Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
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The Wonga Coup was a ludicrous scheme stuck in the past. Stuck in the idea that you can just turn up with a bunch of blokes on a plane, overthrow the dictator and get the mineral rights. The mercenary adventurer is something the British have always done, to our moral detriment but to our financial advantage…Simon Mann is the last of those and this is his story.
Finally, The Wonga Coup.
The British invented the modern private security industry in the Yemen in the early 1960s because there was a civil war in the Yemen which threatened Aden – the last imperial outpost of any use to anyone. We couldn’t go to war because we had just lost out in the Suez Crisis and it was very clear that we couldn’t act any more without the US coming in. So what the Yemen government did was recruit directly a group of people led by the founder of the SAS. In this group were the legendary mercenaries of the 70s like Bob Denard. At the end of the campaign in the Yemen they split into two groups. One group went on to found the private security industry as we know it. These were the people who founded the company Control Risks. The other group went on to become the wild-eyed, African-dictator-toppling gang of mercenaries.
I think belonging to the last of those is Simon Mann. And I suspect that we will never see the likes of the Wonga Coup again. It was a ludicrous scheme stuck in the past. Stuck in the idea that you can just turn up with a bunch of blokes on a plane, overthrow the dictator and get the mineral rights. And of course he was rumbled from the very beginning, before he even got on the plane. Every single secret service in the world was waiting for him.
Why didn’t he realise that?
Because, bless him, he’s an Eton schoolboy who was in the guards. The whole gang of them weren’t the sharpest tools in the box. Mark Thatcher, who was in charge of them, got lost in the desert when his mother was prime minster. It will be interesting what happens now that Simon Mann is free.
So all this was going on, and meanwhile Mann’s former partner in Sandline, Tim Spicer, has a four-hundred-million-dollar contract with the Pentagon. Now which way is it going to go in the future? The Wonga Coup talks about what can never happen again.
Private Security Companies are huge now and all over the world. The mercenary adventurer is something the British have always done, to our moral detriment but to our financial advantage, and I think that Simon Mann is the last of those and this is his story.
Read full interview
Author Stephen Armstrong describes the real men who become mercenaries - the British nightclub bouncer who turned up in Iraq, picked up an AK47 and got himself some private security work. 'You have to remember that there are blokes who were trained as soldiers, then the army said, ‘You’ve served your time, out you go,’ and they are doing the best they can. And can you blame them?' Most of these people, he says, are not bloodthirsty mercenaries, they are just trying to get by using the skills they have.
