Part Two: The Dumbest Coup In World History

terrible story of the dictators of Equatorial Guinea. My guest on part two, as with part one, is Bridget Todd. I get that. I get the fake airhorns. I love it. There's a national here. Yeah, sadly there's a national airhorn shortage, so we were out of the real ones. But when when those come back in stock, I will I will force our editor to put them back in. Please do. I I will only go on podcasts where I am

introduced the plot with airhorn, so please please do. Yeah, I think it should be illegal to introduce people any other way, to be honest, Like, can you imagine if that's how like like first dates always went, and just like anytime you're out at the bar, you just randomly hear you like because like two people are meeting on tender or something. I love it. My people are Caribbeans, so we love a good airhorn. Oh yeah, yeah you do.

I would really like some sort of sound effect to let me know if it's like a cute meat or if it's like this guy is or this person is horrifying, Like I would like to know that. I would like some sort of sound of what to happen. What would be your horrifying sound effect for a for a date? What's the what's the theme song of Hannity? I'm Sean Hanny dy I eat man at Tease. I think that's it.

I'm pretty sure that's that's basically it. Yeah, yeah, Bridget, you are the host of a new podcast launching next month h called There Are No Women on the Internet. Right, that's true. Uh, it's not mostly true. It launches on July seven, and it's called there Are No Girls on the Internet. But you got the broad stroke? Oh wait, June is after Okay, yep, sorry, well I got the broad strokes. And speaking of broad strokes, let's get the broad strokes of this coup, right, Um. Yeah, I'm a

master of transitions. Thank you. Uh. So, yeah, we we ended our episode talking about the dictators of Equatorial Guinea and this attempted coup that didn't turn into a coup but did turn into a successful book, which is, Um, I don't even know what level of privilege that is, where you like attempt to overthrow a sovereign nation in order to make a profit and fail but still get rich off of the book. Like that's that's like I feel like there's another level of white privilege that's like, yeah,

I don't even know how to describe that. That's like platinum white privilege that it's like yeah, like yeah, that is some like ultra uncut pure white privilege. Yeah, that's the kind of white privilege you need the Costco card to take advantage of, right, Like you gotta pay an extra sixty five dollars. There's a yearly subscription that you have to pay into for that. So yeah, so yes, um, and now we're going to start So, so we're gonna

go back in time again. And now that we've explained all of these coups and mercenaries in the situation in Equatorial Guinea, we're going to go back in time, um to talk about another mercenary before we get back to Equatorial Guinea, and this mercenary's name is Simon Francis man Uh Now Simon was born on June nineteen fifty two.

His family were British as all hell, I think they're Irish British so like British people who became part or Irish people who like did all enough to become part of the British aristocracy and got to be a lot less Irish as a result of things. Anyway, I don't really know. Um. The man family wealth came from brewing, and right around the same time Simon was born, his family sold their family business to a big company in return for a pile of cash and a seat on

the board. This meant that Simon grew up very comfortable, but it also meant that he would need to find a new career for himself when he grew up. Taking over the family business would not be an option. In the grand tradition of all fancy English people, his parents sent him the funk Away to spend his childhood and Eaton, which is frequently referred to as the nursery of England's gentleman uh Eaton, is probably the most prestigious high school

on the planet. Boris Johnson went there, as did David Cameron, Prince William, Prince Harry, Tom Hittleston, and in general about thirty of all of the famous British men who have ever lived like it eatens where you go if you're a fancy British boy. Now this is like some like

very fancy British white guy shit. I feel yeah, yes, this is like this is this is the peak of fancy British white guy ship like it does it doesn't get I would say the whitest thing it is possible to be is a British person who went to Eaton. Like that's that's like like top tier of of white dude. Like very few of us are that white mm hmm. Now, Eating currently cost fifty two dollars a year in tuition, and the cost was broadly similar when Simon went there.

Only students from age thirteen to eighteen are accepted, and the application process starts at age ten. Eating students each get their own separate room. Students are split up into fifty person houses where these boys are watched over by a full time staff supervised by what a Business Insider article I found calls a hired dame. Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't imagine having that on your resume. Yeah, I was

a hired dame for about four years in the nineteen nineties. Yeah, and they also couldn't they couldn't just call it like an r A like here, like familiar with It has to be a hired dame. Poor people have r a's bridget Rich people have hired dames. And I do think like your r a's job is just to make sure nobody burns the building down. Really like a hired dame.

They're doing a lot. More so, like she's managing this whole staff of people who like adults, So all these kids when the eighteen are living alone in little apartments and having an entire staff of adults clean for them, um clean their clothing, like, launder their clothing, cook food for them, and like this woman whose job it is to manage all of the people who manages their lives, like it's this kind of imagine what that does for you as a little kid growing up, Like it's yeah,

I feel like it would really fuck me up to have an adult woman doing all this ship for me, and I'm a little kid. I feel that there's no way I can come out of that being well adjusted. Yeah. I think that's probably the case with Etonians, as they're known. So after rich Boy High school, Man joined the military and went into officer training at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. In addition to being Brewers, the men and

his family had a long history of military service. Simon graduated and followed in his father's footsteps by accepting a commission in the Royal Scots Guards. He was good at soldiering, and after a few years he applied to join the Special Air Service, Britain's equivalent to the Navy Seals. He eventually became a troop commander in the s A S and specialized in counter terrorism and intelligence gathering. Both of those specialties will become powerfully ironic as we go along,

but for now. Simon did his three year rotation and then returned to the regular Army, where he was stationed in Northern Ireland. He bounced around Cold War era Europe in Central America until the early nineteen eighties, when he grew bored of army life and retired. Man immediately moved to the private military sector, joining a company run by S A. S founder David Sterling, who was pretty close

to just being a straight up fascist. Uh. And in general Old Man's friends during this period were members of like a trend in British conservatism that started in the early nineteen seventies when the Labor Party won control of the government and right wingers began ranting about communist infiltration. In the early seventies, Sterling, his boss, had solicited volunteers to join what he called a strike breaking army to

destroy the unions in Britain violently. Um. This put him ideologically right in line with Margaret Thatcher's political mentor airy Neive, who urged a right wing coup against the Labor government. Oddly enough, this also put Sterling and his fellows right in line with David Bowie, who openly supported an extreme right wing government and stated in the early seventies that Britain needed a dictator. Yeah, but you know that about

David Bowie, did you. Yeah, when like in the seventies, when unions got super powerful in England and uh, the Labor government started winning a bunch of David Bowie, an extreme right wing government and a coup and a dictator. Uh. You know this is like when you're presented with, like when you know, the idea of a problematic saves, when you're presented with some unfavorable information about somebody that you love and you're like, I pretend I do not see it.

I feel like that's like I'm like, ohs it Sylvie with your Lager's jersey. Of course. Exactly, yeah, exactly, yeah. I mean, as much as we may try to be here, we all have someone like that. I love what I love Bill Shatner, and he's objectively a monster. Yeah. So the talk of coups on the British right wing mostly died down in nineteen seventy nine when Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister, but Simon Mann's social circle in the early eighties was made up almost exclusively of folks who

were unabashed supporters of violently suppressing the left. He worked with David Sterling's company as a rent a mercenary and hobnobbed with high society. But a desk job didn't suit Man, and he was already getting restless by the time his boss, Guy in trouble for misusing funds donated to this to a charitable foundation. Lucky for him, by this point, Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and the British military was suddenly involved in something interesting again. Man re enlisted and joined

British Army staff in Saudi Arabia. The war didn't last long, and in its wake, Simon Mann was left more bored and restless than ever. He got involved with an oil firm that was investing in the newly emerged oil industry in Angola, and as luck would have it, just as Man started sniffing around Angola in nineteen ninety two, the nation found itself in the midst of a civil war.

Now Angola's second largest political party, UNITA, had started out as a left wing organization supported by the People's Republic of China, but during the nineteen eighties UNITA had pivoted to the hard right under the command of Jonas Savimbi. Thanks to our old buddy Paul Manafort, it received piles and piles of money and guns from the Reagan administration during this period. In nineteen ninety two, UNITA troops overran several oil pump thing of a jigs near a town

called Soyo. The Angolan army failed to retake the will field. Now this was a threat to Man's investments in the area, but more than that, it was an opportunity. He and his business partner, an entrepreneur named Tony Buckingham, approached the government of Angola and said, Hey, we're pretty sure we could put together a mercenary army to take care of this rebel problem for you, and Angola said, yes, it really is that easy, or at least it was in

the early nineties too. Get your own army. Yeah, that's cool, totally cool. Like, wouldn't it be cool if you could just like a master or own army with that amount of ease, welcome back come about. Yeah, I mean that's what I'm trying to do with this whole fd A thing. But um, it's it's it's harder than I thought to amass your own army, to be honest, frustrating. What would what would your the what would your army be called? I don't know, I think I don't know. I I uh,

maybe you're right. Maybe that's why I haven't gotten an army yet, is that I haven't figured out the branding for it. Yeah, that's a shame. I'll have to think about that. Bridget So the whole, the whole, Yeah, so Simon Mann and his partner Buckingham got to follow in the grand tradition established by Bob Dinnard in myke Cory. Only unlike those men, they were helping to keep a ruler in power and actually fighting against far right militants. So you might call this a promising start, or at

least as promising a start as any mercenary outfit can have. Um, you know, broadly. Um. It doesn't end well, though, As Adam Roberts notes, Quote Man, however, was a little different. He was as likely to wear a crumpled business suit as riomless spectacles and rimless spectacles as camouflage or chest webbing. He was an early example of a new sort of mercenary, the type familiar with company law, bank transfers, and investor agreements,

as with the workings of a browning pistol. In other words, Simon Mann was probably the first example of a modern mercenary leader, the prototype for men like Eric Prince so

before him. Mercenaries are like these, like really hard bitten people, like guys who go to war in their youth and never escape it, and like you know, like Bob Dinnard in My Corey, like those those dudes saw heavy, heavy combat, and it just like they were just fucked up in a way that this was all they could do, and all of their men were kind of the same way.

Simon Mann is someone who is perfectly capable of succeeding in the non shooting people world, and in fact has been very successful in that, but he likes the excitement of war, so he's like he gets involved in this mercenary company as a business um, and he's really the first example of that. He's the Eric Prince type, right, um, where he's a good he's good at running a corporation, and he also just thinks it's cool to have an army. Um. And that's that's kind of the sort of dude that

man is. And he blazes a trail. Yeah, I feel like that's really a dangerous recipe, that kind of that kind of dude who thinks it's it's cool to have an army. Yeah. Yeah, because he's gonna use it. You know. There's something to be said. Like Mike Horrer, as we talked about, was a monster, like killed a ton of people, super racist, but at least he got shot at a lot. Like he and his men like they like he he

he didn't. He wasn't just like sitting in a boardroom while people committed murder on his behalf like he was. He was out there, and I guess that's something Simon Mann is going to be the sits in a boardroom while people get shot kind of leader. Um yeah, so yeah, he was not really an adrenaline junkie um in the in in the traditional way, Like he wasn't addicted to like running into combat and getting shot at directly. He

was happy staying behind the lines and basically playing. Like you get the feeling that running a mercenary army for Simon Mann is like what a lot of people get out of playing real time strategy video games. Like that's kind of what he likes about it is it's like the stakes and stuff. Um so yeah. He hires a bunch of South African and British mercenaries to fill out

his army. These are white and mostly black men who had worked in counter terrorism, which counter terrorism within the South African context in this period meant that they had been supporting the apartheid government of South Africa and fighting against like Nelson Mandela and his crew. Um So, for the sake of having a corporate structure and all the legal permits necessary to buy guns and stuff. Man somehow wound up in control of a private security firm called

Executive Outcomes. We'll talk about them a little bit later. The bulk of his soldiers were veterans of the thirty two Battalion, which is a veteran South African unit who had fought in Angola before, and they've been fighting on the same side as Jonas Savimbi then because the apartheid

government backed this far right militia. But since the apartheid government had fallen, you know, they just wound up on the other side, fighting against these guys that they fought alongside before, which actually works out great because they know all their tricks. Um thirty two Battalion had a reputation for toughness and for viciousness. Their nickname was the Terrible Ones, and in February of nineteen three they got a chance

to prove they deserve the name. Man's Little Army launched an assault to retake the oil fields of Soil, supported by the Angolan Air Force and army. The core of their force was just twenty five men, but these were hardened veterans, and they had the assault skills necessary to act as the tip of the spear for the undisciplined and largely amateur and Golan army. The Unita rebels were forced to retreat and the end Goolan Army to established

a beachhead on the Soyu oil field. The success so You earned Executive Outcomes a reputation for ferocity and competence. The England government offered Man an eighty million dollar contract if his firm would help them continue the war against Unita and train the regular Angolan army. More battles followed, and Executive Outcomes expanded into a much larger force, eventually reaching more than a thousand regular employees, and Goalie even

let Man help run their air force. In nineteen nine four, they carried out what Man claimed was the largest combined arms attack in Africa since World War Two, forcing UNITA out of the Soyu oil fields entirely. So he it seems like it's working out so far. Uh in The mid nineties were in general probably a pretty happy time for Simon Mann. He expanded his little army into a medium sized army, complete with planes and helicopters. From nine

to nineteen ninety six. They fought numerous battles in Angola and other African countries. Twenty one Executive Outcomes men were killed in various clashes, but they racked up a much higher death toll among the rebels they fought. Unita was largely funded by diamond mines, and Man's contract specified that he got a cut of any diamond mine freed by his men. So this is really interesting because it leads to they don't just get like a percentage of the profits.

Executive outcomes like as part of like a web of companies, and it's almost impossible. I don't think anyone has ever really done a good job of unraveling all of them. But Simon Mann and his business partners create like multiple different companies, including a mining company that they have actually like they get a contract to run these diamond mines that they liberate with their soldiers, and then the mining company that Simon Man owned starts mining the diamonds, so

they get money from the diamond mining. UM. He creates a subsidiary called branch in g which does a lot of the oil extractions. And this is where things start to get really fucking complicated. UM and In fact, things have been complicated from the beginning because at this point in Africa, all of these different fucking mercenary companies and mining companies are all like like it's it's it's shady

fucking corporate ship. Like where you you'll have like twenty different companies that are all really the same company run by the same three or four guides, but they're different companies on paper. Um. So, like Executive Outcomes had started as a front company for a South African war criminals

that he could evade international arms embargoes. And I don't really know how Man wound up running it, but like Man wound up basically using this as like the face for his company, even though like the real company actually doing most of the fighting for Executive Outcomes was another company Man had founded called Sandline. Like it's all fucking

stupidly complicated. Um And to make matters even more complicated, a bunch of other shady companies that we all know and love were involved to for so, for example, that big first deal that Executive Outcomes brokeren with Angola to have their their their fucking mercenary army liberate those diamond minds. It was brokered by de beers, so like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

we all know to beers. Yeah, this is like tail as old as time when it comes to fucking like rich gas companies, like shell companies, you know, it's like this is tales all the time, like companies where it's all like, oh, these different companies with like crazy names and it's all one company, but they were actually like five companies. All you need to know is that, like somebody is getting fucking paid and shady shit is happening, right, Yeah.

All you really need to know about this in particular is that like Simon Mann and a handful of his friends at the top, who are all white dudes, are getting paid millions of dollars and all of the fighting and dying is being done by mercenaries sixty or seventy percent of whom are black guys. Um, And they're not getting paid so much like it's good money for them. It ain't Simon Man money, um, because the real moneys

and the diamonds in the oil um. The mercenaries are just a way to get at the diamonds in the oil um. Yeah, and you'll hear a lot of like libertarian types talk about how good a job Executive Outcomes did here um, and they did a great job at fighting Unita, but they didn't really care about stabilizing Angola. They cared about stabilizing the mines and oil fields of Angola and the roads that lad those two distribution centers UM, which is why they didn't actually achieve any long term

security for the region. UM. So yeah, by nine, Executive Outcomes was effectively a giant web of companies, all more or less run by Simon Mann and his buddy Buckingham, with interest in mining, oil, security, air transport, and everything imaginable. In nineteen the government of Sierra Leone went to Executive Outcomes begging for their help and suppressing a brutal insurgent group called the RUF. Now, the RUF had been formed by a disaffected army corporal and they basically gone from

fringe political armed group to violent psychopaths. Their trademark tactic was severing the arms of their victims. Depending on how pissed they were, ore UF men would either give short sleeves where they amputated just the hand, or long sleeves where they took the whole arm. So yeah, these guys are bad uh and they're kicking the ship out of the government to Sierra Leone, and a big part of why is that they're receiving money in arms from Liberian

President Charles Taylor. And so in short order, Sierra Leone is near collapse and Executive Outcomes gets hired. They come in and they effectively changed that. They pushed the rebels back and focus heavily on retaking diamond minds the RUF had occupied. This was a decent tactic, but it was

also very profitable. The Sierra Leonese government had awarded a lucrative diamond mining contract to Branch Energy, a subsidiary of Executive Outcomes UM, and the Executive Outcomes war against the r u F went well enough that in nineties seven seven ninety seven, Sierra Leone was able to hold elections. Now, the story that comes next is really complicated. The story the site you usually here is like again kind of the libertarian mercenaries are good story, which is that like

Executive Outcomes comes in, they stabilize Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone has their first independent elections that are like decent, and then the I m F and the UN pressure the new president to sign a peace deal with the r UF that includes them forcing out executive outcomes. And as soon as that happens, the r u F goes on the offensive again and the co countries drawn into war. And if you know, these mercenaries have been allowed to keep doing their job, Sierra Leone would have stayed peaceful.

And it's the fault of the the u N and the i m F. There's certainly blamed for the u N and the i m F in here, but also documents that have been released more recently show that the President of the United States actually pressured or sorry that the president of Sierra Leone went to UH, the United States and was like, I want to kick these mercenaries out because I don't think they're good for the country.

Will you demand that I kick them out so that I have an excuse to say that I've like that, like the international communities forcing me to force these guys out. It's actually much more complicated than people who just want to make this into a pro mercenary story want to see. Um, yeah, it's fucking it's it's a whole mess. This this, this whole story is a mess. And if it was true that like mercenaries were good, and if they've been allowed

to do their thing, Sierra Leone would have stayed in peace. Um. Then Sierra Leone probably wouldn't have had a civil war that lasted for years, because mercenaries continued to be a part of the fighting in Sierra Leone for the entirety of the nineties and into the early two thousands. And in fact, the government of Sierra Leone, after kicking Executive Outcomes out, hired Sandline International, which was a subsidiary of Executive Outcomes, to back the Nigerian Army and its peacekeeping there.

And things were still bloody for years. So it's just like a big fucking stupid mess. But the point of the matter is that mercenaries were good at capturing minds um and fighting rebels. They were not good at actually developing a stable society in any of the countries in which they were active UM and Yeah. In spite of their protestations that they to bring peace to Africa, Executive Outcomes made the bulk of its money by getting poor

countries to sign over mining rights to branch energy UM. Yeah. In nineteen ninety eight, Sandline International breached a u N embargo on weapons sales to see ear leone. The company also got in trouble in Papua New Guinea UM and Man was flown out of the country under shady circumstances for trying to help them put down a rebellion. It's

just a whole fucking complicated, messy story. Now. The end of it is that by nineteen ninety eight, Africa was filled with countless competing mercenary firms and nearly all of them were either based in South Africa or mainly employed South African soldiers UM. And the Mandela administration got really fucking angry at this and was like, all you guys are doing is perpetuating violence and all these countries and like adding fuel to the fire and making a shipload

of money for yourselves. Fuck this. So in nineteen South Africa passes the Foreign Military Assistance Act, which makes it illegal for South Africa is to offer military aid to foreign country companies. And this means that in nine executive outcomes goes out of business um because they can't really operate anymore. So South Africa shuts a lot of this stuff down very effectively. So that's good, Yeah, it is good. One thing I want to say is can we just I know this sounds kind of silly. Can we talk

about the name executive outcomes? There are more? Is there a more? Sort of like it's not clear what we do, but you like, no one involves somebody getting rich and fucking shady business dealings name than executives outcomes. Yeah, executive outcomes. Yeah. It it is like the name you would give a mercenary company in like a Paul Verhoeven movie. Like that's what it's like, a RoboCop sounding fucking name. Yeah, it is.

It totally is yeah, yeah, yeah, and they are out of business by and again this is heralded as a tragic thing by a lot of folks. Um. I have somewhat different opinions. Um, but yeah, it is a complicated as hell story. And the fact that like there's all these companies that are on paper even sometimes like competing with each other, but also a lot of them are owned by the same people. It's a big fucking mess. But you know what's not a mess, Bridget tell me

what's not a mess? The products and services that support this podcast. Oh, I want to hear all about them. Is there some avenue where I can do that? No, just just kidding that Avenue is now all right, we're back bridget So, yeah, that's executive outcomes. They're they're they're gone in Man in Buckingham sell off their interests in most of their subsidiary companies and they get they're both super fucking rich. We don't know how rich Man gets.

He claims Buckingham made a lot more money. Buckingham went up with something like a hundred and fifty millions. Simon Mann did very well for himself though. They're both millionaires, and he was already rich. So yeah, good ship um. Now. Interestingly enough, the men who actually did the fighting for his companies did not get rich. Most of executive outcome soldiers were black men, veterans of thirty two Battalion or

Nigerian Special Forces. Many of them were left destitute when the company folded, forced to take on menial work as security guards and live in Squalor in northwest South Africa. They had not benefited from the network of mining companies and airlines that filled Man's pockets for the better part of a decade. Simon, though got to retire, he competed in car races, married a much younger woman, and had

several kids. He should have been happy, but retirement didn't suit Simon Mann, one of his friends, later recalled, I've never seen anyone looks so bored. Man's fiftieth birthday came and went. He tried to make peace with the fact that his exciting youth as a war profiteer was behind him, but he just couldn't do it. It's a sad story. It is sad. You know, lots of money, younger wife, how sad? I mean, you know, I feel bad for

the guy. Yeah, I mean he has a lot of things that you might consider hallmarks of success, but he doesn't get to profit off of a war. He doesn't get to order men into battle anymore. Well, this is like what you were saying, is like how much of the bad ship that men do is out of kind of boredom or just like wanting to like mix it

up and have a little fun. And like, you know, I do think that that, like evil is definitely part of it, But I do think another part of it is like just like wanting to do something that is exciting and kind of fun, even if it kills people and like fox up their lives kind of especially if it kills people and their lives, because then there's stick bonus. Yeah again, this is why turning Florida into just a walled off, open air war zone is such a good

business idea. I think, and look, nobody has to wear masks there. It's it's what's fine. That's COVID nineteen is gonna be at least your problem in war Uh yeah, Warida. You've already got a name, You've got a Brandon. I think I think we gotta do this. I thinks it's the fast track. We gotta get this. I bet Governor de Santis could get on board with this, you know

so um. In two thousand three, this aging former mercenary board and in need of a challenge, had a fateful meeting with a fellow named Eli Khalil, a Lebanese businessman and financier with strong ties to the oil and gas industry. Now Khalil's eyes had recently turned towards Equatorial Guinea. He couldn't help but notice that Exon was paying the nation's dictator, Oh Bong just three dollars a barrel, while nearby Nigeria

got eight dollars a barrel for their field. A savvier head of state could negotiate much better terms, opening up huge amounts of money to flow into the coffers of a guy like Eli Khalil. He started talking to folks members of Parliament in the House of Lords who might be interested in funding such a venture. In January two thousand three, he talked to sign and Man for the first time. The two met in London and their talk

quickly turned to Equatorial Guinea. Now Man knew nothing about the country, but Khalil told him he was friends with an exiled Guinea and politician, Severo Moto Nasa. Now Moto had been a mid level politician and Equatorial Guinea and had fled for his life to avoid being murdered by the dictator oh Biong. He'd wound up in Madrid, where he'd charmed the Spanish Prime Minister and collected a small

circle of exiled fellow Guineas to him. Moto had become the most vocal opponent of Obiang's regime, and Eli Khalil later admitted to providing him with modest financial support to make his exile comfortable. Now we are talking about very powerful men and very serious crimes here, and I cannot

tell you precisely what happened next. A lot of this is just like, this is the likeliest way things happened, because nobody who actually knows is talking, or if they're talking, they're lying, because again they're talking about overthrowing a government and violating international arms embargoes. So again, all of this is kind of me putting together from research I've done.

In the research, primarily Adam Roberts did like what seems like the likeliest chain of events that actually occurred, And from what I've read, it seems like Eli Halil, basically on behalf of himself and other rich guys, found this mercenary who was bored and started just talking to him about all the terrible things this dictator Obian was doing to his people, and also how weak the military there was, and how they had this wonderful exiled opposition leader would

be a great leader in Obion in stead and kind of let man put two and two together in his own head, like, yeah, you just sort of like lay out the bones of the crime, but don't suggest the crime. And then this guy Simon Man is like, what if we overthrew him? And Eli Halila is like, that's a great idea, Simon, that is like how rich guy cry. How it happens like where it's like you suggest it to someone who like you suggest it and then they think it's their idea. That is like t's oldest time

when it comes to like rich guy crime. If you've seen Tiger King, you know what the I'm talking about. That is how it goes down. Yeah, that this is this is like not like a rare story in history. So um yeah. Uh. In his career as a mercenary, Man had always worked before for nations. He'd never gotten involved in the kind of skullduggery that men like Mad Mike Corey got famous for doing. But he'd grown up

reading the same kind of books as Mad Mike. I'm I'm sure he read King Solomon's mind, being a British child of that era. Uh, And he'd come into adulthood

hearing the stories of mercenaries like Cory and Denard. The idea of sailing into some horribly oppressed little African country, installing his own chosen king and making a big pile of lute was deeply appealing to Man, so he started to do his own research, and of course he came across horror stories of Obiang's cannibalism and all the terrible things that he'd done, and he also learned that the leader was sick with cancer. This all convinced him that to fly to Spain and meet with Moto, just to

see what he thought of the man. The two had a couple of conversations and eventually Motto asked Simon, straight up, will you help me take power in Equatorial Guinea. Man later recalled that this was the moment he realized he

was getting involved with a serious game. So Man began reaching out to his old friends, including Greg Wales, who had worked as a an accountant for executive outcomes, and they did enough research to learn that Obiang's army was small, usually drunk, and easy pickings for an elite team of veteran fighters. In recent interviews, Wales too refers to the attempted coup as a game and starts states his belief

that the government of Spain supported from the beginning. And again, all of like the white guys behind this, It's very common for them to talk about like this is a game, um, because I think that's really how a lot of them see it, Like they want to get rich off of this. But they also it just it's it's a game. Um. Yeah. And you know it's not a game though for the

Spanish government. They want Equatorial guineas oil um. And you get the feeling that you just kind of pissed that they decolonized the country before they knew it had incredibly rich oil fields. Um. So there's a lot of talk about the fact that a Spanish oil and gas company would have been given access to Equatorial guineas rich fields. And if this is true, it means that the Spanish government got involved as a way to stealthily recolonized part

of Equatorial Guinea. So Simon Mann began collecting soldiers, starting with a handful of trustworthy white veterans. They tended to be executive outcomes men. One of them, Style had flown from man in Angola. He transitioned to a peaceful and lucrative career as the private pilot for a billionaire. So Style is and again he's a white guy. He's doing incredibly well. He's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. He's like getting to live in luxury hotels and party

with a billionaire all the time. He doesn't need the money. But his old friend comes out to him and says, hey, do you want to fly a bunch of men into battle to help overthrow this dictator? And style is like fuck yeah, and he's like fun, yeah, because it sounds fun. Like that's the reason he gives is that it sounds

like it'll be a neat time. Um. Yeah, this is my favorite thing about like like people who do shitty things when they don't need the money, they just like are kind of reckless and like are up for up for like a good time. Do you know. It's like it's like you didn't need to do this, but you're just like kind of a reckless person and you were bored. Yeah, yeah,

and that's why you did it. As another mercenary who was approached to the job told the author of the book the Wonga Cou quote, you can see why this is tempting. It's fun, it could work. You trust the leaders. Some of the guys did it for the kicks because life is boring. Wow, exactly. At least they're at least they're open about it. Where it's like like this boring, they're very open about it. Yeah, it's it's awesome. Actually, I mean no, it's not it's horrible but interesting. Yeah.

So the bulk of the men who were recruited by man Um, the guys who were like the cannon fodder for this operation, were of course Black soldiers. Buffalo soldiers is the term you'll hear for these guys, the veterans of the thirty two Battalion in South Africa. And these men's stories were saturday. They were not doing it for fun.

Most of them lived in a place called Pomfrey, which had been the military base they'd been bunked in when they'd been in the South African military and was now when old asbestos filled slum that they lived in with their families in horrific squalor Adam Roberts rights quote. Families told of husbands and fathers who scrabbled at the chance of well paid work, no questions asked. At one house, a wooden carving on the wall shows a lion eating

a man with a gun. Cecilia Chimoisha says that her father, Edwardo, fought as a buffalo soldier for the South Africans for nearly two decades. He received a small army pension and took a job as a security garden Pretoria, leaving his family behind because there's no jobs in Pomfrey. Pomfrey is only full of humans, there's no jobs. He was working in Pretoria, his contract had finished, and he came home

for Christmas and New Year. When he returned to Practoria, he met a guy at an association for people who were in Battalion thirty two, a hostel. Then he phoned us and said that he was going to Congo, And most of the accounts of the black men, who again are the majority of the fighting for it here, are

the same. There offered jobs that paid more than their current work and offer maybe the possibility of an escape from poverty while still being a pittance of what Eli Khalil and Simon Mann planned to make in the operation quote. Friends recruited each other, cousins urged relatives to join, hoping to bring more wages into the family. The signs of misery and palm frey, broken windows, sandy Street strewn with litter all help explain the readiness of men to border

plane for an ill defined military job. Many of the foot soldiers and their families later claimed ignorance of the coup plot. Perhaps they were not told, at least not early on. And there's a good chance that most of these men, up until like the day they were supposed to carry out this coup, didn't really know what they were being brought in for. Um. So recruiting these black soldiers, who were again expected to do almost all of the fighting and killing, was basically an after thought thought for

Simon Mann. He devoted most of his pre coup efforts to recruiting rich white guys to provide funding for the whole escapade. He did this by throwing a series of fancy parties that is Johannesburg home. According to an attendee at one of these parties, interviewed by The Sunday Telegraph, quote, it was a casual conversation at a drinks party around a swimming pool about a security project in an African mind. Yeah, First of all, I love this accent you're doing, and

I say that. Um. Also, this sounds terrible and they did terrible things. This Johannesburg pool party sounds kind of lit. I'm not gonna yeah, I I have. I have gone drinking at parties that are heavily mercenary, attended a couple of times, and you drink a lot. Yeah, yeah, you drink a lot with private military contractors. Although the drunkest

people at the party were the U n UM. They actually like fucking parked illegally and we were going to get the party busted and we had to like find the drunken U n guys and steal their keys to move the land rover. It was fucking night. Wait, why is this not a podcast episode? You're doing story? It's a fun tale. You are you got up? We got you can get up to some ship in Iraq? Yeah so um yeah. So he hosts these these pool parties

where he talks to people. They're just having drinks and he's like, you know, we're having a project to mine. You know, it'll be a quick profit if you're willing to invest some money. And then, you know, most people are, you know, as soon as he mentions that the project is an equatorial guinea, most reasonable people are like, oh fun, No, I have no interest in getting involved in business in that company, Like it's way in that country, it's way

too unstable. Um. But the people who are interested. Man then has like private one on one conversations with Um and he asked him to put up a hundred thousand dollars in seed money and promises them a million dollar return inside of ten weeks. Now, I'm not an investment guru, but I know some people who are good at investments, and one thing they'll all say is that if anyone is offering you returns like that really returns an excess of like five, ten, maybe fifteen percent, um, Like, that's good.

If someone's offering you ten times return in ten weeks, that's a scam. They're either going to steal your money or they're committing some sort of horrible crime. And this is the horrible crime type thing, right Like, somebody either either somebody is getting scammed or there's a terrible fucking like a legal thing going on. For sure, it's either heroin or a coup, right Like, if they're not just going to take your money and run, it's heroin or

a coup. Yeah. So, um, a number of people invested, but a much larger number wound up spreading rumors around town about the coup that man was planning. Because again, he tries to stay secret about this, but he's bad at it, and he just starts like telling anyone who says, yeah, I might invest money, like yes, we're gonna overthrow this government. So like he's simultaneously these black soldiers that they're expecting to do the fighting don't know what they're getting involved in.

And like every random white dude that Simon man gets drunk at here's about his plan to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. Like it so funny, Like this actually reminds me of when we were at that when we were talking about like Nazis, how I was so surprised by how many of them had. Like we're taken down by personal messiness that you think you would be some like a dictator or like someone who is committed to threading awfulness and like shittiness in the world, and then

you get taken down by your own messiness. It's like again, like you got drunk and told everybody like that that really tells you all you need to know. Don't you think that that is what separates the bad people who are terrible but ultimately just foot soldiers, to the really danger The really dangerous people are people like Eli Khalil, like the guy at the top of all this who was smart enough to be like this Simon guy is going to try to do this, and he's going to

be incompetent and messy. But as long as I like steer clear just enough that I can't be legally tied to him, this might work out. If it does, I make a bunch of money. If it doesn't, I'm out, what you know, a hundred grand or two. He's the one gathering most of the funds anyway, Like, those are the people you have to fucking watch out for. Is that you like Halil's like the Simon Man's funk up a bunch of ship, but they're usually too dumb to get most of what they want because they're just they're

they're messy. Yeah, Samon Man is messy. Listen, if you're gonna be if you're gonna be involved in like like dirty ship, don't get drunk and tell everybody that's Like that's like a number one rule. Yeah, Like, if you're gonna be a dealer, don't smoke your own stash. And if you're going to plot coup's stay sober until the coup's done. That's what fucking Bob Denard did, right, They brought the champagne. They didn't drink the champagne before the coup. Mike Corean is men did and they got into an

airport gunfight. Drinking getting wasted before the coup means an airport gunfight. Getting wasted after the coup means a fun evening. Like it's not hard. I almost I almost feel like you're like giving people the recipe, like launch a successful coup, get drunk after those Venezuelan guys who got busted, they were on a boat, you know, they were getting drunk

on that boat, like, yeah, fucking idiots. And of course it was like most of the actual dying was done by like these local Venezuelans who just wanted to be freed by a shitty dictator. These white guys wanted to be heroes. It's fucking bullshit. It's so frustrating. I don't know, maybe they'll suffer real penalties for what they did, because funk those guys, Uh, Like, it's so such bullshit. It's always such bullshit. So man was not secretive about what

he was proposing to do. Obviously, he slipped up constantly in the drinking parties. Um. And you know, while a small number of people invested, a much larger number of the people that he talked to wound up just spreading rumors around town that Simon Mann was planning a coup. South African intelligence found out about it almost instantly and wrote out multiple different reports about the Button coup in the months before it was attempted. So like South African

authorities like right away know what's going on. Um Now, it's like really that Simon Mann himself was well aware that the gist of his plan was known to local authorities, and he doesn't seem to have cared much. There's debate as to why, but the likeliest explanation is that he just didn't think anyone would bother to stop him. He thought that Obiang was such a bad dictator and international law was so lax that nothing would happen um. And

he had good reason to think this. Um. His partner Wales, had reached out to an American lobbyist, Joe Sala, who advised them that a four day program of introductions to US officials could be arranged for Motto, the guy they wanted to put in place as the new dictator, for just forty grand And we don't know exactly what kind of deal Whales worked out with Sala for Motto, but the two talked regularly for months and when man purchased a former Coastguard Boeing seven for the United States to

use in his coup. The whole process of buying this former military aircraft and shipping it to South Africa went really smoothly, like weirdly smoothly, and there are there's no hard evidence, but there's a lot of people who think that someone, if not a US government at the top level, people in the US government knew about this button coup and wanted to kind of help it along a little bit by letting them get access to this plane more easily. Again, there's a good chance that people at the top did

know that. George Bush was like, yeah, funk it, let's see what happens. Who knows. Yeah, I honestly wouldn't put it past him, like that does sound like something he would do and what it also might have been due to the Spanish government asking the US government to help things out here because Spain again had a massive financial

interest in this. The Spanish government did because they wanted to get access to Equatorial Guineas oil, and Spain had backed the U S and the invasion of Iraq, which was like the Spanish leadership had backed the U S and the invasion of Iraq, which is a very politically dicey decision, to say the least, and there's suspicions that basically the Prime Minister of Spain was like, look, George w Bush, like, when you wanted to go to war,

we helped you out. Now I want to overthrow a dictator and take some oil, Like let's get some quid pro quo going up in this bitch. Um. So you know you can't I can't say enough. This is two thousand three and two thousand four, like yeah, so um. Wales was responsible for also putting together most of the non military aspects of the scheme. He set the day of the actual event for a Thursday or a Friday, because those were the days that most ministers would be

in the capital in Malabo and Equatorial Guinea. The coup plotters would then have the weekend to consolidate their power and reopen the country on Monday. So that's kind of the was the goal is, like we overthrow the government on Friday, we like work through the weekend, and then by Monday we got the whole new country set up. I mean, I like the way they think it seems it sounds very efficient and that within the way the plan.

Yeah sure, yeah, that makes sense. That scans um. So he had plans to get the National press such as it was in line and put together and quote impressive plans for social, political, medical, and economic improvements for the general populace um that he was going to have motto announced on the monday he took power. Now, none of these plans would actually be implemented, but that would get like just talking about it would get the world off of their backs long enough to suck Equatorial Guinea dry.

And I'm gonna quote now from the book the Wonga Coup. Quote. By the turn of the year Wales, his ideas and presumably Man's, had expanded to something grander and Equatorial Guinea. He proposed forming a company controlled by Man and his closest plotters to run Equatorial Guinea, with Moto as a puppet leader. The English accountant had long liked to dream up plans and models for how to run failing countries.

He says he has written other proposals for other companies modeled on the old buccaneering firms that underwrote British imperial expansion in India and Africa. He thinks Somalia and Gabon should be run by boards of directors, not by governments or warlords. So he wrote a lengthy document, the Bite of Benin Company Document, describing how such men such a company could take power and run the oil rich West African state. John Smith believed the document shows how the

coup plot was pure neo colonialism. To put Motto in place so they can remove him in any time. Simon would have been the president's security advisor and his company, the Bite of Benin Company, would have controlled it all. So, yeah, that's the plan. That's suck up. It's super fucked up. Yeah, it's real bad. You shouldn't do that, shouldn't shouldn't do that at all. By the way, the name the Wonga coup comes from a letter that I believe it was

Mark Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher's son um was one of the backers of this plan, and he got He got in legal trouble for it eventually, and again the exact dimensions to which he was involved aren't known. It kind of looks like he just gave them some money, knowing vaguely that they were going to funk up some ship in

Africa and maybe make a lot of money. Um, but yeah, so Margaret Thatcher's kid like h Simon Mann writes him a letter when he needs more money and refers to the money that he needs as wonga, which is like upper classs rich British kids slang for cash. Um like it's what Etonian boys called cat like some wonga? What of the wonga? Whatever? Fucking bullshit, fancy rich British kid stupid. I hope that you do. I hope that you do your like rich British kid accent A hundred more times

in this episode. Very happy. I'll do my best. Can you do that voice to call to an ad Brick? Just won? Oh? God? Alright, alright, speaking of colonialism and wonga, speaking of wonga. He'll get this show somewhere. I went Australian right away, like I immediately, like Beard in Australian territory. I didn't want to say anything, but it's very Australian. I know, I know, I know, I know. I could do a pretty good Irish accent. Yeah I do what Irish? That's a Irish boy faith? And why don't you check

out these odds? Now? Give this man a raise? Good? That was so good not even please HOI you toy t tidy Tom. We're back from the odd brick. It's the Irish behind the Bostard's episode that really is, like, I guess that's I don't know what kind of colonialism it is when you try to make fun of rich British people but you're bad at the accent, so you just make fun of another colonialized oppressed people, the Irish. Instead. You're like, I wanted to make fun of them, but

now the Irish are getting pulled into it somehow. I don't know. I'm so sorry Ireland. Um, you didn't deserve that. You're a wonderful country. So the Bite of Bening company document shows the plotters fretting that oil firms may not

play ball after the coup. They were worried that, like, um, basically that some of these international companies would be like, you illegally overthrew a government and maybe we don't want to do business with you, which is weird because it means that these coup plotters had way more faith in the morality of oil company executives than anyone on earth ever has. Um. Yeah, so, uh, they were worried about

this because if oil revenue stopped flowing. You know, there was no point in taking control of Equatorial Guinea, which again shows that they did not care about overthrowing this dictator. But they knew that there were regular direct flights between Malabo and Houston, UM because you know, there was a

lot of American interest in Equatorial Guinea. UM, and they didn't want to like piss off the United States because if they messed with the oil interests at all and like damaged the business interests of any of these companies actively mining Equatorial Guinea, that would get the Marines in. Like that was like literally like the writing they wrote, like this is what gets the Marines in. UM. So they had to assure the American government early on, and

that was something they like wrote into their plan. UM. They figured that like the best way to do this was to offer lucrative jobs to American private security firms UM. And they decided that like one way to do this was to offer the Military Professional Resources Incorporated mpr I company the job of guarding the new president once the government was overthrown. So they like are immediately thinking, how do we bribe the US into not stopping us from

doing this? UM. Yeah, the bite have been in company. Document is proof positive against any claims that humanitarian concerns were a factor in the coup. Under its strictures, the coup plotters would have total control over the new president's schedule and what contracts he was allowed to sign. The plotters were well aware of the fact that Equatorial guineas first dictator Macias had initially been a figurehead for the Spanish government. They would not allow this to happen again.

The document itself notes, quote, the two most potent general threats are one. As it is potentially a very lucrative game, we should expect bad behavior, disloyalty, rampant individual greed, a rational behavior, kids in toy shop style, backstabbing, bum fucking,

and similar ungentlemanly activities too. If the result is not seen by the outside world is noticeably better than the current situation, our position there and uh in anything other than the very short term will be hard to sustain, and our involvement will be more likely to be the

subject of unfavorable scrutinty. So that's really the wording on this is fascinating to me, Like because there's so number one they call it a game again, but also because there's gonna be so much money at stake, we should expect everyone to act badly, Like we have to assume everyone's going to be a piece of ship that's involved in this plan that we're cooking up. Yeah, everyone's going

to act like a child at a toy store. And then also for I do think referring to it as a game, it really shows you, like what they were thinking that they like don't understand this sort of steaks. Yeah, they don't. And it's is like this is StarCraft for rich people, Like that's what this is. Is like that, Yeah,

it's it's fucking wild. So the biggest issue facing the plotters was the problem of acquiring weaponry UM and a lot is said stereotypically about how easy it is to acquire guns in Africa, but that's actually not as true as people think. For one thing, there's fewer firearms and the entire African continent than in the United States, probably a lot fewer, because the US has roughly half of

all the world's guns. UM in South Africa, probably the most heavily armed nation on the continent, roughly ten out of one hundred people own a gun. In the United States, there are one dred sixteen firearms for every human being. That's just private guns too. By the way, UM, Now, there are places in Africa where you can buy an a K forty seven for cheap, generally places that have

just finished having civil wars or coups or whatever. But that's not the case everywhere, and just being able to buy an a K forty seven doesn't mean you can actually get access to high quality arms. Coup plotters needed not just random street a ks. They needed good, reliable guns, and they needed things other than a K forty sevens. They needed hand grenades, heavy machine guns, mortars, mortar ammunition, and rocket launchers. All of this ship is necessary if

you're going to overthrow even a small modern government. Um and that stuff is hard to fucking get, especially in the quantities that you need. Man eventually worked at a deal with an arms manufacturer, Zimbabwe Defense Industries z d I. Now, he had no end user certificate, which is what you need to arm a large group of people without breaking

international law, but he did have bribe money. Z d I didn't want to just deliver weapons to Man in his army in their own country though, because they legally couldn't ship them to him going to handle all these logistical hurdles. Man and the other plotters set up an

incredibly complex and stupid scheme. The short of it is that they bought a bunch of extra guns from z d I to have delivered for rebels that they knew in the Congo, and they were going to have these rebels attack and take an air strip from the government of the Congo. The z d I plane would then fly into the Congo, land at that air strip and unload a bunch of guns to pay the rebels and to give Man's army, which they would then fly into

Zambia to give to their fighters. So like, we're already over complicating things, right, like every every other complication is that is another way for things to fail. Like this is like we haven't even like the steps before we even land an army in fucking Eduatorial Guinea are such a fucking mess. It's clearly a bad idea. So Man's forward team would meet with these rebels and then fly to Zambia, where the bulk of the mercenaries would be waiting.

They'd load up their arms and then fly to Equatorial Guinea to carry out their coup. A separate group of mercenaries arding future present Moto would land by boats supported by a small squadron of Spanish frigates, which would be there to secure naval supremacy. Now in war, as in life, simple plans are always better than complicated ones, and Man's convoluted coup scheme collapsed before it really got started. The Congolese rebels failed to capture the airstrip and probably never

even tried to assault it. The z d I plane had no place to land, so it flew back to Harare. The Spanish frigates sailed off when it became clear that no coup was going to occur, and in general, the whole scheme diet fizzled. And in fact, even the plane that the Man's advanced team flew from the Congo to Zambia like it hit a bird in midflight and had to be emergency repaired. It just it falls apart fucking immediately, and most of Man's army just spends the whek getting

drunk in fancy hotels. Um. So, not not a great first try, not a great first try. But is it fun to get drunk in fancy hotels? It is? It is uh and a lot of of the guys who were getting drunk in those hotels would go on too wish that they just stayed in the hotels getting drunk. Um. Yeah, imagine if that's all they did where they were just like, oh, I just I just went to this hotel, got drunk, and then I like stayed there. I'm at home. Cous

are awesome. So after this inauspicious cluster fox, several of the coup's early backers backed out, wisely, deciding that Man and his fellow mercenaries were a lot worse at overthrowing corrupt regimes than they'd been at propping them up. But Simon Mann had the coup plotting equivalent of blue balls, and he was not the kind of man who was gonna let a little thing like rank failures stop him. He committed to trying again and started pounding the ground

in search of yet more funding. This was not an easy process, and in interviews Man's friends noted that he was visibly uneasy by late February two thousand four. Quote he looked under huge emotional pressure, recalls one who saw him regularly. Matters were not helped by Amanda, his free spending wife. On one occasion, he lost it. He threw the phone ten ms at a wall and it smashed to a thousand bits to somebody who worked in his office.

The reason, on top of the stress of finding cash for his coup, he had to provide ever more dollars to his wife. Man could afford it in the longer term, but he lacked ready cash. His wife and children used to luxury were running up bills just as he needed every dollar. And it's it's a whole another level of self absorbed when you're angry at your wife and kids for spending money not because you don't have it, because you need it to overthrow a sovereign nation to steal

it's oil. It's like, baby, don't you understand I need this. I need this money for the coup. I need this for the coup. That's my coup bucks. She's like you, I'm getting a facial Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like like normal like middle class guys who are the kind of man Simon man is when they get old, like spend too much money buying like a shitty convertible, Simon

launches a coup. That's really what is going on here. Yeah, It's like, are you gonna buy a like midlife crisis car or execute a Q whichever yeah one of the two. So um yeah he uh. He starts to get desperate, right um, because he's having trouble raising enough money, and like all desperate men, he cuts corners. And the fact that he was cutting corners in his attempted a second attempted a coup is embodied nowhere better than the story of how Man planned to collect his zimbabwe and weapons

the second time around. Rather than set up a drop in another country, he just decided to fly his seven seven loaded with mercenaries into Zimbabwe and pick up the guns there. Now, these guns were being bought illegally, and the mercenaries were also illegal. Um so. This introduced a number of wrinkles into the plan. Now Man and his soldiers were going to be landing in another sovereign nation and buying illegal weapons, which is a whole new list

of people you have to bribe. Like smuggling an army all the way across Africa is not an easy thing to do, um so, but Man decides, fuck it, we'll figure it out. On Arch fourth, a small advanced team flew into Equatorial guineas Capital. Their role would be to set things up for when the full army arrived. Unfortunately for them, Obiang and his government were well aware of what was about to happen. For one thing, the South African government had warned them in detail that Simon Mann

was planning a coup. For another thing, before the first coup attempt, Man had sent an advanced team into Equatorial Guinea. They've gotten drunk in one of the capital's few restaurants and talked openly about their plans to overthrow the government. So there's a number of reasons that Obiang knows what's about to happen again, like getting drunk, and like getting drunken talkie if you're if you're planning a coup, If you're out there listening and you're planning a coup, don't

get drunken talkie. After Bridget and I will have a lot more coup advice in our new podcast, How to Coup, which launches on the I Heart network this August, so you can wherever you get your podcast, how did you Yeah? If you're stockpiling F A L S and three oh eight mm o in hopes of overthrowing I don't know Uruguay, don't do it. Until you listen to our podcast, because we're gonna have a lot of advice for you. We should call it the A b C's for always be couping.

You gotta be learning your A b c s. You know, if you're going to carry out a coup, the including d don't drink um. That really is the number one lesson I've gotten. Like that is like the undoing of so many people in this story. It's like getting and honestly, like these are horrible, horrible people. I want to make it very clear, they're terrible. Fuck them all, But I kind of I've been there where you like, have a plan, you have a few drinks, you're feeling good. You start

talking like, I don't know how it happens. Oh, we could call our podcast get a Coup. Oh that's good, dude, that's a good one. That's a good one. It's gonna be a great show. Gonna be a great show. We'll have to have Simon man on. Thank you so uh. When the point team flew in on March fourth, Obiang was ready um and still the coup plotters and the advanced team member Nicki took steps to try to conceal

the fact that we're about to execute a coup. So Nick Deta is like the head of the advanced team that lands in Equatorial Guinea a head of the second attempt, and as soon as he lands, he gets the impression that the government might be aware that they're about to carry out a coup. And his response to this is to send out a bunch of text messages on his phone, which he was sure was bugged, stating, hey, guys were canceling the coup. Not because he was canceling the coupe

because he caught that. We thought that would throw the government off of their trail. I kind of love that smart people here. So just as the Spanish government hoped a successful coup would allow them to profit from Equatorial Guineas oil, South Africa felt that stopping the coup would

help them profit off Equatorial Guineas oil. So, in addition to warning young South Africa put in a call to Robert Mugabe, the dictator of Zimbabwe now and they were like, Hey, a bunch of mercenaries led by a British guy are going to be picking up a legal arms at your airport. Maybe do something about it. And Mugabe didn't really care that much about Equatorial guineas sovereignty. But he was, above all else terrified of Britain, which is the most reasonable

thing about Robert Mugabe. And he and many of them in his government were worried that their old colonial oppressor was plotting at coup against Zimbabwe. So when they hear that a British mercenary is about to land in their country and pick up a pile of guns, they're not worried about Equatorial Guinea. They're worried that he's going to

try to overthrow his own country. So, to make a very long and dumb story short, man lands in Harare with the bulk of his army and they all get arrested before they can even so much as pick up their guns. His advanced team is also arrested. In Equatorial Guinea, both groups of mercenaries mercenaries are thrown into horrible prisons and tortured. One man dies under torture in each country. UM. Now in Zimbabwe, man and his mercenaries are all tried,

convicted and sentenced to prison. Um Most of the grunts got a year with no time served for the six months had already been incarcerted pre trial. So all these poor black eyes just get no money and are in jail for eighteen months. Um. Yeah, most of the white men got sixteen months sentences. They all get fined two thousands Zimbabwe dollars each, which comes to about thirty cents,

so at least the fine isn't too much. But yeah, Man himself was sentenced to seven years and forfeited both the plane he bought in a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in cash. He also missed the birth of his seventh child, which happened the same month that he was sentenced. H this was a mild penalty compared to the suffering experience by the families of the black soldiers. Man had led into this stupid disaster because Man's family at least

was still rich. According to Lawonga Coup quote, Viviana Chimuchi, wife of Eduardo who's one of the men, was desperate. We attended. We depend on people who have pity and on the churches we get food parcels. She explains. Her daughter Cecilia says, we heard the sentence of my father on the radio that we were We were surprised. They told us he would come out now tears appear in her eyes. She blames man in the financiers. Those people put us into trouble. We're suffering because they put our

father into problems. She once man punished. I'm happy not to give him seven years, no to give him the death penalty he deserves it. Wow powerful words. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at the end of the day, like yeah, man and his fellow white guys, they all do suffer. Like they spend time in a really shitty prison and man, a couple of them get tortured. Um, but the fucking these these poor black dudes who probably didn't even really know what they were being paid to do in detail, uh,

suffer the worst. And all of the white guys when they do get out of prison, have our rich still, and all of these black guys their families are poorer than ever. It's it's some bullshit. It's so sad like that, like what you've just described, I feel like is such a blueprint for so many things, where white guys go into this, they come out of it and they're fine, and then the people that that kind of like go along with it, who are more oft than than not

black just have nothing. And it's just it's it's it's makes me, it's it's it's very upsetting, and I think it's like a common thing when we talk about Yes, it is by far the normal way for this ship to go. So Man and his fellow whites had enough money to pay bribes that made their lives behind bars easier. Zimbabwe in prison is never comfortable, but they were able to secure themselves enough food to stay relatively healthy, as

well as a few luxuries. The same was not true for the black men that they'd planned to lead into battle. Those men spent their year behind bars on the edge of starvation. When they were freed, they found themselves in debt, nursing criminal records, and tired by their toxic affiliations to one of the most disastrous coups in history. Simon Mann, however, was it extradited to Equatorial Guinea after four years in the Zimbabwe in prison, and it is widely believed that

he was traded by Zimbabwe for oil. He went on to spend another eighteen month the Equatorial guineas notorious Black Beach Prison. Before his extradition, President Obiang had promised to personally sodomize and skin alive the mercenary, but he didn't actually, yeah, he didn't really do that. Um. It was bad though. Man was tortured horribly and locked in solitary confinement. He was beaten and starved. I'm not gonna say he suffered a fair punishment, but he was. He was punished like

he has. He spends like years in unspeakable misery and torment. So you know, at least there's that. Uh. Yeah. During his time incarcerated, he was allowed to speak to journalists provided he telled them that he was being treated very well. And you can find interviews from him and like the mid aughts where he's talking about like, no, I haven't

been tortured. Everything's good here. When he got out of prison in two thousand ten, he started being like, yeah, I was absolutely tortured and he's probably not lying like he almost certainly was tortured. Um. But yeah. One of these interviews I found from before he was released through the Independent, has a very choice quote from Mr Mann quote Hugo, tigers shoot, but you don't expect the tiger

to win. Yeah. He was pardoned by President obiong And two thousand nine, and in two thousand tend he gave an interview to the Guardian where he revealed the details of his torture and provided this quote. I didn't go there to make lots of money and sit on my own and say hey, I'm a rich man. I did it for my family, to improve their lives. I made the wrong choices. I am very sorry about that, for the pain and grief I brought my family, especially my

daughter who was ten when I was incarcerated. Which is like Number one clearly doesn't give a shit about any of the like the soldiers that he put in danger through as a result of this. He doesn't even mention them. Doesn't even mention them. Um. And also like you were rich already, your family could have lived a comfortable life and you never needed to work again. You wanted them to be like own their own islands rich. That's why

you did this. Oh my gosh, this could be a whole other behind the bastard's episode of like people who have tons of money who just get this obsession with the money. Where you could have done you could have whatever, like shitty, illegal, horrible thing you did. You could have not done that and lived a comfortable life, Like what is this obsession with Yeah, we have to be private island rich, and I don't. I don't even think it

was really that. I honestly don't think I think the money was an incentive, but I think more than anything, man wanted the excitement and he wanted this to be able to brag about, like he wanted to be able to think this would be the feather in his cap as a mercenary. All these other mercenaries like Mike Cory and Bob Denard, they had led coups, like they had helped overthrow governments. He had never gotten to do that,

and he wanted to. You know, it goes back. Yeah, if you had to say, how many people out there to doing horrible things? Do you think you're doing it for bragging rights? If you had to say one way or the other, that's a very high percentage. Yeah, you know, you don't. You know, speaking of Tiger King, that that guy who was the inspiration for Scarface, that's clearly a

guy who was just in it for the money. Because he he doesn't seem to have any desire to brag about it, like he just wanted to fucking He got rich, he did his time, he got out, and he bought a fucking farm in the middle of nowhere. I can respect that, even if you do awful things to get the money. But most of them want everyone to know how cool they are. So up. It's like worse to me. I don't know. I find it like yeah more yeah,

it's like it's like more like, um, I can't understand it. Yeah, yep, yep, souh more. Recently, um, in like a couple of weeks ago, uh fucking uh. Simon Mann was interviewed by The Daily Mail about the coronavirus epidemic of all things, and the Daily Mail being a giant piece of ship. They were basically like, Hey, you spent a bunch of time in solitary confinement. What's your advice for people going through quarantine? Oh? No, the idea for a fucking article I can conceive of. Um.

But Man's quote is really funny. Quote. You have to make your world the people in the place of your confinement, and stop constantly thinking at this time we should be doing this or that and the kids should be going back to school. Those thoughts are the ones that hurt you. Um, which I don't know, maybe is good advice. I kind of refused to acknowledge this guy is being capable of giving good advice, so fuck it. Yeah, fuck him. I don't want to hear his advice. He honestly like, this

is this is how I where I'm at. That same advice could be given by somebody else and I'd be like, oh, good advice, could advice? It's given by him, and I'm like, fucking I'm terrible advice. Yeah, fucking terrible advice. Well badka you want to know would be good advice? Right now? Uh? Robert advising people to go to go listen to Bridget's new podcast. Yes, I can tell you all about it. Oh please do um, thank you, Sophie. UM. My new podcast is called There Are No Girls on the Internet.

It drops on I Heart Radio on July seven, and it's all about exploring the intersections of gender, technology and the Internet. You know. It's a culture show that really asked how have women and other marginalized voices shaped the experience of being online? And we really have shaped it. So please check it out. Question mark exclamation point. Do it. It's a requirement of joining our cult. Yep, yep. So that's the episode. Go, I don't know, overthrow a sovereign nation.

Give it a shot. Just stay sober, stay sober. Yeah, if you're gonna drink, do it after, don't do it during. And if you're gonna drink, like keep your mouth set, like don't get mouthie, don't drink and coup and don't text in coup. All of the rules for driving apply to coups. Yeah, that's the lesson all of them. That was good. I like Jesus Christ. These people are so dumb, all right, all right, cool, Well that's the s spode h