The Wonga Coup

"The British invented the modern private security industry in Yemen in the early 1960s because there was a civil war in Yemen that threatened Aden – the last imperial outpost of any use to anyone. We couldn’t go to war because we had just lost out in the Suez Crisis and it was very clear that we couldn’t act anymore without the US coming in. So what the Yemen government did was recruit directly a group of people led by the founder of the SAS. In this group were the legendary mercenaries of the 70s like Bob Denard. At the end of the campaign in Yemen, they split into two groups. One group went on to found the private security industry as we know it. These were the people who founded the company Control Risks. The other group went on to become a wild-eyed, African-dictator-toppling gang of mercenaries. Belonging to that last group Simon Mann. I suspect that we will never see the likes of the Wonga Coup again. It was a ludicrous scheme stuck in the past and the idea that you can just turn up with a bunch of blokes on a plane, overthrow the dictator and get the mineral rights. He was rumbled from the very beginning, before he even got on the plane. Every single secret service in the world was waiting for him. Because, bless him, he’s an Eton schoolboy who was in the Guards . The whole gang of them weren’t the sharpest tools in the box. Mark Thatcher, who was in charge of them, got lost in the desert when his mother was prime minister. It will be interesting what happens now that Simon Mann is free. So all this was going on and, meanwhile, Mann’s former partner in Sandline, Tim Spicer, has a four-hundred-million-dollar contract with the Pentagon. Which way is it going to go in the future? The Wonga Coup talks about what can never happen again. Private security companies are huge now and all over the world. The mercenary adventurer is something the British have always done, to our moral detriment but to our financial advantage. Simon Mann is the last of those and this is his story."