Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Dumbest Coup In World History

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

Robert is joined by Bridget Todd to discuss the Wonga Coup.Footnotes: Saving Sierra Leone, At a Price Safety at a price: Military expertise for sale or rent ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare, mercenary in Congo who later led a failed coup, dies at 100 An African adventure: Inside story of the wonga coup Ely Calil, backer of a farcical coup plot, died on May 28th A mercenary's tale Understanding the Wonga Coup The Wonga Coup Simon Mann, freed dog of war, is demanding justice The strange and evil world of Equatorial Guinea The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs, and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Shit. Dammit. Nope. Bad. That's the introduction for the podcast, though, because we're recording. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that is not introduced very well, but often includes stories of terrible people. Today, my guest to help me kind of rewrite the ship after that terrible introduction is the inimitable Bridget Todd. Bridget, hello. Hello. I'm so happy to be here, even though we're not physically in the same place. I'm happy to be here doing this socially distant podcast with you. We are very socially distant because you and I are almost as distant as we could possibly be while still being on the same continent. So that's very, very responsible. It's true. You're on one side. I'm on the other. I'm in DC. We're

all wearing our masks and freaking the fuck out, you know, here in DC, the nation's capital. Yeah. Here in where I am, no one is wearing a mask, and we all live in the woods. But we are both coastal elites, so that's fun. Oh, definitely. Bridget, you are a veteran podcaster. You are on my podcast early on in Behind the Bastards Run when we went to protest Nazis at the second Unite the Right rally in DC. That was fun. It was so fun. That was my first time. I protested a lot of things in my life. That was my first time specifically protesting Nazis. It was a good time. It was a new experience. I'll put it that way. Yeah. It was a good thing to have done. And speaking of good things to have done, you know, what's not a good thing to do?

What's that? Attempt to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation for your own profit. I don't think that's a good thing to do now. That was such a good intro. I'm so proud of you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that's what we're talking about today. We're talking specifically about, we're talking about coups because coups are in the news. I'm proud of that one too. You remember when those guys tried to invade Venezuela and it didn't work out and one of them wound up lying in his own pee? Yes, I do remember that. Well, when that happened, I started

getting a whole bunch of people hitting me up on Twitter being like, you should do an episode about this. And we will someday, but there's just, there's so many more dumb details that haven't come out yet. I'm certain that it would be silly to cover it right now. But also, some folks reached out and said like, you should cover something called the Wanga coup, which was a coup in 2004 in Equatorial Guinea that's generally seen as one of the worst coup attempts of all time. So that's kind of what we're talking about today. But I fell down a rabbit hole researching it. And so mostly we're going to talk about like the whole weird and dumb history of white people trying to overthrow governments in Africa and usually doing a really bad job of it. So that's

today. Yeah, that shit never goes well, right? Like it's always, it always turns out badly. Yeah. And it's awesome because like, it doesn't matter if the leader they're trying to overthrow is legitimately shitty or not. They always make the situation worse. And given how bad some of the dictators are, it's kind of incredible that they managed to like, like you've got a guy who like takes hands from people for fun and then like they make it worse somehow. It's incredible. So that's today's podcast topic. Are you ready? Are you ready to dive into this, Bridget? I'm ready. I'm locked and loaded. I am strapped in. Let's do this. All right. All right. All right. All right. So I want to start by going back in time to what I

think is the piece of fiction that is kind of the seed for this desire in the heads of some white dudes to carry out coups in Africa because there's a single fictional book that really started this ball rolling. And it's a book called King Solomon's Mines. Have you ever heard of King Solomon's Mines? I have not. Oh my gosh. So this is, my dad read this to me when I was a kid. And it's like, it was one of the big influences behind Indiana Jones, which should give you an idea of kind of like some of the themes that we can expect from King Solomon's Mines. And it was written by a fellow named H. Ryder Haggard. And H. Ryder Haggard is like the colonial fiction writer of the 1800s and early 1900s. And King Solomon's Mines is considered to be like the quintessential classic

of British colonialist leadership. It's the first novel to star big game hunter and explorer, Alan Quartermaine, who was like kind of like the James Bond of colonialism. And in fact, in the movie League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, he was played by Sean Connery. So that's interesting. Oh, shit. Yeah. Now I know it. Yeah, he's like the, and if you've never even read one of these books, you've been influenced by this guy because he's like Alan Quartermaine is like the archetype of like the British big game hunting like safari dude. And like, yeah, like the guy in fucking Jumanji, like the white guy hunter is based off of Alan Quartermaine. Like that's just how they always do it. So very influential character in King Solomon's Mines is generally

regarded as the first example of a book in the lost world genre of fiction. So you know, those, those kinds of books and movies where like a bunch of explorers or scientists find a lost or forgotten city in some desolate chunk of the world. Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with that genre. Yeah. H. Ryder Haggard invented it. King Solomon's Mines is like the first example of that kind of book. I feel like I feel like I can picture what this guy looks like. Like I'm picturing a safari hat, like maybe some like loose khaki pants of some kind. Yeah, a very specific kind of facial hair. Yes, you know, you know everything about H. Ryder Haggard in his life now. I mean, you kind of get it by the name. Like if someone tells you there's a famous author named

H. Ryder Haggard, you could probably guess, oh, he wrote books about how colonialism is awesome, didn't he? Yeah. So the basic gist of the story is that a group of explorers led by Ellen Quarterman go on the search for a lost European who went missing looking for the fabled King Solomon's Mines. And that's the big biblical King Solomon. There's this rumor that he had these famous diamond mines, yada, yada, yada. So they go off looking for these, this white guy and these mines and they wind up finding a lost African civilization that possesses tremendous wealth. The movie Congo, based off the Michael Crichton book of the same name, is the modern adaptation of this story. So yeah. And interestingly enough, for as racist as this book is, it's not as racist as you might

assume. It actually opens with the main character, Ellen Quarterman, going on an angry rant about how the n-word is never okay to use. So that's good, right? That's a step. That's pretty progressive, I guess. I see what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. And there's even an interracial relationship in it, although the black woman dating the white guy dies. But 1895, that's about as good as you're gonna get from a white guy book. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't be expecting that from the 1800s. It's like a little, like, interracial pairing. Of course, she has to die in the end. Of course, she has to die. But so be intent is there. Yeah. Yeah. And H. Reider Haggard did repeatedly point out through his characters that a lot of European colonialist officers were horrible people.

Ellen Quarterman regularly notes that a lot of black Africans he meets are more worthy of the word gentlemen than British officials. So it's not the kind of racist you'd expect, but it's also simultaneously still one of the most racist books ever written for a very specific reason. See, the climax of the book comes when the explorers manage to finally locate the lost kingdom of Kuwana land, which is a surprisingly well organized and advanced society that's completely cut off from the rest of the world by tall mountains in a wide desert. The kingdom is ruled by a cruel king, Twalla, who maintains power by dint of horrific violence. The white explorers are able to get special treatment by convincing the natives that they're white men from the stars

basically magical gods. But they're horrified by the brutality of the king and his evil advisor, Gagool, who regularly burns innocent people as witches and traitors. Yeah, I know Gagool is a proof. Yeah. So it becomes gradually clear that the current king earned his position by murdering his brother, the old king, and forcing his brother's wife and infant son out into the desert to die. So there's a lot of the lion king in this story too. Like it was clearly inspired by King Solomon's minds in a lot of ways. And anyway, it turns out that one of the the porters that the white expedition team brought along, this guy named Umbopa is the royal child who got exiled, you know, decades earlier. And he was noted throughout

the book as being better looking and more well spoken than the other Africans who like were working for the expedition. So the white people decide to overthrow the king of Kuwana land and put their friend Umbopa on the front on the throne instead. And after a vicious battle that kills a lot of black people, but no white people, they succeeded instituting regime change in Kuwana land and they get to go home with pockets full of diamonds. So that's like the that's the story of like you can you can draw a straight line from King Solomon's mind to the thinking that led us to war in Iraq if you really like it's not hard. Yeah, just killing off black and brown people and like like coming back with your pockets full of diamonds. Yeah, that that fantasy.

And you make everything better by putting your one black friend in charge and like yeah, that's the whole like that's the story. So I also have to say it really is very Lion King. This idea that you know this guy was like more handsome and like somehow better and then like he comes he goes away comes back like I want to rewatch the Lion King now. Yeah, there's some there's some of this in the Lion King for sure. Obviously, it has a lot of influences, but there's there's there's pieces of age writer Haggard in that script. So yeah, this book was a huge success. It was like one of the biggest books of the 19th century period. And like I said, it inspired the whole lost world genre. It inspired probably tens of thousands of particularly white British kids, but a lot of

Americans to to go to Africa and like overthrow fucking countries. And while he did like absolutely this book inspired real world coups, it was also inspired by stuff that had happened earlier in the history of like African colonialism. Cecil Rhodes is a mercenary army with the British South Africa Company had conquered Zimbabwe and Zambia, the British East Africa Company under the command of mercenary Frederick Lugert had conquered large chunks of East and West Africa. And in all these places, local leaders were selected to rule based on their amended amenability to the desires of white Europeans. And for decades, the whole story was repeated all over the continent. So age writer Haggard didn't come up with this idea, obviously, but he created like this very

classical and and and attractive fictional justification for it that helped helped solidify it in the heads of white colonialists is like the way things ought to go. So yeah, that's that's that's cool. I it's not cool, but it happened. It's not cool. It's funny. I really feel like in addition to the way that we understand, you know, kind of American exceptionalism and the idea of like going to another country or another continent, and like, and like, we're going to quote, save them and then get rich in the process. I feel like I see that vibe reverberated in so many different ways. And even the idea of like, how white people have this idea that they're going to go to Africa and save the babies and they post a picture of them like helping an

African Instagram, like the entire kind of gross vibe, I feel like is sort of established as a blueprint in this work. Yeah, it really is. And it's like, right down to the fact that this would actually be, I think, a less unsettling novel, King Solomon's Minds, if H writer Haggard had been super hatefully racist. But he's like, you see part of like a lot of the horror that comes from like attempts, even as particularly in the modern day, like we talked about that lady, that white girl in Africa who like ran that baby killing clinic. Yeah. She was fucking wild. Yes. Wild. And it's, um, it's always, it's always sketchier and often more dangerous when the person doing this stuff is like super woke about it. Right. And that's

kind of what's so scary about King Solomon's Minds is that it's this white guy being like, Oh, these white dudes in Africa are doing horrible things. I know the right thing white dudes in Africa should be doing like. Yeah, I think you totally hit on something that it's sort of like, scary. If someone is evil and racist, I get it. I understand it. I know where they're coming from. Cool. If they have a mentality that they are righteous or that they're like, the fact that this person probably thought he was like doing something good, like that is so much scarier. And I feel like has such a more a bigger capacity for evil. When you think that you're righteous. Yep. And, and the, the, the person we will eventually get to who carries out

this possibly the worst planned coup in all of history is like the, the, the patriot, well, the archetype at least of, of that kind of person. So, uh, as the 1800s turned into the 1900s and the world wars came and went, Europeans in particular and white folks in general gradually started to accept that on balance colonialism had at least been a problematic idea. Uh, Europe, Europe gradually began to release their active, uh, or their captive African colonies, uh, from their chains. And since there was no profit in doing this, colonies were generally let go in the laziest way possible. Slap dash elections were held. And as a general rule, men were left in charge who colonialists thought would be trusted to rule in a manner beneficial to European economic

interests. Uh, one example of this would be former British military sergeant Idi Amin, uh, who we, we did a, an episode about, you know, you just like, we got to leave this country. It's, there's no money in like actually setting up, uh, a functional government before we go. So like, uh, this guy's good at beating people up and likes us. Let's put him in charge. Nothing will go wrong. Yeah. So obviously sometimes these newly freed local peoples made decisions that white folks thought were dangerous. Since the militaries of states like Great Britain and Belgium could no longer be used to enforce order, uh, directly, they often turned to mercenaries to do so. These modern day descendants of Alan quarter main and his companions regularly used

their superior military training and access to firepower to carry out their own coups. Mad Mike whore is probably the patron saint of this kind of guy. He was originally a British soldier born in Calcutta and raised on a steady diet of novels by H writer Haggard and his fellow adventure writers. Mad Mike joined the British army, but by the 1960s, the empire was in steep decline and the colonies he'd been raised to help control were flying free. So Mad Mike became a mercenary in 1961. He took, he traveled to the Congo to fight Moishi Shambe who wanted to create a breakaway nation by leading the Congo's wealthiest territory and secession. Now this was all in reality a plot by rich Belgian business owners and the CIA to ensure that black Africans didn't

have the opportunity to control a huge chunk of their continent's wealth. Like this breakaway chunk of the Congo was more friendly to Belgian economic interests and the Congo at that point was controlled by the socialist leader who they later assassinated. We did an episode on that, Patrice Lumumba. Um, but yeah, so, uh, the whole attempt failed, the secession attempt failed and two of Mike's men were allegedly cannibalized in the attempt, but he didn't lose the bug for trying to like lead coups in African nations. A couple years later, Shambe was elected prime minister of the Congo under Shady Reed. The CIA put him in power circumstances and Shambe angled himself as an anti-communist fighter, but he was really just a tyrant. Unhappy Congolese people revolted against

Shambe backed by the USSR and the Cuban government. Shea Guevara got involved and obviously these guys weren't super great either. So basically you just had kind of, and this is like the story of Africa in a lot of the Cold War, you have like Soviet imperialists on one side being like, we'll give you guns if you do the thing we like, and you have capitalist imperialists on the other side going like, we'll give you guns if you do the thing that we like. And Mad Mike Horror and his fellow mercenaries made a lot of money by just kind of standing in the middle and shooting at whoever had the most cash or shooting for whoever had the most cash. Um, for years, the Congo wars provided white combat veterans with steady employment. Mad Mike was a World War II veteran.

A lot of these guys were World War II veterans and like they were just guys who like after the war ended, they couldn't do anything else, but kill people. And a number of them were actually Nazi military veterans. That was even in like the French foreign legion had a lot of Nazi military veterans because they were like, all I know how to do is kill people. And the French foreign legions like, will you help us kill people who aren't white in Africa? And they were like, absolutely. As long as I'm killing. So, uh, now Mad Mike, uh, again, is probably the most famous of these guys. And he, he, for among other things, he was renowned for telling black mercenaries who attempted to join his mercenary army that he only hired white women or white men. Uh, he earned a

colorful reputation, uh, for among other things, shooting the toes off of a fellow mercenary who'd raped a woman in the field. Um, and as a general rule, uh, Mad Mike soldiers were kind of rough customers, you might say. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I would say they, they sound like rough customers. Yeah. Yeah. Shoot, shot the toes off a man. I mean, you know, so as the fighting in the Congo war on Mad Mike wound up on the side of Mobotu Cece Siku, the Congo's longest lived dictator. Mobotu also patterned himself as an anti-communist fighter, which was enough to earn the allegiance of the CIA and of Mad Mike. In order to help Mobotu stay in power and fight against rebels, he put together a commando army of Irish mercenaries, the Wild Geese. Uh, here's how the

Washington Post recalled their service in the obituary they wrote for Mad Mike earlier this year. This guy fucking had the longest life. Holy shit. I was sorry. In, I went a million years, I never would have thought that you were going to say he died earlier this year. Yeah. He was 100 years old. Like fucking incredible. Um, quote, I believe we have a great mission here. He told a fellow mercenary, according to a history of the Simba Rebellion by John Hopkins, Professor Piero Giljece. The Africans have gotten used to the idea that they can do whatever they like to us whites, that they can trample on us and spit on us. So that's, that's the kind of fellow Mike is dubbed the white giants. Mr. Horace men's belt that swept through the country, mowing down,

untrained and outnumbered Simba forces who believe that witchcraft made them impervious to bullets. In total, the mercenary unit was paid about $300,000 a month by US authorities, according to a post report and backed by what the New York Times described as an instant air force created by the CIA. So can we back up to the white giants just for like one second? Yeah. That needed some more attention. It's, it's actually the reason why they were called giants is actually pretty sad. It's because they all grew up in wealthier Western countries and had access to a lot of protein and milk and stuff like that when they were growing up. And folks in the Congo tended to be malnourished in large part due to the fact that the Belgian colonialists who had

owned them had starved the entirety of Central Africa for decades prior to this point. And so people in the Congo tended to be smaller and white mercenaries tended to be very large. Well, that's fucked up. Jesus. Yeah, it's not great. It's not great. I'm feeling really good about the world. Yeah. So the white giants or the wild geese, whatever you want to call them, killed a shit load of people. Mike himself bragged to journalists, quote, killing communist is like killing vermin, killing African nationalists is as if one is killing an animal. My men and I have killed between 5,000 and 10,000 Congo rebels in the 20 months that I've spent in the Congo. But that's not enough. There are 20 million Congolese, you know, and I assume that about half of them at

one point or another were rebels whilst I was down there. This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One of them is that the generation prior to Mike King Leopold of Belgium had killed fully half of the population of the Congo. And here you have another white guy generation later being like, if we just got rid of another half, yeah, pretty bad people, pretty bad. And Matt Mike is perfectly embodies the fact that a lot of the men who were responsible for fighting the Nazis would have been perfectly happy with Nazism if Hitler had just picked slightly different white people to fight. Oh, yeah. It's funny that you say this. I feel like I have to, like, admit something. When I was young, I thought that there was just like white people. I had no idea

that there was like in like, these white people don't like that white people. I thought it was just white people. And when we found that out, it was like a big sort of galaxy brain thing for me. I didn't realize that white people could have problems with other white people. That was like a whole new understanding of how white people function for me. We're fascinating. There's this thing going on. I mean, it's been going on for a long time within like Nazi circles, but it's hitting the internet Nazis now. Well, we're like in depictions of Mussolini, they'll depict him as a black man. And the reason is because there's a chunk of white people who think that Italians are still who still think Italians aren't white. It's it's pretty wild.

Yeah, that's like the racism equivalent of still using my space. Like, having like a hotmail, you know, yeah, that's hotmail for Nazis is calling like yeah, Italians non white. So yeah, yeah, Mike killed a lot of people. Mike and his men were good enough at killing to ensure that the regime of Mobutu Sese Siku was established and allowed to persist for 30 brutal years. Mobutu spent the time robbing the Congo blind, providing no social services, building no infrastructure and torturing unknown numbers of Congolese people who complained about any of this. The CIA was fine with all of it because again, Mobutu was not a communist. Now, um, Mad Mike's success made him into a mini celebrity and he was indeed a colorful character.

In one interview, he told a post reporter, quote, I think I'd like to have been born in the time of Sir Francis Drake. Yes, out sailing, robbing the Spaniards. And when you brought the booty back to Queen Elizabeth, you knelt before her and she made you a knight. You were respectable even though you were a thief. So yeah, yep, that's the guy he is. So unfortunately for Mad Mike and a lot of other people, it turns out that coups are kind of addictive. In the early 1980s, 62 year old Mad Mike Horry led 40 men in an attempt to overthrow the socialist regime regime of the Seychelles and reinstall an old pro capitalist president. The plan was comical. Mike's men dressed as rugby players with a drinking club named Ye Ancient Order of Frothblowers. They hid their AK-47s in

fake bottom bags and posed as tourists. Unfortunately, they all got fucking drunk as shit on the flight over. And so they were really drunk when they arrived at the arrivals call and they started a fight with customs. And so the customs guys like said like, fuck you, we're going to search your bags now. And then they found the AK-47s, which sparked this massive gunfight in the customs hall at the airport in the Seychelles. So again, Mike and his men had overwhelming firepower, but they were also hammered. So they shot one of their own men to death and then killed one of the other soldiers in this like running incompetent running gun battle that ends when they hijack an air India flight and force the crew at gunpoint to fly them to South Africa. Oh my god. I have to

say though, part of me is a little sympathetic because who among us has not had big plans, be derailed because you got too drunk, right? Absolutely. Look, they're racists and monsters, but they're still humans, right? Yeah. Yes. I too have had getting drunk on a plane, interfere with a plan and lead to a fight at customs. That leads to you killing someone. Yeah, of course. I mean, if I had an AK-47, I might have hijacked an air India flight. Like there's no way to know. You know, they don't stop you. They never cut you off on air Emirates when you're drinking. So yes, a lot of things can happen. Shout out. Shout out to air Emirates. Shout out. The open bar in the sky. So, yeah. So they were all arrested as soon as they landed in South

Africa. And this is again, apartheid South Africa was like, you crossed a line, Mike. Even we have to arrest you. We're doing a fucked up shit to people, but even we have fucking standards. Like Jesus, dude. So he gets arrested. And during his trial, Hori testified that the South African government had approved the coup and given him weapons. And this was almost certainly true, although the government denied it because obviously South Africa fucking loved coups as long as they were, you know, the right kind of coups. Yeah, the government denied it though. Mike was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but he was released after just three. After he was freed, a journalist asked him if he planned to retire. He responded,

this is all a question of opportunity. Mercenary opportunities now mainly exist in films and books. And yeah, as I told you inconceivably, Mad Mike survived until February of this year, which is fucking wild. When you talk to the mercenaries that came after him, though generally say that Mike was one half of a holy duo of African mercenaries who kind of like inspired the whole modern modern field of mercenary dumb. In the other half, his other half was a guy named Bob Denard, a French imperialist who did a lot of the same kind of stuff as Mad Mike, but more quietly, competently and on behalf of France. In 1977, Bob Denard led 80 mercenaries in an attempt to overthrow the communist government of Benin, which had recently nationalized all

of their banks and their petroleum industry. Unfortunately, Bob timed things badly. The president wasn't home when Denard's mercenary army reached his palace. A detachment of North Korean military advisors were at home and they had heavy machine guns, so Bob's men were forced into a fighting retreat. But as we saw with Mad Mike Horry, coups are addictive. In the very next year, Bob Denard hired another army to overthrow the government of the Camaros, a small island nation off of Africa's east coast. His 50 men brought sought off shotguns in a case of Dom Perignon Champagne. They landed on the coast, attacked the palace, murdered the president, and installed his rival. Then they got drunk on Champagne. So yeah, most of these mercenary coups don't work out well,

but some of them do. And they're very profitable when they do. Also shout out to the expensive, fancy Champagne. I mean, these guys knew how to party. Look, yeah, I mean, again, that is a G move. Like, yeah, bringing a case of Champagne with you to the coup is, yeah, that's a G move. Yep. I don't want to interrupt. Sophie, I think your dog is like, is she humping something? She's not humping something. She's licking something. And I don't, and I will not disrupt her in her actions. Yeah, leave her be. I'm proud of her. I like what's happening. And it gives you a free show while we record this episode. I know this is like a show within a show. It is a show within a show. Yes. Anderson has just performed a coup on behind the

bastards, taking over attention. And spoilers. She also has a case of Dom Perignon Champagne and the sought off shotgun. She does. She does. She knows you're talking about her. It's so funny. She's like, my brother's talking about me. I hear him. Oh, she thinks of you as her brother. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, this all builds to the point that there's a long history of small groups of mercenaries overthrowing tiny African nations reinforced in both actual shit that happened and in fiction like King Solomon's Mines. In the real world cases, Western governments were generally involved in almost always the South African government. The people who lived in these nations were never, ever consulted. And all of this background brings me, Bridget,

to the story of Fernando Poe. Have you ever heard of Fernando Poe? I have not. So it's an island off the west coast of Africa. And it makes up the bulk of the nation we now call Equatorial Guinea. And Fernando Poe was colonized by Spain prior to the great scramble for Africa, but they never really did anything with it. Bastard pod alumni Henry Morton Stanley called the island the pearl of the Gulf of Guinea, but stated that he would not pay a penny for it as it was a jewel which Spain did not polish. So basically, the Spanish like owned this place, but they never really did anything for it because there wasn't really anything to do. Like when white people went there, they always died because like they didn't have any immunity to

the local diseases. And there wasn't any gold or anything that was generally considered to be super value valuable by white people on Fernando Poe. So it was kind of like a refueling station, but not much more for Spain for most of the time that they they controlled it. So I'm going to quote next from a book called The Wanga Coo by Adam Roberts for a picture of how Fernando Poe fared under colonialism. Quote, in 1936, the British novelist Graham Green, who was generally fond of West Africa, dismissed the dreadful little Spanish island where there existed a mild form of slavery that enabled a man to pawn his children. Towards the end of its two centuries of rule, Spain did little to improve the lives of those it ruled. The colonial power

set up an economy based on cocoa plantations in a reasonable school system. Health campaigns reduced the impact of tropical diseases, at least on Fernando Poe. By the second half of the 20th century, equatorial guineans were less poor than most Africans thanks to exports of cocoa. But few Spaniards settled and native Africans were denied political rights and economic chances. When independence loomed, the Spanish organized hasty polls to find a new government. Spain, under its own dictator, General Franco, was hardly qualified to promote democracy. An equatorial guinean was ill-prepared when, in late 1968, it became the 126th member of the United Nations. After independence, things really went wrong. Its citizens were soon desperate to escape.

A sleepy-eyed man, Macias Neguema, won the elections. The shy son of a reverend and a brutal witch doctor known as his saintly father, Macias did badly at Catholic mission schools, but took up jobs as a junior bureaucrat and a coffee farmer. Jin then is a court interpreter and subsequently is mayor of a small town. He became an influential leader within an important subgroup of the Fang, the country's most populous ethnic group, and was groomed for office by a few Spaniards who believed he would serve their interests. So this isn't a great start for independence for equatorial guinean. And it's not going to be a great continuance. So I found another book called Double Paradox by Andrew Weddeman that explains that Macias largely wound

up in power due to his ability to charm Spanish colonial officers. Weddeman notes that he impressed them with his willingness to treat other guineans with contempt, which is kind of the same story as Idi Amin. The British liked him because he was good at cracking down on other like Africans who tried to get independence from England. And they were like, okay, this guy we can probably trust. But it turns out that Macias hated Spain too due to having to lick their boots for years. And as soon as he was in power, he like fucked them over and took every action he could to uproot any local industry that benefited Spanish companies. He formed a children's militia and used it to harass all the remaining white people out of Equatorial Guinea. And that doesn't

necessarily sound too bad with the exception. But the problem is that like, again, the whole economy of Equatorial Guinea had been based around these cocoa plantations, and he kicks out everyone who knows how to operate and run them. And he nationalizes them. But rather than hire locals to run them, he brings in cheaper Nigerian workers to run the fields, because he wants to make all of the profits from them. And yeah, so it's like he completely uproots the entire economy overnight. And that is not a great thing to do, from an economics point of view. Macias also ordered the entire nation's retail sector shut down and replaced it by a new network of state-run stores. This left another 15,000 native retail workers out of a job. The

country each entered into a terrible recession, which is made worse by the fact that Macias gave his best friend a monopoly on all international trade. Prices for food imports soared out of the budgets of most actual guineans. It became impossible to import the spare parts for the machinery that made the nation run and made its cocoa plantations function. The electrical grid failed, and the roads were eaten by the jungle. So he just like, what little the Spanish had done to set up, you know, in infrastructure, he just bulldozes. And suddenly everyone's out of a job, no one has any money, and no one can buy any food. Which is not a great job, I would say. I don't want a backseat dictator of Equatorial Guinea here.

Yeah, it's bad. Do you want to know? And I really need you to take an ad break, but I don't know how to do a witty transition after that. So could you just like do an ad break, please? You know who won't give their best friend a monopoly on all international trade that makes food import impossible and leads to widespread famine? Our sponsors? Yeah, our sponsors won't do that. Maybe. I mean, historically, we should probably just roll the ads. Yay. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that

stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast,

or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space,

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when

there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. And yeah, we're talking about Equatorial Guinea and its first few years of independence, which don't go great. So the people of Equatorial Guinea could clearly see that a calamity had been visited upon them by their new leader. And Macy is deflected blame for it by claiming his political opponents had attempted a coup. He launched a vicious terror campaign against his own people, which fucked the economy up more and led to him confiscating the property of thousands upon thousands of citizens and

putting it in the hands of himself. One third of the population was killed or fled the country in just a couple of years, which is a lot of the country. Yeah, so that's not great. Macy has instituted a new set of internal travel restrictions to try and stop people from fleeing the country. But the only way you could think of to do this was to create a massive series of burdensome checkpoints. And this made domestic trade impossible within the country itself. Macy has also ordered all ordered all ships, boats and canoes impounded, which destroyed the fishing industry overnight and ended the population's access to protein. Macy has sold fishing rights to the Soviets instead and pocketed the money from this while his people starved. By the early 1970s,

Equatorial Guinea was a failed state by any reasonable definition of the term. The people who had once enjoyed at least a decent standard of living were starving and forced into subsistence agriculture. The state bureaucracy collapsed since there was no food to buy government workers had to leave their posts in order to fill their bellies. In order to stop the exodus, Macy has ordered the only road out of the capital, mind. Yeah, he's not good at leading a country. Not great. And again, this is the guy like it's one of those things. This is the guy who this guy only comes to power because Spain puts him in power because they're too lazy to do a proper job of giving up this colony. So they just put the guy who's best at kissing ass in charge and he turns out to be a

monster, which happens repeatedly in Africa in the period as colonialism like departs it. Like this is kind of what they all did. I have a question. I mean, I don't know if I asked this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, please. I guess I feel like when it comes to dictators, people, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, I am not a I'm not a dictatorship expert. But I feel like people are more willing to be okay with it. If like the trains run on time, our roads are bad, we have food. It seems like having someone who is this shitty, like, be like making these kinds of changes that really fuck over the average person like that seems so different from what I would have from what I have come to know and love about dictators. I guess I feel like

my understanding is that like, oh, when someone's a fucking shithead, people are willing to overlook it if they if their lives are either made better or not significantly changed. And it seems like in this case, their lives were made much worse. This is what gets us into like the the the truth of that is that in almost all dictatorships, you know, you get the odd exception. There's guys like Tito who like Tito was a monster. But you know, I've spent a lot of time in former Yugoslavia and a lot of old people think back to Tito fondly because things went so shitty after his he died. But like as a general rule, particularly when you're talking about like dictators who like come into power with a lot of popular support, it's popular support from one specific group of

people. And it's one specific group of people who does well, you know, in Germany's case, we all know what that specific group of people was. And in in in Equatorial Guinea's case, there is a specific group of people, the largest ethnic group in the country are the Fang, which is like the same tribe that he is a member of. And they do pretty well under this. Because they get preferential treatment, they're able to like they kick out like like he like he executes genocides against like the Igbo and a couple of other different tribal peoples in Equatorial Guinea, and all of their stuff gets given to like members of his tribe. So like the largest, most Equatorial Guinea and suffer, but the largest single group of them does pretty well, because they're able to take

shit from the other people who are suffering. And that's kind of the story of dictatorships. That's really what happens when we talk about people talk about things going well, it's more often that like, you know, your specific group was the group that things went pretty well for, because the guy in charge stole things from everyone else to give to you. Like, yeah. And that's kind of what happens in Equatorial Guinea is like the Fang do all right, at least at first, the Fang do all right, because he's just taking shit from everybody else and giving it to them. One Swedish researcher who managed to sneak into Equatorial Guinea during this period called it the Dachau of Africa. Everyone else just called it Death's Waiting Room, a name that became more

relevant when Macyus banned Western medicine, leading to a resurgence of leprosy among other illnesses. As his nation crumbled, Macyus lost his mind. He began seeing coup plotters in every corner, and he executed people almost as random in an attempt to keep them at bay. During one Christmas mass execution at a sports stadium in the capital, Malabo, Palace Guard shot 150 people to death while the song Those Were The Days, My Friend played on an endless loop, which is one of the most nightmarish things I can imagine. Yeah. Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. One survivor of the horror later wrote, quote, no food in the shops, no water, no electricity, no kerosene for the lamps and night we walked in blackness. Yes, for 11 years we walked in blackness. The Wangaku by Adam Roberts

goes on to note, quote, nightclubs and schools closed. Missionaries were chased from the country. Macyus, like Pol Pot in Cambodia, launched a campaign against the educated and they began to disappear. He banned the word intellectual once finding a minister who used it at a cabinet meeting. He called educated people the greatest problem facing Africa today. They are polluting our climate with foreign culture. He declared himself president for life, then renamed the island part of the country after himself. He adopted new titles, each more eccentric than the last, major general of the armed forces, great maestro of popular education, science and traditional culture, the only miracle of equatorial Guinea. He ordered teachers and priests to promote his

cult of personality. Schoolchildren chanted that Macyus alone had freed the country from imperial Spanish rule. The sanctuary of every church was to show his portrait. Priests read out messages venerating the insecure president, such as, God created equatorial Guinea thanks to Macyus. Without Macyus, equatorial Guinea would not exist. Some 80% of the people were nominally Christian, but he eventually forced churches shut. So he's not great. I keep making that point. Not great. Like he had kids chanting their shit at school. Yeah, it's bad. It goes bad in equatorial Guinea. And Macyus, for an example of how bad it goes, Macyus was almost certainly a cannibal, but that's not even really worth talking about,

because the fact that he ate people was like one of the least shitty things about him. You know shit is bad when it's like, well, he eats people, but there's so many other things going on that like that's just a footnote. We have so many other problems. Yeah. Yeah. So he was so good at killing basically everyone who didn't agree with him or like him that there was basically no organized society in equatorial Guinea for a rebellion to even form in. If there was ever a nation in desperate need of a foreign backed coup, it was equatorial Guinea. And unfortunately, the coup they got was not the one they deserved. And again, like, if you're talking about like, as I think we've established, it's always problematic to talk

about foreign coups to overthrow governments. But this is the guy who it's like, yeah, if you're going to justify a coup, it's against a guy like this. And it still doesn't work out. So the man behind this coup was not a grizzled mercenary. Instead, it was a former journalist and novelist named Frederick Forsythe. Now, Frederick had reported to for the BBC during the Nigerian Civil War, and he knew a number of mercenaries as a result of his reporting work in Africa. By the early 1970s, he transitioned out of journalism and into a very successful career as a fiction author. His most famous book was probably The Day of the Jackal, which made him wealthy. And there's a movie made out of The Day of the Jackal. There's a movie made out of a lot

of his books, actually. Flesh with cash, Forsythe looked out at the sad case of equatorial Guinea and decided he was in a position to do something about Macius. He sat down with a mercenary friend of his, and from his flattened Camden, the two painstakingly plotted out a coup that would overthrow Macius from power. The basic idea was to hire several dozen former soldiers from Nigeria and paid them to capture or kill the mad dictator and replace him with a Biafran politician who seemed amenable. The whole thing took about five months to plan, and the affair was largely an excuse for the now wealthy Forsythe to live out his fantasies of being an international man of mystery. In a later interview with Adam Roberts, he explained, quote, I originally postulated a

question to myself, would it be possible for a group of paid and bought for mercenaries to topple a republic? I thought if the republic were weak enough and power concentrated in one tyrant, then in theory, yes. I looked around and saw Fernando Poe, and every story about the country was gruesome. I didn't go there myself, but I met businessmen and others who had been there, and they told me this place was weird. So I decided it could be done. If you stormed the palace, well, it wasn't really a palace, it was the old Spanish colonial governor's mansion. Probably by sunrise you could take over, provided you have a substitute African president and announce it was an internal coup d'etat. I began to explore the world of black market arms. Where

do you get a shipload of black market arms? I knew nothing about it, so I dug around. I discovered the capital was either Prague, where Omnipole, the communist arms dealer, was. But for that, the client had to be cleared by Moscow. Otherwise, it was Hamburg. So off I went. I penetrated under subterfuge, using a South African name, and developed my theme. I attended conferences of black market freelance criminals, and learned about the curious end user certificates to identify those who are entitled to use and buy weapons, how they're forged or purchased from corrupt African diplomats. So Forsythe will claim to this day, usually, that he was just writing a book about how to carry out a coup, and the fact that someone attempted a coup in this country,

based on his book, was completely separate from it. But also, sometimes in interviews, he'll admit that like, oh yeah, I was carrying out a coup from the beginning, and I just wrote a book about it later. Yeah. So let me ask you then, who is the bastard here? Which one of these people is the bastard? They're both bastards. I do think, in a way, Macyus is like, it's tough, because like, obviously, he's a monster who kills tens of thousands of people. But also, there's something that's like, almost a little bit more unsettling to me about a guy who's just like, a rich novelist being like, I bet I could overthrow this country. It seems easy enough. Like, that that's his, that he's not, like, they always throw in some like, little jib

about how, oh, it seems like the dictator's really bad there. But when you get a chance to like, read long interviews with them, like, that's a sentence. And then the rest of it is like, yeah, it really seems easy and fun. And I was interested in this and this and this, like, the whole, the fact that a terrible dictator was in charge of Equatorial Guinea was like, like, 3% of why they did it. 97% was, it seemed fun. So I have one more question in your life, in your, do you feel like how, what percentage of shit like that do you feel like comes down to? Oh, it was, it seemed fun. I do feel like when you hear about all the terrible shit that goes on in our world, so often it comes down to like,

oh, we wanted like, yeah, we wanted the money, we wanted control, whatever, whatever. But also, wouldn't it be fucking fun? Like, I do feel like a lot of these guys are doing this because they want the excitement and the fun. Yeah. No, no, no, not at all. And like, one of the problems that we're going to have to tackle if we're ever going to have a more peaceful society is how to, how to give young men in particular and really young white men in most particular, although it's all young men, like something to do that is exciting and feels meaningful and might kill them, but doesn't involve them fucking up other people's lives. Because a lot of us need that. It's not all of us, but like fun. I mean, I've bought multiple

plane tickets to war zones and I would be lying if I said that a part of it wasn't like, yeah, that sounds like fun, like going through that experience. Now, I didn't try to overthrow no countries, but it is a thing you have to grapple with. Yeah. Well, if you lived in Washington, D.C., there's a very obvious avenue available to you and that is join an illegal dirt biking because you don't wear a helmet. You don't have insurance. Your head is so close to the pavement. It's dangerous, but it's not, you're not, you're not overthrowing anything, you know. Yeah. We need to somehow make rugby more high stakes. Yeah. Or have one of those. Yeah. There's, there's, it's tough. Like maybe we could just pick like one of the states we don't like and

let anyone who wants to go, go fight a war there. Like we just declare, I don't know, let's say here. Florida. Iowa. Florida. Florida. Yeah, that's the state. Florida. Yeah. Of course, Florida. Florida is a war now. And if you really need that in your life, you can go to Florida and you can have your war in Florida. We'll call it war. It'll be, it'll be fine. Very little will actually change about daily life in most of that state. Yeah. In Iowa, he didn't mean it. He didn't mean it, Iowa. He, he, he met Florida the whole time. Oh, I meant it. I meant it. We love your corn, Iowa. We love your corn, Iowa. We need a war state to, to get some of this energy out of people. Paintball is not doing it for folks. So yeah, yeah. So this fucking fiction author,

Frederick Forsythe, like starts quote unquote researching his book. And at the same time, a group of mercenaries led by his friend that he planned this book with get hired. And like they, they, they charter a boat and they like start sailing through like two equatorial Guinea to carry out a coup. Now this doesn't work out. They don't even get to land. The British intelligence catches onto them and Gibraltar and tips off Spanish authorities who arrest them in the Canary Islands. The coup gets called off. And it never actually happens. But the very next year, Frederick Forsythe published another book called The Dogs of War about a group of European mercenaries who carry out a coup against a brutal island dictator. And the book bore a striking resemblance

to all of the planning for the failed 1973 coup. And like very little of the book actually involved any action or fighting or the coup itself. Almost all of it was just a detailed step by step guide to how to like, here's how we go about getting end user certificates. Here's how we go about buying weaponry. Here's how we go about transporting that weaponry. Here's how we chartered the boat. Here's how we hired all these mercenaries. Like it's, it's famously still seen today as like a step by step guide for how to carry out a coup. And rumors began to swirl after this that Frederick Forsythe had attempted to overthrow the government of equatorial Guinea and then written a fictionalized account of his actions. In 1980, the book was made into a movie with Christopher Walken.

In 2006, Frederick Forsythe all but admitted to an interviewer that he had in fact planned and failed to execute a coup to overthrow Macyus. His book became a hit among mercenaries in particular and Bob Denard successful coup off of the coast of East Africa. All of the men he's carried in the battle had copies of the French translation of the Dogs of War in their back pocket. So again, they're like, that's part of why I started this with like King Solomon's minds is that like the Dogs of War is really like the modern retelling of that. We're like, okay, we're just going to make this all about the coup. That's the real money shot. So yeah, that's cool. That's cool. Yeah, I think that's cool. I like that. I also think it just goes to show you like what like culture,

like books and movies and all of that really makes a difference of like how things play out, you know, I think you could you could easily be like, oh, it was just a book. It was just a book. But clearly, that's not the case. I think that these things really matter and they can really make an imprint on how things go down in history. Yeah, I think this has inspired me to write a book about how a fictional cult fins off the FDA in the mountains of Idaho and use the proceeds from that book to buy a compound in the mountains of Idaho and then launch a health and beauty network that gets the FDA brought down on us. Are you currently trying to start a cult? Am I misremembering this? You know, most of the time, yeah. That's on brand. Yeah. Yeah. More

or less, you know. I mean, I told him he could like it's fine. Start a cult. Why not? Yeah. He's got Sophie's sign off. Yeah, why not? As long as no dogs are harmed, it's fine. Almost certainly not probably. And on that note, Robert, it's break time. Oh, it is. Yeah. Well, speaking of coups, here's a product coup. That was not your best work, but along with some services. Yeah, that wasn't that didn't work out great ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take

a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. Okay. So yeah, Macyus remained in power until August of 1979 when a coup finally unceded him. No Europeans were involved. Instead, the culprit was his nephew, Obeong, who Macyus had put in charge of the notorious Black Beach Prison where regime enemies and random people were tortured to death. Obeong was spurred into action when his uncle's mismanagement got so bad that the army could no longer pay wages. When representatives of the military asked the president for money, Macyus had them all executed, including some officers who were members of the royal family. This spurred Obeong into action and a brief civil war was the result. Obeong obviously had the support of most of the military.

His uncle resisted for a time, thanks largely to Cuban and North Korean officers who backed up his forces, but eventually Macyus was forced out of his palace and into a small jungle village named Mungomo. There he hid the entire national treasury, somewhere between $60 and $150 million, in what is generally described as a wooden hut. Obeong attacked and in the battle that followed, the hut was set on fire and the entire nation's foreign currency reserves were incinerated. Macyus fled again, but he was eventually arrested and brought back to the capital of Malabo. Obeong took over from his uncle and convened a court in Malabo's largest building, the old cinema. The former dictator was hung from a cage attached to the ceiling. He and a number of flunkies were

charged with genocide, mass murder, treason, and a litany of other crimes, and may have been the first time in history that a head of state was actually charged with genocide anywhere in the world. Macyus was quickly convicted and executed, and evidence that inconveniently implicated his nephew Obeong and regime crimes was ignored by the court. In a better world, this would have been the start of a period of healing for Equatorial Guinea. But we live in this world. Things only went from bad to slightly less bad, but still more or less the same. And I'm going to quote now from the book Double Paradox. Quote, If anything, the plundering worsened. As international aid started to flow in and efforts to rehabilitate the export sector began, Obeong and his inner

circle, most of whom were either members of his immediate family or fellow clansmen, grabbed whatever they could. Companies seeking government contracts and concessions were informed that they had to pay bribes and kickbacks to senior officials. The amounts demanded were often so high that many would-be investors quit the country soon after arriving. Obeong privatized Macyus' state farms, but then either took them over himself or gave them to his henchmen. Petty corruption among street-level bureaucrats continued unabated. The one-time thugs and killers of the Macyus era thus morphed into a new regime of tropical gangsters, under which the Equatorial Guinea and economy remained a ruin. According to one visitor, the economy is dead

and corruption is the game. By early 1993, things had become so bad that the IMF announced it was suspending all aid and would leave the country to its own crumbling devices. And Equatorial Guinea might have continued to just kind of be a tiny, dirt-poor kleptocracy, if not for a small, Texas-based oil and gas company, Walter International. In 1991, they struck oil off the coast of Equatorial Guinea, revealing a massive field of extremely high-quality crude. In short order, the Wee Nation was producing 350,000 barrels of oil a day, worth more than $6 billion a year. The field in Equatorial Guinea actually produced enough oil to make it the highest per capita producer of fuel on the planet. And this could have literally

made every single person in the tiny country rich. That is, of course, not what happened. Obeong and his family took all the profits. They should not have been able to. The 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act made it illegal for U.S. companies to make direct payments to foreign officials. Instead, they had to pay royalties to official government accounts so the money could be used for the benefit of the people. Obeong got around this by having oil companies like Exxon Mobile deposit their payments in a series of offshore accounts owned by himself and his family members. This was at best on the verge of being illegal. But Exxon Mobile, Hess, and Marathon were happy to play along and risk congressional censure for the simple fact that guinea oil was

the cheapest on earth. Obeong charged them about half of what other governments in the area were paid for their oil. This would have been a terrible deal for the people of his country, but none of the money was going to them anyway. On paper, the guinea economy grew by leaps and bounds in the late 1990s, topping 60% per year, which is almost an impossible rate. Very little of that growth though reached the normal people. In 2002, Equatorial Guinea spent less money than any other country on earth save a rack on health care. No country on the planet spent less money on education. The average lifespan in Equatorial Guinea was 50 years. On paper, guineans should have been receiving at least about $6,000 a year per person in income, which would have put the

country in line with Chile. But all of that money went to Obeong and his family instead. A 2003 radio program declared him the country's god who can decide to kill anyone without being called to account and without going to hell because it is God himself with whom he is in permanent contact who gives him his strength. So this guy's not really a big improvement from Macius, is kind of the point that I'm making. Yeah, I think that's clear. So by the early 2000s though, Equatorial Guinea was what you might call a coup plotter's paradise. It has this horrible, unpopular dictator who's a global pariah and there's a huge amount of oil that's just been discovered there. And best of all, the war on terror has just started and the invasion of

Iraq has caused a situation whereby it's suddenly really, really easy to justify overthrowing a foreign dictator in order to get at his oil. The Spanish government very much wanted access to Equatorial Guinea's fuel because they were pissed off, they'd given up this country and not known that it was filled with oil. And they even had a ringer from Equatorial Guinea who they felt they could trust to replace Obeong and give them access. All that Spain needed was a mercenary, ambitious enough to risk torture and execution in Black Beach prison for a chance at a massive payday. And in part two, we're all going to meet this mercenary, South Africa's equivalent of Eric Prince, a fellow named Simon Mann. Yeah. Oh boy. So that's where we end in part one.

I can't, I'm like gripped to my seat. I can't wait to, to meet this new, this new bastard. Yeah, it's going to be exciting and everybody's going to have a fun time learning about him. But first, people should have a fun time learning about you Bridget Todd. You have a new podcast, there are no girls on the internet, and that is about to launch on the iHeartRadio Network. Which, which y'all's drop day? Oh, it is July 7th. So please subscribe, listen, all of that stuff. Can we talk about that transition for a second though? It was flawless. It was. I was, I was almost like in awe of it. It was, I really was. I wonder, can I say one more thing before we, before we move away from this?

You'd say as many things as you'd like. Yeah. I'm going to say this, the things, I've spent a lot of time in South Africa and I will say that like, I will never, I will never pretend to be an expert on, on the history or the country or the people. But the one thing that was very clear to me from spending a lot of time in South Africa was that I think that like, the people there are like, I traumatized by how shitty all the shitty experiences they've had with the government and that I think it lasts today. I was very, it was interesting to see how that shit like doesn't go away. It's just as I kind of like passed on the generations. And so as someone who has spent a lot of time in South Africa, all the shit you're saying, I'm like,

oh shit. Yeah, that makes sense. People are fucking traumatized. So yeah, I love, I loved my time there, but it just was really a place where, you know, I just feel like even today, I see the reverberations that people really deserve better. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of like the only real conclusion you can make because both sides in this, if you want to look at them as sides are just so shitty, like the dictators of Equatorial Guinea are awful. All the people who try to overthrow them are just trying to get rich and just equally shitty. And there's, there's at no point does anyone involved give a shit about the people who live in Equatorial Guinea. And that's like, yeah, it's a bummer. That's not good. It's not, it's really not bad and not good. So

speaking of things that are bad and not good, go back out into the world or stay inside and you can go to our website to find our sources, which are under the episode description behind the bastards.com where you could follow Robert on Twitter at our right. Okay. Or you could follow us on Twitter and Instagram at bastards pod or you could buy a, a face mask or a t-shirt or a cell phone case or a mug or a thing or whatever they've decided to sell on t-public today. Yeah. Our, these face masks cure COVID-19 face masks are going to be on sale soon. FDA approved. You can help us FDA approved written right on the front. So yeah, help us, help us thumb an eye in the FDA's face and get rated in a mountaintop compound in Idaho. That's the dream. That's my dream.

And it should be your dream too. Is there information about how folks can join the cult? Not yet. The cult is in your heart. The cult is in your heart. You know, you'll find it in your heart as long as you, you know, want to fight the FDA on a mountaintop in Idaho. That's really all it takes. That's the episode. I think that's the episode. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup

on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

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