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

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

Robert is joined again by Bridget Todd to continue to discuss the Wonga Coup. 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 in 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. It's the part of the second two. No, that's not how we should introduce a podcast. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. This is a podcast about terrible people. And this is part two of our series on the wanga coup, which started as an episode about a coup. But the first part was really just a more general description about the history of coups in Africa as both a literary tradition and as a real attempted thing, ending with the terrible story of the dictators of Equatorial Guinea. My guest on part two, as with part one, is Bridget Todd. Oh, I get the fake air horns. I love it. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, sadly, there's a national air horn shortage, so we're out of the real ones. But when those

come back in stock, I will force our editor to put them back in. Please do. I will only go on podcasts where I am introduced with air horn. So please, please do. Yeah, I think it should be illegal to introduce people any other way, to be honest. Can you imagine if that's how first dates always went? And just like anytime you're out at the bar, you're just randomly hearing like, like two people are meeting on Tinder or something. I love it. My people are Caribbean, so we love a good air horn. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you do. I would 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 effect to happen.

What would be your horrifying sound effect for a date? What's the theme song of Hannity? I'm Sean Hannity. I eat manatees. I think that's it. That part. I'm pretty sure that's that's basically it. Yeah. Yeah. That works. So Bridget, you are the host of a new podcast launching next month called There Are No Women on the Internet, right? That's true. Mostly true. It launches on July 7th and it's called There Are No Girls on the Internet, but you got the broad strokes. 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? Yeah, I'm a master of transitions. That was very nice. Thank you. So yeah, 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, 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. 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. You only get that if 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 like pay an extra $65. There's a yearly subscription that you have to pay into

for that. So yeah. So yes. And now we're going to start. So we're going to go back in time again. And now that we've explained all of these coups and mercenaries and the situation in Equatorial Guinea, we're going to go back in time to talk about another mercenary before we get back to Equatorial Guinea. And this mercenary's name is Simon Francis Mann. Now Simon was born on June 26, 1952. 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 well 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. 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 fuck away to spend his childhood at Eaton, which is frequently referred to as the nursery of England's gentlemen. Eaton is probably the most prestigious high school on the planet. Boris Johnson went there, as did David Cameron, Prince William, Prince Harry, Tom Hiddleston. And in general, about 30% of all of the famous British men who have ever lived. Eaton's where you go if you're

a fancy British boy. This is some very fancy British white guy shit, I feel. Yeah. This is the peak of fancy British white guy shit. I would say the whitest thing it is possible to be is a British person who went to Eaton. That's top tier of white dude. Very few of us are that white. Now Eaton currently costs $52,000 a year in tuition and the cost was broadly similar when Simon went there. Only students from age 13 to 18 are accepted and the application process starts at age 10. Eaton students each get their own separate room. The 1,300 students are split up into 50 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, imagine having that on your resume. Yeah, I was a hired dame for about four years in the 1990s. Yeah, and they couldn't just call it like an RA, like something that you're like familiar with. It has to be a hired dame. Poor people have RA's, Bridget. Rich people have hired dames. And I do think like your RA'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 they're 13 to 18 are living alone in little apartments and having an entire staff of adults clean for them, 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 shit for me. And I'm a little kid. I feel like 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 in 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 SAS and specialized in counterterrorism 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 and Central America until the early 1980s, when he grew bored of army life and retired. Man immediately moved to the private military sector, joining a company run by SAS founder David Sterling, who was pretty close to just being a straight up fascist. And in general, man's friends during this period were members of like a trend

in British conservatism that started in the early 1970s, when the Labour Party won control of the government and right-wingers began ranting about communist infiltration. In the early 70s, Sterling, his boss, had solicited volunteers to join what he called a strike-breaking army to destroy the unions in Britain violently. This put him ideologically right in line with Margaret Thatcher's political mentor, Ari Neve, who urged a right-wing coup against the Labour 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 70s that Britain needed a dictator. Yeah, but you didn't know that about David Bowie, did you?

Yeah, when like in the 70s, when unions got super powerful in England and the Labour government started winning a bunch, David Bowie wanted an extreme right-wing government and a coup, an addictator. You know, this is like when you're presented with like when, you know, the idea of like problematic faves, when you're presented with some unfavorable information about somebody that you love and you're like, I pretend I do not see it. You know, I feel like that's like, I'm like, oh shit, Sophie with your Lakers jersey, of course, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, as much as we may try to be pure, we all have someone like that. 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 1979

when Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister. But Simon Mann's social circle in the early 80s 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 got in trouble for misusing funds donated 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. Mann 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 Mann started sniffing around Angola in 1992, 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 1980s, 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 1992, Unita troops overran several oil pump thingamajigs near a town called Soyo. The Angolan army failed to retake the oil field. Now, this was the threat to Mann'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 90s, to get your own army. Yeah, that's cool. Totally cool. Wouldn't it be cool if you could just amass your own army with that amount of ease? What bad could come of that? Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm trying to do with this whole FDA thing, but it's harder than I thought to amass your own army, to be honest. Frustrating. What would your army be called?

I don't know. I think, I don't know. 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 Simon Mann and his partner Buckingham got to follow in the grand tradition established by Bob Dennerd and Mike Horry. 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, you know, broadly. 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

rimless 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 Dennerd and Mike Horry, like those, those dudes saw heavy, heavy combat. And it just like it, 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. And he's really the first example of that. He's the Eric Prince type, right? Where he's a good, he's good at running a corporation, and he also just thinks it's cool to have an army. And that's, that's kind of the, the sort of dude that Mann is. And he blazes a trail. Yeah, I feel like that's really a dangerous recipe. The kind of, the kind of dude who thinks it's cool to have an army. Yeah, yeah, because he's going to use it. You know, there's something to be said,

like Mike Horry, 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. Yeah, so yeah, he was not really an adrenaline junkie in the, 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. 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'd worked in counterterrorism, 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. So for the sake of having a corporate structure and all the legal permits necessary to buy guns and stuff, Mann 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 32 battalion,

which is a veteran South African unit who'd fought in Angola before. And they'd 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'd fought alongside before, which actually works out great because they know all their tricks. 32 battalion had a reputation for toughness and for viciousness. Their nickname was The Terrible Ones. And in February of 1993, they got a chance to prove they deserved the name. Mann's little army launched an assault to retake the oil fields of Soyo, supported by the Angolan Air Force and Army. The core of their force was just 25 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 Angolan Army. The UNITA rebels were forced to retreat and the Angolan Army'd established a beachhead on the Soyo oil field. The success at Soyo earned Executive Outcomes a reputation for ferocity and competence. The Angolan government offered Mann an $80 million 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. Angoli even let Mann help run their air force. In 1994, they carried out what Mann claimed was the largest

combined arms attack in Africa since World War II, forcing UNITA out of the Soyo oil fields entirely. So, it seems like it's working out so far. In the mid-90s, we're 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 1993 to 1996, 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 Mann'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 is 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 Mann owns starts mining the diamonds so they get money from the diamond mining. He creates a subsidiary called Branch Energy, which does a lot of the oil extractions. And this is where things start to get really fucking complicated. 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… it's shady fucking corporate shit. Like where you'll have like 20 different companies that are all really the same company run by the same three or four guides, but they're different companies on paper. So like Executive Outcomes had started as a front company for a South African war criminal so that he could evade international arms embargoes. And I don't really know how Mann wound up running it. But like Mann 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 Mann had founded called Sandline. Like it's all fucking stupidly

complicated. And to make matters even more complicated, a bunch of other shady companies that we all know and love were involved too. So for example, that big first deal that Executive Outcomes brokered with Angola to have their fucking mercenary army liberate those diamond mines, it was brokered by De Beers. So like that… I know them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know De Beers. This is like Taylor's oldest time when it comes to fucking like rich ass companies. Like Shell companies, you know, it's like… this is Taylor's oldest 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, 60 or 70% of whom are black guys. And they're not getting paid so much. Like it's good money for them, but it ain't Simon Mann money. Because the real money is in the diamonds in the oil. The mercenaries are just a way to get at the diamonds in the oil. Yeah. And you'll hear a lot of like libertarian types talk about how good a job executive outcomes did here. 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 led those to distribution centers, which is why they didn't actually achieve any long term security for the region. So yeah, by 1995, 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 1995, 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'd 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. RUF 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 and they're kicking the shit out of the government of Sierra Leone. And a big part of why is that they're receiving money and 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 change that. They push the rebels back and focus heavily on retaking diamond mines the RUF had occupied. This was a decent tactic, but it was also very profitable. The Sierra Leone's government had awarded a lucrative diamond mining contract to Branch Energy, a subsidiary of executive outcomes. And the executive outcomes war against

the RUF went well enough that in 1997, Sierra Leone was able to hold elections. Now the story that comes next is really complicated. The side you usually hear 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 IMF and the UN pressure the new president to sign a peace deal with the RUF that includes them forcing out executive outcomes. And as soon as that happens, the RUF goes on the offensive again and the co-country is drawn into war. And if these mercenaries had been allowed to keep doing their job, Sierra Leone would have stayed peaceful. And it's the fault of the UN and the IMF.

There's certainly blame for the UN and the IMF 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 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 community is forcing me to force these guys out. It's actually much more complicated than people who just want to make this into a pro-mercenaries story you want to see. Yeah, it's fucking, it's a whole mess. This whole story is a mess. And if it is true that like mercenaries were good and if they'd been allowed to do their

thing, Sierra Leone would have stayed in peace, 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 90s and into the early 2000s. 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 mines and fighting rebels. They were not good at actually developing a stable society in any of the countries in which they were active. And yeah, in spite of

their protestations that they helped bring peace to Africa, executive outcomes made the bulk of its money by getting poor countries to sign over mining rights to branch energy. Yeah, in 1998, Sandline International breached a UN embargo on weapons sales to Sierra Leone. The company also got in trouble in Papua New Guinea. 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 1998, 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. And the Mandela administration got really fucking angry at this and was like, all you guys are doing

is perpetuating violence in all these countries and like adding fuel to the fire and making a shitload of money for yourselves. Fuck this. So in 1998, South Africa passes the Foreign Military Assistance Act, which makes it illegal for South Africans to offer military aid to foreign countries. And this means that in 1999, executive outcomes goes out of business 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 I be just, I know this sounds kind of silly. Can we talk about the name executive outcomes? Is there a more, is there a more sort of like, it's not clear what we do, but you like know what involves somebody getting rich and fucking

shady business dealings, name then executives outcomes? Yeah, executive outcomes. Yeah, it is like the name you would give a mercenary company in like a Paul Verhoeven movie. Like that's, it's like a Robocop sounding fucking name. Yeah. It totally is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they are out of business by 1999. And again, this is heralded as a tragic thing by a lot of folks. I have somewhat different opinions. 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, it'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 kidding. That avenue is now. 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 Bullock 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 in 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. All right, we're back. Bridget, so yeah, that's executive outcomes. They're gone in 1999. Man and Buckingham sell off their interests in most of their subsidiary companies, and 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 150 million. Simon Mann did very well for himself, though. They're both millionaires, and he was already rich. So yeah, good shit. Now, interestingly enough, the men who actually did the fighting for his companies did not get rich. Most of executive outcomes soldiers were black men, veterans of 32 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 look so bored. Mann's 50th 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 shit 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 fucks up their lives. Kind of especially if it kills people and fucks up their lives because then there's a bonus. Yeah. Exactly. Again, this is why turning Florida into just a 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 it's fine. That's COVID-19 is going to be the least of your problem in war. Yeah, war. You've already got a name. You've got a branding. I think you I think we got to do this.

I think this is a fast track. We got to like get this get this going. I bet Governor DeSantis could get on board with this, you know. So in 2003, this aging former mercenary board in the 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 Exxon was paying the nation's dictator, Obyang, just $3 a barrel, while nearby Nigeria got $8 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 and the

House of Lords who might be interested in funding such a venture. In January 2003, he talked to Simon Mann for the first time. The two met in London and their talk quickly turned to equatorial Guinea. Now, Mann knew nothing about the country, but Khalil told him he was friends with an exiled guinea and politician, Severo Moto Nassau. Now, Moto had been a mid-level politician in equatorial Guinea and had fled for his life to avoid being murdered by the dictator Obyang. He'd wound up in Madrid where he'd charmed the Spanish prime minister and collected a small circle of exiled fellow Guineans to him. Moto had become the most vocal opponent of Obyang'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 happen 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 the research I've done and 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 Khalil, 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 Obyang was doing to his people and also how weak the military there was and how they had this wonderful exiled opposition leader who'd be a great leader in Obyang's 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 Mann is like, what if we overthrew him? And Eli Khalil is like, that's a great idea, Simon. That is like how rich guy cry like that is like 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 Taylor's oldest time when it comes to like rich guy crimes. If you've seen Tiger King, you know what the

fuck I'm talking about? Yeah, that is how it goes down. Yeah, that this is this is like not like a rare story in history. So yeah, in his career as a mercenary, Mann had always worked before for nations. He'd never gotten involved in the kind of skull-duggery that men like Mad Mike Horry got famous for doing. But he'd grown up reading the same kind of books as Mad Mike. I'm sure he read King Solomon's Mind being a British child of that era. And he'd come into adulthood hearing the stories of mercenaries like Horry and Denard. The idea of sailing into some horribly oppressed little African country, installing his own chosen king and making a big pile of loot was deeply appealing to Mann. So he started to do his own research. And of course, he came across

horror stories of Obi-Wan'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 Moto asked Simon straight up, will you help me take power in Equatorial Guinea? Mann later recalled that this was the moment he realized he was getting involved with a serious game. So Mann began reaching out to his old friends, including Greg Wales, who had worked as an accountant for executive outcomes. And they did enough research to learn that Obi-Wan'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 states his belief that the government of Spain supported it from the beginning. And again, all of the white guys behind this, it's very common for them to talk about like, this is a game. 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's a game. Yeah. And it's not a game, though, for the Spanish government. They want Equatorial Guinea's oil. And you get the feeling that they're just kind of pissed that they decolonized the country before they knew it had incredibly rich oil fields. So there's a lot of talk about the fact that a Spanish oil and gas company would have been given access to Equatorial Guinea's rich fields. And if this is true, it means that the

Spanish government got involved as a way to stealthily recolonize 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 for Mann 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, fuck yeah, because it sounds fun. Like that's the reason he gives, is that it sounds like it'll be a neat time. Yeah, this is my favorite thing about 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 a 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 Wangaku 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. Yeah. At

least they're open about it. Whereas I hate like this boring. Let's mix it up. 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, 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 32 battalion in South Africa. And these men's stories were much sadder. They were not doing it for fun. Most of them lived in a place called Palm Frey, which had been the military base they'd been bunked in when they'd been in the South African military, and was now an old asbestos filled slum that they lived in with their families in a horrific

squalor. Adam Roberts writes, quote, families told of husbands and fathers who scrambled 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 Chimoise says that her father, Eduardo, 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 guard in Pretoria, leaving his family behind because there's no jobs in Palm Frey. Palm Frey 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 Pretoria, he met a guy at an association for people who were in Battalion 32, 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 effort here are the same. They're 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 plan 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 in Palm Frey, broken windows, sandy streets strewn with litter, all help explain the readiness of men to board a plane for an ill-defined military job. Many of the foot soldiers in 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 the day they were supposed to carry out this coup, didn't really know what they were being brought in for. So, recruiting these black soldiers who were, again, expected to do almost all of the fighting and killing was basically an afterthought 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 at his 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 at an African mine.

First of all, I love this accent you're doing. Can I just say that? Also, this sounds terrible. I made terrible things. This Johannesburg pool party sounds kind of lit. I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, I have gone drinking at parties that are heavily mercenary attended a couple of times. And are they lit? You drink a lot. Yeah. Yeah, you drink a lot with private military contractors, although the drunkest people at the party were the UN. They actually like fucking parked illegally, and we were gonna get the party busted. And we had to like find the drunken UN guys and steal their keys to move the Land Rover. It was a fucking night. Wait, why is this not a podcast episode you're doing? I want to hear this whole story. It's a fun tale. You got up. We got,

you could get up to some shit in Iraq. Yeah. So yeah, so he hosts these pool parties where he talks to people. They're just having drinks and he's like, oh, yes, we're having a project at a 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, a tendency mentions that the project is an equatorial guinea. Most reasonable people are like, oh, fuck no, I have no interest in getting involved in business in that company. Like it's in that country, it's way too unstable. But the people who are interested, man, then has like private one-on-one conversations with. And he asked them to put up $100,000 in seed money and promises them a million dollar return inside of 10 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 in excess of like five, 10, maybe 15%. Like that's good. If someone's offering you a 10 times return in 10 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. Yeah, somebody either, yeah, so either somebody is getting a scammed or there's a terrible fucking like a legal thing going on for sure. Yeah, 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 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 going to overthrow this government. So like he 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 Mann gets drunk at, here's about his plan to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. That's 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, were taken down by personal

messiness. Oh yeah. Is that funny too? You think you would be some like a dictator or like someone who is committed to spreading awfulness and like shittiness in the world. And then you get taken down by your own messiness. It's like, again, you got drunk and told everybody. Like that is such a, that really tells you all you need to know, don't you think? That is what separates the bad people who are terrible, but ultimately just foot soldiers to the really, the really dangerous people are people like Eli Khalil, like the guy at the top of all this who is 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 doesn't make a bunch of money, if it doesn't amount 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 the Eli Khalil's like the Simon man's fuck up a bunch of shit. But they're usually too dumb to get most of what they want. Cause they're just, they're, they're messy. Yeah. And Simon man is messy. Listen, if you're going to be, if you're going to be involved in like, like dirty shit, don't get drunk and tell everybody that's like a, that's like a number one rule. Yeah. Like if you're going to be a dealer, don't smoke your own stash. And if you're going to plot coups, 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 Horian as 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 to tell like, want a successful coup, get drunk after. Those Venezuelan guys who got busted, they were on a boat. I, you know, they were getting drunk on that boat. They were probably so lit. 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 fuck those guys. 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. 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 budding coup in the months before it was attempted. So like South African authorities like right away know what's going on.

Now it's likely 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 Obi-Wan was such a bad dictator and international law was so lax that nothing would happen. And he had good reason to think this. His partner, Wales, had reached out to an American lobbyist, Joe Sala, who advised them that a four day program of introductions to U.S. officials could be arranged for moto, the guy they wanted to put in place as the new dictator for just 40 grand. And we don't know exactly what kind of deal Wales worked out with Sala for moto. But the

two talked regularly for months. And when Mann purchased a former Coast Guard Boeing 727 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's no hard evidence, but there's a lot of people who think that someone, if not the U.S. government at the top level, people in the U.S. government knew about this budding 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, fuck 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 U.S. 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 Guinea's 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 was 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. So yeah, you know, you can't, I can't say enough, this is 2003 and 2004. Like, yeah. So 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 was the goal. It's 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 they made out the plan. Yeah, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. That scans. So he had plans to get the national press such as it was in line and put together quote, impressive plans for social, political, medical and economic improvements for the general populace, that he was going to have Moto announce 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 going to quote now from the book The Wonga Koo quote, by the turn of the year, Wales's ideas and presumably man's had expanded to something grander in 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 a company could take power and run the oil rich West African state. Johann Smith believes the document shows how the coup plot was pure neocolonialism to put Moto in place so they can remove him at any time.

Simon would have been the president security advisor and his company, the bite of Benin Company, would have controlled it all. So yeah, that's the plan. That's fucked up. It's super fucked up. Yeah, it's real bad. You shouldn't do that. You shouldn't do that at all. By the way, the name the Wangaku comes from a letter that I believe it was Mark Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher's son, was one of the backers of this plan. And he got you 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 fuck up some shit in Africa and maybe make a lot of money. But yeah, so Margaret Thatcher's kid,

like 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 class rich British kid slang for cash. Like it's what Etonian boy is called cat, like some wonga, a ward of the wonga, whatever, fucking bullshit, fancy rich British kid, stupid term. I hope that you do. I hope that you do your like rich British kid accent a hundred more times in this episode. I'll make you very happy. I'll do my best. Can you do that voice to call to an ad break? Just wonder. Oh god, yes. All right, all right. Right. Speaking of colonialism and wonga, speaking of wonga, help get this show some more. I went Australian right away. Like I immediately like bearded Australia 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, do an Irish. That's, go to an ad break Irish. Why don't you check out these odds? No. Give this man a raise. Oh my god. No, that was so good. This is not even. Oh, please. 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 Bullock 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. That really is like, I guess that's it. 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. So 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. You didn't deserve that. You're a wonderful country. So the bite of Benin Company document shows the plotters fretting that oil firms may not play ball after the coup. They were worried that 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. So they were worried about this because

if oil revenue stopped flowing, 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 because there was a lot of American interest in equatorial guinea. And they didn't want to piss off the United States because if they'd messed with the oil interests at all and damaged the business interest of any of these companies actively mining equatorial guinea, that would get the Marines in. That was literally like the writing they wrote, this is what gets the Marines in. So they had to assure the American government early on, and that was something they wrote into their plan. They figured that

the best way to do this was to offer lucrative jobs to American private security firms. And they decided that one way to do this was to offer the military professional resources incorporated MPRI company, the job of guarding the new president once the government was overthrown. So they are immediately thinking, how do we bribe the US into not stopping us from doing this? Yeah, the bite of Benin 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 guinea's 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, irrational behavior, kids in toy shop style, backstabbing, bumfucking and similar ungentlemanly activities. Two, if the result is not seen by the outside world is noticeably better than the current situation, our position there and 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 scrutiny. So that's really fun. 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 going to 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 shit that's involved in this plan that we're cooking up. Yeah, everyone's going to act like a child in 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 the sort of stakes. Yeah, they don't. And this is like, this is starcraft for rich people. Like that's what this is. It's like, yeah, it's it's fucking wild. So the biggest issue facing the plotters was the problem of acquiring weaponry. 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 in 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. In South Africa, probably the most heavily armed nation on the continent, roughly 10 out of 100 people own a gun. In the United States, there are 116 firearms for every human being. That's just private guns, too, by the way. Now, there are places in Africa where you can buy an AK-47 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 AK-47 doesn't mean you can actually get access to high quality arms.

Coup plotters needed not just random street AKs, they needed good, reliable guns. And they needed things other than AK-47s. They needed hand grenades, heavy machine guns, mortars, mortar ammunition, and rocket launchers. All of this shit is necessary if you're going to overthrow even a small modern government. And that stuff's hard to fucking get, especially in the quantities that you need. Mann eventually worked out a deal with an arms manufacturer, Zimbabwe Defense Industries, ZDI. 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 bright money. ZDI didn't want to just deliver weapons to man and his army in their own country, though, because they legally couldn't ship them

to him. So to handle all these logistical hurdles, Mann 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 ZDI to have delivered for rebels that they knew in the Congo. And they were going to have these rebels attack and take an airstrip from the government of the Congo. The ZDI plane would then fly into the Congo, land at that airstrip, and unload a bunch of guns to pay the rebels and to give Mann's army, which they would then fly into Zambia to give to their fighters. So we're already over-complicating things. Every other complication is another way for things to fail. The steps before we even land an army in fucking Equatorial Guinea are such a fucking mess. It's clearly a bad idea.

So Mann'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 guarding future President Moto would land by boat supported by a small squadron of Spanish frigates, which would be there to secure naval supremacy. In war, as in life, simple plans are always better than complicated ones, and Mann'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 ZDI 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 died fizzled. And in fact, even the plane that the Mann's advanced team flew from the Congo to Zambia, like it hit a bird in mid-flight and had to be emergency repair. It just falls apart fucking immediately, and most of Mann's army just spends the week getting drunk in fancy hotels. So not a great first try. Not a great first try, but is it fun to get drunk in fancy hotels? It is. And a lot of the guys who were getting drunk in those hotels would go on to wish that they'd just stayed in the hotels getting drunk. Yeah, imagine if that's all they did where they were just like, oh, I just went to this hotel, got drunk, and then I stayed there and went home.

Coups are awesome! So after this inauspicious clusterfuck, several of the coup's early backers backed out, wisely deciding that Mann 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 failure 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 Mann's friends noted that he was visibly uneasy by late February 2004. 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 10 meters at a wall, and it smashed into a thousand bits. This is 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. Mann 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 nother 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 its 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, fuck 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 Mann 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 going to buy a like midlife crisis car or execute a coup, whichever,

you know? Yeah. Yeah. One of the two. So, yeah, he, he starts to get desperate, right? 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 attempt at a second attempt at a coup is embodied nowhere better than the story of how Mann planned to collect his Zimbabwean weapons the second time around. Rather than set up a drop in another country, he just decided to fly his 727 loaded with mercenaries into Zimbabwe and pick up the guns there. Now, these guns were being bought illegally and the mercenaries were also illegal. So, this introduced a number of wrinkles into the plan. Now, Mann 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. So, but Mann decides, fuck it, we'll figure it out. On March 4th, a small advanced team flew into Equatorial Guinea's capital. Their role would be to set things up for when the full army arrived. Unfortunately for them, Obi-Wan 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, Mann had sent an advanced team into Equatorial Guinea. They'd 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 Obi-Wan knows what's about to happen. Again, like getting drunk and like getting drunk and talking, if you're planning a coup, if you're out there listening and you're planning a coup, don't get drunk and talky. Drink after. Bridget and I will have a lot more coup advice in our new podcast, How to Coup, which launches on the iHeart network this August. You can find it wherever you get your podcast, How to Coup. Yeah, if you're stockpiling FALs and 308 ammo in hopes of overthrowing, I don't know, Uruguay, don't do it until you listen to our podcast, because we're going to have a lot of advice for you. Oh, we should call it the ABCs for Always Be Coupin. Always be Coupin, ABC.

You got to be learn your ABCs, you know, if you're going to carry out a coup. Including D, Don't Drink. That really is the number one lesson I've gotten. 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 what happens. Oh, we could call our podcast, Get a Coup. Oh, that's good, dude. Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one. Get a Coup.

Oh, it's going to be a great show. Going to be a great show. We'll have to have Simon Mann on. You're so good at naming things, Robert. Thank you. Very proud. So, when the point team flew in on March 4th, Obi-Wan was ready. And still, the coup plotters and the advanced team member, Nick Datois, took steps to try to conceal the fact that they were about to execute a coup. So, Nick Datois is like the head of the advanced team that lands in Equatorial Guinea ahead 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, we're canceling the coup. Not because he was canceling the coup, but because he thought that would throw the government off of their trail. Oh, I kind of love that as a response. Smart people here. So, just as the Spanish government hoped a successful coup would allow them to profit from Equatorial Guinea's oil, South Africa felt that stopping the coup would help them profit off Equatorial Guinea's oil. So, in addition to warning Obi-Wan, 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 illegal arms at your

airport, maybe do something about it. And Mugabe didn't really care that much about Equatorial Guinea's sovereignty, but he was above all else terrified of Britain, which is the most reasonable thing about Robert Mugabe. And he and many of it in his government were worried that their old colonial oppressor was plotting a 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 are thrown into horrible prisons and tortured. One man dies under torture in each country. Now, in Zimbabwe, man and his mercenaries are all tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. Most of the grunts got a year, with no time served for the six months they'd already been incarcerated pre-trial. So, all these poor black guys just get no money and are in jail for 18 months. Yeah, most of the white men got 16-month sentences. They all get fined 2,000 Zimbabwe dollars each, which comes to about 30 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 and 180,000 dollars in cash. He also missed the birth of his seventh child, which happened the same month

that he was sentenced. This was a mild penalty compared to the suffering experienced 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 the Wangaku, quote, Viviana Chimucci, wife of Eduardo, who's one of the men, was desperate. 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 surprised. They told us he would come out now. Tears appear in her eyes. She blames man and the financiers. Those people put us into trouble. We're suffering because they put our father into problems. She wants man punished. I'm happy not to give him seven years. No,

to give him the death penalty. He deserves it. Wow. Those are some 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 they spend time in a really shitty prison and a couple of them get tortured. But the fucking these these poor black dudes who probably didn't even really know what they were being paid to do in detail suffer the worst. And all of the white guys when they do get out of prison have a are 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 and they come out of it and they're fine. And then

the people that kind of like go along with it, who are more often than not black, just have nothing. And it just 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 stories like this. Yes, yes, it is by far the normal way for this shit 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 in the 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 extradited to Equatorial Guinea after four years in a Zimbabwe in prison. And it is widely believed that he was traded by Zimbabwe for oil. He went on to spend another 18 months in Equatorial Guinea's notorious Black Beach prison. Before his extradition, President Obi-Yang had promised to personally sodomize and skin alive the mercenary. But he didn't actually, yeah, he didn't really do that. It was bad though. Mann was tortured horribly and locked in solitary confinement. He was beaten and starved. I'm not going to 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. Yeah. During his time incarcerated, he was allowed to speak to journalists, provided he told them that he was being treated very well. And you can find interviews from him in 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 2010, he started being like, yeah, I was absolutely tortured. And he's probably not lying. Like he almost certainly was tortured. But yeah, one of these interviews I found from before he was released through The Independent has a very choice quote for Mr. Mann quote, you go tigers shooting, but you don't expect the tiger to win. Yeah. He was pardoned by President Obi-Wan in 2009. And in 2010, 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 10 when I was incarcerated, which is like number one, it clearly doesn't give a shit about any of the soldiers that he put in danger as a result of this. He doesn't even mention them. Doesn't even mention them. 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 bastards 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 life? We have to be private island rich. And I don't even think it was really that. I honestly don't think it, 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, like this would be the feather in his cap as a mercenary, all these other mercenaries like Mike Horry 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's fucked up. 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. 60, 70% one way or the other. Yeah. Very high percentage. Yeah. You know, you don't, you know, speaking of Tiger King, that guy who was the inspiration for Scarface, that's clearly a guy who was just in it for the money because 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 fucked up. It's like worse to me. I don't know. I find it like more, yeah, it's like, it's like more like, I can't understand it. Yeah. Yep. Yep. So more recently, in like a couple of weeks ago, fucking Simon Mann was interviewed by the Daily Mail about the coronavirus epidemic of all things. And the Daily Mail being a giant piece of shit, 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 dumbest idea for a fucking article I can conceive of. But Mann's quote is really funny. Quote, you have to make your world the people and 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. Which I don't know, maybe is good advice. I kind of refuse to acknowledge this guy as 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, good advice. It's given by him. And I'm like, fuck him. Terrible advice. Yeah. Fuckin' terrible advice. Well, that's podcast. You want to know what would be good advice right now? Robert advising people to go listen to Bridget's new podcast. Yes. I can tell you all

about it. Oh, please do. Thank you, Sophie. I try. My new podcast is called There Are No Girls on the Internet. It drops on iHeart Radio on July 7. And it's all about exploring the intersections of gender, technology, and the internet. You know, it's a culture show that really asks 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? Do it. No question mark. Exclamation point. Do it. It's a requirement of joining our cult. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the episode. Go, I don't know, overthrow a sovereign nation. Give it a shot. Just stay sober. But stay sober. Yeah. If you're going to drink, do it after. Don't do it

during. And if you're going to drink, like keep your mouth shut, like don't get mouthy. Don't drink and coo and don't text and coo. All of the rules for driving apply to coos. Yeah. That's the lesson. All of them. That was good. I like that. Jesus Christ. These people are so dumb. All right. All right. Cool. Well, that's the S. S. of Ode. 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. 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 in 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.