Simon Mann - The Mercenary

Full transcript: Simon Mann on London Real

6:14 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Simon Mann, the British mercenary and former SAS officer who served seven years of a 34-year jail sentence for your role in a failed coup d’etat in 2004 to replace the dictator of Equatorial Guinea in Africa. You were charged with crimes against head of state and crimes against the government, yet were subsequently pardoned in 2009. You’ve written about the experiences in your memoir titled Cry Havoc.

6:38 Today you continue your work as a paid military contractor for oil and gas and mining promotion in Africa. And have worked with Vice Magazine on a series in Venezuela. And you’re also currently writing a fiction trilogy told by a woman, which you began writing while still in prison. Simon, welcome to London Real.

6:55 Simon Mann: Thank you.

6:56 Brian Rose: It’s great having you here. And I can’t wait to get in and ask you more about the coup, et cetera. But as I learn more about you, I was just wondering if you could kind of walk us through, say, what your life was like, say, in the late 80s, early 90s, when you’re running executive outcomes and you’re doing, you know, contracting work in Africa, you must have seen some things and experienced some things that I probably wouldn’t be able to fathom or understand.

7:23 They say sometimes life is stranger than fiction. If you had to tell people what you were doing around then, what was like a typical day or a typical year, what would that be?

7:35 Simon Mann: Okay. Well, it is, like you say, pretty inexplicable and pretty hard to describe, really, because in one sense, we were having the time of our lives. In another sense, we were in very grave danger. And in another sense, we thought, and I still think that we were doing something good because we were fighting on the right side in Angola and Sierra Leone, where we went to subsequent to Angola. In both cases, we were fighting for the government.

8:07 And in both cases, we were fighting against people who were doing some terrible wrongs. But we were enjoying it and we were making money out of it. And it’s a long story. But so in order to describe it in a nutshell, it was an amazing period of my life and very satisfying and great fun. And

8:33 Brian Rose: so if you had to describe what EO did at the time, which is executive outcomes, for me, it’s kind of like a badass name.

8:43 It seems like you guys were doing like some gangster things down there. But what was the mission of a company like that? What are some of the kind of things that it would accomplish that you could offer your services? Yeah,

9:01 Simon Mann: executive outcomes in the form that it fought in came about entirely through Unita, the Angolan rebels, returning to war, following the loss by them of the November 92 elections. And they had signed international peace agreements.

9:19 They had promised bloody, bloody, blah, they promised upside down this way, that way, the other way. They will not go back to war. And they did go back to war. And almost the first thing they did was attack Soyo Operating Base, which is an Angolan town on the southern lip of the mouth of the River Congo. And by doing so, they attacked the company that I worked for, Heritage Oil and Gas.

9:49 I had just left the British Army for the third and the last time, following the first Gulf War, where I served with the general, our general. And I joined my friend, Tony Buckingham, in this company called Heritage. And that company, we had one project, which was offshore Angola, lot 424, and our operating base was Soyo. When Unita went back to war, they attacked Soyo. And Tony said, right, well, that’s the end of our new business.

10:23 And I had left the army again. I’d been offered a very good job in the army. To me, for me, the heritage was everything. I’d met a lovely woman, fallen in love with her. And I said, Tony, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

10:40 Let’s fight back. Why should these guys take a whole country back to war? Why should they be able to attack us, our men, our equipment, our livelihoods? Let’s fight back. And Tony said, no, no, you’re crazy.

10:55 How are we going to do that? Anyway, it’s a whole long story in it. It’s sort of in the book. But in the end, the Angolan government basically paid us and 60 South African mercenaries to retake Soyo, which with 3,000 kids, Angolan kids, boys, and they were in uniform and they had AKs, but they were kids. So our 60 South Africans and those 3,000 kids basically attacked Soyo to retake it from UNITA, who had 3,000 of their best troops waiting for us, ready.

11:32 They knew we were coming. And a pitch battle resulted, a very African pitch battle, but nevertheless a pitch battle.

11:39 Brian Rose: A pitch battle? What does that mean?

11:42 Simon Mann: A pitch battle is one, you know, it’s not like we’ll run away and you run away and we’ll run away.

11:48 It was like full on. Full on fighting. Full on fighting. At times, hand to hand. Very close.

11:56 Brian Rose: And you were there. You were there.

11:59 Simon Mann: I was, I took the guys in and then I was running the things from, we operated from a place called Cabinda. It’s a long story and a very hard five, six weeks, three months rolled on and the South Africans were just unbelievably good. Incredibly good soldiers.

12:20 And in the end we won’t. It’s a long story. Okay. But and then the Angolan said, wow, that was interesting because we haven’t seen people do that kind of thing before. They were especially interested in the fact that none of the South Africans had gone back around to them, right, and said that we hadn’t paid them right or treated them right toward them.

12:41 Brian Rose: Okay. Quite interesting. So this was kind of a new professional style of mercenary they hadn’t ever seen or dealt with before.

12:49 Simon Mann: Well, more or less, because the weird thing was that most of the South Africans with us had literally months or years or few, you know, one or two years before they had been fighting on the other side. Okay.

13:03 Because of the way the South. Or the Angolan rebels. For UNITA. For UNITA, right. Because they had been South African soldiers backed by America and the CIA.

13:13 Brian Rose: Okay. And yet they stayed with you.

13:16 Simon Mann: They came to us very gladly because, of course, South Africa was in transition. Was going over to a, you know, majority government. Nelson Mandela had been released.

13:28 Their pension plans were being torn up. You know, they’d served for some of them for five, 10, or 12, 15 years fighting. And now suddenly everything’s being taken away from underneath them. So when somebody came along and said, okay guys, we’ve got something for you to fight for and make some money with, they came.

13:53 Brian Rose: Pretty weird period of time because remember, you know, the Berlin Wall had only recently come down. So the world was in that kind of, you know, it’s miles away from where we are now. But there was a sort of a vacuum post the Berlin Wall coming down, post the Cold War. And you’ve got to remember that Angola was the hardest, hottest proxy war of the entire Cold War. Okay, so that was where the communism, the capitalism.

14:20 But also, I mean, there were tank battles. Yeah, you know, we don’t know about that here and people don’t know about it in the States. Not at all. But it happened. So those South Africans, they were looking for a way out.

14:33 Okay. And we offered one. And it’s fair to say that the Angolan government couldn’t have pulled off what you pulled off. They couldn’t have found the people to go in and do that job.

14:42 Simon Mann: They were very open about it.

14:43 After Soyo and afterward won at Soyo, they said, listen, we are losing the war. Can you come and help us properly instead of just this single operation on Soyo? And Tony and I, Tony Buckingham and I, we sat down, we talked about it at great length, you know, in terms of our business, our morality, our personal lives and everything. And basically, by then we sort of realized that by having done Soyo, we’d basically committed ourselves. And that all of those things now required us to see it through.

15:19 Brian Rose: You had committed yourself. We had committed ourselves. Because you had done this thing and now you were in. We’re in. It was too late to be out.

15:27 Simon Mann: Too late to be out, in a way. I mean, we could have just said, okay, fuck off. We’re out of here. But we didn’t want to, you know, because by then we’d become very good friends with the Angolans. We felt that they were right.

15:39 They had won an election in November 1992, which was free and fair, judge free and fair by the UN. And, you know, we’d started a fight with some really powerful enemies, because the CIA and the United States were behind Unita. Okay. So was big oil. And so would David.

16:00 The diamond conglomerate. The diamonds. How do you fight against that? It’s tricky. Well, we won.

16:05 Yeah,

16:05 Brian Rose: you won. Okay.

16:07 Simon Mann: In the end.

16:07 Brian Rose: Now, for people that don’t understand the concept of, paid military contractors or mercenary, how do you feel about the word mercenary? What does that mean to you?

16:19 Simon Mann: You know, I’ve had it so much, and I’ve been accused of being one and convicted of being one. And it’s never worried me. And it still doesn’t. Okay. Because you can be a mercenary doctor.

16:30 A mercenary doctor is a guy who worries more about money than about the health of his patients. Okay. But it is a derogatory word because it’s implying that money is more important than something else. Absolutely. A mercenary soldier is a pejorative top.

16:45 Brian Rose: Okay. All right. And so for people trying to get their head around this, because I think the most recent experience that the global community had with paid military contractor was, of course, the Blackwater guys and what happened in Iraq. And of course, they were portrayed as these kind of bad people, charging money, killing people. And you came from Scots Guard, S.A.S., like proper, serious military breeding here in the UK.

17:12 And now they hear of the story of you now being this paid military person. You said there’s questions of morality. You had to ask yourself and this kind of thing. How do you explain it to people that, look, this is me making a choice that I think was right, or this is like any other job out there?

17:30 Simon Mann: Well, first of all, I have to declare an interest.

17:33 Okay. So Eric Prince is a friend of mine.

17:35 Brian Rose: Yes. Who is the former president of Blackwater, the founder of Blackwater, but has

17:40 Simon Mann: since sold his interest. He sold it and exchanged its name and so on and so forth.

17:45 Okay. But Eric is presently in the news for putting a big plan to the United States government for a very private military contractor operation in Afghanistan. Okay. So basically we place American troops with a mercenary force that’s in the news. Okay.

18:08 And he’s a friend of mine. So I have to sort of, okay, put my cards on the table here. Okay. And going back to your question, how do I deal with it? Well, I deal with it very differently, as you would imagine, depending on who is asking the question and how they’re asking it.

18:25 Because, you know, serious people in a way don’t sort of ask the question because they know. I mean, for example, and this is, I find it quite a, quite a negative debate in a way, in the sense that, for example, the Gurkhas, the Gurkhas are a part of the British army. They come from Nepal. They’re not here for a love of England. They’re born in the Himalayas.

18:53 Okay. Now, anyone who’s pejorative about them and say, ah, well, you’re the Gurkhas, they’re Gurkhas and mercenaries, they’d tell you to get lost in very short order because they fought for the UK for, I think, over 100 years, incredibly well, and they regard themselves as part of the British army. British army is a professional army. And when I joined the British army, I didn’t imagine I was doing it out of a sense of duty. I wanted to join the British army.

19:22 I wanted to be a soldier.

19:24 Brian Rose: Okay. I wanted to be paid. I wanted to join that entity. Okay.

19:28 But it was more than a job, though. You swear loyalty and there is some nationality and pride along with that.

19:34 Simon Mann: But all that loyalty is there anyway. I mean, if there was a war, if there was an existential war, we’d all join up anyway. So I’m now saying, I know I actually want to be a soldier.

19:44 I don’t want to be a doctor or a dentist. That isn’t me saying I’m being particularly patriotic. I’m just saying that’s what I, that’s a profession I want to do.

19:53 Brian Rose: Okay. But in the army, there’s people that don’t feel that way.

19:56 People join for different reasons. But you’re saying you joined because I wanted to be a soldier. I think

20:02 Simon Mann: people join for all sorts of different reasons. I remember when I was about, when I was probably, let’s say, 24 or 25, the war in Oman was in progress, which was more or less a secret war. It wasn’t well-publicized, but there was a war against communists.

20:18 And this was like the 70s. Now, I could have actually got into the same firefight in Oman by three completely different routes. Okay. I could have been a seconded British officer. Working with the Oman troops.

20:37 I could have been a contracted British officer, somebody who’d left the British army and now joined the Oman armed forces under contract. Or I could have been an SAS troop commander in the British forces actually fighting. Okay. Now, I could have gone to the same, exactly the same firefight with more or less the same people around me by three different routes. But most people would say that one of those was a mercenary.

21:05 And I would just say, well, say what? I’d just say, well, if you want, I mean, is a girl a whore or is she a whore? You know, what? Or is she a gold digger? Does she do it for a living?

21:18 Or does she do it for fun? I don’t know. But you can use the word how you like. All right.

21:23 Brian Rose: So it’s perspective in your opinion.

21:25 It’s context. It’s how you want to look at it and bring your own baggage to the table.

21:30 Simon Mann: I think what matters is what you do. Okay. In the process.

21:33 Okay. If you are, I mean, mercenaries, there were some really horrific mercenary incidents in the 60s. Right. In Biafra and in the Congo. Congo, yeah.

21:44 Brian Rose: What were some of the things that happened in the Congo?

21:47 Simon Mann: Oh, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Okay. But, you know, the raping of nuns, the robbing of banks, you know, burning this village in order and killing everyone in it in order to pretend that the enemy had done it.

21:57 I mean, there were some absolutely horrific. My mercenaries

22:01 Brian Rose: from Europe, from Spain or England

22:03 Simon Mann: absolutely from all over. And they gave mercenaries a bad name. Yeah, it completely devalued the currency.

22:10 Brian Rose: Okay.

22:10 And so you’re saying I wasn’t doing that. I was providing a service and I believe we were on the right side working for the government. No,

22:20 Simon Mann: what I really like to say is if I put together a company to go and help in whatever country here or there, or if I’m Eric and I put together my fourth to go and to do Afghan, the criteria, surely, is the criteria by which I should be judged is surely what have I done? How good a job have we done? Have we achieved what we were asked to achieve?

22:44 Is that a good job? And have we done it in a good way? Okay. You know, have we raped people, burnt villages? No, no, no.

22:54 Have we achieved the objective? Have we brought about peace? Have we won? Have we actually managed to sort of improve the situation? Yes. Then we’re okay.

23:01 Brian Rose: And how do you rate Blackwater overall?

23:04 Simon Mann: I don’t know Blackwater. I wasn’t in Iraq. Right. And I haven’t been anywhere, you know, I haven’t seen them.

23:11 I’ve had lots of stories because obviously all my friends, you know, were involved, many of my friends. But I don’t, you know, if you don’t see what actually happens yourself, if you’re not actually there, it’s very hard to say.

23:24 Brian Rose: You must have an opinion. I mean, as a, you’re in the same business. So do you think people probably misunderstood, given a bad rep in the press?

23:32 Simon Mann: No, I think some bad things happened.

23:35 Brian Rose: And while we’re on the subject, this proposal to kind of privatize the military force in Afghanistan, what are your thoughts on that kind of a concept or what he’s proposing?

23:47 Simon Mann: Again, I think, you know, we have to look at these things in terms of the best results for everyone. And, you know, maybe Eric is right. Maybe that is the best way of doing it.

23:59 But I actually personally think that that’s an admission of failure. You know, if we’re really saying that a group of privately contracted military personnel can do a better job than the United States armed forces, then surely something’s wrong.

24:16 Brian Rose: You think so? I would think so. Maybe a profit-driven company will always do something better than a government entity.

24:24 Simon Mann: Well, first of all, again, I think that’s an admission of failure. I don’t see why that that should be true. I mean, I was in the Scots Guards, which has been going since 1642. I was in the Special Air Service and I knew David Sterling who founded it. And both of those organizations that I was in absolutely prided themselves on doing everything they were asked to do better than anybody else.

24:53 And 110% of their ability.

24:55 Brian Rose: Out of probably a sense of pride in nationalism and not to be paid.

25:00 Simon Mann: Not nationalistic. It’s just like, this is the Scots Guards or this is the Special Air Service and this is what we do. Okay, pride in that unit themselves.

25:11 And even more, the people with you. Because we all had that sense. And that was the, I think it’s a bit like a football team in a way. You know, you really don’t want to let the rest of the team down and want to do as best you can. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

25:26 Brian Rose: Was your biggest obstacle in creating executive outcomes trying to mimic that same type of camaraderie and dedication in your own private contract service?

25:38 Simon Mann: No, because I wasn’t really, I mean, Tony Buckingham and I were the joint founders of executive outcomes. In the sense that we got the job. The job that made executive outcomes was Angola. Yeah.

25:52 Which you just stumbled on, right? I mean, that

25:55 Brian Rose: stumbled on you, right? In a way,

25:57 Simon Mann: but I had helped Tony get into Angola in the first place. I mean, he was an oil and gas guy and I know I’m a business fan and I helped him get into Angola a bit and we’d worked together. And suddenly this thing happened and our business was under threat.

26:14 And so we decided to do what we did. I knew the right people down in South Africa. Ibn Barlow, who is the, you know, he founded executive outcomes the company, it’s his name on them, which he’d actually done before we went to see him for something else. And we all worked together. But I was never like a sort of on the ground officer with executive outcomes.

26:43 Okay. I was more like some horrible staff officer from the First World War who used to sort of come and say, okay, now chap, listen carefully because tomorrow morning. You’re like the CEO. Yeah, I have to get into something.

26:57 Brian Rose: And yet you must have fostered, you know, some type of a sense of, you know, unity with these people.

27:03 Simon Mann: I didn’t have to because the South Africans were, you know, these guys had been fighting for like 10, 15 years and these people were the very best that they had and they were coming out of the best units. And one of the things about executive outcomes was that everyone, we had 3,000 people on the books who we’d vetted but didn’t even get into executive outcomes. Right.

27:26 Brian Rose: And you were saying that no other time in history would you have had access to 3,000 well-qualified troops.

27:32 Simon Mann: Well, we had 5,000 because we had 2,000 in executive outcomes. And we had another 3,000 who wanted to be in executive outcomes. And they were all vetted. And that wouldn’t have happened 10 years later or 10 years earlier. It couldn’t happen today.

27:44 They don’t exist.

27:45 Brian Rose: You couldn’t find them in. Those guys don’t exist. Ex-seals, ex-sees people. Well, no,

27:50 Simon Mann: that’s an interesting point because actually I was just going to say because they do exist in America and in the UK.

27:56 But it’s a very different story because those South Africans at that point in time, $5,000 would buy them a farm in South Africa. It would buy them what their ambition was. That wouldn’t buy you very much with seals today. I promise you.

28:15 Brian Rose: So they were cheap.

28:17 They were cheap labor at the time. Or

28:19 Simon Mann: even then, I mean, actually, I came under some stick later because I had people from the SAS saying, hey, boss, you know, what happened there? Because why did you go and hire all these bloody South Africans? They wanted the jobs. Yeah.

28:34 I said, I’ll tell you why. Because firstly, they’re much better value. You know, they’re cheaper. Secondly, I don’t think you guys would even have done it. Not because you couldn’t, but because you wouldn’t.

28:47 You know, it was extremely hairy, what happened. Okay. And thirdly, you don’t know the climate. You don’t know Africa. You don’t know the people.

28:55 The South Africans had been, remember, working with and fighting with Unita for years beforehand. So they knew the theater of operations. They knew the people.

29:06 Brian Rose: Okay. And so Angola happens and you continue on with executive outcomes.

29:11 You’re now probably getting better at this. What are some of the highlights of that period as you look back? Things you’re proud of and again, you got to be able to tell me what are the things that, how is your life now when you have an army of 2000 highly qualified men that you can send in? You must get some very weird phone calls from very strange people in Africa entertaining ideas with you.

29:35 Simon Mann: Yeah, to a certain extent, but Tony and I both, we stayed very much under the parapet.

29:40 We were not executive outcome. And the executive outcomes office in Pretoria, they had a family’s office. They had a padre. They had a PR office. You know, it was very well run.

29:53 Even Ballet set it up very well. And it was a very efficient machine. Who were Tony biking with Simon Mack? Never heard of them. No contract, no shares.

30:09 Brian Rose: But then as things rolled on and we went into Sierra Leone, I remember actually one of the first real alarm bells ringing in my mind was I was on a flight, because we had two Boeing 727s that we were flying around Africa. Because by then we had 2000 people, some in Angola, some in Sierra Leone. I was on a flight back down from Sierra Leone. And by this stage, it was a big machine. And I sort of thought people didn’t really know who I was.

30:41 I hoped that they didn’t. Walked back to the loo in the airplane and this big Zulu, black, sergeant, sort of put his arm out. So I walked down to the loo. He said, excuse me sir, but I know exactly who you are. We’ve won in Angola now.

31:00 And now we’re about to win in Sierra Leone. Where are we going next? And I made some joke with him and I went off to the loo and I walked back to the front of the airplane. I sat down and I thought, this is now getting very dangerous.

31:16 Well, where are we going next? So he was one of your guys.

31:19 Simon Mann: Yeah, this was our plane. Okay, everybody on the plane, the pilots, everything. So he said, where are we going next?

31:25 And I just thought, wait a minute, this is now very dangerous because if he’s thinking that in that way, other people are thinking the same thing. Then we can do anything we want. No, the real thing was I thought, well, because at that point, we got involved in two really nasty wars in a good way and we’d actually won them. We’d actually managed to bring about peace. And one of my great points of pride is that in both of those, nobody has ever charged us or accused us of any wrongdoing.

32:00 Nobody. There wasn’t a single court case against us. Anyone. Which regular armies don’t have that. I mean, the British Army are being charged in Afghan.

32:10 All this nonsense is it. But nobody has charged us with anything. And I think that was correct. I mean, I don’t think anybody did anything wrong.

32:17 Brian Rose: And that shows that you did everything by the book.

32:20 Simon Mann: By the book. Okay. And I’m very, very proud of that, you know. But then I thought, well, wait a minute, we’ve actually done the right thing in two places. Okay, we’ve made a lot of money out of it, but we have done the right thing.

32:34 But now, what if somebody says, oh, well, let’s start a war for us to go and… You see what I mean?

32:41 Brian Rose: Yeah. At what point does the solution become the problem? Right.

32:45 So you’re worried that this thing might have been getting too much momentum.

32:48 Simon Mann: When that guy said that to me, I just thought, you know, this is going to get… Because remember, we don’t have any regulations here. This is not British Army. There’s no Queen’s regulations.

32:57 There’s no American army law code being applied. These are private individuals. Yeah.

33:03 Brian Rose: Besides losing life, what is the downside? Could the United Nations have charged you with something?

33:10 Could… I mean, you know, things went well according to you and Angola and Sierra Leone. But if they went gone wrong, what happens? You’re put up for charges in these countries or… Can the UN get involved and tell you to stop doing this?

33:23 Simon Mann: The UN were in both countries and were absolutely useless. In both.

33:29 Brian Rose: That’s the theme of the UN, right?

33:32 Simon Mann: Okay. Not only were they useless, but they badmouthed us and asked us for favors all over the place whenever they ran into trouble, which they constantly did.

33:46 And we bailed them out on numerous occasions. Okay. So, I’m not a big fan. Okay. But they would have never tried to do anything.

33:56 Who’s

33:56 Brian Rose: the police force at this point when you’re going, you know, between countries and negotiating with the government or the rebels, these kinds of things. I mean, there’s no referee here.

34:08 Simon Mann: Well, the referee actually is Uncle Sam. Because in both countries, Angola and Sierra Leone, just as we had approached the point of sort of we were like 80% to actually winning the thing completely and having everything squared away, we were ordered out. And that came from the White House.

34:26 Okay.

34:26 Brian Rose: On both occasions. Really, via the CIA? Via

34:29 Simon Mann: the presidents of those countries. Oh, okay.

34:32 And you listened. But they were our hosts. Okay,

34:36 Brian Rose: right. And then, okay, interesting. And why did they stop you at 80% done?

34:42 Simon Mann: I think, I didn’t blame them and I wasn’t surprised. I just thought, you know, there are people in Washington and London who are looking at this and thinking, well, it doesn’t really matter how good a job these guys have done. This is not how we want the world to be run. By these mercenary units that are winning wars. And I also more cynically thought, we’re just having too much fun.

35:05 Someone’s bound to send us home. Now,

35:07 Brian Rose: a lot of people would say, oh my gosh, you know, you’re having too much fun killing people in these countries. And they’re going to say, Simon, you’re an evil man.

35:17 Simon Mann: But we were trying to stop the war. Right.

35:19 Brian Rose: Okay. All right. But I’m sure the Angolan rebels didn’t feel that way.

35:24 Simon Mann: Definitely not. Okay.

35:25 Brian Rose: And as Sierra Leone, you said we created a diamond mine from scratch. Can you briefly talk about what happened in Sierra Leone? Because all I ever hear coming out of that country are conflict diamonds. So what happened in there? What did you do?

35:37 No, but I mean,

35:38 Simon Mann: Sierra Leone is a great source of diamonds, as is Angola. And the Koi Du Kimberlite in Sierra Leone is a world-recognized, world-renowned diamond mine. So we certainly weren’t creating anything out of scratch. And the movie Blood Diamond, Decaprio, that is actually based on our story. But of course, only after Hollywood had got hold of it and completely changed the story.

36:12 Brian Rose: Was he playing you?

36:14 Simon Mann: Well, that’s come up as a bit of a joke on a couple of occasions. But in the movie, the South Africans are absolutely the bad guys. Whereas I can assure you, in Sierra Leone, they were the exact opposite. Because the RUF, who were the enemy in Sierra Leone, were world-class atrocity commissors.

36:38 Who we defeated.

36:39 Brian Rose: Okay, all right. In the meantime, so all this time, you’re making a lot of money. More money than you’ve ever made as a soldier.

36:47 Simon Mann: Not in Sierra Leone.

36:48 Because in actual fact, we really were never paid for Sierra Leone. But that’s okay. I don’t expect any bronze statue. We kind of did it with the profits from Angola.

37:02 Brian Rose: Okay.

37:02 But you’re still making money.

37:03 Simon Mann: We were making a lot of money in Angola.

37:05 Brian Rose: Okay, all right. And even though you don’t have the shares in the company, you’re still finding money. Money’s coming your way.

37:11 Money’s coming,

37:12 Simon Mann: yeah. We’re managing money. And

37:14 Brian Rose: you’re enjoying this. You’re a businessman. You’re having success.

37:18 Simon Mann: Yeah, I’m really a soldier. I really wanted to win that war.

37:22 Brian Rose: Okay, all right. And what comes next? Because you stepped away from this for a few years.

37:29 Or what was…

37:30 Simon Mann: You mean what comes next now? No, no. No,

37:34 Brian Rose: after Sierra Leone. Yeah, what happened to you?

37:38 Simon Mann: Okay, well, we’d started a diamond mining company. Which we started in Angola. That led us to Sierra Leone. And for a while, I ran that company. I was chief operations officer at Africa.

37:52 So we built three mines in Angola. We built one in Nikoidu, Sierra Leone. Well, there was still fighting going on. So it was quite, you know, it was very challenging. It was very interesting.

38:03 I knew nothing about mining. Had some very interesting partners. Robert Friedland, the famous mining entrepreneur. Benny Steinmetz, the famous, you know. And

38:16 Brian Rose: so what are these people like?

38:18 Benny,

38:18 Simon Mann: I’ve never met, but he was a great shareholder, a great investor, because he always did exactly what he said he was going to do. Robert is amazing. I mean, he’s probably the world’s number one mining magnate today. And sort of… I like him a lot.

38:35 You know, he’s a friend. Little bit crazy, but immense vision and sort of drive. And yeah, interesting guy. Really interesting. Really gets things done, obviously.

38:49 And then I retired from that. I did the Peking to Paris motor car rally with Tony Buckingham. Okay. And an Aston Martin DB5. We were still friends when we got to Paris.

39:00 Just.

39:00 Brian Rose: You went from where to Paris? Beijing. Okay, all right.

39:05 Simon Mann: It was the 100th anniversary of the original motor car rally, believe it or not.

39:11 1897. They went from Peking to Paris. And this was the centenary thing. So we did that. And then I moved down to Cape Town with my family.

39:22 I have a young family.

39:23 Brian Rose: Okay. If you had to tell people, I mean, part of your expertise is doing business in Africa. Yes. And understanding all of these local nuances and power plays and things happening there.

39:34 Or not. Or not. How would you describe to people how you do business in Africa?

39:43 Simon Mann: How do I do business in Africa

39:47 Gently and slowly?

39:49 Brian Rose: Can you be more specific?

39:51 Simon Mann: Well, because if you try and do it not gently and not slowly, you won’t do any business in Africa.

40:00 Brian Rose: Okay. Okay.

40:01 And is every country different? I don’t know.

40:05 Simon Mann: I think people are the same the world over. I don’t see a huge difference between doing business in the Middle East to doing business in Africa. Obviously, you know, people are the same, but there are cultural differences and different ways.

40:24 And basically, you know, if I say if somebody’s talking to me who doesn’t know Africa and they want me to do something business-wise in Africa, I say, okay, we’ll look. In Africa, there is going to be a long checklist and we have to go the whole way through the checklist and we have to get a tick into every single box on that checklist. You can’t jump. You can’t sort of say, oh, well, the guy at the top said this and so all these people are going to fall into line.

40:52 They’re not because this is Africa. So basically, we have to work the whole way down this list and we have to get a tick into every single box from the president down to the magic man in the village. Okay. But before you run away and say, well, I don’t want to do that, I say, but it’s actually not that difficult. You just have to do it.

41:16 It’s not going to cost that much money. We just have to get each one of these guys on site.

41:22 Brian Rose: Okay, you have to go have a conversation with them. Sit down. Yeah.

41:26 Listen to their problems. Come up with an agreement.

41:29 Simon Mann: Yeah. I remember arriving in Sarimo in the middle of Angola in the war and the general was there and Sarimo is like a two-hour flight in a jet from Rwanda. And I got hold of the general.

41:41 I said, okay, I’ll just come from General D’Amato, he’s the head of the Angolan Armed Forces and we’ve got our troops here and this is what’s going to happen now. And he just shook his head. He said, no, no, no. I am in charge in Sarimo. I will tell you what’s going to happen here.

41:59 I said, but this is a direct order in writing from Luan. He said, I don’t care. Now, you know, suddenly the British Army officers all the gyros start wobbling. Right. What do you mean they don’t care?

42:16 So

42:16 Brian Rose: all the chain of command assumptions and protocols that might be in the British Army go out the window there.

42:23 Simon Mann: So as long as you’re aware of that, you can. Well, you have to take that into account.

42:28 Brian Rose: Okay. And at some point when you’re flying on this 707 into Sierra Leone.

42:32 727. 727, sorry. And the Zula guy says that to you. And do you ever think back and say, wait a second. I’m an Eaton grad.

42:40 My dad was a famous cricketer. I was in the SAS. I was in the Scots guard. I was wearing the bearskin hats. And now here I am mining diamonds in conflict zones in Sierra Leone.

42:53 Do you ever wonder how did I get here?

42:55 Simon Mann: Well, on that list you gave just now that the special air service bit answers all the questions. Because that’s the, you know, I think, you know, traditionally in the UK, that is the radical part if you like. That’s because in fact, in my day, the moment you opened your mouth to your commanding officer, if you were in the Scots guards and you went and saw your commanding officer and you said, excuse me, sir. I quite like to volunteer for the SAS.

43:23 You could just basically put a big cross against your name. Yeah. And really that what that cross said was this officer does not like the army.

43:34 Brian Rose: Okay. All right.

43:35 This officer wants to go and join the hippies, the military hippies. So it was like the Delta Four skies in America, the counterculture rebels. But

43:45 Simon Mann: Delta Force, you know, I don’t know how much of the history, you know, but I mean, Delta Force, Charlie Beckwith and Don Burroughts, they did the SAS election. They went back to America and said, this is how we have to do this. We haven’t got this.

44:01 And Bucky Burroughts was the Sergeant Major and Charlie Beckwith. Beckwith, I think, is known as the unguided missile. Okay. So the Delta was formed from SAS. And in fact, the original Delta, when they first did their selection, they first did their training.

44:18 There were many SAS instructors there. Delta Force and the Special S Service are very close. Okay. And not SEALs. SEALs is still an elite unit, but different.

44:29 SEALs are close to the SBS, which is the special boat section, which who come from the Royal Marines.

44:36 Brian Rose: And still attracts a certain type of person that doesn’t want to go, quote unquote, the corporate route in the military and wants to do.

44:45 Simon Mann: I don’t know the SEALs and I don’t know Delta. I know one or two people. But definitely in the UK on forces, if you say, if you’re in the Scots Guards and you say, I want to go to Hereford, I want to do SAS selection.

44:59 You’re putting up a flag that says, you know, you want it. I remember being absolutely grilled by a senior general in the Scots Guards who’d known my father in the war and everything else. And he said, what the hell do you think you’re doing joining that bunch of cowboys? The place for people like you, Simon, is with your troops and the battalion. Yes, but I think I want to go.

45:25 Brian Rose: Why did you want to go there? This is 70s then? 80s? No,

45:30 Simon Mann: it’s a funny story. My cousin is somebody called Lachlan McLean, head of the Clan McLean.

45:37 And he joined the SAS from Eton. He was my first cousin. And I was sent this magazine because in those days, it wasn’t all right now and it wasn’t all sort of hush-hush and secret. And the Sunday Times color supplement. There was this article about what the SAS were doing to the Indonesians in the Borneo, what was called the emergency, or the confrontation, I think it was called.

46:01 When Indonesia were trying to overthrow the Brunei, the Sultan of Brunei, and take over Borneo. And the SAS were deep inside Indonesian territory, fighting Indonesians. Okay,

46:12 Brian Rose: as mercenaries, but paid by the British government?

46:16 Simon Mann: No, no, this was a full-on British army deployment. I mean, they had royal artillery, they had infantry behind them.

46:23 This wasn’t an undercover thing. What was undercover was that they were miles inside Indonesia. But anyway, I read this article and I thought, I was about 15 or something and I thought, oh my goodness, this is like, I want to do that. So that planted the seed? I wanted to do it.

46:42 Brian Rose: Okay. And so it was in the 80s or the 70s? No, this was in the 60s. This was like 67. Right, that’s when you heard about it and then you joined later.

46:49 Simon Mann: Yeah, I was at school then. I got sent the magazine by my nanny who said, look what Locky’s doing.

46:57 Brian Rose: And how old were you when you joined the SAS? Oh,

47:01 Simon Mann: 24, 25.

47:02 Brian Rose: And what were your memories of those years?

47:05 Simon Mann: Very good. I mean, it was extremely hard. Very young and they’re not young. Everyone’s older than you. And a very different experience than the army.

47:20 Brian Rose: But you liked that?

47:22 Simon Mann: Of course, I loved the challenge. Unfortunately, when I was there, it was Northern Ireland, which was a dreadful business. Not fun? Just horrible to think about.

47:37 We were in the UK, supposedly it’s in the UK. Right. And you just thought, what are these people all doing? Why are we fighting each other? Why are we doing this?

47:48 We were fighting to try and keep them up, to stop them from fighting. And I went to, the first time I went to Northern Ireland, I wasn’t even 21. Old Etonian 20-year-old in charge of 30 Glaswegian lunatics from the Scots Guards, dealing with religious fervor and God knows what,

48:13 Brian Rose: what could go wrong? What’s the worst thing you saw in Northern Ireland? Oh,

48:20 Simon Mann: not good.

48:21 Civilians being blown up. Pretty heavy stuff. Yeah.

48:26 Brian Rose: And how did they treat an Etonian in the SAS? They give you a little bit of stick.

48:33 Who are the Scots Guards? Yeah, or the SAS themselves. Well,

48:39 Simon Mann: if you’re in Northern Ireland, in my day, with the Special Air Service, then they definitely didn’t know, nobody knew who you were or what you were. I mean, soldiers might have an idea, because of the length of your hair, because you were undercover.

49:03 Scots Guards, I mean, that in itself is a whole, the history of Northern, you’ve got a lot of American people who watch this. I mean, the history of Northern Ireland and the British involvement with Ireland is a massive subject and very complicated. I mean, the Scots Guards, the regiment that I joined as a 20-year-old, was formed in 1642 by royal commission to the Duke of Argyll to suppress the rebellious Irish,

49:45 Which the Guardsmen used to remind the people on the Fools Road and both of us about, from time to time, who quite often would say, well, you haven’t done a very good fucking job, have you?

50:02 Brian Rose: Yes, you’re still here, it’s 300 years later. So there’s quite a history there. Big history. Did that prepare you for anything you had to see and do in Africa?

50:16 Simon Mann: Interesting question. I mean, you know, they always say that when you look at any soldier, you have to look at his military childhood in the same way as a psychologist looks at, so if they say you want to study Rommel, you have to look at Rommel’s, when Rommel was first a soldier, and the same with Montgomery or whatever. Now, my military childhood was Northern Ireland, where basically we were trying to be policemen, and the whole British army had to reinvent itself.

50:47 You know, Aidan was ended in 68 or 67. That was when the British pulled out of Aidan with serious fighting, all sorts of bad stuff going on. It’s in Northern Ireland, Aidan. And then there was a year gap, 1968. And then in 69, the British army was into Northern Ireland.

51:11 In 1970, I joined the British army. So in a way, there was a very important lesson there for me, because suddenly the British army had to reinvent itself as a police force on UK territory, because Northern Ireland is the UK. So the stuff that we were taught as to how to suppress a riot when I was at Sandtest did not apply to the UK, because it was contravened UK law. Drawing a white line across the road and then withdrawing from it and saying anyone who crosses the white line will be shot, which was the drill I was taught at Sandtest, is illegal in the UK.

51:52 It’s perfectly illegal if you’re in Kenya, Aidan, Hong Kong, or anywhere else. According to the British, it’s absolutely fine there, but you can’t do that here. So the British army had to very, very quickly sort itself out. Bloody Sunday. You know the story of Bloody Sunday, which I actually did in that movie.

52:14 And so this was an amazing…

52:16 Brian Rose: What year was Bloody Sunday?

52:18 Simon Mann: The actual incident was I think, what was it? 73. Okay, and that was in Northern Ireland at Belfast.

52:25 It can’t be 73, it was 71. That was in Londonderry. And that was when the parachute regiment

52:37 Brian Rose: shot those boys who, you know, wrongly.

52:42 Simon Mann: And that was the moment when everyone really had to grow up in terms of what we’re now doing, as against what we used to do, how we see ourselves. And I think probably, yeah, you know, your question is very good, because if I then translate that forward into my attitude to executive outcomes in Africa and everything else, I do come to the thing from a policing, let’s get this straight, you know, rather than a crash-bang wallop.

53:19 Brian Rose: Yeah, rather than a, let’s just kill them all.

53:23 It’s more of, let’s figure this out so we can move forward.

53:27 Simon Mann: Well, I acted in Bloody Sunday in the movie, and I played the chief baddie. I played the part of Colonel Wilford who commanded the parachute regiment.

53:37 Brian Rose: You acted in it?

53:38 Simon Mann: Yeah.

53:38 Brian Rose: Wow. As a named actor. And

53:40 Simon Mann: that was the movie. Paul Greengroth was the director, and that was the movie that took Paul to Hollywood. Yeah, but it was

53:50 Brian Rose: a big deal.

53:51 And

53:51 Simon Mann: I was also the technical director on the movie. And I can’t remember the name of the general who was in charge of the operation into Londonderry that day. And Paul Greengroth, and we were talking about it, and we were sort of having a chat. And he said, I don’t understand that general. You know, he was very far forward for a general.

54:10 He was right with Wilford at the battalion command post. And what was he saying to Wilford? What were they, you know? I said, well, I don’t know. You know, I wasn’t that.

54:22 But I can tell you one thing. That general, his military childhood was fighting Germans in Germany. And if those guys came across a bit of a town that there was resistance, the first thing they did was bombard the place with artillery for hours. And then they’d drive tanks straight through the buildings. That was how they dealt with urban warfare.

54:49 Because they didn’t want anyone to be, they didn’t want any of their men to be killed by these people. And that was the military childhood of that general. Okay. Wasn’t it interesting? Now, in actual fact, when you think about that, in those times, it’s amazing that, in fact, there wasn’t less damage done on the day.

55:08 Right. But I’m not trying to excuse anything that happened there because it was wrong. And, you know, the whole army had to grow up as a result of it. But as it affected me, it did affect me. Of course it didn’t.

55:23 You know, we really, every round in Northern Ireland was accounted for. You gave soldiers their bullets and they had to hand the same number back. Otherwise, we wanted to know what had happened. It was absolutely, it was like a police booth.

55:40 Brian Rose: Okay. All right.

55:41 So back to Africa, you retire. You got all the money you need. You don’t want the drama in your life. You don’t want the danger. And you moved to South Africa.

55:53 Yeah. Is that correct?

55:54 Simon Mann: Well, no, not really. Because I moved to South Africa because I’m half South Africa. I’m half South Africa.

56:00 And there was a little bit of an upset here with sort of tax and accounting and everything. And so that was just a better place to go. Okay. And we had a lovely time. We lived in Cape Town for six years.

56:12 Beautiful. Really not.

56:13 Brian Rose: But you were out of the business. You were out of the paid military contract business, the mining business.

56:20 Simon Mann: Not entirely.

56:21 I mean, I still own chairs in the diamond business we had. For a while, I was still working for diamondworks and invested in a South American exploration mine.

56:33 The executive outcomes, people, you know, the machine, although we, 98 was the end of executive outcomes because the South African government passed the FMA, Foreign Military Assistance Act, which forbade things like executive outcomes. That was the end of it. Okay.

56:53 Brian Rose: As in their former soldiers weren’t allowed to be mercenaries or mercenary companies weren’t allowed to be doing business in their country.

57:03 Simon Mann: It’s actually very strict.

57:05 Okay, so hold that. Yeah, even if you’re like a military paramedic and you get a job with the UN in a war zone and you’re South African, you could be charged under the FMA. Okay. It’s kind of one of these crazy bits of legislation. Okay,

57:19 Brian Rose: so you couldn’t employ any of those guys anymore.

57:22 It became,

57:23 Simon Mann: it all became very complicated. And in fact, the South Africans tried to charge South Africans who joined the British army to go to Iraq and Africa, as many did. And they actually tried to charge them under the FMA. So it’s a long story and it’s a bit ridiculous. Okay, but the people involved went on because we had Tim Spicer’s arms to Sierra Leone scandal, which led to the resignation of a government minister here.

57:54 Brian Rose: Right, so that’s the Sandline company and providing arms to Sierra Leone. It was your company.

57:59 Simon Mann: Well, Sandline, yes. Okay, so you’re helping provide the arms to Sierra Leone and the foreign minister here. It wasn’t actually sort of mine.

58:07 It was just, I was sort of that. And then Papua New Guinea.

58:10 Brian Rose: Is there a morality play when you’re providing arms into Sierra Leone? And you have to ask yourself, is this the right thing to do?

58:18 Simon Mann: Well, it’s definitely the right thing to do.

58:20 The UN were helping unload the airplane with the arms on.

58:23 Brian Rose: Okay. And why did the foreign minister here have to resign on the back of it? Well,

58:27 Simon Mann: that’s a long story.

58:28 Brian Rose: And since when does the UN participating make it the right thing to do?

58:32 You said there were a bunch of goofballs.

58:34 Simon Mann: I don’t know. They must be standing around and felt embarrassed. That somebody was trying to do something.

58:40 Brian Rose: All right, so you were doing business and it was the right thing to do.

58:44 And that’s okay.

58:45 Simon Mann: But sort of business from a slightly remote point of view. And then the Papua New Guinea thing happened.

58:52 Brian Rose: And you were involved in that. That was…

58:55 Simon Mann: But remotely, you know, I wasn’t sort of directly involved. I was just one of the people who was like, if you like a senior shareholder, you know.

59:06 Brian Rose: And you helped them sort out a rebel issue there.

59:10 Simon Mann: Yes, except that went terribly badly wrong. Because the Papua New Guinea army sort of mutinied and they conducted a coup against the Papua New Guinea president because we were there.

59:24 That’s another long story.

59:25 Brian Rose: That is a long story. But you never got charged or anything? No,

59:28 Simon Mann: no, no.

59:28 Brian Rose: Okay, all right.

59:29 And in the same time, you did some advising for the UK government about the initial invasion into Iraq and you advised against it.

59:38 Simon Mann: Yes, and to say that I did that for the UK government is slightly because there was this very eccentric guy called David Hart, who was an advisor to Lady Thatcher at one point and became an advisor to Tony Blair in that run-up to the Iraqi invasion. And he, if you like, he’s dead now. So I can say anything I like about him. He’s actually a great friend of mine.

1:00:04 But he, if you like, was basically the UK ambassador for the neocons. Okay, and he asked you for some advice. Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, and those guys. Okay. Okay, stateside.

1:00:20 So

1:00:20 Brian Rose: he believed very much that they were right and that the invasion must happen. And he kind of, he didn’t pay me, so he didn’t, I can’t say he hired me, but he got me onto his bandwagon. Okay. Because he wasn’t never a soldier and he wanted that kind of military thing. What did you tell him?

1:00:45 I said, well, what are you actually doing?

1:00:48 Simon Mann: We had some pretty big arguments, but what they really wanted, at that time, what they wanted, this end, I’m not saying they wanted this in the states, but they said, because in fact, when he recruited me, I said, David, why do you want me? Why are you asking me to do this? Which incidentally was in the dining room at the Ritz. So it was in the right kind of ambiance for this kind of conversation.

1:01:14 And he said, well, because, you know, you were in the Scots Guards and you were in the SES, blah, blah, blah. I said, but David, you know, and I know, that there are probably 20 people within a mile up here, who are also in the Scots Guards and the SES and who are better qualified than me. So why are you talking to me? He said, well, well, because they haven’t won two private wars.

1:01:36 So that gives you a little bit of a bearing on where he was coming from. So I said, okay, so what’s the story? And he said, well, this has got to happen. We’ve got to invade Iraq. We’ve got to take down Sudan.

1:01:50 And we’re looking for ways of kicking it off. Can you think of anything? I know it’s hilarious, really. Well, that’s hilarious, if you’re in Iraq yet. But I said, okay, go and think about it.

1:02:05 And we talked about it off and on. I was down in Cape Town. I used to come up once every two or three weeks and talk to him about it.

1:02:13 Brian Rose: And was he keen on it because the Americans were keen on it or he just really believed they should go in? Or was it a push?

1:02:20 Simon Mann: Well, David was a very interesting guy, you know, and incredibly connected, incredibly connected because he didn’t charge anybody for his time. He’d fly anywhere in the world, private jet, this, that, it didn’t matter. And he’d charge no one. He’d never ask the government for money. And that gives you great power because every door is open and he used that.

1:02:48 And he felt that Saddam Hussein need to be taken out.

1:02:54 Brian Rose: And what was your ultimate advice to him?

1:02:58 Simon Mann: We had many different conversations. And I came up with two schemes that would kick the war off.

1:03:08 And I also came up with the thought which I planted very firmly in his mind, which was that the way that he was talking to me and the way the whole thing seemed to be being considered was quite irresponsible because they were not thinking it through. And that was very clear to me. But the two ways I came up with, one was that we take some town in Iraq that was under the U.S. air umbrella and basically say to Saddam, come and get us. You know, now what are you going to do?

1:03:45 Go in there with the rebels because there are lots of the Iraqi rebels that I think the 30,000th met, you know, military age in the States. And the U.S. government had approved a lot of money to pay for them to go to Iraq. But, you know, one of those funding things is that the money had been approved but it hadn’t been paid up. Complicated.

1:04:09 So that was one option. That was one option. And I said, well, we can get the executive outcomes, guys. We can train the people up, either in the States or in South Africa or wherever. And then we can go in and take someone and raise the flag of rebellion.

1:04:26 And then what’s Saddam going to do? Because if he ignores us, the rebellion will spread. If he comes after us, he gets taken out.

1:04:36 Brian Rose: So that was one idea. That was one idea.

1:04:39 Do you ever have to check yourself an immortal compass before you give advice to a man like this? Because you might be giving him the thing that makes him do something that’s potentially wrong.

1:04:50 Simon Mann: No, absolutely. Well, first of all, you know, I was serving during the first Gulf War. And I also think that Saddam absolutely needed to be taken out.

1:04:58 And I still think that. I mean, you know, how many counts of genocide do you need against you before somebody does something? So I thought that the invasion was totally justified and totally right. I think that the disgrace and the crime, if you want to put it into that kind of terminology, is what happened the next. How fantastically incompetent it was.

1:05:25 After we’re taken back down. After you’ve gone. So, you know, lots of people don’t agree with me.

1:05:33 Brian Rose: Right. And is the second idea just before we move on?

1:05:37 Simon Mann: The second idea was much more fun or would have been. We were going to get a really old steamer out of the Far East. Sail it around to Karachi from, you know, Singapore where loads from genuine nuclear weapon parts in Karachi, which we’d have bought from the Pakistani. And then sail it into the Gulf destination, Basra. They would have had genuine parts on board.

1:06:02 A mucked up old tramp steamer. All the right, you know, audit trails laid. Stopped and searched by a Saudi patrol boat. To make it look neutral. Sink the boat, kill all the Saudis on the boat.

1:06:17 Wouldn’t actually have, would have. Put them somewhere safe. And then taken the boat into Basra. At which point the world would have said, oh my God, this is a disgrace. You know, we know what’s on that boat.

1:06:29 You’ve killed these Saudi boys coming on your way. We’re coming now to get the boat.

1:06:34 Brian Rose: And a man like you could have probably arranged that.

1:06:38 Simon Mann: We definitely could. And I certainly intended to be on the boat.

1:06:42 Brian Rose: You wanted to be on the boat.

1:06:44 Simon Mann: I would have been on. I would have definitely wanted to be on the boat. So you’re a bit of an adrenaline joke. What was funny was that after this had gone in, and so I now go to my next lunch in the, you know, in the Ritz restaurant.

1:06:57 And we’re in this sort of alcove. And David Hart’s got his sort of enormous cigar because it’s just on the cusp of, you know, no smoking, but hadn’t quite got that. And I sit down. I’ve just got off the aeroplane from Cape Town. I said, so, you know, David, the tramp steamer option.

1:07:18 Or the, I think we call the other one, raising the flag. So we had two. We had raising the flag and tramp steamer. I said, tramp steamer, you know. Any takers?

1:07:31 He’s always puffing away. He’s eating or whatever. And this had apparently gone to Tony Blair. This is according to David Hart. I have no idea if this is actually true.

1:07:41 And he said, yeah, well, Tony Blair really liked tramp steamer, but isn’t very happy about the sauce.

1:07:51 Brian Rose: Oh, yeah. Wasn’t a fan of your work. Not,

1:07:55 Simon Mann: definitely not going to be overtly, no. Okay.

1:08:00 And it’s just funny. Okay,

1:08:01 Brian Rose: that is funny. And you could have secured some nuclear parts from Pakistan. That wouldn’t have been hard.

1:08:07 Simon Mann: I don’t think any of it would have been very hard.

1:08:09 Okay. And like you said, you know, if they hadn’t been real, by the time we’d faked the documents and bribed everybody, they would have looked real.

1:08:16 Brian Rose: And these kinds of things probably happen all the time that we don’t really know about it. The public, these things cooked up to start wars. I think

1:08:23 Simon Mann: actually looking back on it, I don’t think anyone would really be that stupid.

1:08:27 I’m not sure you could get away with it, actually. And you said somebody somewhere would say, hey, you know, you guys. I heard you with the ritz.

1:08:35 Brian Rose: And you would have wanted to be on that boat. So you like the action.

1:08:39 Yeah. Are you an adrenaline junkie?

1:08:41 Simon Mann: No.

1:08:41 Brian Rose: But you joined the SAS.

1:08:43 Simon Mann: That’s not an adrenaline junkie.

1:08:45 Brian Rose: What is that? No, that’s just,

1:08:48 Simon Mann: like I said, you know, it’s just, when I first read about it, what they were doing in the jungle and everything in Borneo, it just seemed to me like something very extreme that I could do.

1:09:06 Brian Rose: Okay, a test.

1:09:07 Simon Mann: A test, yes. And a challenge.

1:09:10 Something I wanted to do because-

1:09:12 Brian Rose: And a tribe, a group of men that are doing extraordinary things. Very tight group,

1:09:18 Simon Mann: yeah. Because my grandfather, and my father, both captained England for cricket. And so I grew up in this sort of rather crazy situation where there were these two sort of international sports giants, really. And also had both fought in both world wars.

1:09:36 And my grandfather, the whole way through the first, the father was the second. And they were both sort of war heroes. And so it was sort of quite some, quite testing environment to grow up in. And, you know, I was no good at cricket at all. I was hopeless at lessons.

1:09:53 You know, I knew I was going to be a genius or an academic or, you know, great businessman or great cricketer or anything. So by the time you go to 14, 15, you’re beginning to think, well, what am I going to do? It’s like, obviously, I’ve got to do something spectacular, you know, because these guys are like giants. And so I thought, oh, well, okay. Yes, yes, it’s not spectacular because it’s very quiet.

1:10:19 Because, you know, this was when, in those days, nobody really knew who they were. It was pre the Iranian embassy. It was all very quiet. Right. I just thought, no, this is something that I can do.

1:10:30 Brian Rose: Do you think if you look back at it now, that’s why you have a history of doing risky things. Because ultimately, you felt like you need to do something big with your life, like your father and your grandfather.

1:10:40 Simon Mann: But who doesn’t want to do something big with their lives? Yeah,

1:10:43 Brian Rose: but there’s scale. There’s scale, right?

1:10:45 Yeah, I guess. I know what you mean, but not everybody goes as big as you did.

1:10:51 Simon Mann: No, we’ll probably have gone. In fact, our dear nanny used to say, Simon, there are some boys who will always go too far. You’re one of them.

1:11:01 Because she was talking about you. Okay.

1:11:03 Brian Rose: Too far. And did you feel pressure from your father and grandfather to go into the military, to be a great cricketer?

1:11:10 Simon Mann: They were horrified when I said I was going to join the military.

1:11:14 Brian Rose: Oh, really?

1:11:15 Simon Mann: Because they were merely wartime soldiers. All they’d done was fight the Germans. And they thought it was extremely stupid idea to go and become a professional peacetime soldier.

1:11:26 Brian Rose: Interesting.

1:11:27 Okay. But you did it anyways.

1:11:29 Simon Mann: And before we get to this, a very last exciting chapter, being an Eden graduate, for people like in America that don’t know what it is, did you find that growing up there gave you certain tools? Did you stay in touch with a lot of those men? Did you later do business with them or have contact with them?

1:11:49 What’s that whole experience like? Would you send your children there? Did you? I mean, the first thing I have to say about that is that Eden has changed completely. Completely.

1:12:02 I mean, I would not, I would not get to Eden today. The 13-year-old Simon Mann would not pass the Eden exam today.

1:12:13 Brian Rose: Standards are high.

1:12:14 Simon Mann: Way high. When I went to Eden, it was basically no big deal.

1:12:20 It’s the default school for the English gentry, if that’s what you want to do. So there were people who were super academics there and there were people who were like me, you know, just lucky enough to have parents who had enough money to send me there and who had that tradition.

1:12:41 Brian Rose: And what about all of those connections and contacts? Did you use them thoroughly throughout your life? Yeah, I mean,

1:12:49 Simon Mann: most of my real friends are those friends and from the army, but many of them joined the army as well.

1:12:57 But I mean, this is a different age now. I mean, really it is. The world has changed quite a lot. Not out of recognition, but I mean, now I’m a member of a crazy thing called Eton Preners, which is a sort of old Etonian networking on the web. Let’s start businesses and do business together.

1:13:22 And it’s actually phenomenal. I mean, you read it and you just think, oh, shit, you know, in fact, I feel completely out of my depth because it’s mostly the younger guys and they’re doing the most incredible things and the networking is just fantastic.

1:13:38 Brian Rose: Yeah, I can imagine. All right. Take me to the year 2004 or semi-retired in South Africa playing around here and they’re making a few phone calls but not actively involved in mining or private military service.

1:13:51 Yeah,

1:13:52 Simon Mann: I was in the jungle in South America doing some exploration, but yeah, basically.

1:13:58 Brian Rose: And if you can think about maybe that year of 03, how did we find ourself on a airstrip in Zimbabwe with 69 guys on a plane getting arrested? That’s what my wife wants to know. She told me that’s this question. No,

1:14:16 Simon Mann: I was approached by some guys.

1:14:19 I was taken to meet this person here in London, a guy called Eli Khalil.

1:14:27 Brian Rose: Lebanese.

1:14:28 Simon Mann: Yes. But UK passport, born in Nigeria. Okay.

1:14:33 Lives here. Business man, whatever that means. Business man. And he and Severe Moto, the leader of the government in exile of Equatorial Guinea. Right.

1:14:48 Still alive. Still that. Lives in Madrid.

1:14:51 Brian Rose: Okay. And Equatorial Guinea, tiny little country, West Africa, former Spanish colony.

1:14:57 Simon Mann: Correct.

1:14:58 Brian Rose: Before oil was discovered, it was nothing going on but the rent. Nothing. Nobody wanted it.

1:15:04 Simon Mann: No.

1:15:04 Brian Rose: And when was oil discovered in that region?

1:15:07 Simon Mann: I think about 96. Okay. No, actually, maybe earlier, but they got going in 96. 96.

1:15:12 Yeah. Okay. And they said, right, we think that this guy, President Obiang, is an out-and-out tyrant. You know, they’ve got all this oil. Everyone’s living in poverty and they’re being tortured and this and that.

1:15:28 Perfect target. Would you get involved in a coup? Said, yeah. Why not? Let’s have a look.

1:15:37 Brian Rose: This reminds me of the Blues Brothers when they go back and say, we’re getting the band back together. Actually,

1:15:44 Simon Mann: while it was all going on, I actually did say it was like one of those Ealing movies, you know, where the jelly man, you know, the explosive man on the sort of, and he said, he gets talked into one last job and we all know what’s going to happen to him. He

1:16:00 Brian Rose: talked into one last job. Why did you say yes so quickly?

1:16:04 Simon Mann: I didn’t say yes that quickly, actually.

1:16:06 I said, well, let’s have a look.

1:16:09 Brian Rose: Okay. Why?

1:16:10 Simon Mann: I thought it was worth doing. You know, it had the right ingredients.

1:16:16 Doable. The right amount of money involved.

1:16:19 Brian Rose: Small country. I mean,

1:16:20 Simon Mann: the money was all way down the track, but there would have been an awful lot of it. Yes.

1:16:26 Okay. But there was no sort of upfront money.

1:16:28 Brian Rose: So it’s all kind of what you think you might be paid in the future based on. If this happens.

1:16:33 Simon Mann: If this happens, and they generate the world wealth.

1:16:36 Okay.

1:16:36 Brian Rose: So it’s a lot of handshakes and trust in your business.

1:16:40 Simon Mann: In this one, in this, in the EG thing. Okay. Honor

1:16:43 Brian Rose: among thieves.

1:16:44 No, that’s not fair, but honor among rebels.

1:16:47 Simon Mann: Well, no, I mean, honor amongst thieves and rebels. But also, you know, the local politics as well, because what happens if the guy we put into power can’t control his own cabinet? You know, there’s so many variables. Okay.

1:17:01 It’s definitely not something your bank manager would lend you money on.

1:17:04 Brian Rose: Right. But also you had been paid well in Angola over time. So you knew you wouldn’t just cut get cut out of the loop. There was always the possibility.

1:17:11 Simon Mann: But Angola was very different. Okay. Because they were losing a war. Sure. That was existential for those people.

1:17:17 Brian Rose: Okay. I think you were just bored.

1:17:23 Simon Mann: No, well, quite bored. But I mean, you can always go and climb Everest or something.

1:17:29 Brian Rose: Yeah, but you had plenty of money.

1:17:31 Simon Mann: Yeah. I had lots of money, beautiful wife, lovely children.

1:17:35 You know, so it definitely wasn’t Deadpool. You know, the mercenary bar. I’m down to my last thousand dollars. Oh, shit. I need a job.

1:17:47 No, it wasn’t that.

1:17:48 Brian Rose: Right. Okay. So you had this meeting in London and you decide, okay, it took a little bit of time. I want I’m in.

1:17:55 I’m in on this. Yeah. Okay.

1:17:57 Simon Mann: Well, we sent a recce group into Ecuador Guinea. Okay.

1:18:02 Brian Rose: You have to do that covertly and get him in there.

1:18:05 Simon Mann: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And they suss the situation out.

1:18:08 Yeah, because I didn’t want to take anybody’s word for how bad because to me, the essential element of the whole thing was that this really was a bad tyranny. There’s no way we’re going to just go and do this to even a benign dictator. You know what I mean? Yeah, it had to be justifiable.

1:18:27 Brian Rose: Okay.

1:18:27 Isn’t it all perspective, whether the rebels are right, or the government is right, or, you know, Trump won the popular election or Trump won the, you know, the electoral vote. I mean, isn’t it a matter of perspective of who’s the bad guy and who’s not?

1:18:44 Simon Mann: Totally.

1:18:45 Brian Rose: So at the end of the day, is it not just self justifying what you want to go in and do to a certain extent?

1:18:53 Simon Mann: Well, I mean, you’ve got to, you’ve got to make your own judgments, haven’t you?

1:18:58 Yes. I mean, I might decide tomorrow that I’m going to divorce my wife. Now her friends are going to think that I’m an absolute bastard. My friends are going to say, good for you Simon, I never liked her anyway. But, but my choice is my choice.

1:19:15 Now, at the end of the day, I have to justify that to myself.

1:19:19 Brian Rose: Right. But you understand my point. Well,

1:19:21 Simon Mann: I do. But on the other hand, these things are relative.

1:19:24 Okay. I mean, if what you’re asking me is do I think everyone would approve of Simon Matt? And the answer is absolutely categorically not.

1:19:33 But, you know, tough. Okay, so you didn’t make my own decisions and I’m going to do what I think is okay. And I’m quite sure I’ve made mistakes.

1:19:43 Brian Rose: So you recce the country. You figure out, okay, this guy is tyrannical.

1:19:48 He needs to go.

1:19:50 Simon Mann: We got information that said that he really was behaving in a way that would justify in any moral set of rules an immediate arrest. Okay. All right. Okay.

1:20:05 Okay.

1:20:05 Brian Rose: So he’s doing bad things to his people. Bad things. Okay. Killing them and projecting power and stealing all the wealth into a Swiss bank account.

1:20:12 Simon Mann: Imprisonment without trial.

1:20:14 Brian Rose: Isn’t putting all your country’s wealth in a Swiss bank account kind of de-rigor for Africa? Doesn’t everyone do it?

1:20:23 Simon Mann: No. There are degrees.

1:20:25 Okay. There are degrees. Okay. So I mean, for example, if you take Angola, there’s all sorts of bad shit goes on in Angola. But I mean, that is the MPLA.

1:20:34 It is a Marxist-Leninist party. They have up a lip euro. This isn’t just one guy saying, oh, I’d like to do this that tomorrow. You know, it’s not, so there is, so there is a big difference I think between. So for example, when people stop people talking about the morality, let’s say of acts inflicted on the population by the Saudi royal family or the government of China.

1:21:04 You know, there’s a difference between them and an out-and-out tyrant down the road. Because the Saudi royal family and the Chinese government in very different ways, they have to relate and justify themselves to all sorts of people. Totally different. I’m not saying they’re the same, but they do have to justify what they do. Okay.

1:21:34 There are committees. There are religious leaders in the case of Saudi. There are all sorts of checks and balances. Okay, we may not like them, but they’re there. But if you take a real African tyranny, there’s nothing there.

1:21:52 Anything’s going to go.

1:21:53 Brian Rose: And you were convinced that’s what was going on in Equatorial Guinea?

1:21:57 Simon Mann: I was then, yeah.

1:21:58 Brian Rose: Okay. And what was the rest of this process?

1:22:00 So the Lebanese guy is going to finance it.

1:22:03 Simon Mann: So he said.

1:22:04 Brian Rose: So he said, okay. And are other people involved?

1:22:07 Simon Mann: There are other financiers, there are other backers, there are other people knocking around.

1:22:13 Some of them I know or I hear about. Others I have no idea. Okay. But I kind of sense that they’re there. Yeah.

1:22:19 Brian Rose: Okay. And Mark Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s son, was he involved then?

1:22:23 Simon Mann: Mark Thatcher, I brought on board very late in the day for not very much money because the whole thing was running out of money. And it reached the point where I had to basically say to myself, either you go and find some more money or you kick this thing into touch.

1:22:38 Brian Rose: Because you couldn’t finance it and it was going to go off wrong.

1:22:42 Okay. And

1:22:43 Simon Mann: it was not in good shape.

1:22:44 Brian Rose: And why would he put his own money in? Because he sees. Who,

1:22:48 Simon Mann: Mark?

1:22:48 Yeah. Mark. Well, Mark’s basically and the nice thing about Mark is that Mark is an absolutely inveterate naughty boy.

1:22:56 Brian Rose: What does that mean?

1:22:57 Simon Mann: Well, he’s the kind of boy that you know, when you’re at school, you say, hey, come on, let’s go and throw some stones through those windows.

1:23:06 He’d say, yeah, come on, let’s go and do it.

1:23:09 Brian Rose: Okay. So he wasn’t hard to convince to do something like this. Is that what happens when your mother’s prime minister?

1:23:17 Simon Mann: I don’t think so.

1:23:18 I think that’s just his character. Okay.

1:23:20 Brian Rose: But for him, there must have been a payout from this money.

1:23:23 Simon Mann: Of course, for everybody. Okay.

1:23:25 Brian Rose: So he might be involved in future oil drilling.

1:23:28 Simon Mann: Yeah, but he wanted to be part of the gap. I mean, he absolutely, because there were a number of people who were in favor of the project of the coup. Um, but they were like investors in the back of the bus. Yeah.

1:23:43 Here’s my 50 grand. Give me a call when you want to pay my dividend. If it goes wrong, don’t give me a call. Okay. He was not one of those.

1:23:53 Brian Rose: He wanted to be in on the experience. He wanted to be one of the. Okay. He

1:23:57 Simon Mann: might argue it wasn’t about the money for him. He just wanted to be in.

1:24:01 But he loves money. Okay. He loves money too. And he could see that this was potentially a huge, you know, a huge deal. Because the whole country needed development

1:24:13 Brian Rose: and.

1:24:13 And there was a lot of oil there and it could be very, very.

1:24:17 Simon Mann: Yeah, the oil thing. In fact, one of the things that we all said to one another in advance was we don’t touch the oil. We do not touch the oil. Because that’s what everyone expected us to do.

1:24:30 And I also think that there might have been conversations in the United States about that subject. Okay. I don’t know anything.

1:24:37 Brian Rose: So if they knew you weren’t going to touch the oil, they might leave you alone.

1:24:41 Simon Mann: I think the conversations may have gone a little bit further than that.

1:24:45 Okay.

1:24:45 Brian Rose: Can you tell me what you mean?

1:24:47 Simon Mann: Well, I don’t know because I wasn’t there. This is supposition. We’re now into the realms of supposition.

1:24:53 Okay. But my supposition is that. Elly Khalil or somebody above him in the food chain. But I don’t know anybody above him in the food chain. Basically had a conversation at some point in the States whereby they were told right.

1:25:08 We wouldn’t mind this happening. This would be quite a good thing if it happened. But it has to happen in the right way. And it has to be done immaculately well. And in that case, we will give you a fair wind thereafter.

1:25:24 Okay. We’re not backing you. Right. We’re not going to say a word. There’s no money.

1:25:30 There’s nothing.

1:25:31 Brian Rose: Right. But nothing goes on in the world without the tacit approval of Uncle Sam. You said that earlier.

1:25:38 Simon Mann: Did I say that?

1:25:39 Brian Rose: Kind of.

1:25:39 Simon Mann: I don’t think that’s true because I wish it was actually. I think there are things that go on.

1:25:45 Brian Rose: But you think they had kind of known it might have happened and they were going to let you do it.

1:25:50 Simon Mann: I think I think they might have even suggested it.

1:25:53 Okay. Because certainly the people who I know who are in that sort of sphere, they know that you don’t do things like that without asking first.

1:26:02 Brian Rose: Right. Maybe it was like some dinner at the Ritz like you had where someone would come up with this crazy idea.

1:26:08 Simon Mann: But I think it’s the Beltway.

1:26:10 Okay. So the same dinner you had. So two guys there.

1:26:13 Brian Rose: Is there a Ritz on the Beltway? There’s

1:26:16 Simon Mann: probably something else.

1:26:17 Brian Rose: McDonald’s. Maybe. So two guys smoking cigars came up with this crazy idea. We’ll get an XSAS British guy to go in and get this thing done.

1:26:25 Simon Mann: No, I think that conversation happened with Ellie Khalil.

1:26:28 Okay. And I don’t think anybody mentioned anything about the SCS or anything like that. They just probably said, Ellie needs doing.

1:26:39 Brian Rose: Okay. And what was your plan?

1:26:42 Simon Mann: We had many. We were working through the menu. Right.

1:26:46 Brian Rose: You always have some interesting plans. All right.

1:26:49 No, no.

1:26:50 Simon Mann: The plan that we actually tried to execute was about, I don’t know, I always call it plan echo. So we tried A, B, C, and echo was not a good plan.

1:27:02 Brian Rose: Okay. And why did you skip A, B, C, and D?

1:27:05 Well,

1:27:05 Simon Mann: we tried to do D two weeks before we tried to do E. Okay. The trouble was that we didn’t have the money and we were running out of time and that’s a really bad place to go. Right. I’m a pilot.

1:27:21 And if you get low and slow, that’s bad. Right. That’s when you’re about to crash. But

1:27:27 Brian Rose: the ultimate goal was to depose the dictator, bring in the former dictator or someone else that would have been…

1:27:34 Simon Mann: No, bring in Severo Moto.

1:27:36 Okay. Who is still the leader of the exile in opposition.

1:27:40 Brian Rose: Right. Okay. And do it quickly, inefficiently, boom, coup, done.

1:27:44 Simon Mann: Well, it would have been a palace coup. If everything had gone according to plan, once we had got gear up and we were on our way, irrevocably on our way, there would then have been a palace coup and he would have been arrested in bed.

1:27:59 Brian Rose: Okay. Palace coup means his own people just take him out.

1:28:03 Simon Mann: Yeah, he goes to bed and someone comes along and goes, get up, Mr. President.

1:28:08 You’re under arrest.

1:28:10 Brian Rose: Right. And then your guy sails in

1:28:12 Simon Mann: and… And then we then would have arrived with Severo Moto. He was due to arrive like 45 minutes an hour after us.

1:28:21 And really, we would have just been his escort.

1:28:23 Brian Rose: Okay. Just a very well-armed escort to show everyone you mean business.

1:28:27 Simon Mann: A heavily armed escort.

1:28:28 Brian Rose: And let the military know that maybe they should just go with this.

1:28:31 Simon Mann: Stay in barracks, guys. Right. Stay in the barracks and that we got it.

1:28:35 Brian Rose: So it’s kind of a show of force and executed properly, it could have worked.

1:28:39 Simon Mann: Well, we also had to look at the downside.

1:28:41 You know, so we had to be armed in case it all went wrong and we had to fight. We couldn’t turn up there in sort of like British policemen’s uniforms.

1:28:52 Brian Rose: Right. Hello, hello, what’s all this then? And so plan D was to do something slightly different in B and C, but you couldn’t execute.

1:29:01 Simon Mann: No, no, the palace coup element was critical to all plans. Okay, okay. But as it turned out, we were all over the place. I mean, everybody knew what was happening. Alarm bells were ringing all over the place.

1:29:20 It wasn’t good. But we just thought, you know, this is how the West is one is by just putting a bull’s on the land and going for it. But we made a mistake, you know. I should have said stop.

1:29:36 Brian Rose: Right.

1:29:36 You said one of the biggest things was between creating the plan and executing the plan, a year had passed.

1:29:42 Simon Mann: Yeah, that was crazy.

1:29:43 Brian Rose: And that’s crazy because that should be months.

1:29:45 Simon Mann: It should be days if it can be done like that.

1:29:48 Brian Rose: And why?

1:29:48 And that dragged because there was so many. Probably

1:29:51 Simon Mann: because we didn’t get the money that we needed to do it. If we’d had the money that we were promised when we were promised it, who knows what would happen.

1:29:59 Brian Rose: Okay. And you said even down to the last few days, you’re a pilot, you were looking for that red warning light to come up and maybe even give you the excuse to go ahead and quit.

1:30:09 Simon Mann: But you never got that big flashing red light. So I didn’t get it. So I just thought, we’ve just got to go. We just got to be ballsy.

1:30:18 Brian Rose: Right.

1:30:18 You’ve been in uncomfortable situations before where you wanted to maybe not do an operation, but you did it and you had success. And you know that there’s that fear would creep in. Sometimes you have to go for it.

1:30:28 Simon Mann: Yeah. Okay.

1:30:29 And what happened? Just like mountaineering. I mean, sometimes you get frightened. And you have to overcome it. And when we went into Angola and then when we subsequently went into Sierra Leone, we were incredibly fast.

1:30:47 You know, we were really light footed. And once we’d done it, there was so many people who were up in arms and said, wow, okay. You didn’t ask anyone. You didn’t talk to Uncle Sam. You didn’t talk to London.

1:30:59 You didn’t do this. You didn’t do that. You said, well, we’ve done it now. Right. Which was a point.

1:31:05 Come and get us, you know. We’ve done it. And we got away with it. So in a way, I was not misled, but I’ve become overconfident.

1:31:15 Brian Rose: Not following your own playbook.

1:31:17 I’ve

1:31:17 Simon Mann: become overconfident that just by being really ballsy, we’d get away with anything. That’s overconfident.

1:31:26 Brian Rose: Yeah. So what happened?

1:31:28 Simon Mann: I got arrested.

1:31:29 But I think actually funny enough, I think it was Uncle Sam that blew the whistle on us. Okay. I don’t blame them, by the way. Because

1:31:36 Brian Rose: you had flown into Zimbabwe to get the arms, and then you were going to take that plane over to Equitore Guinea. Equitore Guinea.

1:31:43 And you got arrested in Zimbabwe.

1:31:46 Simon Mann: Correct.

1:31:46 Brian Rose: And you thought you had the implicit okay of Mumbai and a few other leaders to let this thing go through. Yeah. You thought the U.S.

1:31:56 Was either backing this or at least not going to have.

1:32:01 Simon Mann: I didn’t really know, but what I said to you earlier is how I pretty much figured that it was, how the land lay. I knew that the Portuguese Intelligence Service knew what was happening and were not stopping it. I knew that Spain was heavily behind us, backing us. And I knew that South Africa were backing the operation.

1:32:27 So I thought well.

1:32:28 Brian Rose: Because they have their own interests in there and they would rather you have done it.

1:32:33 Simon Mann: The South Africans thought that they thought this was a wonderful opportunity to basically take over Equitore Guinea themselves on the basis that if we succeeded, they’d hijack the operation. If it failed, they’d say it had nothing to do with us. Okay.

1:32:46 I think that was pretty much.

1:32:48 Brian Rose: And so at the last minute, what do you reckon happened? The U.S. got involved or people got cold feet?

1:32:54 Simon Mann: Well, as far as I can make out, and you must, in this story, I mean, I don’t know.

1:32:59 You know, I wasn’t. I was in prison by this state. I was arrested. As far as I can make out, literally two hours before we were arrested and Becky was in favor of the operation. Because he allowed the airplane to leave South Africa, which he absolutely definitely didn’t need to do that.

1:33:20 He just stopped it. They knew what was happening. They could have stopped it at any point over several months prior.

1:33:34 Now, my information is that America, the United States government, probably the CIA or whoever, contacted the Angolans and told the Angolans to tell the South Africans to tell the Zimbabweans to arrest us.

1:33:54 Brian Rose: Now, why use that chain? Why go through Angola?

1:33:59 Simon Mann: Because it distances. It separates.

1:34:02 Because obviously everyone wants to kind of disassociate. Apparently, the South Africans were threatened. They were told, if you don’t stop this now, then your fingerprints are all over this, which they were. And we’re going to blame you.

1:34:17 Brian Rose: Right.

1:34:17 You had kind of cleared it with them.

1:34:19 Simon Mann: We hadn’t really cleared it. Well, I had serious indications that it was cleared with them. Okay. And then they told us Zimbabweans who were very happy to sell the weapons to us.

1:34:29 We paid them. We had the money. I mean, it wasn’t under the table. I’d been to the ZDI’s Zimbabwe Defense Industry’s main boardroom. We’d exchanged business cards.

1:34:40 I’d said, do you want to know where the weapons are going? And they said, oh, no, we don’t care. We just want to sell weapons. You know, it was all calm. So the key question is, well, why would the Americans have stopped it when you say that the Americans started it?

1:34:55 And I think the answer to that is that they basically got cold feet and felt that A, the operation was in bad hands. It was going wrong. It was too messy. It was going to be a fuck up. And that B, inadvertently, I’d managed to, by accident actually, make it look as if the Americans were involved.

1:35:24 Okay. And then thirdly, I think somebody bright enough in Langley said, wait a minute, why did we want this coup to happen in the first place? Well, we wanted it to happen because we wanted better governance in Ecuador or Guinea. So why don’t we torpedo the coup, get the credit for torpedoing the coup, but tell the president that he now needs to behave. That we can’t go on.

1:35:51 He is our friend. We’ve just proven it. But now you have to behave yourself properly. Okay. Because when I finally ended up in Ecuador or Guinea, four years later in chains, one of the things I learned was that everything started to change in Ecuador or Guinea in 2004.

1:36:12 Okay. Like, I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

1:36:15 Brian Rose: So you were the agent of change?

1:36:18 Simon Mann: It may be, and I don’t want to make too much of this, but it may actually be that in fact we achieved what we really wanted to achieve. Bloodlessly.

1:36:29 Albeit by means of an enormous cock up and a lot of suffering. And I’m now friends with the president.

1:36:36 Brian Rose: I know. That’s the fascinating part. That’s weird.

1:36:39 He’s the same guy. You told me he was a very, very bad man on your recce. You’re now good friends with him.

1:36:44 Simon Mann: Yeah.

1:36:45 Brian Rose: Okay.

1:36:45 We’re going to get to that. So you get arrested on that tarmac in Zimbabwe. How do you feel right there? Because you got 69, what, former EO guys there or South African? No,

1:36:55 Simon Mann: they were all former executive outcomes.

1:36:57 Brian Rose: Okay. Yeah. South African hardened trick guys with you. You get arrested. How is that 24 hours for you?

1:37:03 What are you feeling like? They’re all looking at you.

1:37:06 Simon Mann: Well, they weren’t looking at me because I was separated from them immediately. And I thought, well, I’m going to die now.

1:37:13 Brian Rose: Why were you on that plane?

1:37:15 Simon Mann: I wasn’t. I’d actually gone up 24 hours earlier.

1:37:18 Brian Rose: Why were you on the ground? You said you were like the old field general in the previous days. You wanted to get your hands dirty.

1:37:26 Simon Mann: No, I was really committed to this operation. And I knew it was dodgy. I knew it was going to be very dangerous because we were on plan echo, which should have been plan echo for easy. And I just thought, I have to be there. I just have to go.

1:37:44 Because that’s where it’s going to go wrong. If it’s going to go wrong. And I don’t want to get the guys going in. And I’m not there.

1:37:51 Brian Rose: Okay.

1:37:51 Did your wife know what was going on? You didn’t tell her.

1:37:56 Simon Mann: She sort of knew a bit.

1:37:58 Brian Rose: Good answer. Okay.

1:37:59 So you’re on the ground. They separate you. What’s going through your mind there?

1:38:03 Simon Mann: I just thought, well, this is it. They’re going to kill me.

1:38:06 And then they pretended to kill me. And then they kept me separate. The Zimbabwe government did. This is the CIO, yeah, which is like the Zimbabwe Gestapo.

1:38:16 Brian Rose: How did they pretend to kill you?

1:38:18 Simon Mann: Not nice. Not nice people.

1:38:20 Brian Rose: Really bad.

1:38:21 Simon Mann: They weren’t that bad. Well, they would have killed me.

1:38:26 Brian Rose: Right. What do they do? Like put guns to your head?

1:38:29 Simon Mann: Yeah. There’s a mock execution down by the river.

1:38:31 And all that sort of nonsense.

1:38:34 Brian Rose: That’s not nice to go through.

1:38:36 Simon Mann: No. And there’s a lot of sort of… But, you know, it was Christmas for Mugabe.

1:38:43 You know, old Etonian Scotscar’s SAS officer doing something outrageously, you know, wrong. And I’ve arrested him. Yippee. So it’s a great feather in his cap. Yeah.

1:38:59 Brian Rose: So you thought they might execute you.

1:39:01 Simon Mann: I did think that, yeah. Because

1:39:03 Brian Rose: why? Had you committed laws against… crimes against them?

1:39:06 Simon Mann: No, I hadn’t. But, you know, I knew that I wasn’t going to be flavor of the month. Okay. All right. And I knew that they would know that I was a massively soldier, you know.

1:39:17 And I guess, yeah, the thing with Africa, which I’d been warned and I sort of had read, is that if you ever get captured in Africa, if you ever get taken prisoner in Africa, the first 24 hours or 48 hours are going to be rough. Because basically they’re frightened of you. You know, you are a frightening thing. And they’re angry. And they’re going to show they’re angry.

1:39:40 And then if you look at African politics, and when they go for it, they really go for it. The machetes come out and one village chops up another village that they live next to one another. Because it’s all in the heat of the moment. But then five years later, they’re all friends again. So it’s much better than somewhere like Northern Ireland, where they’re not friends after 300 years.

1:40:03 They still haven’t forgiven one another. And that’s the beauty of Africa, actually. Quick to anger, but very quick to forgive.

1:40:12 Brian Rose: And so you knew this first 24, 48 hours is going to be hard. Yeah.

1:40:17 And your former essay, yes. You’ve seen probably some of the interrogations and things that happened in Northern Ireland. You kind of know what you might be in for, but this is Zimbabwe style.

1:40:30 Simon Mann: We were never allowed to do what we wanted to do in Northern Ireland.

1:40:34 We weren’t even allowed to do what we did to one another in training in Northern Ireland. But no, I had had some training.

1:40:41 Brian Rose: Okay. Like, and I kind of knew what to expect. Okay.

1:40:44 So you get through those 48 hours? Yeah,

1:40:47 Simon Mann: it was a week, actually. Okay. And it was difficult because I bumped into, sounds weird, but I ended up in the same place as some of my men who then told me that they were being pretty badly treated. I mean, tortured.

1:41:04 And I was being pretty badly treated and tortured.

1:41:08 Brian Rose: For information? Yeah. Okay.

1:41:10 Simon Mann: And by then, because, you know, there’s a kind of a rule, you know, which is after 24 hours, all bets are off.

1:41:19 So, you know, if you’re in an operation, other people have been taken prisoner, you kind of assume that within 24 hours, they will have built the beans. So by then, we would be on the 24 hours. And the guys, you know, I was really worried about the guys because I just thought, well, this is not right, you know, because they didn’t sign up for this. You know, this is not a war. We’re not, you know, we’re not trying to fight anybody.

1:41:47 And so I basically talked to the senior CIO guy and I said, listen, you know, I’ll give you a complete statement. Now, I’ll just sit down and write it out for you. But you’ve got to stop mistreating the guys. It’s just got to be completely hands off from now. He said, okay, get writing.

1:42:11 Brian Rose: And that’s what they wanted you to be the poster boy that they could just wheel out.

1:42:16 Simon Mann: Yeah, and I didn’t think I had any option. Right. Did you? Did you have an option?

1:42:20 No. Okay. What was the option?

1:42:22 Brian Rose: And yet you knew this could have happened.

1:42:26 Simon Mann: I knew it was a possibility.

1:42:28 I actually didn’t think that that was what would happen. Actually, I thought we’d, I thought if something was going to go wrong, really wrong, it was going to be when we landed and we’d just fly into an ambush. Okay.

1:42:40 Brian Rose: Landed in Guinea.

1:42:41 Simon Mann: Yeah.

1:42:41 Okay. And there’d be a train across the runway and shooting. Okay. Right. If it was going to go wrong.

1:42:50 Brian Rose: Okay. So you say what you want to say, say what they want you to say in Zimbabwe.

1:42:56 Simon Mann: Well, I just told them the story. Because I also knew from what they said to me that they’d arrested people in South Africa who also knew the story. So they weren’t going to keep silent for me.

1:43:11 Okay.

1:43:12 Brian Rose: And how did that turn out in Zimbabwe for you?

1:43:16 Simon Mann: Well, I got eight years. Sentence. And, you know, I was in Chikurubi, Chikurubi maximum security prison.

1:43:27 The Harare Hilton, they call it.

1:43:30 Brian Rose: What’s it like in there?

1:43:32 Simon Mann: Not good.

1:43:33 They say it’s the worst prison in Africa. I’m not sure whether that’s actually true because unlike some of the other people who I was with, I hadn’t done a complete tour of all the other. African prisons. But, you know, I mean, probably sounds crazy, but it was an amazing experience to be in that prison. You know,

1:43:55 Brian Rose: how so?

1:43:55 And what was it like? Because I have no idea what it might look like and feel like.

1:44:01 Simon Mann: Well, it’s there was actually a funny incident because I was sort of getting pissed off with one of the yard sergeants, you know, come and sit in the yard. And I said, you know, you’re killing people in here. It’s like a firing squad in here because it’s just a slow-moving bullet.

1:44:20 Because if a poor person comes in here with no outside support, no money, in five years, he’ll be dead because the food is so bad and the conditions are so bad, you’re killing people. It’s just the bullet, instead of going on a firing squad, it’s going, it’s a five-year bullet. And they used to call me Schoenberg, which means lion in Shona, which was said with great irony in Chikurupi. And he said, Ah, Schoenberg, don’t tell me that this is a cruel prison because this isn’t our prison.

1:44:55 This is a white man’s prison. And he said, we would never build a prison like this, even if we could. But we can’t. This is your prison.

1:45:11 And the amazing thing was, that it was our prison. Because Chikurupi was built to a UK maximum security prison design by an Australian contractor paid for by the Smith regime, the white minority regime of Rhodesia. So it really is a white man’s prison. And he was saying, but don’t blame me, don’t blame us. This is your show.

1:45:40 Which I thought was really quite a good answer. But

1:45:44 Brian Rose: don’t tell me it’s cruel. And why did you say it was an amazing experience?

1:45:51 Simon Mann: Well, you have to go a long way to have a conversation like that.

1:45:56 Try. No, I mean, like that that I had with that, that prison guard. Yeah. Because, you know, he’s wrong, but he’s right.

1:46:09 And I got to learn. I didn’t even know Zimbabwe. You know, I don’t know Zimbabwe to this day, but I do because I’ve been in prison with them. And so I had all the stories, you know, from the villages and from their workplaces and all the different things, you know, magic man. I mean, the whole sort of panoply, extraordinary panoply of African life was sort of laid out in front of me, but in a very weird way.

1:46:45 Brian Rose: And who was serving with you? What what have these people done?

1:46:49 Simon Mann: Everybody. Okay.

1:46:50 Brian Rose: White people, black people.

1:46:52 I didn’t because the guys,

1:46:54 Simon Mann: my guys, went home after 12 months. Okay. And then I was the work. I think I think the 3500 prisoners in Chigurubi, it was designed for 1000. I think there were two other white people in the whole place, but I was always in maximum security.

1:47:14 So I was maximum maximum security. So I sort of, and yet towards the end, I was almost in solitary confinement. Well, what

1:47:22 Brian Rose: they worried about? You getting broken out.

1:47:24 Simon Mann: Very worried.

1:47:25 And they should have been worried. And I had two sets of guards. I had the army. The army used to come in and see me twice a day. And then the ordinary prison guards.

1:47:35 Brian Rose: Were you expecting your guys to get you out?

1:47:38 Simon Mann: No. And in fact, there was a story that the South Africans were going to come and do something. And I and I told the other guys, I said, get the message back to Victoria, that if that happens, I’m going to barricade myself in myself. I’m not.

1:47:54 I don’t want any part of it. Do not try to do that.

1:47:59 Brian Rose: Why?

1:48:00 Simon Mann: Because we set out to basically Severe Moto, the guy next to a Guinea, was the elected mayor of Malibu. He had been imprisoned in Malibu and he’d been released on a pardon at the request of the King of Spain and the Pope.

1:48:21 Okay. And Malibu was in the capital of it. Okay. And what he wanted to do was return to Malibu in order to have an election. That was all.

1:48:33 Okay. And we were his escort. Okay. And I said to the guys, get the message back. I don’t want anything to happen here.

1:48:42 Because if we kill one of these young guards, because they’re just ordinary boys in the zoo, we have no fight with them. They’ve done absolutely nothing wrong to us. Then we will have done something wrong. Then we will actually deserve to be shot or whatever. But right now, we’ve done nothing wrong.

1:49:01 Morally, nothing. We’ve actually done the right thing.

1:49:08 So I don’t want any part of a bust out. And I said, and apart from that, there’s a 23.4 on the roof. The 23 millimeter four quad. So they’re not getting an

1:49:22 Brian Rose: anti-tank. Anti-acro.

1:49:24 Simon Mann: So they won’t get near anyways. Yes, it probably will get shot down anyways.

1:49:29 Brian Rose: People will probably be surprised to hear this kind of very specific amount of morality here where you’re like, no, don’t break me out,

1:49:37 Simon Mann: even though I was willing. It’s not morality, I was scared.

1:49:41 Brian Rose: Yeah, but that’s not what you just said.

1:49:43 Simon Mann: No, because if they fuck it up, then I can be hung. I mean, you just got to think, really, it’s not. It wasn’t trying to be that nice. Although I did actually think, these guys really don’t deserve to be attacked. They’ve done nothing against us.

1:49:59 Brian Rose: When you got that eight year sentence, did your heart drop? Did you have to rethink your whole life?

1:50:06 Simon Mann: Which sentence?

1:50:08 Brian Rose: The one in Zimbabwe.

1:50:09 Simon Mann: Yeah, I knew it was coming.

1:50:12 Brian Rose: Okay. Talk to me about those next four years. Yeah,

1:50:17 Simon Mann: four years. Yeah.

1:50:19 Brian Rose: How do you deal with that?

1:50:22 Simon Mann: One day at a time. Yeah, no, I mean, pushing time, they call it.

1:50:29 Brian Rose: You have to occupy yourself.

1:50:33 Simon Mann: Pushing time.

1:50:34 Pushing time. Yeah, no, so the guys, I had one friend and he said, oh, Shunbo, you’re not going to last. I said, what do you mean, I’m not going to last? He said, you’re thinking too much. You can’t, you won’t last if you think too much.

1:50:50 I said, but Lucky, thinking is always good. To think is always good. He said, no, no, I don’t mean thinking like that. I mean, you’re thinking about outside, aren’t you? Outside in Shunbo is Pamui.

1:51:04 You’re thinking Pamui. And I think it was a Sunday morning. I always used to take calm, Freddie and my son fishing on Sundays in Cape Town. And so I thought, yeah. And Lucky said, look, your life is in here.

1:51:21 We are your friends. We are your family. The guards are your friends. And they’re your family because they need us as much as we need them. This is your life.

1:51:32 If you think about the outside, you won’t make it. You go insane. I know, you know, I mean, I know that long term prisoners very often stop writing to their families. They don’t want visitors. It is because that and now I understand that.

1:51:54 How you push time, how you live that life.

1:51:57 Brian Rose: And you started writing your books and creating kind of stories and fictional characters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Writing where you could or in your brain.

1:52:08 Simon Mann: No, I wanted to write a book in Zim.

1:52:11 I wanted to write some love letter to Amanda, my wife. And that sort of sudden, that sort of not suddenly, it became a book. And then I realized that it was actually a book and it was it was my autobiography because I then realized that, in fact, I might not see the kids again. You know, it was a very strong possibility that I just wouldn’t see any of them again. And so I thought I have to, you know, they’re not really going to know who I am or what I’ve done or anything.

1:52:40 They may hear all sorts of crazy stories. They’re not going to know about me at all. So I started to write that. Eventually took a bit of a bit of a job to start writing it. And then they stole it from me, I think three times or four times, which is probably a good thing because then when I had to rewrite it.

1:53:02 And then I’ve been

1:53:03 Brian Rose: an agent.

1:53:04 Simon Mann: And I tricked them into thinking that I still have the book in myself. But actually, what I had was a plastic bag full of all my notes, chat to rewrite everything. The real book, I’d smuggle back to London. Okay,

1:53:20 Brian Rose: through a guard.

1:53:21 And how did you think this was going to end up for you? How was this whole thing going to play out?

1:53:26 Simon Mann: Well, I thought there was every chance that I would go to Equatorial Guinea and be shot.

1:53:30 Brian Rose: Did you know you were going to end up there?

1:53:32 Simon Mann: No.

1:53:32 Okay. But I feared it. Okay.

1:53:34 Brian Rose: And your fears became a reality. Yeah.

1:53:37 You know, eight.

1:53:39 Simon Mann: Yeah.

1:53:39 Brian Rose: And you just, they came in one day and said, guess what?

1:53:45 Simon Mann: They came at three in the morning.

1:53:48 And it was like the Gestapo. It was the CIO, Mugabe’s secret belief. And they were in my cell. They’re suddenly in my cell. And I knew that’s what was happening.

1:54:00 And I thought, well, this is it now. I’m going to, I will be shot when I get to everyone who told me. If you go to Equatorial Guinea now, that’s it. Friends and foe alike had said that. They say that Mugabe got 80 million for me.

1:54:17 10 million in cash and 70 million in some kind of fuel deal. From? Equatorial Guinea.

1:54:24 Brian Rose: To extradite you. Yeah.

1:54:26 Simon Mann: Rendition. Okay. It wasn’t an extradition. Rendition. And

1:54:29 Brian Rose: because he would have liked to hold you as the prize.

1:54:32 So to give that up, he got paid.

1:54:34 Simon Mann: Well, I was due to be released. So I’d been, because my sentence was reduced to five years. And so I’d done my time in them. But then they didn’t let me go.

1:54:46 They said I was on remand for extradition. So I, I hit my release date, which was a bit of a blow. Yeah. And then they kept me for another year. And all the time I knew this was happening.

1:55:05 And the guards, and one of the guards said, Ashumba, you know, there’s diesel on the street in Hararena. You’ve been bought and sold. That diesel’s here for you.

1:55:17 Brian Rose: The diesel, meaning the oil deal.

1:55:19 Simon Mann: The fuel, yeah.

1:55:20 The fuel.

1:55:21 Brian Rose: And so they come in and they put you on a plane.

1:55:25 Simon Mann: Yeah, two planes. And we flew, and we flew to Malibu.

1:55:30 Brian Rose: And you’re going into the country, run by the dictator, that you tried to overthrow.

1:55:38 Simon Mann: The tyrant.

1:55:39 Brian Rose: The tyrant that you had determined on your recce that had to go morally. You’re about to land. What do you expect to happen? I expected.

1:55:48 Well,

1:55:49 Simon Mann: I didn’t know. But I feared, and I thought it was highly likely, that I would simply be shot as I stepped foot on Equatorial Guinean. Sort of knew that I’d come down the steps, and someone would just say.

1:56:08 And, um, strange feeling.

1:56:12 Brian Rose: Flying into that plane, knowing that could happen. Or worse.

1:56:22 Simon Mann: Or worse. Because quite possibly worse, yeah.

1:56:30 Brian Rose: What are some of the worst things they had done to people? Uh,

1:56:34 Simon Mann: I have no idea. But, I mean, I thought, well, they might interrogate me in a very unpleasant way, possibly.

1:56:41 Brian Rose: Take some body parts off of you and… Whatever people do when they really want to be nasty.

1:56:47 Okay. And what happened when you got there? Oh,

1:56:51 Simon Mann: I came down the steps, and out of the corner of my eye saw this old Russian cargo aircraft, which was ours. But it had been sitting there for four years. So, Equatorial Guinean being the climate it is.

1:57:09 It was completely overgrown. So there’s this Antonov-12 cargo airplane just still sitting over there, looking like a, a, um, a prop from Planet of the Apes. It’s completely overgrown by the jungle.

1:57:25 Brian Rose: It was one of your carrier planes that it had actually landed there. That was Booker Wolk.

1:57:32 Because

1:57:32 Simon Mann: when we were doing our recce and our preparation and everything, one of the things we’d done was we’d set up an air transport business in Equatorial Guinean. Okay,

1:57:41 Brian Rose: the cover. Incredibly cunning plan,

1:57:43 Simon Mann: yeah. Yeah, so that was your plane. You saw that.

1:57:46 I saw that, and I thought, oh, there we go. And at the bottom of the steps was this very dapper, plain clothes general, actually. He said, Mr. Man, please get into the back of the Toyota in English. And, um, don’t worry, because if you help us, if you do your best to help us, we, we are going to do our best to help you.

1:58:20 And at this point, when I was in handcuffs and leggings, they tightened everything up. So everything, you know, had things swell on the airplane. Yeah. So everything had swollen. So I had steel biting into me on my wrists and my ankles.

1:58:34 And these idiot goons from Zimbabwe, who really were idiots. And I just thought, oh, you know. But by that stage, you know, I had actually sort of, um, I had actually got to that point, you know, when you’re sort of at peace with yourself. I was thinking, well, you know, I’ve done four years in prison now. If they pull a fucking gun out and shoot me, well, let’s just hope they shoot straight, you know.

1:59:03 And, uh, at the same time, you know, I’m a pilot and I love flying. And I was still enjoying flight. I was still enjoying being in an airplane. It was weird. And I could see out of the window and I could see on Bioko Island, which is incredibly beautiful.

1:59:19 You don’t often see it actually, as I subsequently learned. But as we flew in, it was exposed. The mountain and the sea and everything just looked incredibly beautiful. And I thought, okay, well, you know, you’ve had a pretty good life. So you don’t have to complain about that.

1:59:37 And I also thought, you know, all these thoughts of like going quite randomly, but I also thought my enemies now are theirs. Because the people who could have and should have looked after me and tried to make things better for me in prison or even get me out of prison, had failed.

2:00:01 Brian Rose: Who were those people? Eli Kahlil.

2:00:04 Simon Mann: His sidekick, Kareem Fallaha.

2:00:07 A guy called Gary Harsham.

2:00:09 Brian Rose: Mark Thatcher.

2:00:10 Simon Mann: Mark Thatcher. They could have captured those thoughts. Those were the people who all, one way or another, had represented themselves as being my friends and my comrades in arms.

2:00:21 And they’d done nothing. No money, no help. Nothing. Not even money for the men’s families in South Africa. Which, selfishly, obviously I’d quite like to look after them as well.

2:00:35 But selfishly, that made my life far more difficult in prison. Because the men were saying, come on, Simon, you know, you’re the big man here. You’re the leader. Who’s looking after our families? You know, there’s no welfare in South Africa.

2:00:50 So I thought, well, maybe these people here when we land won’t shoot me. Maybe we’ll be able to do a deal. Who knows?

2:00:58 Brian Rose: And you did that interview with Channel 4 when you landed?

2:01:02 Simon Mann: That was about, I think, three days.

2:01:05 Okay. Four days afterwards.

2:01:06 Brian Rose: Your arms are still cut up from those shackles and, you know.

2:01:10 Simon Mann: I think I was still wearing them in the interview.

2:01:12 Brian Rose: Yeah. You weren’t in a good state.

2:01:14 I mean, you know, you looked thin and… Yeah, I was.

2:01:17 Simon Mann: Well, you do get thin in Chika Ruby.

2:01:19 Brian Rose: And you spent how long there at that time in Equatorial Guinea?

2:01:23 Simon Mann: Eighteen months.

2:01:24 Brian Rose: Eighteen months. And what happened over those eighteen months? When did you meet the dictator president? You never.

2:01:31 Simon Mann: Never did.

2:01:32 Really? I was like, Charizard. So I was telling a story each day. And then the next morning, I’d get these questions. And I kind of knew they were coming from him.

2:01:44 So my interrogators, who were the Attorney General and the General, the one who met me at the bottom of the steps, they were going back each night to the palace and telling the president everything I told them. And then the next day, I was getting… It’s very weird.

2:02:00 Brian Rose: Did you fear for your safety any time? Or after that first few days, you thought something else was going on here?

2:02:07 Simon Mann: No, I did. I thought, you know, this is Africa. Anything can happen. You know, this is a crazy place. I’ve tried to overthrow this guy.

2:02:16 He may not even be really in power. There may be other people. There may even be a coup against him while I’m in prison. And the people who do that are just going to shoot me anyway. And then I had my trial there.

2:02:28 So I had this whole trial thing. And by then, I’d done the interrogation. And, you know, the interrogation took three months instead of three weeks because we really… I was a good sheriff’s art. I told them lots of stories that they found very entertaining.

2:02:47 Brian Rose: Could they use anything you told them?

2:02:49 Simon Mann: Oh, yes. Yeah.

2:02:49 Brian Rose: Really? Yeah.

2:02:50 Okay. But people that had sold them out…

2:02:54 Simon Mann: Yeah, yeah. I mean, one guy suddenly ended up in the interrogation. And I then ended up as his interrogator.

2:03:03 Brian Rose: Someone that you had mentioned. He showed up. Okay. So you were helping them clean house.

2:03:09 Simon Mann: Yeah. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I didn’t know the answer to the question that they really wanted to know, which was, yes, it was going to be a palace coup.

2:03:21 We realized that. You know, we’re not stupid. 60 people can’t just roll up and take over a whole country. Who were the people? Who were the people inside the palace?

2:03:31 And that was the moment… That was a very sticky moment for me. Because I had to say… I had to be honest. I just had to say, well, I don’t know.

2:03:38 And they said, we don’t believe you. That was the moment when I looked at my fingernails.

2:03:44 Brian Rose: Oh, you might be missing your fingernails.

2:03:46 Simon Mann: Which body parts are going to go missing first?

2:03:49 Brian Rose: What’s the favorite method of torture in Africa?

2:03:52 Or in Zimbabwe.

2:03:53 Simon Mann: I don’t know. You know, the Africans aren’t really into that kind of thing. They’ll chop you up. They’ll tie you to a tree with ants and things.

2:04:03 But I don’t think they’re… I think, you know, the basic African culture is so gentle and so civilized. You know, so nice. I don’t really think they really actually know how to torture. They do because they’ve read the books.

2:04:15 But, you know, it doesn’t come naturally. Yeah. Pretty weird. I remember when I started the interrogation, I said, look, you know, we had this whole conversation. I said, look, you were enemies and my enemies, and I am absolutely prepared to help you.

2:04:35 But, you know, you must understand, you know, we have to do a deal here. And I want a lawyer. I want a written deal. I want you guys to sign it. But if I help you, you’re going to let me go.

2:04:47 You’re going to give me a part. I felt I had to try and… The attorney general said, no, no. Man, we do not negotiate with terrorists, you see. And so I laughed.

2:05:03 They said, why are you laughing? That’s not funny. And I said, it is funny. And they said, why you say it’s funny? I said, because I was an intelligence officer in Northern Ireland.

2:05:13 And I know that we always negotiate with terrorists. That’s what we always do. Are you kidding? Never negotiate with terrorists. Bullshit.

2:05:27 Brian Rose: So you took a leap of faith and went along, because it wasn’t much choice. And you told them what they needed to do. And you went on trial, and they gave you another sentence. Well,

2:05:34 Simon Mann: we went through this whole thing. Okay.

2:05:35 And then we got to the trial before the trial, and they said, okay, you’ve really helped us with the interrogation. That’s fantastic. Now we want you to really help us with the trial. And I’m thinking, oh my God, you know, because they could easily have tried me and then shot me. Yeah, you know, that they have a track record for shooting people who tried to overthrow them.

2:05:56 Oh, no, this isn’t going to be good. So I said, well, what do you want me to do in the trial? And they said, well, what we want you to do is we want you to plead guilty. I said, okay, plead guilty to what? And they said, attempted murder, attempted assassination of a head of state, and attempted acts of international terrorism.

2:06:19 I said, you’ve got to be kidding. You know, I can’t possibly say that. And they said, well, you must, because the president really wants you to do that. You’ve been very helpful, but that’s what we want you to do, and you must trust us. I thought, oh, man.

2:06:38 And I thought about it, and I thought, what else am I going to do? Because, you know, I’m completely in their hands anyway. I’m totally dependent upon them. And if they turn off the tap, I’m dead. You know, malaria, diet, water, everything.

2:06:57 It’s just… And I thought, well, if I don’t do this, then I’m probably fucked. And if I do do this, I may be fucked. So, you know, I’m balanced. I better do it.

2:07:14 I did it. And then I got 32 years. And I thought, oh,

2:07:19 Brian Rose: how did that feel?

2:07:20 Simon Mann: Well, not good. And of course, my poor son here, Freddie, I didn’t know this at the time, obviously, but he just…

2:07:30 Apparently, he said to the man, he’s just, but Daddy will be dead by then. He won’t make it.

2:07:38 So, I just thought, oh, shit. And I thought, well, they probably won’t keep me that long. Because I must be in it. Actually, I must be a pain in the ass for them. You know, in real time.

2:07:50 Brian Rose: You had no contact with your family this whole time?

2:07:53 Simon Mann: Very little.

2:07:54 Brian Rose: Letter, call. Yeah,

2:07:55 Simon Mann: one or two. I hadn’t spoken to Amanda the whole time I was in Zimbabwe.

2:08:00 I think I had two occasions when I did talk to her in Equator Guinea. The old letter. But, you know, things were getting quite… I was quite isolated, really, in Equator Guinea. And I just thought, well, you know, even if they keep me for another five years, that will probably finish me.

2:08:23 And I said to them, when I could, whenever I could, I said, listen, you know, if you do want to let me go, then let me go now, because otherwise I’m not going to have anywhere to go to. You know, Amanda’s going to move on. Kids are going to move on. You know, it’s just going to be nothing. So, that was pretty difficult.

2:08:42 Brian Rose: So, you got the 32-year sentence. You start doing your time. Yeah. And not sure what’s going to happen still.

2:08:48 Simon Mann: I had no idea what was going to happen.

2:08:50 Brian Rose: And then what happened?

2:08:52 Simon Mann: Well, I did 18 months. Well, no, I did a total of 18 months in Equator Guinea. So, of the sentence, I suppose I did 14 months. And then one Saturday, they called me, it was unusual, and they called me down to the interrogation place.

2:09:09 I was taken down, because I was in solitary confinement. I was taken down there. And they just said, well, the President’s giving you a pardon. And I talked a bit more. And they said, well, you don’t seem very pleased that the President’s giving you a pardon.

2:09:26 And I laughed, and I said, no, well, I don’t really believe you. You know, I’ve been in prison now for five and a half years. I’ve had so many different times when I thought I might go home. And I’d learned that disappointment was the most hardest thing. I could deal with anything.

2:09:42 Anything at all. But not disappointment. Not thinking that I was going home. And then not going home. That was the one thing I really couldn’t deal with.

2:09:53 So, I didn’t believe them. I mean, I didn’t believe them even when, even after they’d said, you know, because I was trying to do my exercises. And they said, don’t you know what’s happening this morning? I said, what’s happening this morning? And they said, well, you’re being released.

2:10:08 We’re getting your pardon. I said, okay. I still wanted to do my exercises. And then I didn’t even realize what was happening, really, until I saw my brother and sister arrive in one of the President’s cars outside the courtroom. And then I realized, and then I thought, okay, this is really it.

2:10:27 I’m going to go home.

2:10:28 Brian Rose: And you got with them, and you went on a plane, and you were gone. Next day,

2:10:34 Simon Mann: we flew the next day.

2:10:35 Brian Rose: And what happened there? What do you make of this pardon?

2:10:39 Simon Mann: I don’t know. I think I was, you know, of course, I think, like most people, I think, probably, I mean, you know, I thought I was super fit, super strong, and mentally 100%. And, you know, I was fine. So, it was sort of like, oh, hello, you know, like, nothing had happened. But of course, that’s an illusion.

2:11:03 Brian Rose: You were damaged. No,

2:11:05 Simon Mann: I wasn’t bad. I mean, Amanda thought I looked like somebody out of a concentration camp, you know, my body. And I think I should have had counseling at that point.

2:11:18 Brian Rose: When you came back to Britain?

2:11:20 Well, 18 months in solitary confinement.

2:11:23 Simon Mann: Actually, it was much more than that, because in ZIM, I was very nearly in solitary confinement the last year or two. And so, I think probably counseling would have helped, and I should have had it.

2:11:37 Brian Rose: But you didn’t? And you came back to England, not South Africa? I went

2:11:41 Simon Mann: to England, yeah. Okay.

2:11:42 Brian Rose: You didn’t want to go back to South Africa.

2:11:44 Simon Mann: Oh, no, they could have arrested me. Okay. But everything sorted out now with them, I’m fine with them.

2:11:51 Brian Rose: Okay. And you spoke with the President later, you became friends with them, correct?

2:11:56 Simon Mann: Yeah, they invited me out there. Four months later.

2:12:01 Brian Rose: And you flew back.

2:12:03 Simon Mann: And Amanda said, you cannot go, you’re crazy. And I said, there is something wrong with you.

2:12:11 I said, no, I’ve got to go back. Because it’s just, it’s such a ridiculous story. And in Africa, you know, the guest, apart from anything else, the guest culture is incredibly strong. And so, I have people who ring me up and say, you know, I’ve been invited to go and join the Somali pirates for a month, or they’re a journalist or something. And they’re, am I going to be safe?

2:12:35 You know, which is a kind of a crazy question anyway. And so, I say, well, okay, listen, who invited you? Is it the chief part? I say, yes, yes, yes, yes. I said, okay.

2:12:45 And are you going to be with him all the time? Yes. I said, okay, well, in that case, you’re safer than you are in Piccadilly. Because the culture is incredibly strong. You know, the guest.

2:12:57 Culture, you must look after the guest. So, I knew I was safe.

2:13:02 Brian Rose: And you were curious, and probably still PTSD’d a little bit.

2:13:07 Simon Mann: I just thought, I just thought this is just part of the story that has to be completed. You know, it has to be done.

2:13:16 Okay.

2:13:16 Brian Rose: Because you still have questions about why. Yeah, that,

2:13:20 Simon Mann: I didn’t really expect questions to be answered. I just wanted to complete the story. Okay.

2:13:27 And now, Amanda has been back. Amanda’s been to work as a guest of the president. She’s met the president.

2:13:33 Brian Rose: Isn’t there something called, like, the Stockholm Syndrome? Will you become friends with your captors?

2:13:38 This is the Stockholm Syndrome, but in reverse.

2:13:42 Simon Mann: Is it in reverse? Well, he definitely wasn’t my president.

2:13:47 Brian Rose: Right, so he likes you now. And what’s your relationship like?

2:13:53 I mean, you know,

2:13:54 Simon Mann: he’s a head of state and he doesn’t speak a word of English. So, it’s very formal. But when I meet him, you know, he embraces me and, you know, immediately asks after all the family. He’s lovely.

2:14:10 Brian Rose: And so your judgment call on 04 was wrong?

2:14:13 Simon Mann: I guess so.

2:14:14 Brian Rose: Or did he clean his act up after you failed too? I don’t know. Do

2:14:19 Simon Mann: you know that always bothers me?

2:14:21 Was I being lied to by people?

2:14:23 Brian Rose: That your recce was wrong. Yeah. He wasn’t doing these horrible things.

2:14:29 Simon Mann: Really wrong.

2:14:30 Hmm. Interesting. Amazing. I mean, really, alarmingly out. Okay.

2:14:37 Brian Rose: And his track record has now shown that he actually is doing these things.

2:14:42 Simon Mann: It’s interesting, because when I was in prison in Equatorial Guinea, I had a visit from a really senior Red Cross dude. And he said, no, this conversation is complete. Is it in my cell? Completely alone.

2:14:55 Nobody at the door. And he said, this conversation is completely off the record. You can tell me everything you like, anything you like. I said, is that right? I said, have you seen the thing up there?

2:15:06 That’s a camera. So it’s not off the record. Okay. So we talked and he said, so is it true that there is violence in the prison? Prisonism is treated and so on and so forth.

2:15:23 I said, no. He said, how do you know that? Because you’re in solitary confinement. You’re kept in here. You’re not moving around in the prison.

2:15:31 I said, no, that’s true. But I do occasionally move around in the prison when I get taken to interrogation, et cetera, et cetera. And I do occasionally manage to look out of my, the hole in the wall, down into the exercise. And I see, and I can read the body language. I was in Chikorubi for four years.

2:15:54 And if I watch a prisoner near a guard, I can tell immediately if that prisoner is afraid of the guard or not, it’s just, it stands out from a hundred miles because a human being is, you know, it’s like an animal. It moves with caution around a known danger. And you just don’t get that feeling at all. So I said to the guy, I don’t know what’s happening in other prisons, but I can tell you in this prison, there isn’t any mystery. And I saw a prisoner being beaten by a guard in the prison, but it was a punishment.

2:16:29 It was a ritual punishment. The other prisoners were approving. You know, the guy had stolen something, told to lean forward. The guard gets a stick, whacks his arse 10 times and tells him to fuck off. But even after that, the prisoner is sort of still, you know, grins to his mates and off he goes like being at prep school.

2:16:49 Brian Rose: Okay. So I had a culture of justice that you observed. There’s

2:16:53 Simon Mann: discipline, but there wasn’t mistreatment. Okay. And so now this last time, you know, you can extrapolate that.

2:17:00 And this last time, we went to Equatorial Guinea. This time it was with Amanda and we flew. We saw Equatorial Guinea in a way I’d never seen it before because I’d never been given the five star, you know, tourist guide around Equatorial Guinea. And now we go and do this with my daughter and Amanda and me. And

2:17:18 Brian Rose: how can you write fiction after this story?

2:17:20 Simon Mann: Well, I wrote the fiction in prison. It was the only thing to keep me sane. Okay.

2:17:24 Brian Rose: But you have to agree your story is stranger than fiction.

2:17:26 Simon Mann: It is weird.

2:17:27 But driving around, looking at all this, I could tell immediately the body language of fear is not there. So for example, you’re driving along the main road and we’re going to turn right. It’s a small thing, but it is the small things that tell you what’s going on. And there’s a guy walking along the pavement and we, you know, our driver is just going to turn right. But the guy walking on the pavement hasn’t really seen us that we’re turning right.

2:17:54 And, you know, English highway code, he actually has the right of way. You have to stop for him. Not that we were in England, and as we swung in, this guy, you know, two big official cars, darkened windows, government plates, and the guy just goes like this to the driver. Like, haven’t you seen me? You know, you’re stupid or what?

2:18:15 Now, don’t tell me that that’s a hard-ass police state because I’ve been in countries where just doing that would be quite possibly dead.

2:18:24 Brian Rose: Very interesting.

2:18:26 Simon Mann: There’s no way that was made up. I mean, it’s just like that. And you could see it everywhere all the time.

2:18:33 They weren’t afraid of us. They weren’t afraid of our people with us.

2:18:37 Brian Rose: Was the Vatican calling for your release and other people in the world calling for your release?

2:18:42 Simon Mann: I believe so, yeah, I don’t know that. Why?

2:18:44 Brian Rose: Why were they on your side?

2:18:48 Simon Mann: I don’t know.

2:18:50 Maybe because they believed the original story, which was that we were simply escorting a guy back to the town of which he’d been elected mayor in order to try and have a proper general election.

2:19:02 Brian Rose: Okay. But that really wasn’t the intention. That was a story.

2:19:06 Simon Mann: That was the story.

2:19:07 Well, it really was. But the intention was the palace coup.

2:19:13 That was the necessary step in order to get the guy back safely and to have those things happen.

2:19:18 Brian Rose: Oh, so you still wanted a general election.

2:19:21 Simon Mann: Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Okay, that would have happened.

2:19:24 So, Severe Amoto was going to be the interim president. Okay. And then stand for election and hopefully be elected. So, us getting paid required many steps.

2:19:37 Brian Rose: Right.

2:19:38 Okay. And he said something to you when you returned, such as the Vatican wanted you released and someone else wanted you released. But there was only one person that got you released.

2:19:49 Simon Mann: Yeah, this was the first time I saw him. And it was the first thing he said.

2:19:53 I remember he doesn’t speak English. That’s all through the interpreter. And he said, I want you to understand three things about your release. Number one, I didn’t have to release you. By our African standards, I could have kept you forever.

2:20:05 I could have shot you. I could have done anything I liked with you. Point number one. Point number two, I’ve never had, in my experience as a president, so many different people asking me for something. He said, I don’t know how it happened, but everyone, the Americans, the British, the Europeans, the Vatican, the rabbis, everybody.

2:20:26 Everybody seemed to want you to be released.

2:20:29 Brian Rose: The Americans. Why would the Americans want you released?

2:20:33 Simon Mann: I think I was quite embarrassing so that, you know, because the oil companies rule the show. You know, I mean, they are very, very powerful with Equatorial Guinea.

2:20:43 And contrary to popular belief, all companies don’t like doing business with tyrants because it’s just bad press. I mean, they do do business with tyrants because they have to, but they don’t want to. So if I’m there in the prison, then I’m just a constant reminder of just that this is a sort of badass regime. Okay.

2:21:04 Brian Rose: So that was the second thing he told you.

2:21:07 What’s the third thing? And

2:21:09 Simon Mann: the third thing was, you know, he just said, well, I want you to realize that the person who had the most to do with you getting your part was you.

2:21:20 Brian Rose: What does that mean?

2:21:21 Simon Mann: I have no idea.

2:21:22 Brian Rose: He liked your character. He saw something in you.

2:21:25 Simon Mann: I don’t know.

2:21:26 I just don’t know. And I wasn’t going to ask. I didn’t want to get into this.

2:21:32 Brian Rose: He sounds like a very smart guy and a very intelligent leader to be able to look at you in your situation and not have, you know, this intention to shoot you because by pardoning you, he might look weak to certain people in his own country.

2:21:49 Simon Mann: Which in that part of the world is not a good thing to look at.

2:21:53 And one of the very interesting things about the story, I mean, really weird, and I’m not sure this is true, but this is what I’ve been told, is that the president was in the same prison as me. For the same reason. The same?

2:22:09 Brian Rose: Oh, because he had been arrested before.

2:22:12 Simon Mann: He tried to overthrow his uncle when his uncle was president.

2:22:16 Okay. And he was locked up.

2:22:18 Brian Rose: So maybe there’s a kind of empathy there. Because he had been through your same situation. Maybe he was paying it forward.

2:22:26 I mean,

2:22:27 Simon Mann: it is a cracker story. It is.

2:22:29 Brian Rose: It is. It should be some fiction. Now, you’ve had eight years to process this since you came back to England.

2:22:36 Did you ever get over that trauma with those first few years very difficult? Did you find that you went back to some weird behavior? Did you ever want to be back in prison? How did you deal with all that?

2:22:50 Simon Mann: No, I mean, you know, I didn’t have any counseling.

2:22:54 I thought I was 100% fine. Looking back on it, I think I probably wasn’t 100% fine. But I wasn’t sort of barking mad. I don’t think.

2:23:11 And, you know, sometimes I sort of say, well, when people ask me about it, I say, well, you know, don’t ask me. Ask somebody else. Because, you know, the guy who thinks he’s Napoleon in a loony bin thinks he’s perfectly sane. You know what I mean? He says, ask Amanda if I’m sane.

2:23:31 I know what she’ll say.

2:23:34 Brian Rose: What did Amanda say when you got back to England?

2:23:40 You know,

2:23:41 Simon Mann: quite a traumatic thing that. And I sort of written to her twice on two occasions in the course of my entire jail time. I twice written to her and hopefully in a very kind of grown up way had said to her that I hoped that she was getting on with her life and having fun. You know, which was, I hoped, a cool way of saying that you don’t have to obey your marriage vows. Because I don’t, I don’t know when I’m going to get out.

2:24:20 You know, I may never get out. So you have to move on. So I’d done that twice, which was really hard letters to write. And then I suddenly got this pardon out of the blue. And the really weird thing is that only a week before I got the pardon, for the first time, I’d got a letter from Amanda, which was really angry.

2:24:46 And you’re a bastard. You’ve ruined my life. You know, I don’t know what to do. I never want to see you again. The whole thing.

2:24:55 And I remember reading this letter and I thought, it’s probably just a period. It’s just a bad time of the month. You know, she doesn’t really mean this shit.

2:25:07 And so then a week later, I got this pardon and now suddenly I have to speak to her. And my sister gave me her mobile phone and said, you better bring Amanda now. And I was so nervous. It was like, it was like asking her out on the first date. It was frightening.

2:25:26 And I think she was as frightened as I was. And we talked and we were talking about where I would go, where we would stay because she didn’t want me to go home. She wanted me to go somewhere else. Actually, what she wanted to do was check that I wasn’t barking mad. And I wanted that to happen at a friend’s house, which was all arranged, but she had arranged that it should be with a friend of hers because there’s been quite a lot of disagreement and contention within the family.

2:25:56 And this is one of the bad side effects of anyone going to prison. It blows up families. I mean, it just rips people apart. And as we were talking, we just started to joke with one another and we started laughing. And I just thought, maybe we’ll be able to get this back on the road.

2:26:22 Maybe. Because if we can laugh, then we’re on the right track.

2:26:31 Brian Rose: That was a testing phone call.

2:26:36 Simon Mann: Really. This is just incredibly hard for her. I mean, I fully expected her to sort of say, well, you know, it’s wonderful that you’ve been released. I’m so happy for you, but I’ve got somebody else. I’ve been away for five and a half years.

2:26:51 Yeah. And then when I got home, I had to deal with Arthur, who’s now nearly 13, but who I’d never met because he was born while I was in prison.

2:27:06 Brian Rose: So you’d never met him and he was 13. You had been away for 13 years?

2:27:09 Simon Mann: No, no, no. Oh, he’s 13 now. Now.

2:27:11 Okay. All right. He was five.

2:27:13 Brian Rose: Okay. How was that?

2:27:14 Simon Mann: I think very difficult for him, mainly because no one had ever said no to him. You can imagine, he was like a little prince. Daddy’s in prison. Youngest child. Mummy’s darling.

2:27:29 And so suddenly, this horrible man appears. He says, no. No, you can’t do that.

2:27:34 Brian Rose: Horrible skinny man who appears and says no.

2:27:37 Simon Mann: Yeah.

2:27:37 Brian Rose: When you look back on this whole adventure that you went on because of Ectorial Guinea, would you have changed anything? Would you have not taken that plane flight to Zimbabwe or would you have? No. I mean,

2:27:57 Simon Mann: it caused a huge havoc.

2:27:59 You know, and I don’t know. I find these things very difficult, you know, because similarly, even in the British army, I found these things hard because it’s like in a Western. You know, when the guy gets onto his horse and kisses the girl goodbye and says, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. You know, well, that’s fine in the movie because then the movie’s over and you walk out the cinema. But in the real world, you know, that’s just death and destruction, really.

2:28:36 And yet that is what we have to do. You know, that’s how the West was won. So I’ve always found myself one of these people that’s always torn apart by that. You know, I want to be the loving husband, but I can’t resist the adventure

2:28:57 Brian Rose: getting onto the horse.

2:28:59 Simon Mann: Right.

2:29:00 And what’s the risk?

2:29:01 Brian Rose: And what is some man’s life like today? Are you active in business? Are you still advising countries and doing private military things?

2:29:11 Simon Mann: Yeah, a little bit.

2:29:12 I do a little bit of defense and security consultancy here and there. I love it. And I like the work if I can get it. But I also do mining and oil and gas promotion. Like people come to me and they say, we’ve got this amazing cobalt property outside called Wazy in the DRC.

2:29:33 Can you raise the money for it? You say, well, probably not. You know, that kind of thing. And some of them are more realistic than others, obviously. And then I’m trying to import a really interesting high-tech product from the States into the UK that does some simulation for ground troops training in like six-man, seven-man teams.

2:29:54 It’s all virtual, an amazing system. Trying to raise the money to bring that over here, which is fascinating.

2:30:02 Brian Rose: Do you still have connections in Africa?

2:30:04 Simon Mann: Oh, yeah. Lots of them.

2:30:06 Lots. Okay. Yeah, that’s weird, actually. So, I mean, I’m definitely known. And Africa being Africa, you know, it’s incredibly forgiving.

2:30:18 And…

2:30:18 Brian Rose: Has it improved your reputation down there?

2:30:21 Simon Mann: I wouldn’t say that.

2:30:22 Brian Rose: Can you travel wherever you want? You can’t go to Zimbabwe.

2:30:25 Simon Mann: No, I probably can go to Zimbabwe, but I wouldn’t go without… I would want a specific invitation from Mugabe. Okay. He was not pleased when I got my pardon. Okay, okay.

2:30:39 I think he felt that was a bit… I got off a bit lightly. Do you ever…

2:30:44 Brian Rose: How do you feel about Mugabe? I mean, you know,

2:30:47 Simon Mann: that is one of the things that happened to me in prison.

2:30:50 I am a master of forgiveness. That happened in prison? In the course of being in prison. Okay. I really don’t hold anything against anybody.

2:31:02 I mean, the guards, or the CIO guys, or Eli Kille. Not even Mark Thatcher.

2:31:07 Brian Rose: Did you ever talk to Mark when you got back?

2:31:10 Simon Mann: No.

2:31:11 Brian Rose: And he was tried in South Africa because of all this and then cut a check and went free?

2:31:17 Simon Mann: That’s right. Okay.

2:31:18 Brian Rose: You haven’t spoken to him?

2:31:20 Simon Mann: No. Okay.

2:31:20 Brian Rose: But he knows how you feel? I guess so.

2:31:22 Simon Mann: I don’t know. Is that just business? Maybe he doesn’t know that I’ve forgiven him, but I am very good at the forgiveness.

2:31:29 Okay. Is that just business? Sorry?

2:31:32 Brian Rose: Was that just business with Killeal and Mark and them leaving you to hang out to dry?

2:31:39 Simon Mann: Well, I mean, I wouldn’t go and enter into another arrangement with those people.

2:31:44 Brian Rose: Right. No. So it wasn’t just business? I mean, I just think, you know,

2:31:48 Simon Mann: I know it’s all a bit trite and everything.

2:31:50 I just think that, you know, I’m not religious. I’m not Buddhist or anything like that, but there is a kind of a karma. What comes around goes around.

2:31:59 Brian Rose: And they could have paid the families of the mercenary troops that were with you.

2:32:03 Simon Mann: Well, you know, I think if you were a complete asshole, then that’s going to come back and bite you.

2:32:09 Brian Rose: Right. And they could have spent a few hundred grand and taken care of people. Yeah, I mean,

2:32:15 Simon Mann: I’m not particularly looking for their revenge or my revenge or their downfall or anything. I just think, you know, they behave like absolute so-and-so’s and they have to live with that. I’m not going to bother.

2:32:29 Brian Rose: And how did the British public receive you when you got back? And how are they? How did they receive you now? I know you’re going to Oxford these days and giving talks, but what was the general feel?

2:32:42 Simon Mann: Well, I must admit that when I got back, I was expecting to be given a pretty rough ride by certain sections of the community.

2:32:50 Brian Rose: Military. And my

2:32:52 Simon Mann: military, I knew would be fine. They would just sort of say, well, that was a balls up. You were an idiot. It would be that kind of professional unit.

2:33:05 Brian Rose: You didn’t make them look bad. That’s not the way the military looks at things.

2:33:11 Simon Mann: No, no, I think I think quite the opposite, actually. I think it’s interesting. It’s very interesting with my book, which goes down far better in the Sargent’s mess than in the officer’s mess.

2:33:25 But I remember there was one woman I did a book signing in our hometown. And it’s actually the only time it’s happened. And I was sort of sitting in the water stones in the high street. And this woman came in and started absolutely screaming at me. And how dare you make more money than you’ve made so much money killing people.

2:33:46 And now you’re making even more money signing these books and writing these books. You’re just grace and so on and so forth and so on and so forth. And then ran out of the shop. But that was it. Just one more.

2:33:57 That is really the only person who’s had a real go at it.

2:34:01 Brian Rose: And most people have been more accepted than you thought.

2:34:04 Simon Mann: Well, I think a lot of people have sort of probably not said what they would like to say.

2:34:09 Brian Rose: Right. Along those lines.

2:34:11 Okay. But you still have friends, et cetera.

2:34:15 Simon Mann: Oh, yeah. And

2:34:16 Brian Rose: say 20 years from now, or 30 years or 40 years, they write your obituary. What does it say about Simon?

2:34:24 Do you hope? Oh,

2:34:26 Simon Mann: what do I hope it will say? Oh, what a nice chap that was.

2:34:33 Brian Rose: What will they say?

2:34:35 Simon Mann: I don’t know. I think quite possibly with any luck they’ll have forgotten about me and there’ll be no obituary.

2:34:42 Brian Rose: A man with a strong moral compass that helped liberate countries in Africa and put his life on the line to do so.

2:34:50 Simon Mann: Well, yeah, that would be a very, that would be a very nice interpretation. But I think, you know, what’s that lovely tombstone in America?

2:34:59 Sheriff of this town. Never shot a man that didn’t need shooting. Do you know that one? That’s my favorite tombstone. Not that I’ve tried to emulate him.

2:35:09 Okay. But maybe something like that.

2:35:12 Brian Rose: And how do you, how do you ever get the kind of juice and excitement that you got over those years? Like back in your life, do you ever try to chase after something that’s got that risk and fun?

2:35:25 Simon Mann: No, I mean, I do keep very fit.

2:35:27 I really work at that. Because I’m properly else. I think it’s necessary health-wise, you know, to keep fit. It’s healthy. And I have set myself a challenge lately, but I’m taking it very slowly because I’m a little bit wary about my, I don’t know, my risk perception, shall we say.

2:35:55 And I really want to do a transatlantic row. Okay. And I’m working on that.

2:36:00 Brian Rose: Okay. So there still is some healthy risk taking going on there.

2:36:05 Well,

2:36:05 Simon Mann: yeah, I mean, I don’t think that’s that risky. I just think it’s a really massive challenge to row across the Atlantic on your own in a race and try and raise money for charity, which I think would be a really good thing to do. And I want to raise money for mental health charities, for the research into mental health. Because I think, you know, there’s an awful lot of people walking around, not with sort of, I think mental health might be looked at in a similar way to physical health in the sense that, you know, you can be physically totally destroyed or you can be a little bit ill.

2:36:47 You know, and both are bad. And I think mental health is the same. I think, you know, you don’t have to be completely barking in order to have a mental health problem. And as with the physical, I think, you know, you can do things about that. You can do things.

2:37:05 And I think, you know, what Prince Harry’s done and Prince William is just fantastic to try and open up the conversation because they do lead a lot of people. They do show a lot of people the way. And just Harry saying, you know, I think therapy is a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to do. I mean, you’re American, but, you know, in the UK when I was a boy, I mean, if you saw a shrink, you were, well, that’s really bad. Something must be terribly wrong, you know.

2:37:39 Brian Rose: So they’re opening it up. It was a big no-no. Yeah. I know when we first started talking here, you kind of didn’t want to engage with that kind of base level question of, are you a mercenary? And why would you pay for this kind of thing?

2:37:52 But, you know, people have sat here and listened to you and heard your whole story. Sure. And it’s fascinating to get inside your brain and to see you even living with contradictions. You know, first, I thought this about him and then I didn’t think of this about him. I felt this way and I felt this way.

2:38:07 You know, I think people can see your journey. But if you want to leave them with a thought of this concept of PMC or, you know, private military and something that might be the future, you know, 100 years from now, it might be a privatized business. Maybe it’s something that we’re going to have to get our heads around even more and more and maybe not. Maybe, as you said, the governments will do their job. But how would you leave like some of those thoughts with people listening on maybe how they should look at it in the future?

2:38:35 Or maybe come to terms. We don’t do conscription anymore. Pretty much all militaries around the world are paid now. And maybe that’s evolving to something else of specialized forces that maybe people shouldn’t be quick, like the woman in water stones to scream out and say, look at all the money you made from killing people or you can make an argument. But what would be the thoughts you kind of want to leave people with to think about this concept?

2:39:00 Yeah, I think

2:39:01 Simon Mann: my own personal feeling is that the real military activity is something that should be done by soldiers or by ammon or sailors who are wearing that badge, who are actually formally enrolled in the armed forces. Right, from that country. From that

2:39:21 Brian Rose: country that’s engaged.

2:39:23 Simon Mann: And I think that there’s always been a role for private military contracting within the whole defense machine.

2:39:32 Brian Rose: Back to the days of Hannibal in Tunisia.

2:39:35 He had a mercenary army.

2:39:37 Simon Mann: Exactly.

2:39:37 Brian Rose: And even in the colonies in the States, as Erika Prince reminded the people at Oxford, there were people that were paid.

2:39:45 Simon Mann: Yes, absolutely. And I mean, you know, there were shipyard contractors on HMS Hood when she went out to fight the Bismarck.

2:39:53 You know, there have always been business and private people mixed up one way or another in the military machine. But when you come to frontline soldiering, then I think that the moral and the legal aspects of somebody killing somebody else.

2:40:12 I mean, obviously, it’s horrific. This is a horrific business. This is never fun. It’s always horrible.

2:40:20 And so you need that backup. You need the moral backup of a country. Now, I mean, the two times I’ve really been there were Angola and Sierra Leone. And on both occasions, all the executive outcomes troops, including myself, were formally enrolled into the armed forces of the country’s concept. And that was something that I made happen.

2:40:48 And that’s the reason I made it happen. So that legally and morally, you are actually a part of that military force. So I’m not, you know, I wouldn’t say there is no role for PMCs because that’s obviously not true. There is a role, and many times it’s justified. But a lot of what PMCs do is like in Iraq, you know, they weren’t out there fighting the enemy.

2:41:15 They were there to guard an embassy or escort a convoy. Now, if that convoy gets ambushed, then they’re fighting because they defend themselves. But they’re not being sent out on fighting patrols to go and ambush or kill, you know, like the military are. So there are all sorts of shades. But I banged on enough about it but I would go back to what I said earlier, which is at the end of the day, it’s how you do it and what you do that counts.

2:41:43 So if you’re out there and a civilian, you’re watching this interview and you’re asking me, what should people think? I would say, look at it in terms of the morality and the method of what the guys or the company or the unit has done. Because you can be a unit of the Vermont and wipe out a village just by driving over and kill everybody in it. But you’re doing it for the fatherland, you know. Or you can be a private military contracting company and do everything absolutely right.

2:42:20 So the question is still there but, you know, I can’t really answer it better than that. Now,

2:42:25 Brian Rose: that’s very helpful. Simon always asks everyone here just a few questions at the end. I want to ask you as well, if you could pick up the phone and make a call to the 20-year-old Simon and give that young man a bit of advice. Maybe he’s in the Scots cards at this point or maybe not.

2:42:42 Simon Mann: I am in the Scots cards.

2:42:45 Brian Rose: You are. If you could give him a bit of advice, what would you tell him?

2:42:53 Simon Mann: What would I tell him?

2:42:56 That’s interesting. That’s funny because I’ve been asked similar things by other people and I’m going to be really honest here. I’d tell him, what you should do is resign, become a civilian, then rejoin and join the Special Air Service in the ranks as a private soldier.

2:43:19 Join the Special Officers in the ranks as a private soldier. Yes. Which would be,

2:43:24 Brian Rose: how was that different from what you did?

2:43:26 Simon Mann: Because I was an officer. Okay.

2:43:28 Brian Rose: And that made it harder?

2:43:30 Simon Mann: No, it makes it completely different because you, this is really now very esoteric because in the British Army, if you join the SES as a soldier, you’re in it and you stay in it. And if you want to, you stay in it. The whole of the rest of your career. Okay.

2:43:46 You can get to 45 years old.

2:43:48 Brian Rose: Is this your way of saying you would have liked to have stayed in the SES?

2:43:53 Simon Mann: Yeah, but I would have liked to have done it in that way, not as an officer because the officers tend to be very quickly doing command type jobs in a ops room, command room, whatever. Whereas the guys are actually doing it.

2:44:08 Brian Rose: You wanted to be one of those guys?

2:44:10 Simon Mann: I would love to be that. If I had my whole time again, that’s what I would, I mean, I don’t know about now because I’m not really sure what they’re doing now, but certainly if I’d managed to do that when I was 20, I’d have had a very interesting time.

2:44:27 Brian Rose: Second part of that question to that 20-year-old that’s watching us, listening to us in China, in Angola, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, America, Argentina, what advice do you give to them if they want to pursue a career in the military or in the private military or even do some of the things that you’ve done?

2:44:47 Yeah, now I

2:44:48 Simon Mann: normally write, if I’m giving the book, if somebody’s got my book and it’s a kid, you know, it’s a teenage or something, I always write, please don’t try any of this at home. That’s the sort of warning. I think, you know,

2:45:04 I think really I can’t talk for other people’s armies. But, you know, if you can join the British army or the American army, then that’s such a great thing to do, you know, because that will give you, and it really doesn’t matter if you’re going to be a PMC or not. And I know it’s slightly different in the States, but I think it’s just such a great institution. It teaches you so much about yourself, about other people, about where you fit into society. You know, you’re not that important.

2:45:33 Your mom and dad think you’re really important. You think you’re very important, but actually, you know, it gives you that perspective. And I just think that’s very valuable. I don’t want to sound like a recruiting person.

2:45:44 Brian Rose: No, that’s good.

2:45:45 And the last part is, what’s the best advice you ever received? Could have been in the military on the battlefield, in a country in Africa? What was it? Your father or your grandfather? Yeah,

2:45:59 Simon Mann: no, no, they were definitely not into that kind of advice.

2:46:03 I had to go and seek that from them and ask them. I mean, they both had had very, very hard wars. And they did not talk about it. Right, right. And so any information from them was a hard one.

2:46:20 Okay, so I think that the best advice I was ever given of that sort was if you get into a real jam, then pick out in your mind one of your heroes relevant to the jam you were in and just ask yourself, what would he do? What would he do now? Because that gives you, I think, and funnily enough, I don’t, the answer you’ll probably come up with is actually something completely different. It may not even be what he would have said. It’s something, but it’s something your mind does, which is a clever little sort of handstand thing.

2:46:59 Brian Rose: It gets you thinking. Yeah, and it gets you to do the thing you’re probably avoiding. It

2:47:03 Simon Mann: gets you thinking. It gets you thinking. That’s the hardest thing, isn’t it?

2:47:07 When everything’s gone wrong. I had to in prison many times. I was so angry and I had to, I was trying to write a letter. I was trying to do things. I was trying to organize something and I just had to sit there and breathe deeply and I just had to say, use your brain.

2:47:26 Think. Stop being angry. Stop being emotional. Stop being scared. Stop being all those things and just think.

2:47:33 What are you actually trying to do here? What’s the best way to do it? Be really ruthless.

2:47:41 Brian Rose: Simon, thank you so much. Really enjoyed this conversation. I was on stage about three weeks ago and we had a premiere of our second documentary film and I was interviewing the gentleman who starred in the film afterwards and someone asked him about whether something was right or wrong. He says, you do this, but you contradict yourself with this. And he sat for a second and replied.

2:48:03 He said, I think it was Einstein that says that you can judge someone’s intelligence by the number of contradictory concepts they can hold in their brain at the same time. And not only was it an amazing retort, but it got me thinking that a lot of times in this world, in this new media, whatever, we’re told that something’s black or white. It’s this or that and you said this or you said that, but anyone who’s human knows it’s never that way. And so you have taught me this yet again and it’s very easy to judge you from the outside and to not understand what you did.

2:48:39 And I’m not saying everything you did was right or wrong, whatever that means, but by talking with you now, I can walk in your shoes a little bit and kind of see what was going on with your mind, why you made certain decisions, the way you see certain things. And it just allows me to appreciate it for what it is. So thank you for that.

2:49:00 Simon Mann: Thank you very much for the opportunity.

2:49:03 Brian Rose: It’s my pleasure.

2:49:04 On London Real we say it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours and thanks for your time.

2:49:31 Simon Mann: Thank you.