Thomas Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare (17 March 1919 – 2 February 2020) was a British-Irish military officer and mercenary who fought during the Simba rebellion and was involved in carrying out the 1981 Seychelles coup d'état attempt.
Early life and military career
Hoare was born on Saint Patrick's Day in India in Calcutta to Irish parents. His father was a river pilot. At the age of eight he was sent to school in England to Margate College and then commenced training for accountancy and, as he was not able to attend Sandhurst, he joined the Territorial Army. Hoare's childhood hero was Sir Francis Drake. Aged 20 he joined the London Irish Rifles at the beginning of the Second World War, later he then joined the 2nd Reconnaissance Regiment of the Royal Armoured Corps as a 2nd lieutenant and fought in the Arakan Campaign in Burma and at the Battle of Kohima in India. He was promoted to the rank of major. In 1945, he married Elizabeth Stott in New Delhi, with whom he had three children.
After the war, he completed his training as a chartered accountant, qualifying in 1948. Hoare found life in London boring and decided to move to South Africa. In Durban, Hoare was restless and sought adventures by marathon walking, riding a motorcycle from Cape Town to Cairo in 1954 and seeking the rumoured Lost City of the Kalahari in the Kalahari desert. By the early 1960s, Hoare was extremely bored with his life as an accountant, and yearned to return to the life of a soldier, resulting in his interest in becoming a mercenary.
Katanga
Hoare's first mercenary action was in 1961 in Katanga, a province trying to rebel from the newly independent Republic of the Congo. His unit was named "4 Commando".
Simba rebellion
In 1964, Congolese Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe, his employer in Katanga, hired Hoare to command a military unit named 5 Commando, Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC) 5 Commando, later commanded by John Peters; composed of about 300 men, most of whom were from South Africa. His second-in-command was a fellow ex-British Army officer, Commandant Alistair Wicks. The unit's mission was to fight a revolt known as the Simba rebellion. Tshombe distrusted General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the commander of the Armée Nationale Congolaise who had already commanded two coups, and preferred to keep the Congolese Army weak even during the Simba rebellion. Hence, Tshombe used mercenaries who had already fought for him in Katanga to provide a professional military force.
To recruit his force, Hoare placed newspaper advertisements in Johannesburg and Salisbury (modern Harare, Zimbabwe) for physically fit white men capable of marching 20 miles per day who were fond of combat and were "tremendous romantics" to join 5 Commando. Hoare himself told journalists "Killing communists is like killing vermin. Killing African nationalists is like killing animals. I don’t like either of them. My men and I killed between five and ten thousand Congolese rebels during the twenty months I spent in the Congo".
To the press, Hoare insisted that the 5 Commando were not mercenaries, but rather "volunteers" who were waging an idealistic struggle against Communism in the Congo. Hoare and the 5 Commando are estimated to have saved the lives of 2,000 Europeans taken hostage by the Simbas, which made him famous around the world. About Operation Dragon Rouge, he wrote: "Taking Stanleyville was the greatest achievement of the Wild Geese. There is only so much 300 men can do, but here we were, part of a very big push and clearing the rebels out of Stan was a major victory for our side." After completing his service, he told the media that he estimated that 5 Commando had killed between 5,000 and 10,000 Simbas.
Later, Hoare wrote his own account of 5 Commando's role in the 1960s Congo mercenary war, originally titled Congo Mercenary and much later repeatedly republished in paperback simply as Mercenary (subtitled "The Classic Account of Mercenary Warfare"). The exploits of Hoare and 5 Commando in the Congo were much celebrated for decades afterward and helped contribute significantly to the glorification of the mercenary lifestyle by magazines such as Soldier of Fortune together with many pulp novels that featured heroes clearly modeled after Hoare. The popular image of mercenaries fighting in Africa from the 1960s to the present is that of a macho adventurers defiantly living life on their own terms together with much drinking and womanizing mixed with perilous adventures.
The Wild Geese
During the mid-1970s, Hoare was hired as technical adviser for the movie The Wild Geese, the fictional story of a group of mercenary soldiers hired to rescue a deposed African president who resembled Tshombe while the central African nation the story was set in resembled the Congo. The character "Colonel Allen Faulkner" (played by Richard Burton) was modelled on Hoare. At least one of the actors of the movie, Ian Yule, had been a mercenary commanded by Hoare, before which he had served in the British Parachute Regiment and Special Air Service (SAS). Of the actors playing mercenaries, four were born in Africa, two were former POWs, and most had received military training.
In an interview, Hoare praised The Wild Geese as an authentic picture of the mercenary lifestyle in Africa saying: "In a good mercenary outfit, they're all there because they want to be. All right, the motive is probably the high money they earn, but they all want to do it. They're all volunteers". The movie's message that Africa needed pro-Western politicians like Tshombe and that mercenaries who fought for such politicians were heroes seemed to represent Hoare's influence.
Seychelles affair (1981) and subsequent conviction
Background
In 1978, Seychelles exiles in South Africa, acting on behalf of ex-president James Mancham, discussed with South African Government officials the possibility of a coup d'état against the new president France-Albert René, who had "promoted" himself from prime minister while Mancham was out of the country. The idea was considered favourably by some in Washington, D.C., due to the United States' concerns over access to its new military base on Diego Garcia island, the necessity to move operations from the Seychelles to Diego Garcia, and the determination that René was not someone who would be in favour of the United States.
Preparation
Associates of Mancham contacted Hoare, then in South Africa as a civilian resident, who eventually raised a force of 43 - 55 men including ex-South African Special Forces (Recces), former Rhodesian soldiers, and ex-Congo mercenaries.
During November 1981, Hoare dubbed them "Ye Ancient Order of Froth Blowers" (AOFB) after a charitable English social club of the 1920s. In order for the plan to work, he disguised the mercenaries as a rugby club, and hid AK-47s in the bottom of their luggage, as he explained in his book The Seychelles Affair:
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We were a Johannesburg beer-drinking club. We met formally once a week in our favourite pub in Braamfontein. We played Rugby. Once a year we organised a holiday for our members. We obtained special charter rates. Last year we went to Mauritius. In the best traditions of the original AOFB we collected toys for underprivileged kids and distributed them to orphanages ... I made sure the toys were as bulky as possible and weighed little. Rugger footballs were ideal. These were packed in the special baggage above the false bottom to compensate for the weight of the weapon.
</blockquote>
Airport Fiasco
Upon arrival at the airport one of Hoare's men accidentally got into the "something to declare" line at which the customs officer insisted on searching his bag.
Investigation and trial
Six of the mercenary soldiers stayed behind on the islands; four were convicted of treason in the Seychelles. Hoare spent 33 months in prison until released after a Christmas Presidential amnesty. During his 33 months in prison, Hoare consoled himself by memorising Shakespeare. In 2013, he published his seventh book, a historical novel entitled The Last Days of the Cathars about the medieval persecution of the Cathars in the south-west of France.
After divorcing in 1960, he married airline stewardess Phyllis Sims in 1961 and they had two children. which remained unpublished at the time of her death on Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771.
Death
Hoare died of natural causes at a care facility in Durban, on 2 February 2020.