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If Simon Mann did not exist, you would have to make him up. A classic English
adventurer with a textbook establishment start: Eton, Sandhurst, the Scots
Guards. The son of a wealthy and sporting father, a one-time captain of the
English cricket team who made his fortune in brewing. A restless soul as at
home in a Pall Mall club as on the streets of Belfast.
Off the top of my head, I can think of half a dozen friends with backgrounds
almost exactly like his. But this morning, as they commute to their
investment banks, or sit down in their libraries to write, Mann is the one
who will stand up in manacles, his hair thick with lice and his body lean
from hunger, to argue before an African court for his life.
Mann’s story is an old-fashioned tale of greed and adventure, a story peopled
by improbable characters from the allegedly cannibal dictator and his
tyrannical new best friend; from the shady son of a British prime minister
to the armed men who shift about Africa fighting other people’s wars.
It started conventionally enough with enrolment at Eton, where Mann acquired
the casual confidence of entitlement. From there, he joined the Scots
Guards, Britain’s most pukka regiment, and underwent officer training at
Sandhurst. It was once a common career path for many future businessmen or
diplomats, but Mann had no intention of moving behind a desk. He signed up
for the SAS, passing the gruelling selection process on his first try.
Mann served as a captain in Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Germany, Norway, Canada
and Belize before leaving military life in search of more adventure and
better pay. From then on, his life departed from the regimented and
predictable. He set up a company selling hacker-proofed software but was
quickly drawn back to security, providing wealthy Arabs with guards for
their Scottish shooting estates. Mann was tempted briefly back into uniform
during the first Gulf War as an aide to Sir Peter de la Billiere, the head
of British forces.
It was on his return from the war that he met his third and current wife,
Amanda. Mann already had three children and had undergone a vasectomy, but
meeting Amanda persuaded him to have it reversed. She was four months
pregnant with their first child when they were married at Chelsea register
office in 1995.
In the meantime, Mann had moved full-time into the world of mercenaries,
setting up Executive Outcomes to make millions protecting Western oil
interests during Angola’s brutal civil war. When that company’s reputation
grew too murky, he set up another, Sandline, with a fellow former Scots
Guard Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer. The company famously defended its arms
supplies to Sierra Leone, in contravention of a United Nations embargo,
claiming they had the British Government’s knowledge and approval.
Still it had been a close call. Mann hung up his boots, for a time at least,
buying a house in the exclusive Cape Town suburb of Constantia, where his
neighbours included Mark Thatcher and Earl Spencer. Thatcher began a good
friend, and Mann and his family spent Christmas with him and the newly
widowed Baroness Thatcher. Mann’s life of fishing, beaches and cocktail
parties convinced many friends that he had now retired – until his shock
arrest at Harare airport in 2004.
Mann had gone to rendezvous there with 66 South African former soldiers who
had just landed in a Boeing 727 owned by his company. What emerged later was
straight out of the plot of Frederick Forsyth’s Dogs of War. In it, a
British businessman hires mercenaries to overthrow the government of newly
oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. Mann, it was alleged, was the real life gun for
hire.
Mann was said to have taken on the job in return for cash and a future stake
in the country’s oil reserves. Robert Mugabe, the leader who now had him in
jail, also needed oil. Guinea’s president, Teodor Obiang Nguema, smelled a
win-win solution in the offing, and promptly offered Mr Mugabe oil in return
for a questionably legal pre-dawn extradition from Zimbabwe.
Criminal or thrill seeker? Paul Greengrass the director who once worked with
Mann, said of him: “He is a humane man, but an adventurer. He is very
English, a romantic, tremendously good company.” Humane is not a word often
used of President Obiang, who presides over one of the worst human rights
records in Africa. Mann is a man who belongs to a different era, when white
buccaneers believed they ruled Africa and did what they liked there. Nobody
told him that era was over.
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