Thomas Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare (17 March 1919 – 2 February 2020) was an Irish mercenary leader and adventurer known for his military activities in Africa and attempt to conduct a coup d'état in the Seychelles.

Early life and military career

Hoare was born on Saint Patrick's Day 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 in accountancy and, as he was not able to go to Sandhurst, he joined the Territorial Army. Aged 20 he joined the London Irish Rifles at the outbreak of World War II, 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. After the war, he completed his training as a chartered accountant, qualifying in 1948. He subsequently emigrated to Durban, Natal Province in the Union of South Africa where he later ran safaris and became a soldier-for-hire in various African countries.

Congo Crisis (1961–65)

Hoare led two separate mercenary groups during the Congo Crisis.

Hoare's first mercenary action was in 1961 in Katanga, a province trying to break away from the newly independent Republic of the Congo. His unit was called "4 Commando".

During this time he married Phyllis Sims, an airline stewardess.

In 1964, Congolese Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe, his employer in Katanga, hired Major Hoare to lead a military unit called 5 Commando, Armée Nationale Congolaise (5 Commando ANC) (later led by John Peters; not to be confused with No.5 Commando, the British Second World War commando force) made up 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.

Later Hoare and his mercenaries worked in concert with Belgian paratroopers, Cuban exile pilots, and CIA-hired mercenaries who attempted to save 1,600 civilians (mostly Europeans and missionaries) in Stanleyville from the Simba rebels in Operation Dragon Rouge. This operation saved many lives.[13] Hoare was later promoted to lieutenant-colonel in the Armée Nationale Congolaise and 5 Commando expanded into a two-battalion force. Hoare commanded 5 Commando from July 1964 to November 1965.

Speaking on the conflict, he said, "I had wanted nothing so much as to have 5 Commando known as an integral part of the AMC, a 5 Commando destined to strike a blow to rid the Congo of the greatest cancer the world has ever known—the creeping, insidious disease of communism.”

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 Wild Geese

In the mid-1970s, Hoare was hired as technical adviser for the film The Wild Geese, the fictional story of a group of mercenary soldiers hired to rescue a deposed African president. The character "Colonel Alan Faulkner" (played by Richard Burton) was modeled on Hoare. At least one of the actors in the film, Ian Yule, had been a mercenary under Hoare's command, 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.

Seychelles affair (1981) and subsequent conviction

In 1978, Seychelles exiles in South Africa, acting on behalf of ex-president James Mancham, discussed with South African Government officials launching 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 coup was seen favorably 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.

Associates of Mancham contacted Hoare, then in South Africa as a civilian resident, to fight alongside fifty-three other mercenary soldiers, including ex-South African Special Forces (Recces), former Rhodesian soldiers, and ex-Congo mercenaries.

Hoare got together, in November 1981, a group of white, middle class mercenaries, and 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 his luggage, as he explained in his book The Seychelles Affair:

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.

The fighting started prematurely when one of Hoare's men accidentally got in the "something to declare" line and the customs officer insisted on searching his bag. The rifles were well-concealed in the false-bottomed kitbags but the rifle was found and the customs man, running from the scene, sounded the alarm. One of Hoare's men pulled his own, disassembled AK-47 from the concealed compartment in the luggage, assembled it, loaded it and shot the escaping customs man before he could reach the other side of the building. The plan for the coup proceeded despite this set-back with one team of Hoare's men attempting to capture a barracks. Fighting ensued at the airport and in the middle of this, an Air India jet (Air India Boeing aircraft Flight 224), landed at the airport, damaging a flap on one of the trucks strewn on the runway. Hoare managed to negotiate a ceasefire before the aircraft and passengers were caught in the crossfire. After several hours, the mercenaries found themselves in an unfavorable position and some wanted to depart on the aircraft, which needed fuel. Hoare conceded and the captain of the aircraft allowed them on board after Hoare had found fuel for the aircraft. On board, Hoare asked the captain why he had landed when he had been informed of the fighting taking place and he responded that once the aircraft had started to descend, he did not have enough fuel to climb the aircraft back to cruising altitude and still make his destination. Hoare's men still had their weapons and Hoare asked the captain if he would allow the door to be opened so they could ditch the weapons over the sea before they returned to South Africa, but the captain laughed at Hoare's out-of-date knowledge on how pressurized aircraft functioned and told him it would not be possible.

Four of the mercenary soldiers were left behind and were convicted of treason in the Seychelles.

In January 1982 an International Commission, appointed by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 496, inquired into the attempted coup d'état. The UN report concluded that South African defence agencies were involved, including supplying weapons and ammunition.

Being associated with the South African security services, the hijackers were initially charged with kidnapping, which carries no minimum sentence, but this was upgraded to hijacking after international pressure.

Hoare was found guilty of airplane hijacking and sentenced to ten years in prison. In total, 42 of the 43 alleged hijackers were convicted. One of the mercenaries, an American veteran of the Vietnam War, was found not guilty of hijacking, as he had been seriously wounded in the firefight and was loaded aboard while sedated. Many of the other mercenaries, including the youngest of the group, Raif St Clair, were quietly released after three months in their own prison wing. Hoare's brother-in-law Robert Sims and Sims' common-law wife Susan Ingles were not charged. Hoare spent 33 months in prison until released after a Christmas Presidential amnesty.

Hoare was a chartered accountant and member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Previously the Institute had said it could not expel him despite protests from members as he had committed no offence and paid his membership dues. His imprisonment allowed the ICAEW to expel him from membership in 1983.

Hoare's account of the Seychelles operation, The Seychelles Affair, was markedly critical of the South African establishment.

Personal life

Hoare married Elizabeth Stott in New Delhi in 1945 and together they had three children.

He left accountancy and ran a motor car business. In 1954, he motorcycled across Africa from Cape Town to Cairo. In 1958 he set up a safari business in the Kalahari and the Okavango delta. A keen sailor, he had a yacht in Durban, then later bought a 23 metre Baltic trader called Sylvia in which he sailed the Western Mediterranean for three years with his family and wrote a book about the travels.

After divorcing in 1961, he married airline stewardess Phyllis Sims in 1963 and they had two children.

The Irish-South African novelist Bree O'Mara (1968–2010) was his niece. She wrote an account of Hoare's adventures as a mercenary in the Congo, which remained unpublished at the time her death on Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771.

Hoare died on 2 February 2020 in a care facility in Durban at the age of 100.

Works by Mike Hoare

• Congo Mercenary, London: Hale (1967), ISBN 0-7090-4375-9; Boulder, CO: Paladin Press (reissue 2008, with new foreword), ISBN 978-1-58160-639-3; Durban: Partners in Publishing (2019)
• Congo Warriors, London: Hale (1991), ISBN 0-7090-4369-4; Boulder, CO: Paladin Press (reissue 2008, with new foreword, Durban: Partners in Publishing (2019);
• The Road to Kalamata: a Congo mercenary's personal memoir, Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books (1989), ISBN 0-669-20716-0; Boulder, CO: Paladin Press (reissue 2008, with new foreword, ISBN 978-1-58160-641-6); Durban: Partners in Publishing (2019)
• The Seychelles Affair, Bantam, ISBN 0-593-01122-8; Boulder, CO: Paladin Press (reissue 2008, with new foreword); Durban: Partners in Publishing (2019)
• Three Years with Sylvia, London: Hale, ISBN 0-7091-6194-8; Boulder, CO: Paladin Press (reissue 2010, with new foreword); Durban: Partners in Publishing (2019)
• Mokoro — A Cry for Help! Durban North: Partners In Publishing (2007), ISBN 978-0-620-39365-2
• Mike Hoare′s Adventures in Africa, Boulder, CO: Paladin Press (2010), ISBN 978-1-58160-732-1; Durban: Partners in Publishing (2019)
• The Last Days of the Cathars, Durban: Partners in Publishing (2012 and 2019)