by Simon Mann
Catching a deep breath first, I asked, ‘What happens if I’ve failed?’
My father looked at me, puzzled. Surely he hadn’t forgotten?
‘Common Entrance, Daddy. What happens if I’ve failed Common Entrance?’
There was a pause.
‘Good Lord! Well … if you’ve failed… Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. Well, we’ll have to think of something, won’t we?’
The kindly train drew up, puffing. The carriages were the old-fashioned sort where each compartment had its own door, with no passageway. I opened a door, dived in and slammed it shut: a reassuring sound. I sat, secure from the outside world. Thankful to escape.
There didn’t seem to be anyone else on board. I found the sash to let the window down. As I stuck my head out, my father, standing on the platform, smiled. ‘Don’t worry, old boy. We’ll think of something.’
A toot rang out, then the steam engine puffed itself into movement. The three carriages clanked out from between the tended platforms, each with its hanging pots of startlingly coloured flowers.
England, Their England: we’d read the book at school, and laughed at A.G. Macdonell’s funny and frightening cricket match. As I sat down a thought stepped up. I was going to have to look out for myself; and that might be fun. It was a signal along the track. I saw it. Knew it.
Later, from Eton, Victoria station became a sally port – for lubricious escapades into London. And then from Sandhurst – the Royal Military Academy – it was ‘SAME DETAIL!’, to use the old drill square shout. More London escapades. Rites of passage.
Strangely, it was the Navy that taught me a vital skill: to shoot straight. At North Foreland, there was an old RN Petty Officer who ran the spot-on, perfect .22 rifle range (not air rifle). He and his beard had survived Jutland, 1916, the greatest naval engagement of all time, won by Jellicoe’s perfect command of the Grand Fleet.
‘Mann!’ Chief shouted. Sitting upon his little chair and Persian rug-covered table, he glared at my target. He peered down his Brassoed brass telescope. ‘HOLY MOSES! The days of miracles are over … you wave that bloomin’ rifle around like that, sir, ’n you ain’t hittin’ nothin’…’
I was nine. I had a rifle and a shotgun at home too.
At Eton it was ex-RN Chief Petty Officer Barnes. If he said Barnes it came out Ba-r-r-r-nes. One day, after we had been shooting the 7.62 mm SLR and GPMG, he explained to me how he ran his Flag Ship strict firing range, or anything else.
‘An ’ard ship’s an ’appy ship, sir … an’ that’s all thar is to it.’
Right.
I was 15 – by any normal standards already a trained soldier.
Even my O Levels and A Levels are down to the Army. I scraped three A Levels (History, Geography and English Lit) only because, in those days, if you didn’t have the basic O Levels, and at least two A Levels, then you could not go to Sandhurst. You could not be a Regular Commission Officer. I had to have them.
I was one of the last to go through the old two-year Sandhurst, Intake 50, whereby one of those years was called ‘Academic’. I spent my time foxhunting in Leicestershire and deb-delighting in Annabel’s – whenever I got away, and whenever I could scrape together enough cash.
Improbably, I won the Soviet Studies Prize in my academic year. I had a talent for it – I must have had, given how little reading I did – and became friends with two of our five-star VVIP lecturers, Peter Vigor and Christopher Donnelly.
Chris went on to be the Senior Intelligence Officer in NATO under Secretary General Lord Robertson. Chris and I were to meet again, along the murky corridors that led to the Iraq invasion in 2003.
Peter Vigor was a Sovietologist of vast depth, many papers and several books. His family had traded with the Russians since Tudor times. Peter had been chosen to go with Nixon, on his world-changing Moscow visit of 1972. He knew well many senior generals of the Red Army, and of the KGB, at the height of the Cold War. The strange thing was Peter looked just how a casting director would want George Smiley to look, in a film of Le Carré’s spy novels. We became friends, so later he came out as my guest to Münster, Germany, to lecture to the Scots Guards Battle Group.
Then, at last, I was commissioned as an officer in the Scots Guards, as my father and grandfather had been before me. I turned up in Münster with skis on the roof of my car, as advised. I parked outside the Commanding Officer’s office, as advised. I marched in to report, as required. The result was as hoped. They were short of skiing instructors, so, despite the wails and curses of the adjutant, Roddy Gow, a skiing instructor I was. Straight away. Yes, sir.
I too was to march up Ebury Street, from Chelsea Barracks, to change the Guard at Buck’s and Jimmy’s. When I did so, I always had in mind the places they had marched to: Pop: Ypres Salient, Passchendaele; then Daddy: the capture of the Siegfried Line, the Battle of the Bou, the Battle of Anzio, Monte Cassino, the Arno and Florence, Gothic Line.
Perhaps that’s why I felt unfulfilled and bored. I felt that way despite operational tours in Northern Ireland, then at its miserable worst. I felt that way despite the Cold War rigours of the 4th Guards Armoured Brigade, stationed as we were in Münster, on the North German Plain (good tank country). Opposed as we were to the 2nd Guards Red Banner Tank Army (dissected by Peter Vigor’s technical description and his humorous broadbrush account of the likely views held by those officers and men).
I was proving nothing. Not to myself at least. I was a soldier, but I wanted something more. I wanted to find a cause. I wanted to slay a worthy dragon.
Then a friend suggested I see David Stirling. He had been a young officer, a lieutenant, in the Scots Guards – of course – in Cairo, during Rommel’s North Africa campaign. Then and there, somehow, he had founded the SAS.
Stirling had been the subject of the best book Nanny had ever sent to me at Eton – The Phantom Major, by Virginia Knowles. I couldn’t believe that such a legend existed in the flesh. Still alive and kicking. Stirling had a huge reputation. Founder of the SAS. Wild man. Adventurer. Freedom fighter. Hitler had said of Stirling and the SAS: ‘These men are dangerous.’ How’s that for a write-up?
When this friend suggested: ‘Why don’t you go and talk to David Stirling?’ I thought he was mad. It’s like saying to a wannabe teenage girl: ‘Well? Why don’t you go and have a chat with Madonna?’
But I did track down David’s phone number. Then, armed with the foolhardiness of youth, I called him. Shock horror, he asked me to go and meet him. At his London club for a cocktail. I walked into White’s needing a cocktail. But I needn’t have been afraid. Stirling was amazing: amazingly charming, amazingly friendly, amazingly dangerous.
By then it was the autumn of his no-holds-barred life, but he wasn’t about to settle into quiet retirement. Stirling was a ringmaster of what would now be called private military companies. A circus.
It was there, during that first meeting in White’s – the sanctum sanctorum of the Empire’s club-land – that he popped a question: would I like to help out with a Coup d’État? One that he was putting together. One against the communist rule of the Seychelles? The ousting of the quasi-Marxist-Leninist tyrant France-Albert René. A bad ass if ever there was one.
I was 21. It pleased me that such schemes should be kicked off somewhere like White’s Club, but it didn’t surprise me. My reading of John Buchan made that normal. The plot sounded precisely like the kind of thrill I craved, not least because – as cover for my job as the Op Rupert – I was to pose as a millionaire playboy. With yacht. With squeeze.
Count me in.
I left White’s signed up, a little pissed and feeling as though I too had smoked one of Stirling’s great Cohiba Esplendido cigars. He had puffed away throughout. My overexcited heavy breathing had made me inhale a Che Guevara lungful too.
This amazing man had also signed me up for White’s itself.
‘You’d better be a member here, you know … you’ve gotta be a member of one of these bloody place
s…’ He saw my hesitation, and misunderstood it. (I was in fact worrying about what my father, who hated all London clubs with venom, would say.) ‘…well, yes – I know White’s is a shits’ club, of course it is, but at least we’re the best shits…’
My only act of courage in this Seychelles Op was to leave my post in the Scots Guards. Or try to. I wrote a letter of resignation to Regimental HQ Scots Guards. I could not reveal the reason for my resignation.
The Lieutenant Colonel commanding the Scots Guards at that time was a dragon: Colonel Sir Gregor MacGregor of MacGregor, the 6th Baronet MacGregor of Lanrick, in the County of Perth. A small, toxic, red-haired, farting, foul-mouthed, stentorian dragon. One of his kinder nicknames was ‘the King’. This was because – by his say-so – if the Scots monarchy were ever to be restored, then it would be he who wore the crown. I know other Scots who make the same claim, but it fitted Gregor, his fireworks and his Blimp self-caricature.
When I went to see this dragon king, I dressed in the anachronistic fashion dictated by the then Standing Orders of the Brigade of Guards: black lace-ups, highly polished, three-piece pinstripe suit, stiff detachable white collar, NOT a Brigade of Guards tie, bowler hat, properly furled brolly.
Already ringing in my ears were the rockets of my father and three uncles. One was John Mann, MC and DSO, like Daddy. The other two, as it happens, were Peers of the Realm: Lord MacLean (Chips, the Lord Chamberlain) and Lord Vernon (descendant of Admiral Vernon, and the first ever hereditary peer to declare himself for Labour). All four of them had been wartime Scots Guards.
The dragon rat, Gregor, had phoned my family – told them that I was trying to resign – and asked them to straighten out their crazy child. The network was working. The Mann Pressure Machine at full RPM. The phone ringing. I was surprised that my wonderful godfather, Lord Inchcape, hadn’t joined the chorus too.
‘This is fucking nonsense, Mann! What the fucking hell do you think you are doing? …mmm, boy? What? Resign? What? Bloody hell!’
‘Sir, as my letter states, I do wish to resign.’
‘Well, you bloody well can’t. So fuck off!’
‘But, sir, I insist.’
(Loud) ‘You! You! You insist! Ha ha ha. Fuck off!’
(Quiet) ‘Excuse me, sir, but if you will not allow me to resign, then I will do something that will force you to make me leave!’
Now – let me tell you – up until that point in my life, this was the ballsiest thing I’d ever done. Gregor was a frightening man. And in the post of a god.
(Louder) ‘Make me! Make me! Mann – if you do anything – no matter what – I will not ask you to resign: I will place you under close arrest! Then prosecute you! Then have you thrown into Colchester military prison. Do you understand?’
(Quieter) ‘Yes, sir.’
(Loudest) ‘Now get out of this office – before I lock you up for INSUBORDINATION!’
(Quietest) ‘Yes, sir.’ And out I went. Flimsy. Beaten.
Of course, looking back, the old bastard had done me a favour. He’d done the right thing too. Stirling’s Seychelles putsch never went anywhere. In fact, the same scheme was still bubbling around at his South Audley Street offices years later, when I worked there too.
Despite all that, the founder of the SAS and I became friends. More than that, he became a sort of extra, volunteer, godfather. He was one of those I looked to for fatherly path-finding. Approval. David – always – was a man of beautifully dangerous ideas.
Meanwhile, ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland ground on. I did five tours there, one way or another. The early Seventies were a dangerous time. More than 100 British soldiers were killed each year by the Provisional IRA – as many as in the worst years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite that – from my first tour in 1973 to my last in 1980 – we felt we were going backward, not forward. We weren’t winning.
I cannot say that it was enjoyable, or exciting, or satisfying – even if it was our chance to be on Ops. It was boring, sometimes sickening, frustrating … but always dangerous. Even so, I wanted to see real action: I wanted to follow my first cousin Locky (now Sir Lachlan MacLean Bt, CVO, DL): I wanted to join the fabled SAS – of God-like status to us infantry. The SAS, I knew, were busy with Op Storm, the secret war in Oman; the war to beat off communist-backed insurgents trying to overthrow the old Sultanate, a friend of England.
So, in 1979, aged 27, I did finally reach my teenage goal: a mountain peak of my dreams and ambition. After six years in the British Army, I passed Selection into 22, the Regular Special Air Service Regiment.
Seven months later, in Belfast, one burst of machine-gun fire killed Captain Richard Westmacott, Grenadier Guards, my friend and Brother-In-Arms. He and I had climbed the same mountain – with the same goals – and with the same fires inside us – seeking just causes, worthy dragons.
Richard’s killing began a skid for me. A skid downward. Outward. Out of the SAS, out of the British Army, out of my first civilian job, out of my first marriage, away from my children.
There then followed businesses, with too little business. Derring-do, that never did. A brief second marriage. This girl, that girl, then back to this one. The lower I skidded, the less I dreamed of causes or dragons, worthy or not.
War checked my fall, and turned my luck: the 1989 Gulf War. Peter de la Billière, an SAS general, remembered me. He put me on his London staff, as a captain, my old rank. De la Billière was the Commander of British Forces engaged in the first Gulf War (now sometimes jokingly referred to as the Great Gulf War, since World War II came after the Great War, World War I).
The General is a great man, and good to work for. My job – as a lowly Captain SO 3 – was always different day to day: sometimes lowly and humdrum, others stratospheric and interesting.
When General de la Billière retired, the SAS offered me a great post. More than a job, it was a closure for me. It would bring to an end the bad things that had stayed in my mind after the killing of Richard and my departure from the SAS. Two of the soldiers who interviewed me for the job, and gave me their thumbs-up, were from my old G Squadron troop.
Then, my best friend – brother – father – Tony Buckingham – took me out to lunch. His Angola offshore project had at last become reality. He incorporated Devon Oil and Gas (DOG), and asked me to join him. I had been key in getting Tony into Angola in the first place.
It was my dream job, and the chance for a new start as a civvy. I could trade my army salad suit for a pinstripe, try to earn some real money. The SAS offer had set me free. Despite Tony being wild for their job himself, I just didn’t need it any more.
Tony. Shorter and rounder than me. Always laughing. Always suntanned. Noisy. Perma-rich. Lots of cars. Clouds of Cohiba cigar smoke. Toad of Toad Hall, meet JR Ewing.
Tony made me his office manager, with a small salary and a percentage of DOG’s massive upside. That was in April 1992, when I set out as a wannabe oil tycoon. I enjoyed the challenge, the learning curve.
I met Amanda. I fell madly in love.
Then, the following January – less than a year into the job – everything changed.
I came back from lunch alone into Tony’s office, the air thick with cigar smoke.
‘Ah, Simon – rebels have attacked Soyo. They’ve taken it: the port and the town. It’s been confirmed. There is no doubt.’
Tony paused to suck his Cohiba Esplendido cigar. Then he blew. ‘Devon Oil and Gas’s Angola project is kaput – over. I’m sorry, Simon. I can pay you this month … and next. That’s it. You’d better start looking for something else.’
For weeks I’d felt a storm, somewhere out there, winding itself up to fall upon this patch of sea. On 16 January 1993, the storm had fallen. UNITA – the Union for the Total Independence of Angola and anti-government rebels – had set my dreams on fire, and those of who knew how many others. By returning to civil war, UNITA, at a stroke, had enslaved hundreds of thousands back into privation. Thousands were to die.
> For me, with no DOG, the skids would slip once more. No pay cheque, no Amanda. I was 40 years old, without business qualifications, with a CV that made suits stare, that made insurance companies laugh, with a goods train full of baggage … and that was before the negative equity on my mortgage. My Harlesden railway worker’s two up two down. For this Mann there was no brewing family dynastic fortune.
Fire crackled. A spark spat out.
‘If UNITA have captured Soyo, why don’t we capture Soyo back?’ I let fly.
Stavros, at the far end of Tony’s power desk, laughed. He stirred himself from his own Esplendido: ‘You’re fucking crazy!’
I ignored Stavros, as I knew Tony would. Tony sucked thoughtfully, then blew. ‘How?’
‘Put a scratch force together. Hit the place.’
‘Simon, I mean “How?”… as in “How is this to be paid for?”’
‘You’re Captain Cash Machine.’
Stavros’s laugh had wilted into a worried frown. ‘You’re fucking crazy!’
‘Shut up, Stav.’
‘Tony – look – with Soyo in UNITA hands the Angolan government are out by five million US per week in lost production. That Agip onshore production – the one at Soyo – pumps at least that. We can hit Soyo for the same amount as one week’s lost revenue.’
Suck. Blow. ‘Two weeks. Ten million.’ Captain Cash Machine is right. Cohibas cost a bomb.
‘Fine – two weeks. But … why not? Why should these bastards – UNITA – be allowed to get away with this?’
Suck. Blow. ‘Are you sure, Simon?’
‘With the right money? With the right support from the Angolans themselves? Sure I’m sure.’
‘This scratch force – who would it be? Hereford?’ asked Tony.
‘Not Hereford. They’re expensive. They don’t know Angola. No. South Africans: they’re used to the climate, and to the people … and I know they’re available. Plenty of them.’
‘How do you know them, Simon?’
‘Here and there… I know where to go, once we have a green light from Angola.’