Perched on the banks of the river Beaulieu in the county of Hampshire in south-east England is a rambling house named Inchmery. Today its eight hectares of pasture are placid, but half a century ago they were a training ground for Polish paratroopers preparing for D-Day. When an old pine tree blew over in a storm several years ago it was found to be riddled with bullets from the Poles’ target practice. For a man in search of a life less ordinary, the intrigue attached to the property must have seemed irresistible. In 1997 Simon Mann bought it.
Spring may be turning to summer in Britain, but Mann can only imagine the clear views across the mouth of the Beaulieu river and the Solent to the Isle of Wight. Since March 7 his home has been a 4m x 1,5m solitary confinement cell in Chikurubi prison, a maximum-security facility outside the Zimbabwean capital of Harare, where, his lawyer claims, he has been tortured, assaulted by prison officers, suffered lice, inedible food and general deprivation.
Mann is accused of planning to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea by leading a mercenary force into the capital, Malabo, and kidnapping or killing the president. His lawyers are fighting a formal extradition request from the West African country, where, it is safe to assume, prison conditions will be no better.
It is a story with implausible characters and plot twists. There is the alleged cannibal dictator, his play-boy son and scheming relatives. There is the offshore oil waiting to make millionaires out of those audacious or desperate enough to seize it. There is the exiled politician and the plutocrat in London’s Chelsea. There is the planeload of mercenaries stopping in Harare to pick up weapons. And, at the heart of it all, there is Simon Mann.
How the plot went awry and landed this unusual Englishman in manacles may come to be judged as the end of an era of white buccaneers who thought they ruled Africa.
The 51-year-old has spent most of his career in the murky world of special forces and the mercenary. He is an establishment deviant. The son of an England cricket captain who made a fortune from the Watney’s brewing empire, he was educated at the top English private school, Eton, and the British military academy at Sandhurst, joining the Scots Guards, one of the more pukka regiments of the royal household. But he hungered for something more. He passed the gruelling selection procedure for the SAS (British special forces) at the first try and became a troop commander in 22 SAS, specialising in intelligence and counter terrorism. He served in Cyprus, Germany, Norway, Canada, central America and Northern Ireland. So far, so conventional; he was not out of place among the dukes and earls of White’s, London’s oldest club, where he was a member.
But in 1981 he left the army. ”I think he wanted a new challenge, and after a while some people find army life a little bit mundane,” says a former colleague. The adventures on which he embarked as a result would lead him, eventually, to a cell, decked in khaki prison garb, his life in ruins. He has authorised the sale of his Aerostar jet to pay for defence lawyers and parcels of food, toilet paper and toothpaste for himself and his co-accused. ”Amanda [Mann’s wife] worries the house may also have to go,” says a friend in South Africa.
Unravelling the riddle of Mann is not easy when even relatives were kept ignorant of his activities. ”I only really know as much as you,” his father-in-law, Maurice, tells The Guardian. ”I know nothing about his business — it was as big a shock to me as to you.” But enough fragments emerge to build a picture of a complex character, part thrill-seeker, part businessman, who mined Africa’s wars for profit before coming unstuck in a deal too far. If convicted on firearms and public-order offences, Mann may shuffle out of Chikurubi prison in his seventies. If extradited to Equatorial Guinea he could face the death penalty. Last month, one of the alleged ”advance party” of mercenaries died in Black Beach prison in Malabo. Authorities there blamed malaria, but local reports said he had died after being tortured.
Mann began his post-army freelance career quietly enough, selling supposedly hack-proof computer software. But he soon moved into the security business, reportedly providing bodyguards to wealthy Arabs to protect their Scottish estates from poachers, before briefly being persuaded back into uniform in 1990 to serve on British Gulf war commander Sir Peter de la Billiere’s staff in Riyadh. In 1993 he set up a mercenary outfit, Executive Outcomes, with the controversial entrepreneur Tony Buckingham. It made a fortune protecting oil installations from rebels in Angola’s civil war.
In 1995 when Executive Outcomes became too high-profile, he set up an offshoot, Sandline International, with another former Scots Guard, Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Spicer, and shipped arms to Sierra Leone in contravention of a United Nations embargo. ”Mann would not have been one of the front-line guys in choppers, more the businessman in the suit,” says Will Reno, an American politics professor who specialises in African conflict.
An estimated $10-million made, Mann stepped down a gear. According to the land registry, he bought Inchmery, a former residence of the Rothschild family, in 1997 in the name of Myers Developments, a firm registered in the offshore tax haven of Guernsey. By means of an advertisement headed ”Is this the most beautiful beach house in the country?” he then rented it out and moved to Cape Town.
Already with three children from two previous marriages, Mann had another three with his new wife, Amanda, and settled at 18 Duckitt Avenue, a £200 000 Cape Dutch gabled house in Constantia. He went fishing, bought sculpture and threw dinner parties for friends.
‘They seemed very happy,” says Donald Greig, a jeweller who knew the couple. But no one seemed to know Mann’s source of income. ”He was a very private sort of person,” says Rupert Wragg, a schoolfriend who also ended up in Cape Town.
But not, it seems, entirely private. In a bizarre twist, Mann agreed to play the part of Colonel Derek Wilford, commander of the paratroopers who fired on marchers in Derry, Northern Ireland, in a gritty television reconstruction of Bloody Sunday. In an interview with The Guardian in 2002, Mann suggested he had taken part in the film partly to defend the army (though he admitted Bloody Sunday was a ”cock-up”), and partly, he said, to aid the peace process.
The director, Paul Greengrass, found Mann one of the most interesting, thoughtful and courageous people he had ever met. ”He is a humane man, but an adventurer. He is very English, a romantic, tremendously good company.”
What happened next suggests that the adventurer did not fully grasp how easily things can go wrong, though his motives may have been pragmatic — it is rumoured that Mann needed the money. Whatever the reason, Mann embarked on a monumental blunder.
Equatorial Guinea is a small, malarial country in West Africa ruled by a tyrant, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who pockets vast profits from offshore oil drilling. He wants his favourite son, a dangerous playboy known as Teodorin, to succeed him, a prospect that frightens powerful relatives. Severo Moto Nsa, an exiled opposition politician who claims the president has eaten human testicles, also feels threatened by the succession.
Obiang accuses Ely Calil, a Chelsea-based tycoon, of plotting a coup to vault his friend Severo Moto into power in return for oil concessions. Both men rubbish the allegation. Details are murky, but there is strong evidence of a two-pronged plot. Since last year, Nick du Toit, a South African former mercenary, has forged ties with one faction of the ruling clan involving fishing rights and customs control. It is rumoured that his real task was to somehow nobble the military, especially the president’s Moroccan bodyguards, to clear the way for a small invasion force.
The second prong was to be led by Du Toit’s former commanding officer at Executive Outcomes, Mann. Allegedly promised $5-million at meetings with Calil and Severo Moto last year, he recruited 66 veterans of apartheid South Africa’s bush wars, many of them black mercenaries from Angola and Namibia. They are thought to have trained at a farm south of Johannesburg. The alleged plan was to collect a consignment of AK-47 rifles, mortar bombs and 30 000 rounds of ammunition and fly to Equatorial Guinea.
At 7.30pm on March 7 a Boeing 727-100, recently purchased by Mann’s company Logo Logistics, was impounded after arriving at Harare. The crew and passengers were arrested, as was Mann, who had arrived several days earlier and was waiting at the airport. Soon afterwards, Du Toit and 14 others were arrested in Malabo and the governments of Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe were boasting about foiling a coup.
Relatives of those in Harare say that the men were on their way to Congo to guard diamond mines, so there was nothing sinister about the $190 000 Mann has admitted paying the state-owned Zimbabwe Defence Industries for weapons.
”They were set up,” says Alwyn Griebenow, their lawyer. However, a written confession purportedly from Mann and dated March 9, which was leaked to a South African newspaper, admits the coup plot. Griebenow says it had no legal standing and prosecutors had not cited it. In the only public hearing so far, Mann rebuffed journalists with the words ”I have nothing to say.” One observer said he looked like Richard Burton in The Wild Geese.
Doubters of the coup plot point to anomalies. Some of the arrested men were in their sixties and unfit. Many had good jobs and did not need the money. The flight plan went only as far as Burundi.
These are intriguing points, but explainable by haste and incompetence: ”Amateur hour. It was doomed to fail because they had absolutely no respect for operational security. Everybody knew it was happening,” scorns one aquaintance of Mann, one of several security sources who claims to have known of the coup months in advance.
One version is that South African intelligence infiltrated the group and tipped off Harare and Malabo. Another is that Mann’s arms deal was not squared with key players in Zimbabwe who therefore sabotaged it. Another is that the plotters were manipulated by Malabo’s ruling family.
For all his sophistication, Mann appears not to have read the hidden agendas, or realised that Africa is no longer the pushover it once was, argues Reno.
”Good lord, what idiots, the whole thing seems inept. Are they just ignorant about what goes on in these places?” States are stronger than they were a few decades ago. So too is regional cooperation through bodies such as the African Union, which makes it much more difficult, though not impossible, for mercenaries to topple governments. ”I think this story marks the end of an era,” says Reno.
In studying the layout of military installations in Malabo, it is possible that the plotters, if such they were, overlooked the metaphorical potential of the fact that the island is built on extinct volcanoes, once dangerous things whose time has passed. — Â