TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED*A Cheeky Coup with the Lads, Part II (feat. Joe Kassabian)

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

This week's regular episode got delayed because of scheduling, so in the interim we've unlocked a bonus from our Patreon. This is the follow up to the free Part 1 episode, which is available here: https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/a-cheeky-coup-with-the-lads-feat-joe-kassabian/ Why did a steely-eyed SAS veteran Etonian weirdo team up with Margaret Thatcher's son to try and launch a coup in Equatorial Guinea in 2004? Mostly because they were bored. In this episode we discuss the consequences of a dumb plot that was foiled by an errant bird and the Zimbabwean customs office. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture  Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/the-bail-project We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping. *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/

I'm very excited for this episode where the Colonel and Father McMurtry and Rupert McRupert all of them all of them actually got obliterated in an accident they impacted on an antinom that was carrying some more of Milo's friends I have to say I'm incredibly grateful to the very able ambulance personnel who managed to save my life all I did was lose a leg in my penis I am I am very much alive sir anyway I'm here to guard this lingerie factory now that I've lost my penis I hope no one thinks I hope I wonder if anyone will think my increased estrogen makes me attractive anyway I thought no one could love me again wild Simon man but then I met Simon man so welcome back to part what the man he was welcome

back to part two of this magnificent two-part special on the coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea a subject frequently discussed but infrequently explained on this TF that podcast you're listening to right now bonus episode from TF we have Riley and Milo from hell of a way to die we have Nate Bethay and also we have from Lionslet by donkeys we have Joe Cossabian and from well there's your problem we have Alice Caldwell Kelly struggling to remember the name of my other podcast there from well there's your situation from a you know what's that all thing the thing here yeah from Justin's friend online you know we have just you know that the girl hangs out Justin and Liam that one you know you know what's

her name you're the one I talked to you like four times a week no so if you are joining us again a quick recap these guys Simon man Mark Thatcher Mark Thatcher puts in some money he's a big idiot Simon man stonide killer flies with a bunch of friends to Equatorial Guinea to try to take over the government fails immediately gets arrested right away and we are wondering why it failed in our last episode we looked at the personalities of the two highest profile guys involved and now we're going to look at some of these secondary players and investigate kind of what happened and what it all means think of it as an English version of the mums basement podcast it really it really those guys would have been so much happier in an

era of digital media where they could have just like just exercised all their ambitions on the tech sector or whatever instead they had to do this oh I'm Mark Thatcher and this is Jackass we're taking over Equatorial Guinea we man thinks he's being shot out of a cannon into a septic tank but he's actually being shot into the presidential palace we're choosing we man out of the super gun so so one of the things we don't know is who was who was behind all this who is though it makes his Simon man works for money he works for glory but he also works for money and Margaret Mark Thatcher is someone who put who didn't was his idea idea who like it drifts through life it like introducing torturers to different

torturers yeah he doesn't have ideas so who had the idea now Ellie Khalil one of the main backers but certainly not the only one he's the most prominent name that appeared on a list of potential coup backers that was released by the arrested coup ease there were others murky involvement as well but think of Khalil as the guy that Jan Marseilleck was trying to be yeah if you remember Jan Marseilleck he's the wirecard guy who got extremely arrested for trying to hire 15,000 Libyan militiamen to seem cool didn't he disappear he's not arrested he's at large oh yeah he disappeared oh yeah because he's like cemented into another person he is fully one of the world's most at-large people he's yeah like extremely

local militia extremely alive in person Jan Marseilleck like the vibe that he had was that he kept trying to like tell people that he knew FSB guys and like had secret dossiers and stuff and was this kind of like international mover and shaker and power player and fixer between like various intelligence agencies and like oil companies and things like that that's this guy now what's interesting about le Khalil however is that le Khalil is the most competent of any person we're going to talk about in this entire yes yes he's the one who made the fatal error hiring English people Simon Simon man Simon man was competent at one point common and but scary and then became a farcical yeah but this is why this

is why you don't hire English people right is because if you hire Rupert murders right okay fine he's very good at murdering but the problem is he will have a friend from school named Bunty who is just like the biggest dumbest idiot in the world who will ruin all of your shit shows up in cricket whites and begins inviting everyone to play soggy biscuit so um effectively um what's it you have to understand the British as going through two puberty's at least two oh the trans yeah well we're the first the at least two puberty's where the first puberty is where you become competent and dangerous if you become competent and dangerous the second puberty is where you become farcical each British person embodies

history in that way yes welcome to the 18th brumaire of Louis Napoleon which puberty of the trash future guys on we'll find out so every Englishman has two wolves fighting within themselves yeah that's right yeah and the wolves are wanting to kill people and having a larger stupider friend from school so Ellie Khalil was a british lebanese nigerian oil billionaire who is frequently referred to by simon man in court depositions and stuff as quote the boss um this is now getting a hideo kajima ass law yes if hideo kajima was finished simon yeah so it's uh Khalil's a crawl in the attempted coup was said to be central uh he allet this was alleged by the equatorial guinea government in the high court the genesis of the plot laying secret

discussions in madrid in several moto where basically Khalil and moto sort of decided together they were going to make a change in the government that would benefit Khalil who was an oil billionaire see again actual actual like uh mover in in these circles right whereas mark thatcher is just kind of like drifting idly through them being like oh would you like to buy a helicopter so interviewed in 2008 however Khalil denied the existence of a coup plot altogether stating quote there was a scheme to fly moto back and protect him while he was in country several's belief was that if he was protected in his hometown and could remain alive for a few days a political storm would occur that would simply sweep away the obi ang regime recent as liberos is yeah rich with metaphor there yeah

and also yeah i think like like both as i am to sort of trust simon man's court testimony in equatorial guinea um but is it being like again he doesn't actually have any reason to lie because it's entirely germane for like the kind of dude that simon man is to be like oh well you know fairs fair uh it's a fair cop sometimes you you lose a few wickets in the game of rugby yeah you win some you lose some but if you're a posh english white man you never actually lose any so basically i i kind of like it's like yeah oh there was a scheme to protect him while he was in country could this possibly have been grenades did they have again 150 several hundred people say we need to protect this black guy who we're gonna hire a bunch of angry white

south africans with guns it makes sense so the uh the the plan was for all of the um the three two battalion guys to spawn in the southwest corner of equatorial guinea and then spam grenades across the map and they would glitch in the presidential palace unfortunately the zimbabwe and spawn camp like a bunch of assholes they actually did so this is from an interview with simon man i was recruited by the boss who told me about president obi um his human rights abuses and how much oil he had and then suggested we do a coup wonder which one those is more important yeah i thought well here's the weird thing simon man then had like a brief third or fourth career in like advocating for liberal humanitarian interventionism and sort of cheerleading the

war in iraq cool um so he loves talking about how the right thing to do sometimes the right thing to do coincides with hiring a bunch of mercenaries yeah so i thought it was a great idea i don't want to make excuses but i can explain a bit these things are easy with a blank sheet of paper but our plan gradually morphed over time thanks to months of frustration and difficulty by the time the plan went ahead we had a shit plan no money in no time that's where we were when i was arrested in 2004 so that's him connecting Khalil to the ultimate arrest uh in harari which is yeah it's his plan his money he said hey why don't you go coup this guy and then simon man's like i was fucking waiting for someone to ask me to coup someone yeah also like again as this kind of

slavering psycho he has the most realistic appraisal of this like he's the one who actually knows what he's doing he's like yeah no it was it was a terrible idea and we didn't really plan for it at all where mark thatcher is just like well that sounds like a nice time i'm sure to go perfectly to someone like someone like simon man the fact that the plan is bad is almost part of the attraction because yes it's the whole who dares wins thing right like he wants to be involved in like a rork's drift style like battle of the braves so uh joe you were saying as i imagine thinking yes i am the right side of history as you sit in a room surrounded by apartheid veterans um yeah sas guys are totally like this though they'll be like yeah no i wanted to climb Everest but it was a bit too

commercial for me so i cut off one of my own legs just to like add to the challenge a bit no simon you don't understand the play needs to be that big because you need to divide it into two halves okay i'll explain it later again you're saying this is a joke but this kind of actually did play out uh in ways we'll get to towards the end interestingly ellie khalil was found dead in may 2018 after having fallen down the stairs of his multi-million pound property in holland park west london a close friend said the tycoon quote broke his neck found by his long-term friend nicholas tartaglione he died exactly with a broken neck yeah i i mean tragically yeah it scene see gaz nitsa basnitsa scene uh fleeing the scene you know joe my my school chum

fucking mcblody took a picture on instagram i'm sure there's nothing to do with it yeah he was always jumping down the stairs at shouse hilarious guy honestly like if you get that's how he would have wanted to have gone like honestly move in jpg house like always on the bounce like he'd be there you know cucumber sticking out of his ass and he'd say lads watch this and you just dive down the stairs and try and land awkwardly on his head classic guy honestly god shouse you fucking killed me with that one this fucking country i swear to fucking god yeah um so uh anyway he broke his neck and i'm sure that the um cool plotting oil billionaire just happened by accident yeah that's how coup stock was originally spelled so uh our next

character our second our third to last character is the new labor government huh those guys those guys have never been involved in a dodgy war um so a private intelligence report written for an oil company by one mr yohan smith who was also involved in the south african intelligence services uh claimed that mr khalil had said that peter mandelson uh had asked the government about its attitude towards a coup how could galeen khalil know peter mandelson well how would you feel about a coup if you if you remember from the introduction of the first episode peter mandelson was kicked out of his flat uh kicked out of his house because i turned out that i he had taken an improper loan from a fellow minister he then moved into a flat owned by ellie khalil was his

landlord lovely chap had very slippery staircases i recall it's always rubbing butter on the stairs very interesting individual in 2004 media reports quoted from a document in the hands of the south african authorities which claimed the businessman and politician met privately we explore the abortive coup the report claimed quote khalil says that mandelson assured him that he would get no problems from the british government side and invited mr khalil to come see him again quote if you need anything done now peter mandelson insists that he never had a discussion about this alleged coup i mean we knew it was a coup at this point uh with anyone and and what based on what we have to go on we don't know if he in particular had foreknowledge however it is interesting

that that these claims were being made in these documents and it is interesting that he happened to be living with ellie khalil and it's interesting also there's no landlord asks like comes around is like no i won't fix the sink also can you help me invade a country and well we can't speak for mandelson in particular we do know for a fact that the blair administration had foreknowledge of the coup listen if you don't help me do the coup you're not getting the deposit back so when to when to question in parliament when did the uk government know about the coup in equatorial guinea and jack straw replied in late january 2004 uh i mean yeah he supplied in late january 2004 admitting uh possibly accidentally or possibly not that uh the forens that that blairs foreign

office under jack straw did in fact have foreknowledge of the coup by at least a few months like that first bird strike plane was like february of 2004 right so before before even that jack straw is the coolest foreign secretary we've ever had because this is my favorite deep car about jack straw's before this in about 2000 or 2001 there was this whole media scandal where he got in trouble for being at some international diplomatic event where he shook robert magarby's hand and people were saying he shouldn't have shook robert magarby's hand and his defense to this was it was dark even more fucked up thing about jack straw though like to give you to paint a trajectory of what the british establishment does to people uh when jack straw was a university student in the very early

70s he traveled to chile as part of like a young socialist international thing to basically help do construction and build a community center in support of the ayende government and by 2003 he was like hell yeah let's fucking invade iraq like in a way it's a tragic figure but i have no sympathy for him like at one point he wasn't a horrible piece of shit but the the decades 1970 through 2000 basically did that and that's that's what you have to become to have any semblance of power in the united kingdom it's sort of like that he was gonna change it from the inside that's why he had to like sign off on deporting people to go get tortured in libya with so she could not do that i mean you're a star armor basically jack straw jack straw's political career is like the a mere image of

christopher hitchens like he had to be like oh stop the socialism thing i'd just be like yes whatever war you want to pursue is actually moral and everyone will love you also to be clear it's unlikely that mandelson would have tipped off straw because there is a far more i'd say there's a far more reasonable believable story about how straw would have known but i think the mandelson thing is very is very interesting it's very funny to have your like landlord just do a coup yeah like that's not something most landlords have the energy to do well it it speaks to yeah it don't work it speaks to britain as a particularly class cocked country that the foreign secretary can be pressure allegedly like asked for geo political favors by his landlord

so here's another another character margaret thatcher the following is an unpublished bit of simon man's memoir about the following event where the former prime minister allegedly according to this memoir told men at a meeting at her belgravia home i'm sure it's going to work maggie asks me how there hers in mark's money is being handled i reassure her that is going through an air ambulance joint venture separate to any other investment maggie compares it to the docklands redevelopment in london how everything had to be raised to the ground first before it could be improved you know it's it's always nice to be reminded of just how evil she was before her brain went um like and how late that that happened like that in 2004 as late as 2004 she's like well

sometimes you got to burn down a thing it's fine yeah accelerationist margaret thatcher pretty much so thatcher has also uh said to have asked whether man had yet met a group led by a man called san chose who we're seeking to remove who goes shaves from venezuela hey all of it just like having a like uh this is my coup thursday i have my coup guys blocked out an appointment man right these guys want to shoot him with some kind of a cancer gun well seems weird to me man right just eric prince in the waiting room like looking over his venezuela file and is reading a time magazine uh man continues no i hadn't but mark says we're seeing him the next day in the house and eat in place just next door he continued he continues with thatcher's

reply good well i hope that goes well too she looked at me with her imperial gaze we must always look after our friends simon as i'm sure you know that doesn't sound mysterious at all no doesn't sound like the sort of thing an evil villain would say no absolutely not um wow okay yes and remember to pick up a wayfare uh like wardrobe on your way out is it weird that i could just imagine her breastfeeding him as this conversation is going on i recommend on the wayfare website she still does i recommend on the wayfare website the cabinet sondra it's only 50 000 dollars why does why does she sound like a queen this whole conversation uh it's an indigma machine um once again the riley accent machine encodes margaret thatcher and comes out are we

sure this entire meeting didn't take place at a sex party of some kind yes i met her at the elm guest house uh didn't look into any of the rooms but like i'm sure it was normal margaret come back in here and screw my penis back on um also it's like you know i'm like sw1x is a is a sex party all of sw1x is a sex party w1xxx yeah that's why they call it that sw1xxx fantastic shut the fuck up all of you none of this none of this out of you fell down the stairs so i hear yeah so um so basically he has support from literally he seems to have support from everybody in britain from the money to both sides of the politics or at least if not the support of new labor then new labor like

knew about it and didn't do anything and that's when they had a meeting with the most powerful man in all of bermen z and then um and then they had they had they had basically everything they could possibly have wanted except there are the fact that all of the powers arrayed to support them were deeply decayed and impotent yeah just absolutely sclerotic vibes um and so then you have to remember the soldiers themselves many of them old three tube italian which was kind of a mix of the old two new p m c eras uh so i think alice joe and nate you you know more about this than i do yeah it was it was kind of like three tubes handling was a bit of the south african defense forces that was uh like originally conceived to do um well war crimes against the communists in

angola and then counter insurgency avond la letra in namibia uh and so you have kind of like this divide between it's like the last hurrah of this uh like generation of mercenaries of like ex-south african ex-rhodesian little shorts guys um and the new sort of what would become the war on terror special forces like uh listens to drowning pool tribal tattoos gears of warhead bangers um yeah gas bars and donald mcdonald's yeah so uh joe what's what how can you the soldiers themselves right we talked about the companies but who are many of the actual like boots on the ground guys not the top level simon man's and funders but who are like the actual guys carrying the too many machine guns for a company so a lot of the guys were veterans of the rhodesian bush war

and the uh the various south african bush wars and a lot of them were volunteers from like the commonwealth like canada u.s. not commonwealth will wait a lot of american volunteers as well which leads which leads into like a hilarious scene of rhodesian military recruiters waiting outside of bars when vietnam veterans came back and trying to lure them back into the military but like a lot of rhodesian members and a lot of rhodesian foreign volunteer veterans were like members of like the british national front or like i wonder why they'd be interested in that yeah uh and there were there were several legit neo nazis from like minnesota who ended up in rhodesia uh one of whom is buried there i sure do love rhodesia

it was like the national socialist white people's party had like a huge content like if you name your party national socialist you don't have to add the white people part we know the ancient society of only white people but the weird thing is i think it's that this the the actual company in this case that undertook this coup attempt was actually correct me if i'm wrong was relatively multiracial like but it was that a lot of the guys who were the foot soldiers were uh were like black south africans and a lot of the guys were the officers were white south africans and english that's my understanding that is uh the the the white officers black soldiers thing is incredibly but that was just how those militaries ran all the way until apartheid ended um especially in

rhodesia yeah rhodesia is a whole episode in itself that we've got to do at some point but yeah it was definitely the the relationship that those kind of white people are comfortable with uh in the worst way possible like hazing was like horrific and like uh the white officers have beat this shit out of the black soldiers and and the english men are probably just threw around the milk races yeah i mean i'm sure it's not what happened but it's very funny to imagine them deliberately doing like identity for superficial identity politics on their coup attempt like just like a get gather together a bunch of white soldiers and so i'm as like oh guys i've got a bit of an got a bit of an optics problem here i mean we're trying to a coup in an african

country just a bit we're looking a bit white here come on can we get some just someone whose job is staff writer being like uh maybe the problem is that there were no women in the coup yeah that's right kenny and lin-manuel miranda to cast your coup the coup's equal opportunity advisors like guys there's not enough diversity in this coup so let's get to this question right how on earth could this crack team of savvy personnel who definitely weren't representing just the most sclerotic and decrepit just humble down interests imaginable have failed mm-hmm so um adam roberts author of because this was called the wanga coup because wanga is slang for money is not to do with the payday lender i'll be very funny james

bull having to come out in defense of the coup in equatorial getting deep so um just remember the most specific stuff oh i did so um adam roberts author of the wanga coup uh says that the group was infiltrated and compromised from the outset because quote but how could this be people were loose tongued they were talking about it and constantly boasting about it in bars a long time before they set off they would sit around rest of the corp nothing new they would sit around in restaurants in johannesburg they'd sit in hotel foyers they would basically boast to whoever would listen about what they were going to do and some of the people who i interviewed in the research for the book who've been approached to take part in this plot told me that they turned

down the opportunity because they felt the whole thing had been organized in a very careless way which i find very interesting because again this goes back to simon man is is sort of a terrifying person but not stupid you know and this kind of a mercenary is not stupid they knew this was a bad plan and i think what this indicates is like in 2004 the global war on terror was kind of starting and that was the end of this kind of mercenary having the run of africa it's like the business had fundamentally changed and again i want to throw right i want to throw back to joe for an understanding of like how sort of you might say like white label regime change was a replaced with name brand regime change it's actually a really good way of putting it

you know it's like all these gangs of like south african mercenaries and redesian mercenaries and you know commonwealth volunteers sprinkled throughout was definitely like a pre global war on terror thing because there wasn't a ton of money in it like there was but you also had to like run an illegal diamond mine as a side hustle in order to like get any liquid cash from it whereas now like you can just be dinecore or fucking silvercore or whatever iteration black water is calling itself now correllas and is it really oh all right yeah it merged with it it was black water and then it became xz and then it became academy and then it merged with triple canopy and now it's correllas yeah brief brief stint is no war crimes here in corporate

and like you now they can go in and talk directly with like foreign ministers or sometimes heads of state depending on how small and desperate the country is and just like this is our price you know you pay us upfront like cash or whatever though a Wagner group out of Russia is working for like oil profits in Syria and shit so like there's still like the exploitation of mineral wealth but a lot of it's more like liquid cash because it's easier to move around and now you know we've been the United States spent a war for what 20 plus years and the idea of outsourcing your labor to these like professional war crimes committers is considered completely acceptable and legitimate because they work for every big country in the nation and these kind of

deniable like especially the South African and the Rhodesian ones like they were getting old by this point uh a lot of them were kind of like stuck in Johannesburg and like I feel like a lot of people like expectables yeah kind of yeah I feel like a lot of people who like were otherwise sensible war crimes do this otherwise sensible mercenaries signed up with a like a doomed operation headed up by fucking you know money man Ralph Wakeham because there was fuck all else you know that's the thing don't forget these we're in the same like these guys we're like in the same cycle of of labor like you know at the end of all the bush wars in Africa you had a plethora of veterans who had no job and they could link up with some fucking idiot fail son and be like

yeah we'll give you fucking raw diamonds or whatever if you help us in a coup and now you have like hundreds of thousands of people who had probably had a whole lot of fun doing awful shit and they don't get their sweet government paycheck anymore to do it so like you can go work for fucking Corellus or whatever I make eight hundred dollars a day well I'm excited for like the way that that degrades too in time and we find that those guys the global war on terror guys when they're getting just about too old to be doing this anymore get their kind of last hurrah with a job that they really know better than to accept and they try to fucking coup Belgium or something right this is if we think that this was kind of a cold war holdover when like

deniability was necessary and useful because if you wanted to do a coup there was all you needed to do these coups you needed to like secure mineral wealth or whatever but also also there were two superpowers that had nukes pointed to each other constantly and so you needed to be able to convincingly say we had no involvement in that so these private milit these white label private military companies were useful whereas you know foreign policy after 9 11 is just it's it's it's become overt because part of part of doing a coup against like against Maduro isn't is actually in not using silver core that was like that's because the silver core thing camp as it should not be understood as every time someone's like oh this is so 2020 no wrong it is very it was a 97

it's a throwback and it was like self-generated which is like weird and pathetic like in Africa too if macron wants to change the president of Mali then you just have a bunch of french paratroopers drive like an armored car up and down and then it happens you know because there is there is no soviet union who's going to take exception nuclearly to you doing this yourself that's why even in Syria you have like like usm wraps and the like russian russian armored vehicles just like doing fast and furious shit with each other one guido can just be recognized by the west as the legitimate leader of venezuela you then then you know then they're just have to and it's basically just are when are you going to choose to just put him in the irony is right that simon man

south african guys were perfectly adapted to the new world of overt shit they were making the covert thing over by accident i'm like i'm like high on just imagining like yurk van der klok in the foyer of like some hotel in johannesburg chatting up a woman half his age going like yeah yeah seriously this kid's gonna be great okay like the only thing that could stop us now is a large bird it exactly these coordinates exactly this time i mean in the grand scheme of things in the grand scheme of things it really does remind me the the silver corp thing just seems like a weird echo of it in the sense that it's it's uh something that's notionally a foreign policy goal of you know let's say the host nation if you want to call them that in in you think about the uk under player or the

international oil consortium wanting fucking access to equatorial guineas market or in the us's case trump wanting to oust maduro uh and and so in a way like there were enough people making approving noises at this thing snowballed and it's hilarious but also it's one of those that you those situations where you're like surely someone somewhere involved must have known this is gonna be a fucking disaster and yet they still got on that plane yeah and like people said that like oh the silver core guys are so stupid because they're posting about shit on instagram which i mean admittedly yeah they're dumb as shit but like simon man were absolutely done the same hands down yes but oh he he posts the only difference is he was spitting he was he was like spitting game at a

bar in like johannesburg talking about how cool this coup is gonna be while silver core was like hashtag fucking where we go when we go all lol let's go this way for god damn mayan pyramid with an american flag tied to your rucksack yeah same energy but just different manifestation silvacle are making a montage of them preparing for their coup set to till i collapse by m&m is that these is that these guys all just got nationalized that's why silver core is so weird damn work shit um yeah yeah but that's the the private the war dogs industry became went from being soldiers of fortune or whatever to just boring government contractors that's the difference well one thing to bear in mind though riley that i i do think is important is that uh

with regard to the us and the uk the unpopularity of the iraq war and the realization that it was going to drag on really served as an impetus to private military contract or everything and as a result like i do think that the resurgence of this dumb shit is it's not a it's less a continuation of what was going on in sub-saharan africa in the 90s and the early 2000s as much as it's a kind of like a an injection of of money and energy into this because how do you achieve shareholder value when it's massively unpopular in the countries whose volunteer military forces have to get deployed like you just pay you know captain and or staff sergeant retired dicknuts sas slash green beret guy eight hundred dollars a day to potentially go get killed doing it

and then you have plausible deniability but i really do think that i'm looking at 2003 2004 i mean maybe there's a through line with regard to the iraq war but certainly like the more recent manifestations of this is you can see how iraq the unpopularity of iraq and the fact they just did it anyway became the impetus for turning on the money hose and not you know rolling them up into the government but rather privatizing things further making doing as much as you possibly can so that the entire war effort or whatever the mission is the purview of the private sector so that as few actual national forces have to be deployed as possible and thus yeah perhaps it's perhaps it's not accurate to call it nationalization a more professionalized or like regularization

securitization because now this is how i how i think about it right is that i don't so much think that you guys got nationalized it as much they were run for the benefit of the public directly by the state so much as and i get this concept is explored by um uh uh michael hart and antonio nary in their book empire um they got they got blobbed they got consumed by the gelatinous cube the empire as they understand it is a combination of the us the uk nato the imf the wto the multinational multinational corporations etc etc these things that always seem to work together to perpetuate their own interests and against aram university against which dissent is criminal and it is essentially the empire as understood by them maintaining their monopoly on the legitimate

use of force globally bringing in these slightly rogue elements into a much more controlled environment yeah as opposed to just having like a guy who sits around in a big safari suit all the time and periodically shoot someone yeah that's too that's too chaotic and that's why dave courtney wasn't allowed to have control over that many flat nose geese it became too much of a threat to the establishment um i think we saw like the interweaving of those things i think it was like in 2004 as well like when the blackwater contractors who were like you know like we talked about were hired so you could throw soldier adjacent people into these roles and not risk actual soldiers and like the bad pi comes in the we got drove through felucia and got fucking set on fire and

hung up in the middle of the street which then uh precipitated a giant mil u.s military offensive using that as the reasoning so like that at that point they're almost inseparable it is a paper distinction um but anyway so this but this is this is if you want to i think this is kind of how at least how i understand why this happened is like this is a changing world and these are old guys who don't have a place in it anymore who wanted one more crack at thrills it's the film the flight of the wild geese or it's it's the film wild hogs on december 7th 2004 two warnings were sent to british intelligence by yohan smith a south african security expert working for equatorial guinea and michael westfall a senior colleague of former secretary of defense donald

rumsfeld kind of like the joke about the space race about our germans being better than their germans our form our former apartheid spooks were better than their former apartheid spooks was also warned of the plot at the same time and the other funny thing is a lot of the other intelligence was private intelligence gotten made collected by oil companies so i've reviewed the transcript of simon man's chatham house appearance as i said and he had this to say about intelligence community for knowledge the reason i was very certain that they did in fact know happened about two weeks before christmas 2003 when we had intercepted a report from yohan smith a south african private spook whose reports although they were addressed to his oil company employers

undoubtedly went to both america and the uk without a doubt and many people have confirmed that smith later commented uh this is now no longer um this is no longer a man this is now some quotes i've found from smith later commented quote i was continuing to work in equatorial getting with the government it was not in my interest uh that there be a coup d'etat i therefore wanted to warn the equatorial getting authorities i also considered it in my duty to warn the authorities in the us and england because some of their nationals might be killed so the significant thing here i think also is that not in in in in cape town right um there are guys sitting around um who work for every intelligence agency and also every oil company yeah of course why wouldn't that be but

this goes back to what um uh quantian was talking to us about um the on our tesla episode right all of these entities there are more intelligence agencies operating in the world than you could possibly know about you only know about the official ones that work for governments there are many many many more that work for all the oil companies whose work always flows through the governments and where the government's work usually flows back to them yeah and it's kind of like the reason why this falls apart is because as as a coup it's kind of like this tension between the old sclerotic elements of like oh we're just gonna do some empire we're gonna do some adventurism and the juggling empire yeah and and then the like modern oil foreign policy

blobs so you get some ins with some government possibly and they make some approving noises and then all of a sudden this lurches back onto the corporate side and you go well hold on a second i don't think so we actually have quite a good relationship with this guy and we don't need some fucking sas psycho coming in and shooting him in the brain pan to like slightly lower our prices right um it's it's like the the image that i come up with is that it's like vagus right the flashy mob guys get their last run then they just get bought out by viacom right well there's a thing too is that makes me laugh is that when you think about i'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist but more to say that they're obviously you know the end result of the iraq war was iraq's

nationalized oil industry was privatized and private companies basically stood to benefit from extracting iraq's oil wealth and you know the oil wealth is primarily concentrated in the south and in the north of the country so you know there's a reason why the british army took basra and why the u.s basically you know concentrated a significant amount of forces in places like uh you know everywhere from to crete to kurkuk to iraqi kurdistan and there was a new in this regard a new uh bump in the oil supply as a result of iraq so in a way when you think of the timing of this coup in the grand scheme of things i wonder was it even really all that necessary did the oil companies really stand to benefit that much did this really have any

purpose besides it being a fucking adventure for these guys no it didn't because all of these oil companies we said earlier that um obian was like a tough negotiator like he was still the negotiate his negotiation platform was going from like 85 percent of revenue for the oil companies to a to trying to like get them down to like 82 percent they didn't care and also they if the oil companies decide to replace obian that's like something that could be done in an afternoon equatorial guinea has no army and the thing is if even if simon man and and mark thatcher and ellie khalil or whatever could have arranged for a slightly more compliant leader is that worth the hassle is it worth possibly like blowing up an oil refinery or like killing a bunch of

functionaries probably not yeah it was the us oil companies already held the interest in equatorial guinea it wasn't even like properly nationalized it was deeply corrupt and used to like you know buy like a mansion on top of the eiffel tower for obian's idiot son who we'll talk about later right that sounds like something they'd be totally into well that's but they don't care they're still getting the oil you know it's there is there the only people who actually stand to benefit from like any of this is the people who are having fun doing it okay i'm very excited for the concept of like a huge domus area like precariously balanced on top of the eiffel tower so like all of the furniture has to be like evenly weight distributed across the like right yeah you have

guys for that anyway so like the other thing right is that so the african intel intelligence at this point was pretty like shambolic um and so the belief here is just that the cia basically was like wait this who's with this who's happening fuck off no no way do not do that and because it's like there was no business plan to get really get the oil wealth like like man was going to be paid in concessions to it but like and like Khalil might have been able to get in and get some of it but like there was no big structural plans like integrated into the global supply chain it's not venezuela and it's certainly not iraq right it's a it's a minor sort of like reshuffling that it really isn't worth uh i don't know a bunch of flat-nosed geese is throwing grenades at people

Eli listen we've hit a bit of a snag with the oil thing in ecto oiled guinea i'm just looking at the schematics now and uh all the oil is at the bottom of a really long staircase i think the best thing to understand here right is that obiang is not to be understood as the you know ruler of a country he's to be understood as an employee of chevron and there's very little that moto could have done to give the u.s oil companies a better deal than they could have just got by telling him you know but that that raises this other question where if i'm like if i'm jack straw and i know this is going to happen in january or if if the peter mandelson story is true which we have no way of knowing um why like why is the new labor of no why is the new labor

establishment sort of either if the peter mandelson story is true encouraging of this or at least we know because jack straw said he knew about it sort of passively allowing it to happen so i just want to embarrass margaret thatcher i think that's what it is they're just like no way is this gonna work but marky boy is gonna get in trouble i mean watching akuta own thatcher but like also that would be objectively too cool for new labor yeah it's like oh i think i mean we talked this last night alice who's like yeah i know an old atoni and then their landlord said to do it so new labor was just like yeah fine do whatever you want yeah i i don't think new labor's foreign policy after robin cook was that particularly invested in or aware of

equatorial guinea but i think they were very aware of mark thatcher and i think they were just like ah sure whatever yeah they were they were aware of ellie khalil they were aware of mark thatch well they're very aware of ellie khalil he's one of their landlords they're very aware of mark thatcher they're aware of simon man like they know all about executive outcomes and stuff like they think that this is kind of cool i think and again i think this is a shades of the suez like if this if empire was tragedy and the suez was farce like i don't know what this is this is the christmas special too this is this is just something much more sort of this is parody this is scary movie at this point not even scary role for anafaris um and so that's what i said what

i was talking about when i was saying this is just a story about failure and about about about just a tremendous lack of self understanding and the sort of this is this plays out like a tragedy it's just that none of the characters know that they're comic characters as well but it has the structure of a tragedy because they have this flaw that they don't address that brings them their downfall but again there's no gravitas yeah it's like reading um the quiet american but if there's a gas leak in your room so like so many greek tragic figures brought down by bird so uh yeah drop the turtle right on his head so let's uh let's talk about the aftermath uh where are they doing animal house style credit sequence uh mark thatcher was given a five year

suspended sentence in south africa for his involvement in the coup he mostly spends his time now relaxing in marbella uh he was divorced neighbors with dave court yeah he was divorced his ex-wife diana he said he spent some time in marbella he keeps trying to move places but his conviction from being involved in this coup has made it impossible for him to get a visa anywhere after he was divorced by his ex-wife diane who said i think he was incredibly selfish putting his needs for self-fulfillment greed and lust for power before his family but mostly i feel sorry for him it's as though he was given one of the best seats at the banquet of life and he's blown it is he gonna be a father's for justice guy now i think he already is um

hey let's find out uh documents about thatcher's career as a shady university salesman were supposed to be released under the uk's 30 year i sold universities to brockway we're supposed to be released under the uk's 30 year document release rule but in 2016 the government in a decision spearheaded by margaret thatcher's former uh permanent secretary decided to retain them for fear of embarrassment national security baby yep uh it's cool that they can just do that yeah oh yeah you don't have yo like there's a rule but like no we don't feel like actually um silent man and uh nick tutwot were both held in toria's black beach prison in equatorial guinea man was originally alton harari but was then extradited uh man was considered a star prisoner and was

rewarded for naming those who allegedly masterminded the attempted coup among others prison's first 15 as among others he was a pre fact at the prison he was he was sent special food including steak which was courier to your courier to him from a hotel and he had a bottle of rioja every lunch time just fucking everything but public school never stops does it it just kind of keeps going and accumulating you can manage to create golf jail even in equatorial guinea he was given dickens for bedtime reading and when unshackled wrote an exercise bike many mps wrote about his predicament and stressed the diplomatic importance of setting him free one such article was entitled why the world needs men such as simon man

which was written in 2004 for the times by one michael gove cool after his release in 2009 humanitarian grounds man bought a fancy house in london and then can tip as main job when it upon release was advising i'm not kidding president obi hang about protecting him from coups oh they they've resolved their differences they've become friends the real coup was literally the friends we made along the way poacher turned gamekeeper you love to see it most recently he testified on behalf of obi hang's idiot son in a corruption trial in france claiming that george soros was falsely accusing the son and was intent doing so intending to destabilize equatorial guinea so he could take it over okay so he's now a q anon guy like on top of all of it

when man was asked if he put because obi hang you when man was asked if he could prove this in court he said no often the way with the soros shit isn't it and you gotta give him credit for admitting defeat most people that start spouting that shit are like well that's what they want you to think he was like well this avid this tactic clearly didn't work like millions of dollars for a defense thing for like you know the son of an african dictator you think you could call this thing a bit more imaginative than george soros like surely who can say apparently not simon man um who's on twitter and linkedin by the way i insist you check him out and endorse him for coups no don't do that um now makes his money working as an after-dinner speaker and a life

coach did silvercore hire him to be a life coach don't be fucking outstanding uh he is when i'm when i'm trying to move the country i'm getting up at four o'clock in the morning and listening to three audiobooks because you can't waste time if you want to overturn an african dictatorship nothing motivates me as much as a bunch of former rhodesian army guys abseiling through my windows at three a.m and letting off flashbangs and shit but they're all like 70 now those could also just be america so um a lot of a lot of his business is like uh is like get advice from simon man and so on but i don't think he really understands how influence peddling works and so ultimately he'll never be as good at it as mark thatcher

because he was good at it by accident yeah who was good at it because he literally was the dumbest person in the world who was made unf who could not fail because his mother was so devoted to the uh force of the market um simon man's wife amanda is an artisanal cookie maker and sells a man appears again and sells cookies on tiktok under the handle man cookies the tiktok account has both the tiktok account has 13 followers nick de twat now works as a used car salesman in yemen what the fuck that's like the third job that every armenian fail son gets after getting fired from the mall kiosk in his family i'm sorry but i have to go fucking sell used cars in yemen this is like this is like deeply curb your

enthusiasm level shit like selling used cars in yemen just like every time he's about to close a sale a drone just like takes it out like honestly this is a wonderful camry malo welcome to sauna malo i i hate to burst your bubble i think he might be undertaking i don't think i think he might be having some side activities on his social life as well as doing used car sales in yemen this former mercenary who lives in yemen selling cars the old dogs of war business in general is now represented by the international stability operations association which describes itself as the only worldwide association representing the stability sector formerly called the peace sector used to be called the international peace operations association explicitly that was a

bit too much of a piss take so they wrote with this stability sector do do regime change people now have a union is that what's happening it's more of a guild it's more of a guild yes representing the stability sector exclusively and effectively through our partnerships engagement and advocacy members work together with key organizations and government policymakers for long-term stability and growth in the world's most unstable places as we said the the short answer is mercenaries are boring now i'm nick detroit member of the i w w they had they've gone from being psycho shit to being psycho nerd shit um just not cool anymore uh the the soldiers of the coups and all the officers were all given various sentences in harari and equatorial guinea one uh last name

of um shi muishi was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment uh when nes three sons and five daughters aged between 11 and 32 and six infant grandchildren uh to compensate his family uh the man's in britain uh has given the shi muishi family a token payment of 550 pounds one xbox sorry this makes it all worth it sorry i'll sell a lot of cookies to make that kind of money sorry our idiot sons got you got you arrested in some kind of cockamamie effort to do a coup because they were bored here's enough money to buy like yeah an xbox and a couple of triple a games here's a gift certificate to my used car shop in yemen so yeah that's uh that's the story of the abortive 2004 coup in equatorial guinea that i love to reference and have finally explained never ever

hire english people to do anything we all have some kind of deep national psychosis that will ruin your plans um so joe i want to i want to throw back to you what is what is your closing thought on this sordid sordid tale it's incredible man like it's one of those things especially after reading up on like you know the british india company and like the entire insane history of how the british empire spread like this is how that happened but they try to do it in 2004 like that's exactly what the like there's some inbred idiot aristocrat who is bankrolling everything and a whole bunch of people that probably wore necklaces made out of random body parts uh and they just can't fucking do anything it's like we already kind of combined it to like f and stones at retreat from

kabool but that's what that looks like except like but we all had cameras and like the internet and it was really they were so dumb that they got owned by some fucking birds it's just amazing watching them attempt to like such a throwback in an age of where like someone could very easily track your like plane movement on the internet by your tail number well it's i mean that if you if you say throwback i think the way i understand this most is it's it's just the sopranos it's the it's the it's tony and the guys talking all their big game about honor among thieves but then like always always backstabbing each other and running from the police as soon as they see them and and just constantly failing to live up to this

telling themselves this story about the about the godfather and this sort of operatic tragedy of these the strong men who must be who are responsible for these difficult decisions it's a mountain that one must climb because it's there and it turns out the mountain is just like grimly flying a cargo plane between two places and like fucking up everything that's great because like you can see if if they were to write a book like if he was going to do like the andy mcnab write an sas love story and it was like it would look like the expendables movie but this is what the that that's how they picture themselves like we're getting too old for this shit but we got one more left in the tank but in reality it's just some old washed up mother fuckers getting arrested at the airport

or whatever and we're like having their plane canceled due to birds and like oh got it failed again i'm coming back to i'm coming back to mad mike hall here in that after the seychelles coup he they had shot this customs guy and they had escaped and they were on the plane back i think it was south africa and as they were trying to get rid of the evidence he was like he talked to the pilot of this i i think like just regular bowing jet and was like okay cool can you open up the door so we can throw the guns out and the guy just laughed in his face and was like have you been on a plane in the last 30 years you can't do that shit and you can't just open the doors anymore man and that's like that's the perfect metaphor you know yeah the last contract

ahead with the right brother said otherwise so um i have now had these uh hey out there in podcast land you could have listened to this in as many sittings out or with as much time in between them as you want i've been here for now a couple of hours thinking about these clowns so i think um i'm gonna say uh to joe kasabian from lions led by donkeys podcast thank you so much for coming and um and sitting through this just incredible tale with us thanks for having me i've i've been listening to the show for like a really long time i never thought i was actually going to make it on and i'm i'm glad that i could complete the nate bethea universe circle yeah you're you're now um you're now a character in the nate bethea extended universe

yeah on behalf of me when the clerk i'd like to thank my very good friend father mcmurphy for joining us it's been an absolute pleasure to finally talk about the way that simon man made me not in belfast has been nothing short of an honor we're all going to take a long walk down an extremely well lubricated staircase yeah yes um and uh as ever to our wonderful patrons we thank you for your ongoing patronage uh don't forget the usual stuff um conrad marcus brawn is still incarcerated so he does need to be bailed out of austrian jail abolish baby yeah abolish buff in um otherwise uh t-shirts in the description listen to well there's your problem listen to lions led by donkeys listen to hell of a way to die listen to 10k post the boney island whitefish

britannology we keep sport we keep budding shows because we've been bored in quarantine yeah exactly um yeah it's it's what we do instead of doing coups yeah hello and welcome to britannology we're going to be talking about brah techniques you should you really actually should just do a whole podcast as uh as clerk van der klurk and father mcmurphy now he's just doing bad deal do an african version of britannology and it would just be called phrenology all right uh see everybody bye bye you