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The Guardian
3 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Simon Mann obituary
The career of the former soldier and mercenary Simon Mann might have seemed unexceptional in the pages of John Buchan or Rider Haggard but unfortunately for him it ended not in the 19th century but in a jail cell in post-colonial 21st-century Africa. Mann, who has died aged 72 following a heart attack, spent five years in prisons in Zimbabwe and then Equatorial Guinea between 2004 and 2009 for his part in the attempted 'Wonga coup', so called because of his unavailing plea for his friends, including Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of the former prime minister, to stump up funds – 'a splodge of wonga' – to rescue him following a failed attempt to overthrow Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the president of the west African oil state. It was, he admitted, 'a fuck up'. The nicknames of those friends were in a letter he attempted to smuggle to his wife from a prison in Harare: Thatcher was Scratcher, allegedly because of the adolescent acne he had suffered at school, and there was also Smelly and Nosher, names perhaps more PG Wodehouse than Bulldog Drummond. But they did not save Mann from torture in Zimbabwe or isolation at the notorious Black Beach prison in Equatorial Guinea. The Sunday Times in 2011 said: 'Everything about [Mann] is preposterous, fruity, bonkers and slightly frightful,' but his friends found him engaging, intelligent, though easily bored, and wry. He had a military career with the Scots Guards and the SAS before seeking adventure and wealth as the organiser of a firm providing mercenaries, mainly from South Africa, to protect oil and mining companies in Angola. Had the coup to overthrow the tyrannical and corrupt president of Equatorial Guinea succeeded, Mann would have received a pay off in the region of £15m. He was a son of privilege, a scion of the London brewery family whose company merged with Watney's. Both his father, George, and grandfather, Frank, had briefly been England and Middlesex cricket captains, in the days when only amateurs were considered suitable for team leadership. Both had served with the Scots Guards and had won the Military Cross, respectively in the first and second world wars. George Mann captained the MCC England party on a tour of South Africa in 1948-49 and met his future wife, Margaret (nee Clark), an heiress, on the boat taking the side back to Britain. Simon, their son, preferred rowing to cricket at Eton, where he was apparently known as 'Maps' because of his fascination with Africa and, according to a friend, the possibility of staging coups there. He proceeded to Sandhurst and a commission in the family regiment. Seeking a livelier challenge, Mann passed the demanding tests for the SAS and became a troop commander specialising in intelligence and counter-terrorism. He served around the world but left the army at the age of 28 in 1981 and started a security business offering protection to wealthy, mainly Arab, clients in Britain, returning to the army briefly to serve during the first Gulf war on the staff of the commander Sir Peter de la Billière. Later, as a sideline, Mann played Col Derek Wilford, the Parachute brigade commander, in Bloody Sunday, the 2002 Paul Greengrass film of the killings by the army at a Derry civil rights demonstration in 1972. In 1996 he teamed up with an oil executive, Tony Buckingham, to found a firm based in South Africa providing security and military support to governments to protect their interests. The company, Executive Outcomes, helped protect the oil wells of the Angolan government, under attack from Unita rebels. Four years later, Mann co-founded Sandline International, another security firm, with a British former officer, Lt Col Tim Spicer, providing military training and arms to the Sierra Leone government trying to keep control of the country's diamond fields. The profits enabled Mann to buy an estate on the Beaulieu River in Hampshire, but also took him back to South Africa, where he began recruiting mercenaries to overthrow the Obiang regime in Equatorial Guinea and replace it with one led by the insurgent leader Severo Moto. By then Mann was in his mid-50s and the whole operation was haphazard and misconceived. It included Mann checking out the price of some supplies at a branch of B&Q. The South African authorities were well aware what was going on – probably as a result of loose talk by the plotters around a hotel swimming pool – and the Zimbabwean government was alerted too, though it continued selling arms and ammunition to Mann and his colleagues. Friends of Mann, including Thatcher, provided funds, though Thatcher himself later claimed he thought he had been buying a helicopter merely for humanitarian work, an excuse which did not prevent him receiving a suspended sentence and a hefty fine for breaking anti-mercenary legislation. All went wrong after Mann and his band of 70 mercenaries touched down in Harare on the night of 7 March 2004 to pick up the arms. They were arrested, as was a further group already in Malabo, the Guinean capital. It was while he was awaiting trial that the notorious letter was written: 'Our situation is not good and it is very URGENT … it may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga. Now it's bad times and everyone has to fucking well pull their full weight. Once we get into a real trial scenario we are fucked.' The letter was intercepted by the prison guards. No money was forthcoming from Scratcher, or Smelly, thought to be a reference to Ely Calil, a Nigerian-Lebanese oil tycoon. 'They let me down badly,' Mann complained later. 'They ought to be in shackles as well.' He said Thatcher had known perfectly well about the coup plan and had been part of the team management. He regretted the coup: 'When you go tiger shooting, you don't expect the tiger to win.' Four months after the band's arrest, Mann was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment, later reduced to four, on two counts of buying firearms illegally – the other mercenaries faced short sentences. He had claimed the object of the mission was to protect diamond mines in the Congo. Mann later said he had confessed under duress and had been tortured and subjected to sensory deprivation, 'all the sort of stuff we used to do to each other at (the SAS in) Hereford.' But on his release in Zimbabwe in May 2007 he was immediately extradited to Equatorial Guinea. There he was sentenced to 34 years at Black Beach prison, where, for most prisoners, assaults were rife and food intermittent. There were even rumours that Obiang had a penchant for eating bits of his captives – which the dictator denied. Mann's imprisonment was not so harsh: he had access to books and to journalists; food was supplied from a luxury hotel, and he lunched with the country's security minister. It helped that by then he was admitting his guilt, naming names and expressing contrition. Within 15 months, in November 2009, Obiang freed him 'on humanitarian grounds' to receive medical treatment and see his family in Britain. Back home, Mann was able to meet his five-year-old son, Arthur, for the first time, and to reunite with his wife, Amanda, and six other children. His attempts to restart his career, however, were less successful: 'My former peers couldn't hire me, even in the back office,' he told the Times in 2023. 'It was 'look Simon, don't take it personally, but we spend a lot of time and money telling everyone we are not mercenaries.'' In 2011 he wrote a book on his experiences, Cry Havoc, and latterly was chairing a start-up company attempting to turn plastic waste into hydrogen. One of his friends was said to be Obiang. Mann is survived by Amanda (nee Freedman), who was his third wife and the mother of four of the seven children who also survive him. Simon Mann, army officer and mercenary, born 26 June 1952; died 8 May 2025
Times
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Times
How a Belfast-based private eye stopped Simon Mann's African coup
He was the hardened soldier of fortune set to bag millions for spearheading the military takeover of an oil-rich African state, but his plans were brought crashing down from a room in a house in Ireland. The veteran mercenary Simon Mann, who died this month, had secretly worked with Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of the former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, as he set out to topple the regime in Equatorial Guinea 21 years ago. When the Sunday Times journalist Barrie Penrose heard whispers that a heavily armed coup d'état was being planned in London, he asked Ian Withers, an Irish-based private eye who operated offices in Belfast and Dublin, to help him do some digging. Penrose connected Withers, a career investigator
Telegraph
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Death of the last maverick mercenary may herald something far worse for Africa
Simon Mann, the Old Etonian soldier of fortune who died last week at the age of 72, should have been the coda to the inglorious symphony of the white mercenary in Africa. So madcap, so incongruous was the 'Wonga Coup' he attempted to launch in Equatorial Guinea in 2004 that it seemed to belong to another era. Africa had moved on, old hands declared. Mann, poor fellow, had failed to read the winds of change. Yet far from being a holdover from the past, Mann has proved to be a harbinger of the present. Analysts reckon there are now more foreign mercenaries operating in Africa than ever before. The Russians, in the form of the Wagner Group, were the vanguard of the second wave, arriving in 2017. But others are following in ever greater numbers, Turks, Chinese and Romanians among them – perhaps soon even Americans, with Erik Prince, the founder of the infamous Blackwater mercenary group, reportedly offering Congo his services as part of a putative minerals deal with Donald Trump. Some are shadowy outfits, manned by ruthless racketeers, deployed to advance their states' geopolitical ambitions. Others lay claim to greater respectability. Blanching at the term 'mercenary', they call themselves private military contractors. Many play a vital role in protecting weak governments by training inexperienced national armies, guarding key installations and taking the lead in counterinsurgency operations against Islamist militants. Whatever their role, few of the new generation have the panache of the mercenaries of yesteryear who culminated with Mann. Their era began in the early Sixties, in the years when newly independent African states were struggling to find their feet. From Nigeria and Congo to Angola and the island states of the Indian Ocean, they were on hand – often with the blessing of Whitehall and the Quai d'Orsay – to support secessionist movements, prop up feeble governments or mount the occasional coup. Of Mann's forebears the two that most stand out were 'Mad Mike' Hoare, a stiff-lipped Anglo-Irishman and one-time accountant, and Bob Denard, the flamboyant Frenchman with whom he had an unspoken rivalry. Hoare, who bore a passing resemblance to Montgomery, led his motley fighters, the fabled Wild Geese, in defeating Congo's China-backed Simba rebels, who numbered Che Guevara in their ranks, and shoring up the breakaway province of Katanga. He and his 300 men recaptured Stanleyville, later to be renamed Kisangani, from the Simbas, freed 2,000 European hostages, most of them nuns and priests – and then dynamited the vaults of every bank in the city before drinking its taverns dry. It was a tale of derring-do worthy of Empire and made Hoare, who made his men attend church every Sunday, a hero on Fleet Street. Among those who lapped up his antics back home was the young Simon Mann, sitting in the back of a classroom plotting imaginary coups in his atlas. Hoare did much to romanticise the reputation of the white mercenary in black Africa. Yet the image belied a darker reality, too. Some of Hoare's men were German ex-Nazis who still wore the Iron Cross. Most had old-fashioned views on race. Hoare and his Wild Geese had no compunction about shedding blood, decorating their trucks with the heads of Simba warriors they had slain. Hoare, who died in 2020 at the age of 100, may have been a character but, if anything, Denard was even more swashbuckling. He had been in Katanga at the same time as Hoare, leading a unit called 'les affreux' ('the terrible ones'). He later changed sides, was shot in the head by a North Korean soldier, recovered under the care of a nurse and then married her. He reportedly had six other wives, some of them at the same time. After a failed attempt to seize power in Yemen and Benin, he turned his attention in 1977 to Comoros, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, launching the first of four coup attempts he made there. Leading just 50 men, equipped with sawn-off shotguns and two dozen cases of Dom Perignon champagne, he toppled the socialist president, who was shot dead 'while attempting to escape'. Denard effectively ran the country for the next decade as head of the presidential guard, a position he lost after the puppet president he installed was also shot mysteriously. Denard was acquitted of the killing but the mounting presidential body count did him no favours. Whatever their flaws, Mann grew up idolising such men. Like them, he would go on to find triumph and disaster on the world's poorest continent. He helped set up Executive Outcomes, which made a fortune protecting Angola's oil fields from rebel attack in the 1990s and was later involved with an offshoot, Sandline International, seeing action in diamond-rich Sierra Leone's civil war. But in an uncanny echo of his two heroes, Mann's mercenary career ended with a ludicrously injudicious coup attempt. In 1981, Hoare attempted to seize power in the Seychelles, flying economy into Victoria, the capital, with a group of mercenaries disguised as members of a beer appreciation society, The Ancient Order of Froth Blowers. Taking their cover too seriously, most of the men had overindulged on the flight. After starting a brawl in the arrivals hall, a customs officer found an AK-47 in one of their bags, prompting a gun battle that ended when Hoare and his men hijacked an Air India flight to get back to South Africa. The mercenaries drank all the champagne on board and were promptly arrested on arrival. In 1995, Denard's final attempt to take back power in Comoros similarly failed after he and his men drifted onto a beach in inflatable dinghies one moonless night only to find the French army waiting for them. Denard, who died in 2007, spent 10 months in a French prison, Mad Mike Hoare 33 months in a South African one. Mann, whose father and grandfather both captained England at cricket, did more time than both of them combined after a fantastical plot, allegedly concocted in 2004 in the hallowed surroundings of White's, the club in St James's, to overthrow Obiang Nguema, then, as now, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea. The conspiracy was ludicrously complicated, with Mann buying an old Boeing 727 to fly his mercenaries from South Africa to Equatorial Guinea, making a detour in Harare to pick up weapons. The plan was then to fly across the continent to meet an advance party already in Equatorial Guinea, storm the presidential palace and then install a little-known exile as the country's new leader. The problem for Mann was that the entire plot had been blown wide open even before his crew left South Africa. Mann and his team were promptly arrested on arrival in Zimbabwe, where he would serve four years before being transferred to complete a further 13 months in Equatorial Guinea's notorious Black Beach prison. Mann's outfit had neither the intelligence nor the infrastructure in place to succeed, notes Piers Pigou, a Johannesburg-based analyst who has long studied mercenary operations in Africa. 'It was a bit of a Heath Robinson operation,' he said. 'I think everyone was surprised that they ran such a leaky ship, which enabled the authorities in South Africa and therefore Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea to be prepared. I still look at that coup and wonder how on earth they think they could have succeeded.' Mann's failed coup seemed like a final hurrah for white mercenaries in Africa. It was certainly an anomaly. By the turn of the millennium, African economies were growing, democracy was on the rise and, though many countries remained chronically weak, conflict was on the wane. New breed of mercenary Alas, it was not to last. By 2017 a new breed of mercenary had begun to appear in Africa in the form of the Wagner Group, which offered armed services in exchange for access to natural resources – deals remarkably similar to the one Mann and his co-conspirators hoped to strike in Equatorial Guinea. Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner's founder, may have lacked the class of the those who ploughed the same furrows in earlier decades: he did not swill champagne like Denard or recite Shakespeare like Hoare. He did not even go to Eton. But, at least in some cases, Wagner was crudely effective. Hired by Faustin-Archange Touadera, the president of the Central African Republic, Wagner beat back the country's Islamist rebels, though it imposed a huge cost. To this day, the CAR remains virtually a Wagner colony, Mr Pigou says. Wagner was nominally dissolved following Prigozhin's death in a mysterious plane crash in 2023 weeks after he marched on Moscow in an attempted rebellion of his own. The outfit, now controlled more directly by the Russian state, continues to prop up half a dozen African governments, most of them military dictatorships, and has faced numerous accusations of perpetrating massacres and other abuses. Other state-linked mercenary outfits of varying quality have also appeared on the scene. Chinese private military groups operate in more than a dozen African states, mainly to protect China-run oil facilities, mines and infrastructure projects, guard logistics routes and protect Chinese nationals against the rising threat of kidnapping. Chinese mercenaries may be authorised by Beijing to carry and use weapons in Africa but, unlike Wagner, they do not directly prop up authoritarian regimes or intervene in internal politics. Other foreign groups are more overtly engaged in fighting. Last year, Sadat, a Turkish private military force with ties to the country's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reportedly suffered casualties while engaging with Islamist insurgents in Niger. Sadat, which insists that it does not provide 'paramilitary or mercenary services', says its focus is on strategic consultancy, military training and protecting important economic facilities. Not all mercenary groups deliver on the bold promises they make. In 2022 the Congolese government hired 1,000 predominantly Romanian mercenaries, who became known as 'the Romeos', to defend eastern cities against the country's M23 rebels. But when the rebels advanced on Goma and Bukavu, the two biggest cities in the east, in January, the Romeos cut and ran, abandoning their weapons and vehicles as they fled for the safety of the UN peacekeeping base. Both cities swiftly fell and the mercenaries eventually surrendered to M23. Not all mercenaries are shadowy outfits Not all mercenaries are as rapacious as Wagner or as hapless as the Romeos. Indeed, says Mr Pigou, some do a lot more good than harm. In 2019, Filipe Nyusi, then the president of Mozambique, originally looked to Wagner to fight an Islamist insurgency in the north. After the jihadists humiliated the Russians, killing scores, Mr Nyusi turned instead to a rather different beast, the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), led by Lionel Dyck, a colonel who served in the Rhodesian army. Dyck, who died last year, broadly fits the definition of a mercenary but he always insisted that his group followed the highest international standards governing private military contractors. As a result, it helped prevent countries like Mozambique, with weak indigenous armies, from slipping into chaos and bloodshed. By training Mozambique's police, it also strengthened the country's ability to defend itself in the future, he argued. While DAG has faced criticism in the past, including of carrying out attacks on civilians which it denies, it is a reminder, cautions Mr Pigou, that blanket, knee-jerk condemnation of mercenary activities in Africa is counterproductive. 'There's a cookie-cutter demonisation of the bloodthirsty white mercenary,' he said. 'There are elements of truth in this, but these narratives are predicated on cartoon characters that don't reflect the realities on the ground. 'They miss the kind of sober cost-benefit analysis of what they guys are able to achieve.'
Daily Mail
13-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
The terrifying truth about dying while exercising - and why even seemingly fit and healthy people could be at risk
The death last week of ex-SAS officer and former mercenary Simon Mann of a heart attack at the age of 72, reportedly while exercising on an indoor rowing machine, is not the first to be linked to strenuous exercise and gym machines. The husband of Facebook 's then-chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, died while running on a treadmill in 2015 – autopsy results suggested that Dave, just 47, had an undiagnosed heart arrhythmia, which may have caused him to fall while working out, leading to a fatal head injury.
Daily Mail
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
The one subject I didn't dare raise with Simon Mann as we sat in his hellish African prison? That the despot he'd tried to overthrow was intent on eating his testicles! IAN GALLAGHER recalls his bizarre encounter with the roguish Old Etonian
When I first met Simon Mann he was inching across a dusty prison yard in leg irons and handcuffs. Not that his tortuous shuffle was due entirely to his shackles. He moved deliberately slowly, he later told me, the better to savour every precious gulp of fresh air, lest any one of them might be his last. It was March 2008 and I had flown from London to interview Britain's most famous soldier of fortune – who died suddenly aged 72 on Friday – in Africa's most infamous jail, Black Beach. In those days, the prison, on the tropical volcanic island of Bioko off the coast of Equatorial Guinea, was even more of a hellhole than Devil's Island, home to the fictional Papillon. Torture was rife, malaria and yellow fever endemic, cell floors were slippery with rats and sewage, and guards thought nothing of keeping inmates starved for days. Nobody much fancied Mann's chances of getting out alive. Caught red-handed leading a band of mercenaries on a mission to overthrow the country's murderous dictator, President Teodoro Obiang, Mann had already spent four years in a maximum-security jail in Zimbabwe where he was put through a mock execution and threatened with being fed alive to crocodiles. Ghastly enough, you might think. But things then took a turn for the worse. After losing an extradition battle, Mann was spirited across Africa to oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, sandwiched between Cameroon and Gabon – and delivered straight into the hands of Obiang, a despot of reputedly cannibalistic tendencies. Word had spread that he was intent on eating the Old Etonian's testicles and dragging his naked body through the streets. I once put this claim to Obiang, incidentally, during an interview in his presidential palace as he sat, flanked by bodyguards, on a throne beneath an almost life-size portrait of himself. He shook his head. 'I'm not a cannibal, I'm a humanitarian,' he protested. I decided not to press the point. On that morning in Black Beach jail, though, it seemed uncharitable to burden Mann with thoughts of cannibalism. He had enough on his plate, so to speak. After enjoying the sunshine in the prison yard, he appeared in the doorway of an air-conditioned courtroom, part of the jail complex, where I waited with Mail on Sunday photographer Keith Waldegrave. We had expected a pitiful wreck, yet here he was, a little fragile, but all smiles and playing the gracious host, just as if he was welcoming us to Sunday lunch at Inchmery, his 20-acre estate on the banks of the River Beaulieu in Hampshire. 'Welcome, welcome – so good of you to come,' beamed the former SAS troop commander turned mercenary. Charming and witty, he would remain upbeat throughout our interview. Even so, it was hard to reconcile his appearance, almost donnish but for his shackles and grey prison uniform, with his dogs-of-war exploits in Sierra Leone and Angola which made headlines worldwide. This was the man, after all, who intended to land here, this steamy West African outpost, in swashbuckling style, leading nearly 70 mercenaries on a plane loaded with guns and ammunition – had he not been arrested, that is, in Harare on March 7, 2004, when the plot unravelled spectacularly. 'Where do you want me,' he asked cheerfully. Prison guards led their star inmate to a chair in front of the dock. Behind him President Obiang glowered from a framed photograph hanging on the wall. Dispensing with small talk, Mann pushed his specs to the top of his nose with his handcuffs and announced: 'I do want to talk to you about this, absolutely. I think things have gone beyond the stage of telling tales out of school.' And so his extraordinary story unspooled. His mission, he said, was to replace Obiang with Severo Moto Nsa, an Equatoguinean opposition leader living in Madrid. Equatorial Guinea has the third-largest oil reserves in sub-Saharan Africa, making it a valuable prize. Along with shady tycoons, others said to be part of the murky affair included the disgraced peer Jeffrey Archer, politicians at the heart of the then New Labour government and Lady Thatcher's son, Mark, who was later arrested. Mann told me Sir Mark Thatcher, whom he described as 'a very naughty boy', was at the heart of the plot, claiming he was obsessed with how best to exploit commercial interests in Equatorial Guinea after the takeover. Mann would get a generous cut too, of course. And he outlined the role of London-based Lebanese oil tycoon Eli Calil, now dead, who counted British politicians including Peter Mandelson among his circle of influential friends. Calil and Sir Mark Thatcher, said Mann, 'have let me down very badly. It is these I feel most bitter about because of their intimate involvement in all this'. After his arrest in Zimbabwe Mann famously smuggled a letter to his wife from his Harare prison cell demanding 'a large splodge of wonga' from 'Smelly', 'Scratcher' and others to get him out. 'Smelly is Eli Calil,' confirmed Mann. 'It is the name my wife gave him. She is very good at assigning names to people. And yes, Thatcher was known as Scratcher.' But the 'wonga' was not forthcoming and, four years on, Mann's fury was still raw as he spoke that day. 'When you are on an expedition and get stuck half way up a mountain you don't expect the others on the expedition to take down their tents, roll up their sleeping bags and go back to London,' said Mann. 'That has made me fantastically angry. Those two should be here in shackles as well.' But while he spoke expansively about the coup plot, he clouded when it came to matters personal. Anxious not to upset his hosts, he made light of the conditions he endured and said he was being treated quite well. Even being denied access to the exercise yard was a source of mirth. 'It's OK,' he said, and getting up to move across the room, laughed: 'I just walk up and down my cell like this. No problem.' It was stiff-upper-lip in excelsis. Could we have expected anything less? The English public school system and his military training had taught Mann, a scion of the Watney Mann brewing family, all about resilience. But how did he stop himself going insane? Or losing hope? 'Ah, that's the secret,' he said wistfully. 'I've got seven children in England and I miss them desperately.' His wife had not visited, neither in Equatorial Guinea nor during his incarceration in Zimbabwe. 'I don't want her to, and have told her that. I don't want her to see me this way.' It was at this point in our interview that the minister of national security, Manuel Nguema Mba, who was observing from the back of the courtroom, decided it was time Mann was returned to his cell. 'The minister has much to do today,' said an aide. 'He is very busy at the moment.' Just how busy became clear later in the day when it emerged that police had apparently foiled another possible coup. A car shipped from Spain had been intercepted containing hidden guns and ammunition. It served as a reminder that covetous eyes were always focused on the former Spanish colony, dismissed on the world stage as an 'insignificant' microstate before the discovery of two vast oil fields transformed its fortunes. It was impossible not to feel desperately sorry for Mann, at heart a romantic adventurer, as he was led back to his life of solitary confinement. A few months later he was jailed for 34 years. Some cast Mann as a Wodehousian figure, a bumbling Bertie Wooster. But he was much smarter than that and managed to convince the Obiang regime that he could help snare the two men that they wanted to throw into Black Beach above all others – Thatcher and Calil. After only 15 months Mann was pardoned by the dictator he had tried to overthrow and returned to his family in England, where he was introduced to his infant son, Arthur, who had been born while he was in prison in Zimbabwe. Officially, the Equatorial Guinea regime freed Mann on compassionate grounds because of his need for medical treatment. Many observers felt the early release had been Mann's reward for his willingness to identify traitors inside the country who were in on the coup. I saw him again a year or so later at a party in London. Once again he laughed and joked about his ordeal. We spoke a few times afterwards, once when he sought advice on becoming a newspaper foreign correspondent. Clearly his experience had not dented his appetite for adventure. Yesterday I spoke to Jim Nally, writer and film director who assisted Mann with his memoirs. He said he tried 'every trick in the book' to get Mann to 'open up'. 'I felt that discussing his homecoming might help. He kept putting it off. He didn't want to 'do this' at home. We finally agreed to meet in the office of an old friend. 'We were led to an office with a large leather couch. It was the first time we hadn't sat at a table. Notebook, pen and tape recorder primed, I asked him to start with his journey back to the UK. He broke down. I've never seen a man weep for 90 minutes before. 'Head between knees, body convulsing with raw grief, he kept apologising. And asking if 'the chaps outside' could see. I reassured him that there were no other witnesses. 'Simon could justify everything except what his time away did to his wife and children. He swore me to secrecy about what happened that day – but deep down I think he'd want them to know.'
