Mad Mike Hoare

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

Hoare's account of the Seychelles operation, The Seychelles Affair, was markedly critical of the South African establishment. 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. In his last decades, Hoare had extensively studied the beliefs of the Cathars.

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. Tshombe paid the men of 5 Commando a sum of money equal to $1,100 U.S dollars per month. Hoare always argued that he was a "romantic" who was fighting in the Congo for martial "glory", and insisted that for him the money was irrelevant. Whatever may have been Hoare's motivation, his men showed rapacious greed in the Congo, being noted for their looting and a tendency to steal equipment from the United Nations forces in the Congo. Reflecting his pride in his Irish heritage, Hoare adopted a flying goose as the symbol of 5 Commando and called his men the Wild Geese after the famous Irish soldiers who fought for the Stuarts in exile in the 17th and 18th centuries. Hoare was known for coolness and courage under fire as he believed that the best way to inspire his men, some of whom wilted under fire, was to lead from the front. He crushed a mutiny in his commando by pistol-whipping the leader of the mutiny.

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.

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.

Now in 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:

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.

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 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 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.

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 of her death on Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771.

In 1964, Congolese Prime Minister Moïse Tshombe, his employer in Katanga, hired Hoare to lead a military unit called 5 Commando, Armée Nationale Congolaise 5 Commando (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. Tshombe distrusted General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the commander of the Armée Nationale Congolaise who had already carried two coups, and preferred to keep the Congolese Army weak even in the face of the Simba rebellion. Hence, Tshombe turned to mercenaries who already fought for him in Katanga to provide a professional military force.

Hoare led his men south and then turned north in a swiftly moving offensive, supported with aircraft flown by Cuban emigres. A particular specialty for Hoare was hijacking boats to take up the Congo river as he set about rescuing hostages from the Simbas. The Simbas were badly disciplined, poorly trained, and often not armed with modern weapons, and for all these reasons, the well-armed, -trained, and -disciplined 5 Commando had a shattering impact on the Simba rebellion. The British journalist A.J. Venter who covered the Congo crisis wrote as Hoare advanced, "the fighting grew progressively more brutal" with few prisoners taken. Hoare's advance was aided by the fact that the roads in the Congo left over from Belgian colonial rule were still usable in 1964-65. Hoare's men tended to collect the heads of Simbas and stick them to the sides of their jeeps.

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. After completing his service, he told the media that he estimated that 5 Commando had killed between 5,000-10,000 Simbas. The Simbas had been advised by Cuban officers, and one of them was the Argentine Communist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, which led to Hoare to claim he was the first man to have defeated Che Guevara.

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". Hoare relished the macho camaraderie and the chaos of war, telling one journalist "you can't win a war with choirboys".

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 in magazines such as Soldier of Fortune together with countless pulp novels that featured heroes clearly modeled after Hoare. The popular image of mercenaries fighting in Africa in 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 in with hair-raising adventures.

After divorcing in 1960, he married airline stewardess Phyllis Sims in 1961 and they had two children, Michael Jeremy and Simon.

He left accountancy and ran a motor car business. In 1954, he motorcycled across Africa from Cape Town to Cairo. In 1959 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 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. 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. In Durban, Hoare was restless and sought adventures by marathon walking, riding a motorcycle from Cape Town to Cairo 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, leading to his interest in becoming a mercenary.

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. Hoare's childhood hero was Sir Francis Drake. Aged 20 he joined the London Irish Rifles at the outbreak 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, by whom he had three children. A short man, Hoare was described by those who knew him as "dapper" and "charming".

Hoare married Elizabeth Stott in New Delhi in 1945 and together they had three children, Chris, Tim and Geraldine.

Thomas Michael Hoare (17 March 1919 – 2 February 2020), known as Mad Mike Hoare, was a British mercenary soldier who operated during the Simba rebellion, and attempted to conduct a coup d'état in the Seychelles.