In 2004, in a real-life story that feels like it’s straight out of a spy novel, two British men were involved in a plot to overthrow the president of Equatorial Guinea.
The plot was foiled, leading to international headlines and a series of legal troubles, while the country remains under the same leadership today.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I’m Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on “power struggles in post-colonial Africa”.
[00:00:30] In case you missed it, in part one, we looked at Mobutu Sese Seko, the leopard-skin-hat-wearing dictator who ruled the Democratic Republic of Congo for more than three decades.
[00:00:41] Next up, in part three, we’ll be looking at the Angolan Model and the mechanics of how China is building Angola in exchange for oil.
[00:00:52] Today, though, in part two, we are going to talk about a man called Simon Mann and a plot to overthrow the leader of Equatorial Guinea.
[00:01:02] It's a story almost too theatrical to be true, involving mercenaries, the most prestigious and expensive school in Britain, the son of a British prime minister, King Juan Carlos of Spain, Chelsea mansions, a notorious prison, oil, offshore bank accounts, grenade launchers, helicopters and more.
[00:01:23] So, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:29] If I asked you to close your eyes and picture the protagonists of a military coup in an oil-rich West African nation, I imagine certain images might come to mind.
[00:01:42] Perhaps a fierce-looking man with a beret and an AK-47 hanging by his side.
[00:01:49] Groups of disgruntled young soldiers sitting nonchalantly on 4x4s, smoking cigarettes.
[00:01:57] Perhaps even someone like Mobutu Sese Seko, a tall man with a leopard-skin cap, large sunglasses, and an ebony cane by his side.
[00:02:08] Perhaps you might not imagine two English men in their early 50s, one of whom had gone to Eton College, the same elite private school as Princes William and Harry, and the other being the son of a British Prime Minister.
[00:02:24] Yet these were two of the key figures behind today’s story, the plot to overthrow the president of Equatorial Guinea.
[00:02:34] The men’s names were Simon Mann and Mark Thatcher. Yes, Thatcher as in Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.
[00:02:47] Let’s start with Simon Mann.
[00:02:51] He was born in 1952 into a world of money and privilege.
[00:02:57] His father was a major in the British Army, and his grandfather had co-founded an engineering firm that eventually became part of one of the UK’s largest brewing empires.
[00:03:10] This wasn’t just upper-middle-class comfort; this was old money, old connections, the very top of the British upper class.
[00:03:20] This, naturally, led him to Eton College.
[00:03:25] Now, as a quick side note, I made an episode about Eton, it’s episode number 407, if you’d like to listen to that one.
[00:03:33] If you know nothing about Eton, it is one of the most prestigious schools in Britain, perhaps even in the world.
[00:03:42] It’s the educational destination of choice for the British royal family, but also royals from all over the world, as well as the British aristocracy.
[00:03:52] Now, Simon Mann, by all accounts, wasn’t a particularly diligent student, and after finishing school, he went to the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst, where British Army officers are trained.
[00:04:08] Soldiering, it seemed, was a profession that he was well-suited to, and he eventually joined the elite Special Air Service, or SAS.
[00:04:20] Now the SAS is essentially the British Special Forces, and is known for its brutal selection process and its highly specialised operations. They’re the elite soldiers who are flown in for particularly dangerous or difficult missions, the seriously hairy stuff, the stuff they can’t tell their friends or family anything about.
[00:04:45] This was Mann’s life for the best part of 10 years, but in 1981, at the age of 29, he decided enough was enough.
[00:04:56] He left the forces and started to look for new opportunities.
[00:05:01] And this is where the story gets a little murky. Like many former special forces operatives, Mann transitioned into the world of private military contracting.
[00:05:14] He became a mercenary, a gun for hire.
[00:05:19] He saw conflict zones not as theatres of war, but as business opportunities.
[00:05:26] He co-founded a company called Executive Outcomes with a former officer in South Africa’s special forces.
[00:05:34] And this company was essentially a group of private soldiers who would be sent into warzones, fighting on behalf of whoever paid their invoices, without asking too many questions about where the money came from.
[00:05:50] They were well-armed, well-trained, and available to the highest bidder.
[00:05:57] Now, here isn’t the time to go into everything that they did, and of course, a lot of it is still not publicly known, but they made a name for themselves first in Angola, and then in Sierra Leone, supporting the government forces against various rebel groups.
[00:06:15] They were very effective, and these contracts also turned Simon Mann into a very rich man.
[00:06:23] Along the way, he had become a key figure in this new world of corporate warfare. He was charming, well-connected, and increasingly ambitious.
[00:06:35] He began mixing with financiers, oil executives, and political fixers.
[00:06:42] And someone he got to know, as they both ran in similar circles in South Africa, was Mark Thatcher. And yes, again, that is the son of Margaret Thatcher.
[00:06:55] Mark Thatcher had had a string of failed business ventures and had come under scrutiny for his apparent exploitation of his mother’s position for his own financial interests.
[00:07:09] In other words, he was involved in all sorts of slightly dubious and dodgy business dealings, and had a reputation in Britain for being up to no good.
[00:07:21] Now, fast forward to 2003.
[00:07:25] Simon Mann was contacted, he says, by a wealthy Lebanese businessman called Ely Calil.
[00:07:33] Calil had made a fortune, hundreds of millions of dollars, buying and selling oil in West Africa. Or to be precise, it’s a little unclear exactly how he made his money, but he claimed it was through oil.
[00:07:49] Anyway, Calil called up Simon Mann and told him to come immediately to his grand mansion in Chelsea.
[00:07:58] There was something he needed to tell him.
[00:08:02] When Mann arrived, Calil told him about an opportunity in Equatorial Guinea.
[00:08:09] Now, as a brief bit of background, Equatorial Guinea is a tiny country on the west coast of Central Africa, with a population of just over a million.
[00:08:22] It is a former Spanish colony, but for most of its post-independence history, it has been ruled by one man: Teodoro Obiang.
[00:08:33] For the first few years of independence, the country remained poor and isolated. But in the 1990s, everything changed.
[00:08:44] Vast offshore oil reserves were discovered, and suddenly, the country was flush with cash.
[00:08:51] By the early 2000s, it had one of the highest GDPs per capita in Africa.
[00:08:57] But, as you might expect, almost none of that wealth reached the average citizen.
[00:09:04] Most of it was controlled by the president and his family, particularly his son, Teodorín, who became infamous for his luxury lifestyle: mansions, supercars, private jets, all of the things you might expect from the son of a dictator.
[00:09:22] And Equatorial Guinea was a one-party state. Other parties were allowed in theory, but not in practice.
[00:09:32] Now, back to Ely Calil’s Chelsea mansion in 2003.
[00:09:37] Calil told Mann that he had been contacted by someone called Severo Moto, who was the exiled leader of the opposition in Equatorial Guinea.
[00:09:48] Moto had sought Calil’s help in financing a coup to overthrow the ageing Obiang.
[00:09:56] And Calil knew the man to go to: Simon Mann.
[00:10:01] Calil told Mann about the plot, claiming—according to Mann—that King Juan Carlos of Spain and the then Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar, both supported it.
[00:10:16] Calil has denied his involvement, and there’s no hard evidence confirming Spanish backing, so it’s possible Mann or Calil exaggerated this.
[00:10:26] Still, the plan was attractive enough for Mann to proceed.
[00:10:32] Of course, neither Calil nor Mann were doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
[00:10:37] Mann would later say that he was attracted by the adventure of the mission, and thought that overthrowing a corrupt and brutal dictator would surely be a good thing for the people of Equatorial Guinea.
[00:10:50] But more than this, it would be a fabulous financial windfall.
[00:10:56] Not only would he be paid handsomely for pulling off the coup, but he and his conspirators stood to gain oil and mining rights once the coup had been completed.
[00:11:09] Even just a tiny slice of Equatorial Guinea’s oil wealth would be worth billions.
[00:11:16] It was, in essence, a business deal disguised as a political revolution.
[00:11:23] Now, where does Mark Thatcher come in?
[00:11:27] Well, pulling off a military coup–paying the mercenaries, chartering the planes, getting the weapons and all of that–it was expensive stuff.
[00:11:37] Mann thought it would cost around $2.5 million. Small fry compared to the riches that awaited them, but someone needed to come up with the cash to get the operation moving.
[00:11:50] Calil, unfortunately, wasn’t in a position to do this.
[00:11:54] He might have had a Chelsea mansion and a reported 9-digit fortune, but the French authorities were in the middle of a criminal investigation into his business activities, and had frozen his bank accounts.
[00:12:09] Mann floated the idea to Mark Thatcher. He could invest in the project, and in return, he would have a stake in the future profits of the operation.
[00:12:21] Thatcher was in. He was in charge of sourcing a helicopter, which might seem like a strange task, but he was a trained helicopter pilot, so it did make sense.
[00:12:35] Mann got to work, recruiting South African mercenaries and planning the operation.
[00:12:42] He would even later claim that Margaret Thatcher herself–the former British Prime Minister–knew and approved of the plot, although this was vigorously denied by Thatcher.
[00:12:54] In any case, by early 2004, the plan was settled.
[00:13:01] 64 South African mercenaries would fly from South Africa to Harare, in Zimbabwe.
[00:13:09] There, they would pick up Mann and a bunch of weapons: guns, grenade launchers, explosives, and all of the sort of stuff that you need to launch a military coup.
[00:13:21] From there, the plane would continue to Equatorial Guinea. It would land, the men would jump out, take control of the airport, then, in conjunction with rebel troops who were there waiting for them, they would storm the presidential palace and arrest Obiang.
[00:13:39] Moto would arrive and declare himself president.
[00:13:42] The entire mission would last just a few hours. It would be quick, clean, and incredibly profitable.
[00:13:50] But the operation was sloppy. The mercenaries were too visible, the paperwork was too vague, and what’s more, the intelligence agencies were watching.
[00:14:03] Zimbabwean authorities had got wind of the plot.
[00:14:07] Before the plane even touched down at Harare airport, Mann was detained and arrested.
[00:14:14] He initially claimed that the weapons he was found with were to provide security at a diamond mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but nobody was buying this.
[00:14:27] What’s more, in Equatorial Guinea, the authorities arrested a group of South African and Angolan men who had been sent as a vanguard, an advance party.
[00:14:38] By March 9th, 2004, Mann and his “on the ground” mercenaries were behind bars, one batch in Zimbabwe and the other in Equatorial Guinea.
[00:14:51] President Obiang, you could say perfectly reasonably, was not best pleased to find out that there was this plot to overthrow him, seemingly with the tacit approval of various European governments.
[00:15:06] He publicly stated that he would bring Mann to Equatorial Guinea so that he could, and I’m quoting directly, “eat his testicles and then drag his naked body through the streets.”
[00:15:19] Now, whether that is a punishment Mann deserved is a question of opinion.
[00:15:24] Fortunately, it isn’t what actually happened.
[00:15:28] Mann was sentenced to prison, first in Zimbabwe, before then being handed over to Equatorial Guinea, where he was sentenced to 34 years in the country’s notorious “Black Beach Prison”.
[00:15:43] Fortunately, President Obiang seemed to have softened, and in 2009, after Mann agreed to identify his fellow conspirators, after serving only one and a half years of his 34-year sentence, he was released.
[00:15:58] As for the other conspirators, nobody was particularly good at covering their tracks.
[00:16:05] In the immediate aftermath of this attempted coup, there were documents found that linked the operation to a network of offshore companies, shell corporations, and bank accounts in places like the British Virgin Islands and Guernsey.
[00:16:22] One of these was a letter from Simon Mann to his wife, while he was still in jail in Zimbabwe, awaiting sentencing.
[00:16:31] This document named Ely Calil and Mark Thatcher, and contained the now infamous line “It may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga”.
[00:16:45] Now, there’s some British slang in there, so let me explain it.
[00:16:50] Splodge means a large amount, but it’s normally something you’d use with something liquid or runny, like paint or jam.
[00:17:01] And “wonga” is slang for money.
[00:17:05] So, to translate that into more regular English, “it may be that to get us out of jail, we need a large amount of money”. Bribes, payments made to persuade officials to look the other way or make inconvenient problems, like being caught trying to launch a military coup, simply disappear.
[00:17:26] Now, there is no evidence that this large amount of money ever was handed over, but this phrase was pounced on by the British tabloids.
[00:17:36] The coup became known by the press as the Wonga coup, and, back home, Mark Thatcher had some tough questions to answer.
[00:17:46] He was accused of financing the operation and was later arrested in South Africa.
[00:17:53] He first claimed that he didn’t know that the helicopter would be used for a military coup, instead saying he thought it was a humanitarian airlift, but later admitted that it “might be used for mercenary activity”.
[00:18:08] Fortunately for him, he escaped jail, but was given a large fine and a four-year suspended sentence.
[00:18:16] So what do we make of Simon Mann and the Wonga Coup?
[00:18:21] On one level, it’s an improbable story of a failed mercenary adventure: a group of former soldiers hoping to get rich through regime change.
[00:18:31] But on another level, it’s about the murky intersections of business, politics, and post-colonial power structures.
[00:18:41] Yes, Obiang might have been an egregiously corrupt dictator, but does that in any way justify a bunch of mercenaries overthrowing him?
[00:18:51] As of the time of recording this episode, Obiang is still in power, and will shortly be turning 83.
[00:18:59] His son, Teodorín, is still vice president and will almost certainly assume power when his father dies.
[00:19:08] And Equatorial Guinea continues to be one of the most unequal societies in the world, despite its vast natural wealth.
[00:19:18] As for Simon Mann, he died in May this year, his mercenary past–so he said–put well behind him.
[00:19:26] But the legacy of the Wonga Coup remains.
[00:19:30] It’s a cautionary tale about how easily ambition can turn into arrogance, and how the lines between business, war, and politics are often far blurrier than we like to think.
[00:19:43] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Simon Mann, Mark Thatcher and the Wonga coup.
[00:19:49] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:53] As a quick reminder, this was part two of this three-part mini-series.
[00:19:57] If you missed part one, that was on Mobutu Sese Soko, the charismatic and complicated leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
[00:20:06] And next up, in part three, we are going to talk about the Angolan Model, and how China’s interests in Africa compare to those of Africa’s former colonisers.
[00:20:17] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:20:22] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I’m Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on “power struggles in post-colonial Africa”.
[00:00:30] In case you missed it, in part one, we looked at Mobutu Sese Seko, the leopard-skin-hat-wearing dictator who ruled the Democratic Republic of Congo for more than three decades.
[00:00:41] Next up, in part three, we’ll be looking at the Angolan Model and the mechanics of how China is building Angola in exchange for oil.
[00:00:52] Today, though, in part two, we are going to talk about a man called Simon Mann and a plot to overthrow the leader of Equatorial Guinea.
[00:01:02] It's a story almost too theatrical to be true, involving mercenaries, the most prestigious and expensive school in Britain, the son of a British prime minister, King Juan Carlos of Spain, Chelsea mansions, a notorious prison, oil, offshore bank accounts, grenade launchers, helicopters and more.
[00:01:23] So, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:29] If I asked you to close your eyes and picture the protagonists of a military coup in an oil-rich West African nation, I imagine certain images might come to mind.
[00:01:42] Perhaps a fierce-looking man with a beret and an AK-47 hanging by his side.
[00:01:49] Groups of disgruntled young soldiers sitting nonchalantly on 4x4s, smoking cigarettes.
[00:01:57] Perhaps even someone like Mobutu Sese Seko, a tall man with a leopard-skin cap, large sunglasses, and an ebony cane by his side.
[00:02:08] Perhaps you might not imagine two English men in their early 50s, one of whom had gone to Eton College, the same elite private school as Princes William and Harry, and the other being the son of a British Prime Minister.
[00:02:24] Yet these were two of the key figures behind today’s story, the plot to overthrow the president of Equatorial Guinea.
[00:02:34] The men’s names were Simon Mann and Mark Thatcher. Yes, Thatcher as in Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.
[00:02:47] Let’s start with Simon Mann.
[00:02:51] He was born in 1952 into a world of money and privilege.
[00:02:57] His father was a major in the British Army, and his grandfather had co-founded an engineering firm that eventually became part of one of the UK’s largest brewing empires.
[00:03:10] This wasn’t just upper-middle-class comfort; this was old money, old connections, the very top of the British upper class.
[00:03:20] This, naturally, led him to Eton College.
[00:03:25] Now, as a quick side note, I made an episode about Eton, it’s episode number 407, if you’d like to listen to that one.
[00:03:33] If you know nothing about Eton, it is one of the most prestigious schools in Britain, perhaps even in the world.
[00:03:42] It’s the educational destination of choice for the British royal family, but also royals from all over the world, as well as the British aristocracy.
[00:03:52] Now, Simon Mann, by all accounts, wasn’t a particularly diligent student, and after finishing school, he went to the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst, where British Army officers are trained.
[00:04:08] Soldiering, it seemed, was a profession that he was well-suited to, and he eventually joined the elite Special Air Service, or SAS.
[00:04:20] Now the SAS is essentially the British Special Forces, and is known for its brutal selection process and its highly specialised operations. They’re the elite soldiers who are flown in for particularly dangerous or difficult missions, the seriously hairy stuff, the stuff they can’t tell their friends or family anything about.
[00:04:45] This was Mann’s life for the best part of 10 years, but in 1981, at the age of 29, he decided enough was enough.
[00:04:56] He left the forces and started to look for new opportunities.
[00:05:01] And this is where the story gets a little murky. Like many former special forces operatives, Mann transitioned into the world of private military contracting.
[00:05:14] He became a mercenary, a gun for hire.
[00:05:19] He saw conflict zones not as theatres of war, but as business opportunities.
[00:05:26] He co-founded a company called Executive Outcomes with a former officer in South Africa’s special forces.
[00:05:34] And this company was essentially a group of private soldiers who would be sent into warzones, fighting on behalf of whoever paid their invoices, without asking too many questions about where the money came from.
[00:05:50] They were well-armed, well-trained, and available to the highest bidder.
[00:05:57] Now, here isn’t the time to go into everything that they did, and of course, a lot of it is still not publicly known, but they made a name for themselves first in Angola, and then in Sierra Leone, supporting the government forces against various rebel groups.
[00:06:15] They were very effective, and these contracts also turned Simon Mann into a very rich man.
[00:06:23] Along the way, he had become a key figure in this new world of corporate warfare. He was charming, well-connected, and increasingly ambitious.
[00:06:35] He began mixing with financiers, oil executives, and political fixers.
[00:06:42] And someone he got to know, as they both ran in similar circles in South Africa, was Mark Thatcher. And yes, again, that is the son of Margaret Thatcher.
[00:06:55] Mark Thatcher had had a string of failed business ventures and had come under scrutiny for his apparent exploitation of his mother’s position for his own financial interests.
[00:07:09] In other words, he was involved in all sorts of slightly dubious and dodgy business dealings, and had a reputation in Britain for being up to no good.
[00:07:21] Now, fast forward to 2003.
[00:07:25] Simon Mann was contacted, he says, by a wealthy Lebanese businessman called Ely Calil.
[00:07:33] Calil had made a fortune, hundreds of millions of dollars, buying and selling oil in West Africa. Or to be precise, it’s a little unclear exactly how he made his money, but he claimed it was through oil.
[00:07:49] Anyway, Calil called up Simon Mann and told him to come immediately to his grand mansion in Chelsea.
[00:07:58] There was something he needed to tell him.
[00:08:02] When Mann arrived, Calil told him about an opportunity in Equatorial Guinea.
[00:08:09] Now, as a brief bit of background, Equatorial Guinea is a tiny country on the west coast of Central Africa, with a population of just over a million.
[00:08:22] It is a former Spanish colony, but for most of its post-independence history, it has been ruled by one man: Teodoro Obiang.
[00:08:33] For the first few years of independence, the country remained poor and isolated. But in the 1990s, everything changed.
[00:08:44] Vast offshore oil reserves were discovered, and suddenly, the country was flush with cash.
[00:08:51] By the early 2000s, it had one of the highest GDPs per capita in Africa.
[00:08:57] But, as you might expect, almost none of that wealth reached the average citizen.
[00:09:04] Most of it was controlled by the president and his family, particularly his son, Teodorín, who became infamous for his luxury lifestyle: mansions, supercars, private jets, all of the things you might expect from the son of a dictator.
[00:09:22] And Equatorial Guinea was a one-party state. Other parties were allowed in theory, but not in practice.
[00:09:32] Now, back to Ely Calil’s Chelsea mansion in 2003.
[00:09:37] Calil told Mann that he had been contacted by someone called Severo Moto, who was the exiled leader of the opposition in Equatorial Guinea.
[00:09:48] Moto had sought Calil’s help in financing a coup to overthrow the ageing Obiang.
[00:09:56] And Calil knew the man to go to: Simon Mann.
[00:10:01] Calil told Mann about the plot, claiming—according to Mann—that King Juan Carlos of Spain and the then Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar, both supported it.
[00:10:16] Calil has denied his involvement, and there’s no hard evidence confirming Spanish backing, so it’s possible Mann or Calil exaggerated this.
[00:10:26] Still, the plan was attractive enough for Mann to proceed.
[00:10:32] Of course, neither Calil nor Mann were doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
[00:10:37] Mann would later say that he was attracted by the adventure of the mission, and thought that overthrowing a corrupt and brutal dictator would surely be a good thing for the people of Equatorial Guinea.
[00:10:50] But more than this, it would be a fabulous financial windfall.
[00:10:56] Not only would he be paid handsomely for pulling off the coup, but he and his conspirators stood to gain oil and mining rights once the coup had been completed.
[00:11:09] Even just a tiny slice of Equatorial Guinea’s oil wealth would be worth billions.
[00:11:16] It was, in essence, a business deal disguised as a political revolution.
[00:11:23] Now, where does Mark Thatcher come in?
[00:11:27] Well, pulling off a military coup–paying the mercenaries, chartering the planes, getting the weapons and all of that–it was expensive stuff.
[00:11:37] Mann thought it would cost around $2.5 million. Small fry compared to the riches that awaited them, but someone needed to come up with the cash to get the operation moving.
[00:11:50] Calil, unfortunately, wasn’t in a position to do this.
[00:11:54] He might have had a Chelsea mansion and a reported 9-digit fortune, but the French authorities were in the middle of a criminal investigation into his business activities, and had frozen his bank accounts.
[00:12:09] Mann floated the idea to Mark Thatcher. He could invest in the project, and in return, he would have a stake in the future profits of the operation.
[00:12:21] Thatcher was in. He was in charge of sourcing a helicopter, which might seem like a strange task, but he was a trained helicopter pilot, so it did make sense.
[00:12:35] Mann got to work, recruiting South African mercenaries and planning the operation.
[00:12:42] He would even later claim that Margaret Thatcher herself–the former British Prime Minister–knew and approved of the plot, although this was vigorously denied by Thatcher.
[00:12:54] In any case, by early 2004, the plan was settled.
[00:13:01] 64 South African mercenaries would fly from South Africa to Harare, in Zimbabwe.
[00:13:09] There, they would pick up Mann and a bunch of weapons: guns, grenade launchers, explosives, and all of the sort of stuff that you need to launch a military coup.
[00:13:21] From there, the plane would continue to Equatorial Guinea. It would land, the men would jump out, take control of the airport, then, in conjunction with rebel troops who were there waiting for them, they would storm the presidential palace and arrest Obiang.
[00:13:39] Moto would arrive and declare himself president.
[00:13:42] The entire mission would last just a few hours. It would be quick, clean, and incredibly profitable.
[00:13:50] But the operation was sloppy. The mercenaries were too visible, the paperwork was too vague, and what’s more, the intelligence agencies were watching.
[00:14:03] Zimbabwean authorities had got wind of the plot.
[00:14:07] Before the plane even touched down at Harare airport, Mann was detained and arrested.
[00:14:14] He initially claimed that the weapons he was found with were to provide security at a diamond mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but nobody was buying this.
[00:14:27] What’s more, in Equatorial Guinea, the authorities arrested a group of South African and Angolan men who had been sent as a vanguard, an advance party.
[00:14:38] By March 9th, 2004, Mann and his “on the ground” mercenaries were behind bars, one batch in Zimbabwe and the other in Equatorial Guinea.
[00:14:51] President Obiang, you could say perfectly reasonably, was not best pleased to find out that there was this plot to overthrow him, seemingly with the tacit approval of various European governments.
[00:15:06] He publicly stated that he would bring Mann to Equatorial Guinea so that he could, and I’m quoting directly, “eat his testicles and then drag his naked body through the streets.”
[00:15:19] Now, whether that is a punishment Mann deserved is a question of opinion.
[00:15:24] Fortunately, it isn’t what actually happened.
[00:15:28] Mann was sentenced to prison, first in Zimbabwe, before then being handed over to Equatorial Guinea, where he was sentenced to 34 years in the country’s notorious “Black Beach Prison”.
[00:15:43] Fortunately, President Obiang seemed to have softened, and in 2009, after Mann agreed to identify his fellow conspirators, after serving only one and a half years of his 34-year sentence, he was released.
[00:15:58] As for the other conspirators, nobody was particularly good at covering their tracks.
[00:16:05] In the immediate aftermath of this attempted coup, there were documents found that linked the operation to a network of offshore companies, shell corporations, and bank accounts in places like the British Virgin Islands and Guernsey.
[00:16:22] One of these was a letter from Simon Mann to his wife, while he was still in jail in Zimbabwe, awaiting sentencing.
[00:16:31] This document named Ely Calil and Mark Thatcher, and contained the now infamous line “It may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga”.
[00:16:45] Now, there’s some British slang in there, so let me explain it.
[00:16:50] Splodge means a large amount, but it’s normally something you’d use with something liquid or runny, like paint or jam.
[00:17:01] And “wonga” is slang for money.
[00:17:05] So, to translate that into more regular English, “it may be that to get us out of jail, we need a large amount of money”. Bribes, payments made to persuade officials to look the other way or make inconvenient problems, like being caught trying to launch a military coup, simply disappear.
[00:17:26] Now, there is no evidence that this large amount of money ever was handed over, but this phrase was pounced on by the British tabloids.
[00:17:36] The coup became known by the press as the Wonga coup, and, back home, Mark Thatcher had some tough questions to answer.
[00:17:46] He was accused of financing the operation and was later arrested in South Africa.
[00:17:53] He first claimed that he didn’t know that the helicopter would be used for a military coup, instead saying he thought it was a humanitarian airlift, but later admitted that it “might be used for mercenary activity”.
[00:18:08] Fortunately for him, he escaped jail, but was given a large fine and a four-year suspended sentence.
[00:18:16] So what do we make of Simon Mann and the Wonga Coup?
[00:18:21] On one level, it’s an improbable story of a failed mercenary adventure: a group of former soldiers hoping to get rich through regime change.
[00:18:31] But on another level, it’s about the murky intersections of business, politics, and post-colonial power structures.
[00:18:41] Yes, Obiang might have been an egregiously corrupt dictator, but does that in any way justify a bunch of mercenaries overthrowing him?
[00:18:51] As of the time of recording this episode, Obiang is still in power, and will shortly be turning 83.
[00:18:59] His son, Teodorín, is still vice president and will almost certainly assume power when his father dies.
[00:19:08] And Equatorial Guinea continues to be one of the most unequal societies in the world, despite its vast natural wealth.
[00:19:18] As for Simon Mann, he died in May this year, his mercenary past–so he said–put well behind him.
[00:19:26] But the legacy of the Wonga Coup remains.
[00:19:30] It’s a cautionary tale about how easily ambition can turn into arrogance, and how the lines between business, war, and politics are often far blurrier than we like to think.
[00:19:43] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Simon Mann, Mark Thatcher and the Wonga coup.
[00:19:49] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:53] As a quick reminder, this was part two of this three-part mini-series.
[00:19:57] If you missed part one, that was on Mobutu Sese Soko, the charismatic and complicated leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
[00:20:06] And next up, in part three, we are going to talk about the Angolan Model, and how China’s interests in Africa compare to those of Africa’s former colonisers.
[00:20:17] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:20:22] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I’m Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on “power struggles in post-colonial Africa”.
[00:00:30] In case you missed it, in part one, we looked at Mobutu Sese Seko, the leopard-skin-hat-wearing dictator who ruled the Democratic Republic of Congo for more than three decades.
[00:00:41] Next up, in part three, we’ll be looking at the Angolan Model and the mechanics of how China is building Angola in exchange for oil.
[00:00:52] Today, though, in part two, we are going to talk about a man called Simon Mann and a plot to overthrow the leader of Equatorial Guinea.
[00:01:02] It's a story almost too theatrical to be true, involving mercenaries, the most prestigious and expensive school in Britain, the son of a British prime minister, King Juan Carlos of Spain, Chelsea mansions, a notorious prison, oil, offshore bank accounts, grenade launchers, helicopters and more.
[00:01:23] So, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:29] If I asked you to close your eyes and picture the protagonists of a military coup in an oil-rich West African nation, I imagine certain images might come to mind.
[00:01:42] Perhaps a fierce-looking man with a beret and an AK-47 hanging by his side.
[00:01:49] Groups of disgruntled young soldiers sitting nonchalantly on 4x4s, smoking cigarettes.
[00:01:57] Perhaps even someone like Mobutu Sese Seko, a tall man with a leopard-skin cap, large sunglasses, and an ebony cane by his side.
[00:02:08] Perhaps you might not imagine two English men in their early 50s, one of whom had gone to Eton College, the same elite private school as Princes William and Harry, and the other being the son of a British Prime Minister.
[00:02:24] Yet these were two of the key figures behind today’s story, the plot to overthrow the president of Equatorial Guinea.
[00:02:34] The men’s names were Simon Mann and Mark Thatcher. Yes, Thatcher as in Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.
[00:02:47] Let’s start with Simon Mann.
[00:02:51] He was born in 1952 into a world of money and privilege.
[00:02:57] His father was a major in the British Army, and his grandfather had co-founded an engineering firm that eventually became part of one of the UK’s largest brewing empires.
[00:03:10] This wasn’t just upper-middle-class comfort; this was old money, old connections, the very top of the British upper class.
[00:03:20] This, naturally, led him to Eton College.
[00:03:25] Now, as a quick side note, I made an episode about Eton, it’s episode number 407, if you’d like to listen to that one.
[00:03:33] If you know nothing about Eton, it is one of the most prestigious schools in Britain, perhaps even in the world.
[00:03:42] It’s the educational destination of choice for the British royal family, but also royals from all over the world, as well as the British aristocracy.
[00:03:52] Now, Simon Mann, by all accounts, wasn’t a particularly diligent student, and after finishing school, he went to the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst, where British Army officers are trained.
[00:04:08] Soldiering, it seemed, was a profession that he was well-suited to, and he eventually joined the elite Special Air Service, or SAS.
[00:04:20] Now the SAS is essentially the British Special Forces, and is known for its brutal selection process and its highly specialised operations. They’re the elite soldiers who are flown in for particularly dangerous or difficult missions, the seriously hairy stuff, the stuff they can’t tell their friends or family anything about.
[00:04:45] This was Mann’s life for the best part of 10 years, but in 1981, at the age of 29, he decided enough was enough.
[00:04:56] He left the forces and started to look for new opportunities.
[00:05:01] And this is where the story gets a little murky. Like many former special forces operatives, Mann transitioned into the world of private military contracting.
[00:05:14] He became a mercenary, a gun for hire.
[00:05:19] He saw conflict zones not as theatres of war, but as business opportunities.
[00:05:26] He co-founded a company called Executive Outcomes with a former officer in South Africa’s special forces.
[00:05:34] And this company was essentially a group of private soldiers who would be sent into warzones, fighting on behalf of whoever paid their invoices, without asking too many questions about where the money came from.
[00:05:50] They were well-armed, well-trained, and available to the highest bidder.
[00:05:57] Now, here isn’t the time to go into everything that they did, and of course, a lot of it is still not publicly known, but they made a name for themselves first in Angola, and then in Sierra Leone, supporting the government forces against various rebel groups.
[00:06:15] They were very effective, and these contracts also turned Simon Mann into a very rich man.
[00:06:23] Along the way, he had become a key figure in this new world of corporate warfare. He was charming, well-connected, and increasingly ambitious.
[00:06:35] He began mixing with financiers, oil executives, and political fixers.
[00:06:42] And someone he got to know, as they both ran in similar circles in South Africa, was Mark Thatcher. And yes, again, that is the son of Margaret Thatcher.
[00:06:55] Mark Thatcher had had a string of failed business ventures and had come under scrutiny for his apparent exploitation of his mother’s position for his own financial interests.
[00:07:09] In other words, he was involved in all sorts of slightly dubious and dodgy business dealings, and had a reputation in Britain for being up to no good.
[00:07:21] Now, fast forward to 2003.
[00:07:25] Simon Mann was contacted, he says, by a wealthy Lebanese businessman called Ely Calil.
[00:07:33] Calil had made a fortune, hundreds of millions of dollars, buying and selling oil in West Africa. Or to be precise, it’s a little unclear exactly how he made his money, but he claimed it was through oil.
[00:07:49] Anyway, Calil called up Simon Mann and told him to come immediately to his grand mansion in Chelsea.
[00:07:58] There was something he needed to tell him.
[00:08:02] When Mann arrived, Calil told him about an opportunity in Equatorial Guinea.
[00:08:09] Now, as a brief bit of background, Equatorial Guinea is a tiny country on the west coast of Central Africa, with a population of just over a million.
[00:08:22] It is a former Spanish colony, but for most of its post-independence history, it has been ruled by one man: Teodoro Obiang.
[00:08:33] For the first few years of independence, the country remained poor and isolated. But in the 1990s, everything changed.
[00:08:44] Vast offshore oil reserves were discovered, and suddenly, the country was flush with cash.
[00:08:51] By the early 2000s, it had one of the highest GDPs per capita in Africa.
[00:08:57] But, as you might expect, almost none of that wealth reached the average citizen.
[00:09:04] Most of it was controlled by the president and his family, particularly his son, Teodorín, who became infamous for his luxury lifestyle: mansions, supercars, private jets, all of the things you might expect from the son of a dictator.
[00:09:22] And Equatorial Guinea was a one-party state. Other parties were allowed in theory, but not in practice.
[00:09:32] Now, back to Ely Calil’s Chelsea mansion in 2003.
[00:09:37] Calil told Mann that he had been contacted by someone called Severo Moto, who was the exiled leader of the opposition in Equatorial Guinea.
[00:09:48] Moto had sought Calil’s help in financing a coup to overthrow the ageing Obiang.
[00:09:56] And Calil knew the man to go to: Simon Mann.
[00:10:01] Calil told Mann about the plot, claiming—according to Mann—that King Juan Carlos of Spain and the then Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar, both supported it.
[00:10:16] Calil has denied his involvement, and there’s no hard evidence confirming Spanish backing, so it’s possible Mann or Calil exaggerated this.
[00:10:26] Still, the plan was attractive enough for Mann to proceed.
[00:10:32] Of course, neither Calil nor Mann were doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
[00:10:37] Mann would later say that he was attracted by the adventure of the mission, and thought that overthrowing a corrupt and brutal dictator would surely be a good thing for the people of Equatorial Guinea.
[00:10:50] But more than this, it would be a fabulous financial windfall.
[00:10:56] Not only would he be paid handsomely for pulling off the coup, but he and his conspirators stood to gain oil and mining rights once the coup had been completed.
[00:11:09] Even just a tiny slice of Equatorial Guinea’s oil wealth would be worth billions.
[00:11:16] It was, in essence, a business deal disguised as a political revolution.
[00:11:23] Now, where does Mark Thatcher come in?
[00:11:27] Well, pulling off a military coup–paying the mercenaries, chartering the planes, getting the weapons and all of that–it was expensive stuff.
[00:11:37] Mann thought it would cost around $2.5 million. Small fry compared to the riches that awaited them, but someone needed to come up with the cash to get the operation moving.
[00:11:50] Calil, unfortunately, wasn’t in a position to do this.
[00:11:54] He might have had a Chelsea mansion and a reported 9-digit fortune, but the French authorities were in the middle of a criminal investigation into his business activities, and had frozen his bank accounts.
[00:12:09] Mann floated the idea to Mark Thatcher. He could invest in the project, and in return, he would have a stake in the future profits of the operation.
[00:12:21] Thatcher was in. He was in charge of sourcing a helicopter, which might seem like a strange task, but he was a trained helicopter pilot, so it did make sense.
[00:12:35] Mann got to work, recruiting South African mercenaries and planning the operation.
[00:12:42] He would even later claim that Margaret Thatcher herself–the former British Prime Minister–knew and approved of the plot, although this was vigorously denied by Thatcher.
[00:12:54] In any case, by early 2004, the plan was settled.
[00:13:01] 64 South African mercenaries would fly from South Africa to Harare, in Zimbabwe.
[00:13:09] There, they would pick up Mann and a bunch of weapons: guns, grenade launchers, explosives, and all of the sort of stuff that you need to launch a military coup.
[00:13:21] From there, the plane would continue to Equatorial Guinea. It would land, the men would jump out, take control of the airport, then, in conjunction with rebel troops who were there waiting for them, they would storm the presidential palace and arrest Obiang.
[00:13:39] Moto would arrive and declare himself president.
[00:13:42] The entire mission would last just a few hours. It would be quick, clean, and incredibly profitable.
[00:13:50] But the operation was sloppy. The mercenaries were too visible, the paperwork was too vague, and what’s more, the intelligence agencies were watching.
[00:14:03] Zimbabwean authorities had got wind of the plot.
[00:14:07] Before the plane even touched down at Harare airport, Mann was detained and arrested.
[00:14:14] He initially claimed that the weapons he was found with were to provide security at a diamond mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but nobody was buying this.
[00:14:27] What’s more, in Equatorial Guinea, the authorities arrested a group of South African and Angolan men who had been sent as a vanguard, an advance party.
[00:14:38] By March 9th, 2004, Mann and his “on the ground” mercenaries were behind bars, one batch in Zimbabwe and the other in Equatorial Guinea.
[00:14:51] President Obiang, you could say perfectly reasonably, was not best pleased to find out that there was this plot to overthrow him, seemingly with the tacit approval of various European governments.
[00:15:06] He publicly stated that he would bring Mann to Equatorial Guinea so that he could, and I’m quoting directly, “eat his testicles and then drag his naked body through the streets.”
[00:15:19] Now, whether that is a punishment Mann deserved is a question of opinion.
[00:15:24] Fortunately, it isn’t what actually happened.
[00:15:28] Mann was sentenced to prison, first in Zimbabwe, before then being handed over to Equatorial Guinea, where he was sentenced to 34 years in the country’s notorious “Black Beach Prison”.
[00:15:43] Fortunately, President Obiang seemed to have softened, and in 2009, after Mann agreed to identify his fellow conspirators, after serving only one and a half years of his 34-year sentence, he was released.
[00:15:58] As for the other conspirators, nobody was particularly good at covering their tracks.
[00:16:05] In the immediate aftermath of this attempted coup, there were documents found that linked the operation to a network of offshore companies, shell corporations, and bank accounts in places like the British Virgin Islands and Guernsey.
[00:16:22] One of these was a letter from Simon Mann to his wife, while he was still in jail in Zimbabwe, awaiting sentencing.
[00:16:31] This document named Ely Calil and Mark Thatcher, and contained the now infamous line “It may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga”.
[00:16:45] Now, there’s some British slang in there, so let me explain it.
[00:16:50] Splodge means a large amount, but it’s normally something you’d use with something liquid or runny, like paint or jam.
[00:17:01] And “wonga” is slang for money.
[00:17:05] So, to translate that into more regular English, “it may be that to get us out of jail, we need a large amount of money”. Bribes, payments made to persuade officials to look the other way or make inconvenient problems, like being caught trying to launch a military coup, simply disappear.
[00:17:26] Now, there is no evidence that this large amount of money ever was handed over, but this phrase was pounced on by the British tabloids.
[00:17:36] The coup became known by the press as the Wonga coup, and, back home, Mark Thatcher had some tough questions to answer.
[00:17:46] He was accused of financing the operation and was later arrested in South Africa.
[00:17:53] He first claimed that he didn’t know that the helicopter would be used for a military coup, instead saying he thought it was a humanitarian airlift, but later admitted that it “might be used for mercenary activity”.
[00:18:08] Fortunately for him, he escaped jail, but was given a large fine and a four-year suspended sentence.
[00:18:16] So what do we make of Simon Mann and the Wonga Coup?
[00:18:21] On one level, it’s an improbable story of a failed mercenary adventure: a group of former soldiers hoping to get rich through regime change.
[00:18:31] But on another level, it’s about the murky intersections of business, politics, and post-colonial power structures.
[00:18:41] Yes, Obiang might have been an egregiously corrupt dictator, but does that in any way justify a bunch of mercenaries overthrowing him?
[00:18:51] As of the time of recording this episode, Obiang is still in power, and will shortly be turning 83.
[00:18:59] His son, Teodorín, is still vice president and will almost certainly assume power when his father dies.
[00:19:08] And Equatorial Guinea continues to be one of the most unequal societies in the world, despite its vast natural wealth.
[00:19:18] As for Simon Mann, he died in May this year, his mercenary past–so he said–put well behind him.
[00:19:26] But the legacy of the Wonga Coup remains.
[00:19:30] It’s a cautionary tale about how easily ambition can turn into arrogance, and how the lines between business, war, and politics are often far blurrier than we like to think.
[00:19:43] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Simon Mann, Mark Thatcher and the Wonga coup.
[00:19:49] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:53] As a quick reminder, this was part two of this three-part mini-series.
[00:19:57] If you missed part one, that was on Mobutu Sese Soko, the charismatic and complicated leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
[00:20:06] And next up, in part three, we are going to talk about the Angolan Model, and how China’s interests in Africa compare to those of Africa’s former colonisers.
[00:20:17] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:20:22] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
