Simon Mann, the British mercenary and former Special Air Service officer, knew the game was up when he spotted 10 men in cheap leather jackets, submachine guns strapped to their chests, in the dim airport hangar.
Instantly, steel cuffs pinned his hands behind his back. The men, Zimbabwean secret police, told him that the local crocodiles would finish the job for them.
Harare, March 2004: Mr. Mann’s elaborate plot to unseat the dictator of the small, oil-rich Central African nation of Equatorial Guinea had come undone. The “whole [expletive] shambles,” as Mr. Mann put it in his memoir, “Cry Havoc” (2011), was over.
Yet it was the beginning of a kind of stardom for Mr. Mann, an Old Etonian, ex-Scots Guardsman, wealthy country squire and descendant of war heroes and team England cricket captains. How had he so spectacularly come a cropper?
That question fascinated Britain’s respectable and not-so-respectable press for years, as it sought to explain what it called the Wonga Coup — an epithet inspired by a jailhouse letter Mr. Mann wrote to his wife from Zimbabwe, pleading for a “splodge of wonga,” a large sum of money in British slang.
Simon Mann died on May 8 at his home in London. He was 72.
Mr. Mann’s death was caused by a heart attack while working out on a rowing machine, said Aleksandra Binkowska, the chief executive of Hydrogen Utopia, the energy company that employed Mr. Mann.
It was most likely not how he would have envisaged his end. Mr. Mann had survived solitary confinement and torture at two of Africa’s most hellish prisons, Chikurubi in Zimbabwe and Black Beach in Equatorial Guinea; he had led South African mercenaries against rebels in Angola, saving the oil company he worked for and becoming a multimillionaire in the process; he had smuggled weapons into Sierra Leone during the height of that country’s murderous 1990s civil war.
By the time a motley crew of rich men and political exiles recruited him for an Equatorial Guinea operation in 2003, he “had become the go-to guy for military coups,” in the words of his memoir. He was, he wrote, the “most notorious and best paid mercenary of my generation.”
Also in on the operation, Mr. Mann said, was his friend and neighbor in a plush Cape Town neighborhood, Mark Thatcher, the son of Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister. Mr. Thatcher later denied knowledge of the coup plot, but he was arrested by South African police in 2004 for bankrolling a helicopter that was to be used in it.
The target had been irresistible. Equatorial Guinea, a tiny country that was then one of Africa’s leading oil producers, was under the thumb of one of its most brutal dictators, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who had been in power since he murdered his own uncle, the president, in 1979. A uniquely repressive, fearful atmosphere — even by the standards of Central Africa — prevailed there.
The plan for the “private-venture Assisted Regime Change,” as Mr. Mann called it, seemed simple, and worth the risk, given the promise of fabulous oil riches if it succeeded.
Besides, he wrote, “I cannot think of a single reason not to putsch this bastard.”
Mr. Mann would gather up some of the South African mercenaries who had fought for him in Angola and buy a cache of weapons on the sly in Zimbabwe. Bribes would grease the deal. Weapons and men would then rendezvous in the dark at the airport in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, and from there they would make the short flight to Malabo, Equatorial Guinea’s capital. With hired guns already in place, they would surprise the sleeping Mr. Obiang in his palace.
At the same time, another plane would bring in Equatorial Guinea’s former colonial ruler, the country’s longtime exiled opposition leader Severo Moto, from Spain. Mr. Moto would then take over, with inside help, at the palace.
Mr. Mann wanted to do the operation. He remembered thinking, as he later wrote in his memoir, “I long to pull it off.”
All seemed to be going well as the old Boeing 727 that Mr. Mann had bought lumbered in for a landing, with 69 mercenaries aboard, in the darkness at Harare.
Mr. Mann, the mastermind, was there to meet them. But as he acknowledged, the plan had been leaky as a sieve from the outset, “about as covert as a remake of the chariot race in Ben Hur.”
South African intelligence was on to him; it alerted the Zimbabweans, who alerted the Equatoguineans.
Everyone was arrested. In July 2004, Mr. Mann was convicted in a Zimbabwean court for making illegal arms purchases, and sentenced to seven years in prison.
Despite the privations, filth and beatings, “learning to work the Chikurubi system isn’t hard,” Mr. Mann wrote. “Aged 8, I had to deal with North Foreland prep school. Here, I’m an aristocrat in the prison hierarchy.”
In letters to his wife, he referred to Mr. Thatcher as “Scratchy” and Ely Calil, the Lebanese oil trader he said had helped finance the operation, as “Smelly.” Mr. Calil, who died in 2018, always denied Mr. Mann’s allegations.
In early 2008, Mr. Mann’s worst nightmare came to pass: He was secretly extradited to Equatorial Guinea, where he was promptly sentenced to 32 years in prison. But as it happened, Mr. Obiang treated him well, Mr. Mann later said, allowing him to order out for food — even pizza — from prison, a rare privilege.
Back in Britain, Conservative members of Parliament were agitating for his release, and Mr. Mann had become a sort of black-sheep folk hero.
But not to everyone. “How Sad Old Etonian Simon Mann Is a Twit,” read one headline in The Daily Telegraph in 2008. “To the gentlemen of the British press, though, he doesn’t seem to be a twit at all,” the novelist Gill Hornby wrote in the article, “but something completely different.”
Ms. Hornby continued: “It’s not that he is a hero, exactly. More that he is a Chap. He is a chap who was off doing good chap’s stuff, the sort of thing other chaps can only dream of.”
Mr. Obiang pardoned him the next year, on “humanitarian” grounds, and Mr. Mann went back to his country house in Britain and his club in London. He returned the favor eight years later, testifying on behalf of the dictator’s profligate son Teodorin, who was on trial in Paris for stealing from his own people.
Mr. Mann told reporters outside the Paris courtroom that the trial was a bid to “destabilize and overthrow” the “recognized and legitimate regime” of Teodorin’s father.
Simon Francis Mann was born on June 26, 1952, in Aldershot, England, the son of Francis George Mann, a decorated major in the Scots Guards, and Margaret Hildegarde (Clark) Mann.
The family was in the brewery business — Watney Mann was a celebrated name in British breweries — but Mr. Mann said in his memoir that he had inherited none of the fortune. He recalled, though, that at Sunday dinner, “every man there had fought the Germans in one or another world war.”
After Eton, he attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, joining the British Army in 1973. He did five tours in Northern Ireland before being accepted into the most elite of British units, the Special Air Service, in 1979. On leaving the service, he began what he called a “skid,” after the killing of a fellow officer in Northern Ireland, and worked at various unsuccessful businesses before rejoining the army during the first Persian Gulf war.
In 1992, he joined a friend’s oil company with interests in Angola, then still wracked by civil war. The next year, Mr. Mann co-founded Executive Outcomes, a private military company, with a group of South African mercenaries, successfully helping to push back the Unita rebel forces, saving his friend’s company and earning millions for his work, which was backed by the Angolan government. It was this outfit that later became a building block of the Equatorial Guinea operation.
Mr. Mann is survived by his wife, Amanda (Freedman) Mann, whom he was divorcing, according to a colleague at Hydrogen Utopia, Howard White; along with seven children from that marriage and two previous ones: Arthur, Bess, Lillie, Jack, Freddie, Sophie and Peter.
“You’ve got a certain type of person who is quite keen on going out and being adventurous in the world,” Mr. Mann, perhaps modestly alluding to himself, said at a 2017 talk about his life and work at the Oxford Union. “The other kind of person is determined to be a general, and is following everything by the rule book.”
He added: “It’s more or less a character thing, more than anything else.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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