Rent-a-coup

Aug. 17, 2006 | "As it is a very lucrative game, we should expect bad behavior; disloyalty; rampant individual greed; irrational behavior (kids in toyshop style); back-stabbing; bum-fucking, and similar ungentlemanly activities." So reads a cautionary note in the prospectus for what's known as the "Wonga Coup." In March 2004, a group of men with a hired army of about 70 mercenary soldiers set out to topple the government of the tiny West African nation of Equatorial Guinea and install a new one. Ostensibly led by a political opposition leader but actually controlled by the white mercenary officers, this new regime would plunder the recently discovered oil wealth of Equatorial Guinea, enriching the coup's architects by billions of dollars.

The Wonga Coup never came off, but not because of the kind of double-crossing anticipated in that early planning document. Adam Roberts, a correspondent for the Economist magazine and a journalist steeped in the skulduggery of modern Africa, describes just how this "improbable escapade" was born and ruined in his new book, "The Wonga Coup." One of the strangest aspects of the story is that the Wonga Coup nearly replicated an earlier failed attempt to take over Equatorial Guinea in 1973. And that coup had since been fictionalized in a bestselling book, popular with the mercenary crowd, by Frederick Forsyth, "The Dogs of War." A case of life imitating art imitating life? The truth is even more bizarrely convoluted: Roberts has found evidence that Forsyth himself financed the 1973 coup. (And Forsyth has more or less admitted as much.)

Roberts' discoveries allude to the crazy mirror game that goes on between real soldiers of fortune and the popular entertainments (books and movies) that glorify them. There is, as he points out, "a long tradition of grizzled white mercenaries fighting in Africa," and they have often inspired thriller authors. The fighters then, in turn, carry novels like "The Dogs of War" around with them as props to their swashbuckling egos -- and sometimes as playbooks. Forsyth, at least, was motivated by a desire to liberate Equatorial Guinea from a horrifically cruel despot. (The nation's oil reserves weren't discovered until the 1990s.) The 2004 coup plotters made noises about installing a better leader, but their real motives were "wonga" -- British slang for money -- and something less tangible. "It's fun," said one observer. "Some of the guys did it for kicks, because life is boring."

The head man in this band of adventurers was Simon Mann, the scion of a British brewery dynasty who had managed to parlay their wealth into class; Mann attended the elite boarding school Eton and rubbed shoulders with aristocrats at a prestigious gentlemen's club in London. He had a yen for soldiering, however, and joined the Special Air Services (a Special Forces regiment), where his expertise lay in intelligence and counterterrorism. This eventually led him into those murky industries that supply military-style services to whoever can afford to pay for them. One of the outfits he worked with -- a company with the sinisterly euphemistic name Executive Outcomes -- was used by the government of Angola in the 1990s to defend its oil installations from the rebel group UNITA.

"The Wonga Coup" offers a window into the demimonde of African soldiers for hire. If smaller weapons can be picked up for a pittance in many other African nations, South Africa is the place to shop for mercenaries. Many of them are decommissioned members of 32 Battalion, a South African army unit that also fought in Angola. Others once belonged to nasty, shadowy domestic police and army units charged with squashing antiapartheid movements. These guys tend to live in the same neighborhoods and hang out at the same bars. The current South African government frowns on freelance soldiers working out of its territory, but anti-mercenary legislation passed by Nelson Mandela's administration has proved hard to enforce.

Not surprisingly, a lot of these mercenaries are tough, preening thrill seekers. Among the characters Mann signed up were an Angolan named Victor Dracula ("I can only say this; I took blood!") and a fellow described by a colleague as "a thug, very ugly, a mulatto built like a brick shithouse. But quite friendly if he doesn't want to kill you." One was nicknamed "The Enforcer" after he broke a man's arm over a restaurant table, while a cooler customer ominously described himself as a "professional hunter and 'security consultant' for foreign governments."

Mann, however, represents what Roberts calls "a new sort of mercenary, the type as familiar with company law, bank transfers and investor agreements as with the workings of a Browning pistol." But Mann's more cerebral orientation didn't dampen his appetite for buccaneering exploits. When the Wonga Coup plot began to run into some serious setbacks -- and at a point when, as Roberts sees it, a more cautious man might have thrown in his cards -- Mann stuck with his plan, "driven on by a mixture of vanity, the need to recoup his losses and by the love of adventure."

Arrayed against rent-a-coup schemers like Mann is a breed that Roberts calls the "rag-and-bone intelligence dealer," a kind of freelance spy who "darts about Africa with a laptop and satellite phone, lingering in hotel bars, picking up scraps of information where he can, selling them to willing buyers, whether corporate or government. The more sophisticated use electronic, online or other surveillance." If Mann and his team recall a ripping Forsyth yarn, these figures in "The Wonga Coup" seem to have walked out of a recent John le Carré novel.

The target in Mann's plot was a former Spanish colony that, in most atlases, "lies hidden under the staple." It had been ruled in the '70s by a tyrant named Francisco Macías Nguema, the paranoid son of a famous witchdoctor and a man rumored to indulge in not only black magic but cannibalism. He slaughtered tens of thousands of citizens, ruined the country's economy and even tried to ban Western medicine as "un-African," burnishing Equatorial Guinea's reputation as a breeding ground for malaria, yellow fever and leprosy. At the time, one foreign visitor called it the "Dachau of Africa." When Macías was finally deposed, he fled with a suitcase full of banknotes. Then, in the ensuing battle, the nation's entire foreign reserve went up in smoke in a burning hut.

Macías' successor, his nephew, Obiang, isn't much better. In 1995, when the U.S. Embassy briefly closed up shop, American officials called Equatorial Guinea a "basket case" and "a nasty little dictatorship in the middle of nowhere." Amnesty International estimates that 90 percent of the inmates in its notorious prisons are subjected to "inhumane practices" and characterizes jail terms there as "slow, lingering death sentences." An ambassador who complained about the use of torture was accused of conspiring with the president's political opposition to cast evil spells and warned "You will go to America as a corpse."

Next page: Margaret Thatcher's son -- "useful but a complete idiot" -- was a marginal figure in the plot