Brave mercenary behind the “package holiday coup”
Michael Hoare 1919-2020
Michael “Mad Mike” Hoare was an accountant who became one of the world’s most infamous mercenaries. A dapper veteran of the Second World War, he made his name in the mid-1960s, putting down a communist-backed rebellion in what would become DR Congo. He helped save many lives, though arguably his reputation owed as much to his “self-mythologising” as his military skills, said The Guardian. In 1978, his exploits inspired the film The Wild Geese, starring Richard Burton as a character based on him. But a few years later, Hoare, who has died aged 100, rather destroyed his own mystique by coming out of retirement to lead an attempted coup in the Seychelles that ended in farce – and ultimately landed him in jail.
The son of Irish parents, Thomas Michael Hoare was born in India in 1919. At school in England, he dreamt of military glory. His parents steered him instead towards accountancy, but as soon as war broke out, he joined the London Irish Rifles. Having served in India and Burma, he achieved the rank of major. Finding London stultifying after the War, he moved to South Africa, said the Daily Mail. He guided safaris, rode a motorbike the length of the continent, and went in search of the lost city of the Kalahari. Then in 1961, he met the Congolese politician Moïse Tshombe. Belgium had granted Congo its independence, and during a messy transition, the resource rich Katanga region had seceded. Tshombe – the president of the breakaway province – hired Hoare to help defend it. His involvement then was brief, but three years later, Tshombe – by then Congo’s prime minister – hired him again, this time to lead government forces trying to put down the Simba rebellion, a conflict that had drawn in Cuba and China. Hoare put together a band of 300 mercenaries – dubbed 5 Commando – and led them into this brutal battle. It was to his advantage that the war photographer Don McCullin had hitched a ride with them, and was therefore on hand to record some of what followed. Hoare and his men helped drive the Simba forces back to Stanleyville, where – fearing defeat – the rebels took as many Belgian and Americans hostage as they could, said The New York Times. 5 Commando and Belgian paratroopers rescued 1,600 of them, as well as hundreds of locals, but found scores dead, including nuns who had been hacked to death and priests with their throats cut. There were claims his men – whom he nicknamed the Wild Geese after the 18th century exiled Irish mercenaries – committed atrocities of their own, though he’d only acknowledge turning a blind eye to their looting of Stanleyville. “I did not regard it as a shooting matter,” he said later. “Not after what I’d seen.”
After that, Hoare settled quietly with his second wife in South Africa, where he wrote books and later worked as a “technical adviser” on The Wild Geese. But he had an abiding hatred of communists, and in 1983, he agreed to lead a band of 44 “over the hill” mercenaries to the Seychelles, to overthrow its socialist government. They arrived on a charter plane, posing as members of a drinking club called the Ancient Order of Froth Blowers and carrying weapons in the false bottoms of their suitcases. But at the airport, an official spotted a gun muzzle and a firefight erupted. Six hours later, the mercenaries fled in an Air India jet that they had hijacked. Back in South Africa, Hoare was jailed for 20 years for air piracy, and served three. The judge called his operation a “farce”; the press dubbed it the “package holiday coup”. Nevertheless, as recently as 2018 Hoare insisted he remained proud of having been a dog of war, and of having “commanded the legendary Wild Geese”.