that he was being treated very well.
And you can find interviews from him and like the
mid aughts where he's talking about like, no, I haven't
been tortured. Everything's good here. When he got out of
prison in two thousand ten, he started being like, yeah,
I was absolutely tortured and he's probably not lying like
he almost certainly was tortured. Um. But yeah. One of

(01:07:52):
these interviews I found from before he was released through
the Independent, has a very choice quote from Mr Mann
quote Hugo, tigers shoot, but you don't expect the tiger
to win. Yeah. He was pardoned by President obiong And
two thousand nine, and in two thousand tend he gave
an interview to the Guardian where he revealed the details

(01:08:12):
of his torture and provided this quote. I didn't go
there to make lots of money and sit on my
own and say hey, I'm a rich man. I did
it for my family, to improve their lives. I made
the wrong choices. I am very sorry about that, for
the pain and grief I brought my family, especially my
daughter who was ten when I was incarcerated. Which is
like Number one clearly doesn't give a shit about any

(01:08:33):
of the like the soldiers that he put in danger
through as a result of this. He doesn't even mention them.
Doesn't even mention them. Um. And also like you were
rich already, your family could have lived a comfortable life
and you never needed to work again. You wanted them
to be like own their own islands rich. That's why
you did this. Oh my gosh, this could be a

(01:08:54):
whole other behind the bastard's episode of like people who
have tons of money who just get this obsession with
the money. Where you could have done you could have whatever,
like shitty, illegal, horrible thing you did. You could have
not done that and lived a comfortable life, Like what
is this obsession with Yeah, we have to be private

(01:09:14):
island rich, and I don't. I don't even think it
was really that. I honestly don't think I think the
money was an incentive, but I think more than anything,
man wanted the excitement and he wanted this to be
able to brag about, like he wanted to be able
to think this would be the feather in his cap
as a mercenary. All these other mercenaries like Mike Cory
and Bob Denard, they had led coups, like they had

(01:09:36):
helped overthrow governments. He had never gotten to do that,
and he wanted to. You know, it goes back. Yeah,
if you had to say, how many people out there
to doing horrible things? Do you think you're doing it
for bragging rights? If you had to say one way
or the other, that's a very high percentage. Yeah, you know,

(01:10:00):
you don't. You know, speaking of Tiger King, that that
guy who was the inspiration for Scarface, that's clearly a
guy who was just in it for the money. Because
he he doesn't seem to have any desire to brag
about it, like he just wanted to fucking He got rich,
he did his time, he got out, and he bought
a fucking farm in the middle of nowhere. I can
respect that, even if you do awful things to get
the money. But most of them want everyone to know

(01:10:23):
how cool they are. So up. It's like worse to me.
I don't know. I find it like yeah more yeah,
it's like it's like more like, um, I can't understand it. Yeah, yep, yep,
souh more. Recently, um, in like a couple of weeks ago,

(01:10:44):
uh fucking uh. Simon Mann was interviewed by The Daily
Mail about the coronavirus epidemic of all things, and the
Daily Mail being a giant piece of ship. They were
basically like, Hey, you spent a bunch of time in
solitary confinement. What's your advice for people going through quarantine? Oh? No,
the idea for a fucking article I can conceive of. Um.

(01:11:07):
But Man's quote is really funny. Quote. You have to
make your world the people in the place of your confinement,
and stop constantly thinking at this time we should be
doing this or that and the kids should be going
back to school. Those thoughts are the ones that hurt you. Um,
which I don't know, maybe is good advice. I kind
of refused to acknowledge this guy is being capable of
giving good advice, so fuck it. Yeah, fuck him. I

(01:11:31):
don't want to hear his advice. He honestly like, this
is this is how I where I'm at. That same
advice could be given by somebody else and I'd be like, oh,
good advice, could advice? It's given by him, and I'm like,
fucking I'm terrible advice. Yeah, fucking terrible advice. Well badka

(01:11:57):
you want to know would be good advice? Right now? Uh?
Robert advising people to go to go listen to Bridget's
new podcast. Yes, I can tell you all about it.
Oh please do um, thank you, Sophie. UM. My new
podcast is called There Are No Girls on the Internet.

(01:12:17):
It drops on I Heart Radio on July seven, and
it's all about exploring the intersections of gender, technology and
the Internet. You know. It's a culture show that really
asked how have women and other marginalized voices shaped the
experience of being online? And we really have shaped it.
So please check it out. Question mark exclamation point. Do it.

(01:12:43):
It's a requirement of joining our cult. Yep, yep. So
that's the episode. Go, I don't know, overthrow a sovereign nation.
Give it a shot. Just stay sober, stay sober. Yeah,
if you're gonna drink, do it after, don't do it during.
And if you're gonna drink, like keep your mouth set,

(01:13:03):
like don't get mouthie, don't drink and coup and don't
text in coup. All of the rules for driving apply
to coups. Yeah, that's the lesson all of them. That
was good. I like Jesus Christ. These people are so dumb,

(01:13:25):
all right, all right, cool, Well that's the s spode
h