The career of the former soldier and mercenary Simon Mann might have seemed unexceptional in the pages of John Buchan or Rider Haggard but unfortunately for him it ended not in the 19th century but in a jail cell in post-colonial 21st-century Africa.
Mann, who has died aged 72 following a heart attack, spent five years in prisons in Zimbabwe and then Equatorial Guinea between 2004 and 2009 for his part in the attempted “Wonga coup”, so called because of his unavailing plea for his friends, including Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of the former prime minister, to stump up funds – “a splodge of wonga” – to rescue him following a failed attempt to overthrow Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the president of the west African oil state. It was, he admitted, “a fuck up”.
The nicknames of those friends were in a letter he attempted to smuggle to his wife from a prison in Harare: Thatcher was Scratcher, allegedly because of the adolescent acne he had suffered at school, and there was also Smelly and Nosher, names perhaps more PG Wodehouse than Bulldog Drummond. But they did not save Mann from torture in Zimbabwe or isolation at the notorious Black Beach prison in Equatorial Guinea.
The Sunday Times in 2011 said: “Everything about [Mann] is preposterous, fruity, bonkers and slightly frightful,” but his friends found him engaging, intelligent, though easily bored, and wry. He had a military career with the Scots Guards and the SAS before seeking adventure and wealth as the organiser of a firm providing mercenaries, mainly from South Africa, to protect oil and mining companies in Angola. Had the coup to overthrow the tyrannical and corrupt president of Equatorial Guinea succeeded, Mann would have received a pay off in the region of £15m.
He was a son of privilege, a scion of the London brewery family whose company merged with Watney’s. Both his father, George, and grandfather, Frank, had briefly been England and Middlesex cricket captains, in the days when only amateurs were considered suitable for team leadership. Both had served with the Scots Guards and had won the Military Cross, respectively in the first and second world wars. George Mann captained the MCC England party on a tour of South Africa in 1948-49 and met his future wife, Margaret (nee Clark), an heiress, on the boat taking the side back to Britain. Simon, their son, preferred rowing to cricket at Eton, where he was apparently known as “Maps” because of his fascination with Africa and, according to a friend, the possibility of staging coups there. He proceeded to Sandhurst and a commission in the family regiment.
Seeking a livelier challenge, Mann passed the demanding tests for the SAS and became a troop commander specialising in intelligence and counter-terrorism. He served around the world but left the army at the age of 28 in 1981 and started a security business offering protection to wealthy, mainly Arab, clients in Britain, returning to the army briefly to serve during the first Gulf war on the staff of the commander Sir Peter de la Billière. Later, as a sideline, Mann played Col Derek Wilford, the Parachute brigade commander, in Bloody Sunday, the 2002 Paul Greengrass film of the killings by the army at a Derry civil rights demonstration in 1972.
In 1996 he teamed up with an oil executive, Tony Buckingham, to found a firm based in South Africa providing security and military support to governments to protect their interests. The company, Executive Outcomes, helped protect the oil wells of the Angolan government, under attack from Unita rebels. Four years later, Mann co-founded Sandline International, another security firm, with a British former officer, Lt Col Tim Spicer, providing military training and arms to the Sierra Leone government trying to keep control of the country’s diamond fields.
The profits enabled Mann to buy an estate on the Beaulieu River in Hampshire, but also took him back to South Africa, where he began recruiting mercenaries to overthrow the Obiang regime in Equatorial Guinea and replace it with one led by the insurgent leader Severo Moto.
By then Mann was in his mid-50s and the whole operation was haphazard and misconceived. It included Mann checking out the price of some supplies at a branch of B&Q. The South African authorities were well aware what was going on – probably as a result of loose talk by the plotters around a hotel swimming pool – and the Zimbabwean government was alerted too, though it continued selling arms and ammunition to Mann and his colleagues.
Friends of Mann, including Thatcher, provided funds, though Thatcher himself later claimed he thought he had been buying a helicopter merely for humanitarian work, an excuse which did not prevent him receiving a suspended sentence and a hefty fine for breaking anti-mercenary legislation.
All went wrong after Mann and his band of 70 mercenaries touched down in Harare on the night of 7 March 2004 to pick up the arms. They were arrested, as was a further group already in Malabo, the Guinean capital. It was while he was awaiting trial that the notorious letter was written: “Our situation is not good and it is very URGENT … it may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga. Now it’s bad times and everyone has to fucking well pull their full weight. Once we get into a real trial scenario we are fucked.” The letter was intercepted by the prison guards.
No money was forthcoming from Scratcher, or Smelly, thought to be a reference to Ely Calil, a Nigerian-Lebanese oil tycoon. “They let me down badly,” Mann complained later. “They ought to be in shackles as well.” He said Thatcher had known perfectly well about the coup plan and had been part of the team management. He regretted the coup: “When you go tiger shooting, you don’t expect the tiger to win.”
Four months after the band’s arrest, Mann was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, later reduced to four, on two counts of buying firearms illegally – the other mercenaries faced short sentences. He had claimed the object of the mission was to protect diamond mines in the Congo.
Mann later said he had confessed under duress and had been tortured and subjected to sensory deprivation, “all the sort of stuff we used to do to each other at (the SAS in) Hereford.” But on his release in Zimbabwe in May 2007 he was immediately extradited to Equatorial Guinea. There he was sentenced to 34 years at Black Beach prison, where, for most prisoners, assaults were rife and food intermittent. There were even rumours that Obiang had a penchant for eating bits of his captives – which the dictator denied.
Mann’s imprisonment was not so harsh: he had access to books and to journalists; food was supplied from a luxury hotel, and he lunched with the country’s security minister. It helped that by then he was admitting his guilt, naming names and expressing contrition. Within 15 months, in November 2009, Obiang freed him “on humanitarian grounds” to receive medical treatment and see his family in Britain.
Back home, Mann was able to meet his five-year-old son, Arthur, for the first time, and to reunite with his wife, Amanda, and six other children. His attempts to restart his career, however, were less successful: “My former peers couldn’t hire me, even in the back office,” he told the Times in 2023. “It was ‘look Simon, don’t take it personally, but we spend a lot of time and money telling everyone we are not mercenaries.’”
In 2011 he wrote a book on his experiences, Cry Havoc, and latterly was chairing a start-up company attempting to turn plastic waste into hydrogen. One of his friends was said to be Obiang.
Mann is survived by Amanda (nee Freedman), who was his third wife and the mother of four of the seven children who also survive him.
• Simon Mann, army officer and mercenary, born 26 June 1952; died 8 May 2025
