Simon Mann, probably the 21st century’s most famous mercenary, is a small, neat man who looks nothing like he is supposed to.
The former special forces soldier, who did six tours in Northern Ireland with the British SAS and waged war for profit in Angola and Sierra Leone, shouldn’t look like a senior banker or bureaucrat.
And the man, whose mercenary career came to a crashing end when he was arrested in Harare in 2004 for his role in a planned coup in Equatorial Guinea, should not be wearing a turquoise Apple Watch (with matching earphones) in addition to his normal, more traditional, timepiece.
Simon Mann (L) the leader of the group of seventy foreigners arrested in Zimbabwe on charges of trying to topple the president of Equatorial Guinea leave a court set up at a maximum security prison 23 March 2003, in Harare. The 70 men were remanded until April 13. Man at right is unidentified. AFP PHOTO / STR
Mann talks quietly in an upper-crust British accent that tells of growing up in the heart of the British establishment. Born into a brewing dynasty, to a father who captained England in cricket and won two Military Crosses and a Distinguished Service Order during World War II, Mann attended Eton and Sandhurst before joining the Scots Guards.
Having been selected for the elite Special Air Service (SAS), he served in Cyprus, Germany, Norway and Northern Ireland before leaving in 1985. He was recalled from the reserves to fight in the Gulf War.
Mann is hard of hearing in his right ear, making conversation amid the hubbub in The Botanist, the posh Sloane Square pub he chose for the interview, difficult.
There is a natural reticence about him and he takes his time to answer even the simplest question. This is a man who speaks far differently than he writes. There is a modesty in person that is not there in Cry Havoc, his gung-ho account of the disastrous “Wonga Coup” attempt in Equatorial Guinea and his time in two of Africa’s most notoriously hellish prisons, Zimbabwe’s Chikurubi and Equatorial Guinea’s Black Beach.
Mann, and 69 other mercenaries, was arrested in Zimbabwe in 2004 when the Boeing 727 he had acquired for the coup in Equatorial Guinea landed in Harare with $180,000 on board to pay for the arms he had bought for the operation.
He was convicted in Harare of two counts of buying and selling weaponry, and sentenced to seven years imprisonment. After serving three years, he was released and extradited to Equatorial Guinea where he was jailed for the planned coup, having been found guilty in absentia and sentenced to 34 years imprisonment. He served a year before being pardoned on humanitarian grounds by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the president he had been hired to overthrow.
Does Mann regret what he did? While he maintains that Equatorial Guinea was a “nasty” place, he thinks he should not have attempted the coup, and concedes it was a “bridge too far”. Mann believes that the situation is improving in the small oil-rich nation since the coup attempt, although he doesn’t connect the two things.
“It’s heading in the right direction, they’re making effort to get it right,” he says.
Mann has returned to Equatorial Guinea half a dozen times since his release. He says he is now “close” to Obiang who is, in his view, trying to set things right.
“I was very surprised when I was released,” he says, adding that he thought he’d be in jail for at least 10 years.
He has not been back to Zimbabwe and says he would require explicit assurances from the very top that it would be OK for him to do so.
Despite some circles criticizing the British government for washing its hands of the whole affair, Mann believes he was treated fairly.
“If you get involved in something like this and it goes horribly wrong, it is of your own doing.”
Mark Thatcher – the son of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – on the other hand, is still not in his good books.
“I’m still very pissed off with him. He let me down. I’m not a fan,” he says.
In 2005, Thatcher admitted paying for a military helicopter used by the mercenaries but claimed that he believed it was to be used as an air ambulance. Thatcher paid a R3-million ($225,000) fine and got a four-year suspended sentence in South Africa where he had been living.
Mann’s adventures may have cost him a half a decade of his life but he remains unapologetic about the fact that he waged war for money across a continent that has seen too much conflict.
The moral boundaries of being guns for hire have always been blurry, but Mann is prosaic about it. He bundles his critics into a catch-all of “Guardian readers”, after the left-leaning British newspaper, who he says are pre-programmed to dislike “Old Etonian former Scots Guards” like himself.
Was Equatorial Guinea his last big coup? “Something like that,” he responds.
Mann says that the world has moved on, in a good way. He explains that the way to effect regime change is peaceful democratic elections, and that forced regime change only comes about because it is needed.
He agrees that the attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea was morally ambiguous, a far more generous interpretation than his critics had.
“It was controversial,” he admits, “… there was no war, so we can’t argue that we ended a war, we were going against an internationally recognized sovereign government.”
But he is steadfast that he was not wrong when he worked as a mercenary elsewhere on the continent and says that this is a very old profession. In Angola and Sierra Leone, where he was far more successful, he believes he was on the side of the angels – not least because he had been hired by the government of the day. These conflicts passed his moral test.
“I’m not saying we did things for entirely humanitarian reasons but it was self-defence for the… government.”
He claims that Executive Outcomes, the private military company (PMC) he was instrumental in founding, shortened the wars in both Angola and Sierra Leone. He was, he argues, in fact saving lives.
“Executive Outcomes saved the people of Sierra Leone from some real bastards.”
Mann is honest enough not to pretend that his motives were pure. He was in it for the money. While he felt sorry for the people in those countries, and says he was improving their lives, the major driver was monetary.
British mercenary Simon Mann (2ndL) stands with co-accused on July 7, 2008 at Malabo’s courthouse. Mann was sentenced on July 7 by Malabo court to 34 years and four months in prison for leading an abortive coup in Equatorial Guinea. AFP PHOTO/ RODRIGO ANGUE NGUEMA
Asked how you can justify being a mercenary, he quotes a poem by British poet A.E. Housman that sums it up. “This says more in two verses than most can say at all.”
However, he admits that PMCs shouldn’t be necessary and the work that they do would be better done by governments. Large-scale fighting isn’t a job for the private sector.
Putting business prerogatives into military situations can lead to a horrific moral dilemma. Why is this? The chain of command in an official army in a democratic state gives an audit trail of how things happen, and this leads to a better conclusion from moral, legal and philosophical aspects. Doing it as a business is completely different. But if official forces aren’t up to the job, then it is inevitable that PMCs will be there.
“Let’s say you are walking along a road and see a house on fire. If you’re asked to help you will say yes. But if a factory is on fire and you need men and equipment to fight that fire, you will do it as a business,” says Mann.
The nature of our conversation inevitably leads on to how to defeat Islamic State (IS) and other fundamentalists who are wreaking terror and misery across vast swathes of the Middle East and Africa.
For Mann it’s fairly simple, albeit not easy to execute. There are proven ways to win a war. You have to separate the guerrilla forces from people who are willing to support them, thus stopping the mechanism.
“This is hard to do against fundamentalists” who are a part of the communities that they terrorize but it’s better than being “cynical and saying to hell with it.”
Mann is, however, adamant that if western governments are not prepared to do what is required to defeat IS then private military companies should do it. PMC personnel are, after all, all ex-military and can get the job done without the political fallout. But why create soldiers if you are going to let them retire only to pay the private sector to deploy them?
“If society feels it has a moral right and duty to deal with IS then there should be support for boots on the ground.”
Part of that includes the fact that some of your people will inevitably die. War is not romantic and fighting wars is dreadful.
Is there a political will to do it? Mann believes so.
“Society has become far more interfering, and we have taken the approach of ‘if we can help, why not?’… Why care more about someone in Liverpool than in Mosul?”
And if governments are not going to care, there will be men who will be willing to care… for a fee, of course.
But it won’t be Simon Mann. He says his days of being a hired gun are over. He is now only involved in running his businesses and writing a novel which he describes as an adventure thriller modelled on John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps but set in modern times and with a female hero.
Time will tell.