The Wonga Coup (2 page)

USA

Manyame military base
Harare, Zimbabwe
Sunday, 7 March 2004
6.35 p.m.

There were no stars that night on the Harare airstrip, nor any moon; just the southern African darkness wrapping around him like warm, wet velvet …

A slender, middle-aged man with a military bearing stares at the horizon as a dot of light appears in the south. Right on schedule, the lights of a Boeing 727 flicker in the gloom. He feels a twinge of excitement, the familiar adrenalin. The aircraft lumbers closer and his breathing quickens. This night will see the climax to months of hard preparation.

‘Captain F' slips a cell phone into his jacket pocket, spins on his heel and turns his back to the approaching plane. Head up, breathing in the fresh night air, he closes his eyes and – as he has already done so many times before – runs the plan through his mind …

Soon after midnight the forward team will move into position. The sweaty little capital of the target country will be silent as Nick's landcruisers conduct a final reconnaissance. Their beams illuminate Spanish colonnades, palms, the squat concrete houses, the rubbish-strewn streets, the odd drunken
soldier. A last drive past the president's palace, then on to the coast road and towards the orange night sky, towards Punta Europa, the gas-flaring complex beside the airport, and then to the airfield itself. Nick and his welcoming committee will enter the tower, take charge, set the radio to the agreed frequency and wait.

Two hours after midnight, west African time, Captain F's team will be approaching the target. Contact will be made with Nick. Touch down and a rapid exit from the customised ex-American government Boeing. The seventy men of the landing team, veterans of mercenary wars in Africa, of some of the bloodiest battles on the continent, have done all this before. They can be trusted with loaded weapons in a pressurised plane. First task on arrival: secure the airport. Second, load the mortars, grenades, ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and other supplies in the landcruisers.

From the west, skimming the waves of the north Atlantic, another plane will head for the target. In the darkest hours the King Air plane will hop flame-topped oil rigs in the Gulf of Guinea. Its precious cargo, the priest, the man who would be president, will arrive.

From the airport it is a short drive along a toll road to the capital. A small roadblock manned by two drunken soldiers will be swept aside. In the city one unit – perhaps a dozen men at most – will take the first barracks on the road to the south. Sweep into town, past the embassies – expect a light shining in the Spanish one – and into the old quarter. Three smaller units will take the radio station, the telephone exchange and the police station near the central square.

Then the main assault. They may need something big – a fire engine from the airport, perhaps – to flatten the huge iron gate at the entrance to the president's palace. There may be a
guard or two waiting, but nothing to stop Nick's seventy men. Inside it will be a different game: the Moroccan presidential guard and a local force. But with mortars, RPGs, his newly trained men well used to urban fighting and house penetration, the attack will take an hour at most. The president's palace is isolated at the east end of town. Another barracks, beyond the Black Beach prison, will be sealed off by a unit of Buffalo Soldiers.

Inside they will need a local guide to take them to the president's chamber. The man may not need to be killed if he offers no resistance. But a bullet in his head is more likely.

Then, by dawn, the priest's speech will be playing on Radio Asonga. Monday morning and the new government – his new government – will be open for business. Those juicy oil revenues will need to be re-allocated. In a few hours history will be made …

Captain F turns back. The Boeing, safely landed, taxies from the international runway into the military half of the airport, Manyame base. He can make out a familiar face in the cockpit window. He turns and walks towards a parachute hangar and a truckload of weapons. The game is about to begin.

‘Everything we've touched turned to gold. Simon is full of ideas. He finds profitable solutions.'

Crause Steyl on Simon Mann

Beer is the mother of many extravagant ideas and much improbable bravado. The roots of the Wonga Coup draw down into one of the East End of London's largest breweries. Nearly a century ago, the Mann, Crossman and Paulin brewery in Whitechapel was a family affair run by Francis Thomas Mann. He passed it on to his son, Francis George. Young George enjoyed his beer and the brewery served up ale, porter or bitters as fashion changed. Both father and son combined brewing and soldiering – the one fighting in the First World War, the other for the Scots Guards in the Second. Beer, then as now, was capable of giving drinkers the taste for a bit of a scrap.

When peace broke out in 1945, Major George Mann should have returned to the business of brewing, but instead the family's other passion, hardly less combative, intervened. George Mann, though stocky verging on squat, was a cricketer of distinction. And so popular was he with his fellow players that he became captain of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), a quaint English way of saying he led the national team. It was
a remarkable feat, since again he was following his father's example. The Mann family claimed a place in the high echelons of British society. Though its wealth came from trade (and beer at that) and there was little sign of royal blood in their veins, the Manns passed as aristocrats. Their sons boarded at Eton, the country's most prestigious public school, where future ministers and royals were caned, slippered and otherwise battered into shape to run the country. When they came of age, the men joined White's, London's most exclusive, if dry as dust, gentleman's club that still counts the Prince of Wales and other members of the English upper classes on its books.

After the war, George led the English cricket team to tour South Africa. They arrived by ocean-going liner and travelled for months by sea and train. He did well enough on the field during the series of high-profile games, though the gentlemen amateurs who had long dominated the game were fast being replaced by professionals. But he performed best on the long cruise home, using the weeks sailing from South Africa to court a young woman. As the ship plodded north, beyond the coast of Portuguese west Africa (now Angola), heading to the swells of the Atlantic and beyond the Gulf of Guinea, turning past the bulge of west Africa at the Canary Islands, setting a course north for the Bay of Biscay and Southampton, George secured himself a wife. By the time the liner docked, he had snared a South African, Margaret Marshall Clark, the product of another high-society family. Her father was chairman of South Africa's railways and a director of De Beers, the world's largest diamond company. It was a happy match. Marriage followed and their son, Simon Francis, was born on 26 June 1952. At around the same time a brewing giant offered to buy the family business. George cashed in and took a seat on the board of the larger company. His son would need another career.

At first, young Simon followed the family tradition. ‘Mann is used to wealth and an upper class way of life,' sums up a friend. He passed his childhood at Eton, then took up officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He did not try for university as he lacked academic talent and hungered for an active life, if not a sporting one. By the 1970s, when others grew their hair long, donned flares and protested against war and global injustice, Simon followed his father and took a commission in the Scots Guards. Some later suggested that his family had faintly disapproved. Soldiering for your country at a time of grave threat is an honourable duty; but a career in the army when no war is imminent could smack of desperation.

Mann, though, did well as an officer, and applied to the Special Air Service (SAS), Britain's well-respected special forces regiment. He was promptly accepted and became a troop commander in G Squadron of 22 SAS, where he specialised in intelligence and counter-terrorism. Most officers in Britain's special forces are expected to complete a three-year rotation, which Simon duly did before moving back to his regular army job. His counter-terrorism training would have been useful during a three-year tour of Northern Ireland in the 1970s, when British soldiers struggled to keep apart warring Protestant and Catholic factions. He travelled, facing Soviet opponents at the front line of the Cold War, both in West Germany and in Norway (where British squaddies (privates) were notorious for their capacity for pub brawls). He was also posted to Cyprus, Canada and central America. But by the beginning of the 1980s, after a decade in the army, promotions dried up and Simon tired of life in uniform. ‘I think he wanted a new challenge, and after a while some people find army life a little bit mundane,' says an ex-colleague.

Simon Mann turned his hand, maladroitly, to computer software and, more dexterously, to a private military company run by the notorious founder of the SAS, David Stirling, who by the mid 1970s had convinced himself that Britain was in terminal decline and in need of a dose of strong leadership. Mann maintained his privileged life. He mixed with royalty and lingered at White's, though the smoke-filled rooms where geriatrics hurled anecdotes and bread rolls did little to satisfy the restless ex-soldier. When Stirling's private empire became embroiled in scandal at the end of the 1980s over the misuse of charity money, it was time to move on. Saddam Hussein briefly did him a favour, invading Kuwait and kicking off the first Gulf War. Mann re-enlisted, joining the army staff at the headquarters of the British commander in Saudi Arabia, where he liaised with active members of the SAS. Once that war was over Mann was footloose again.

Now Mann found his stride as an entrepreneur, largely thanks to an acquaintance with Tony Buckingham, an ex-North Sea oil-rig diver and businessman who liked to spend time with SAS veterans. Buckingham was involved in various oil firms, including one called Heritage and another called Ranger. By 1992 he was trying to break into Angola's emerging oil industry. He and Mann made contacts with Angola's national oil firm just as a rebel group, Unita (Uniao Nacional para la Independencia Total de Angola), overran several oil installations near a town called Soyo, in the north of Angola, seizing assets of the foreign oil firms. Angola's large but ineffective army failed to dislodge the rebels, so Mann and Buckingham stepped in: they volunteered to recruit a small private army – a
crack mercenary force – to fight the rebels and retake the oil assets. Angola's desperate rulers agreed.

Mann and Buckingham joined a long tradition of grizzled white men fighting in Africa. They followed men like Mike Hoare and Bob Denard, the veteran dogs of war. Hoare was a white-haired, stiff-lipped veteran of the Second World War who took ragbag armies of adventurers and crooks to fight in Congo's wars in the 1960s. Denard, a more flamboyant Frenchman, became famous for another mercenary craft: the foreign coup plot. Notably, in the 1970s, he slipped by night to murder presidents and take control of small African states, usually installing a new leader on behalf of France.

Both were moderately successful: Hoare won the hearts of those settlers, missionaries and civilians he rescued in remote corners of Congo. Foreign journalists lionised him. His daring tactics – ‘In Congo we would rush around in a flying column, all guns blazing and it worked,' recalls one of his men interviewed in South Africa today – inspired novelists and film-makers.
The Wild Geese
, a novel and Hollywood film, is a lightly disguised portrayal of his exploits. Denard's craftier deeds were less well celebrated. One Sunday morning in 1977 he took ninety Sten-gun-waving mercenaries in a DC7 to snatch power in Benin, a tiny west African state. They fought for two hours in the capital, seizing the international airport and attacking the president's palace. Eventually Denard cut and ran. A year later he led a small hired army in a similar assault in the Comoros, a tiny collection of islands off Africa's east coast. He took with him fifty men armed with sawn-off shotguns and twenty-four bottles of Dom Perignon champagne. In darkness they landed from a fishing trawler, stormed the beachside palace, killed the president, toasted their success and installed a rival. Eleven years later Denard did the same thing again.