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Outsourcing Regime Change Cry Havoc by Simon Mann
Outsourcing Regime Change Cry Havoc by Simon Mann
government of Equatorial Guinea. For his role in that failed coup attempt, Mann served
four years in a Zimbabwean prison and was then extradited to Equatorial Guinea, to serve
another 34-year sentence. He was pardoned in late 2009. This book is his account of the
ordeal.
Mann, a former SAS officer, co-founded and managed the private military
assisted regime change in the 1990s in Angola and Sierra Leone, which won Mann and
associates a fortune in mineral exploration rights, and diamond mine concessions. While
private military operations may be lucrative, the jackpot lurks in the spoils of war. Mann,
a soldier of fortune, is quick to point out that the target of the failed coup, Equatorial
Guinea, is the third largest oil-producing nation in Africa. There was big money on the
line.
The book is written in the style of an adventure thriller, books which, Mann read
voraciously as a youth. His beginning chapters shift back and forth between his
operations in Sierra Leone, Angola and the failed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea.
Mann is explaining his motivation behind the coup d’état turned coup de grâce. It’s
unnecessary. We know he’s after petrodollars, action and prestige. But Mann insists on
How many people does a tyrant have to kill or torture before you
can take him on? English Common Law is clear enough on that
topic: tyranny is assault. To fight against assault is good. To fight
to help someone who is being assaulted is good.
He has a Batman complex derived from a children’s comic book. Further, Mann
doesn’t speak of any of the ‘good’ that he did with the expansive mineral wealth he won
in the aftermath of his Sierra Leone and Angola mercenary operations; the working
conditions of African mineral extraction projects are well-known to even the most casual
reader as sub-human. Did Mann build roads, clinics and schools in Black Africa that we
Further, Mann whimsically equates his failed coup attempt to participating in a sort of
zeitgeist of assisted regime change in the early 2000s, referencing the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Certainly, there was a hyper-hawkish attitude in the wake of the 9/11
policy analysts with an aggressive bent have been forced to re-think the methodology of
large scale military operations that have no exit strategy. Hydro-carbon and mineral
exploration rights in Afghanistan, worth tens of billions of dollars, are currently being
And what makes Mann qualified to propose candidates for assisted regime change?
He assures the reader, passim, that he’s been given a green light on the coup attempt in
Equatorial Guinea by the world’s intelligence communities. However, once Mann begins
languishing in African prisons, there is no indication of outside help giving a green light
to his defense counsel or an evacuation plan. And he dwells on the abandonment, often
falling into despair. He now spends his vast mineral wealth bribing underpaid prison
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officials, and paying incompetent lawyers to survive the horrific living conditions during
The narrative is difficult to follow. This isn’t a patios he’s writing in, it’s fragmented,
frequently, I simply had no idea what he was talking about. It doesn’t work.
Years spent in solitary confinement with access to all the books he wants, buys and
has sent do nothing to improve his intellect. For example, Mann—like many of us from
the West who live, work and travel in Black Africa—contemplates Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, and claims to have kept a copy with him in prison. But he never looks
for himself in Heart of Darkness—is he Kurtz, the madman ivory raider?—or Marlowe,
the man sent to retrieve Kurtz? Mann instead fixates on the exotic and the grotesque.
There are three books here, really: the mercenary operations in Sierra Leone, Angola,
and Equatorial Guinea. It would’ve made for a decent action trilogy, had Mann any talent
or a serious interest in writing. But the result is a rambling, scattered and shallow
Private military contractors, while nothing new, have been getting significant press
since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US government continues spending billions
firm, Blackwater, had big problems in Iraq involving high-profile civilian casualties that
were widely reported. Like Mann’s own private military corporations, Blackwater has
been forced to change their name twice, due to bad publicity. Criticisms of these military
impulsively and with impunity. In 2011, the US was publically exposed in Pakistan, as
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having used private contractors in its covert CIA operations there, when one contractor
And it is this recent spate of private military corporations acting in tandem with
government armies, which made this book so anticipated; we want to understand the
machinations in the big fascinating industry of an outsourced war machine. Mann doesn’t
give us the hows-and-whys of mercenary work. The book disappoints again, in that
respect. But much like a disappointing glass of shiraz, the taste won’t linger.
Pete Willows is a contributing writer to The Egyptian Gazette, and its weekly
edition, The Egyptian Mail. He lives and works in Cairo. He can be reached at
willows@aucegypt.edu.