By Ed Stoddard
JOHANNESBURG Dec 13 (Reuters) – British mercenary
Simon Mann may be one of the luckiest foiled coup plotters in
history.
The soldier of fortune expected to spend the rest of his
days rotting in a tropical dungeon for his role in an attempted
African putsch in 2004 that went horribly awry.
Two years after he got an improbable pardon from Equatorial
Guinea’s strongman President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo for
his bid to overthrow him, Mann has returned to the oil-rich west
African nation three times a free man.
Instead of the vast petro-dollars he expected, Mann wound up
spending over 5 years in grim prisons in Zimbabwe and Equatorial
Guinea, becoming a subject of both fascination and ridicule in
the process.
But he is now profiting from the fiasco with a book about
the affair, “Cry Havoc,” in which he gives his side of a sordid
tale that involved Mark Thatcher, the son of the former British
prime minister, 69 desperadoes and an audacious plot.
“I don’t fancy myself as a freedom fighter at all. But I
felt at the time that the government was a very repressive one
and that therefore it was legitimate to try and do something
about it,” Mann told Reuters in a phone interview.
“The major factor for wanting to do the job was this very
simple double-whammy. Here was this terrible tyrant as he seemed
at the time and with that the opportunity to make a lot of
money. And that’s why I wanted to do it,” he said.
Mann claims to have enjoyed military success as a mercenary
in the battled-scarred African states of Angola and Sierra Leone
by helping the governments there quell rebel movements.
Continued…
