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'Mad Mike' Hoare, mercenary in Congo who later led a failed coup, dies at 100
 [WaPo] To his legions of admirers, Mike Hoare was a poetry-reading soldier of fortune who led an army of white mercenaries in Congo, freed missionaries from certain death and beat back a growing communist threat.He served with the British army in India and Myanmar, also known as Burma, during World War II, worked as an accountant in peacetime London and decamped to apartheid-era South Africa in search of adventure. He organized safaris, embarked on motorcycle expeditions that spanned the continent and searched for a legendary lost city in the Kalahari Desert. Mr. Hoare, who was 100 when he died Feb. 2, eventually found his calling as a mercenary, leading two 1960s campaigns in Congo. Covertly backed by the CIA, he and his men stifled a ragtag rebellion that U.S. policymakers deemed a Cold War menace. But while his soldiers were glamorized by the American press, other reports indicated they were little more than rifle-wielding thugs ‐ guilty of "serious excesses," as one CIA cable put it, that included "robbery, rape, murder and beatings." Those accusations did little to damage the public image of Mr. Hoare, who sometimes went by the military rank of colonel and said he had little tolerance for war crimes, even as he likened African nationalists to animals. His mercenary career ended two decades later after he spearheaded a failed coup in the Seychelles that landed him in a South African prison. "I think I’d like to have been born in the time of Sir Francis Drake," he once told The Washington Post. "Yes, out sailing, robbing the Spaniards, and when you brought the booty back to Queen Elizabeth, you knelt before her and she made you a knight. You were respectable ‐ even though you were a thief." Along with Bob Denard of France and Jean Schramme of Belgium, Mr. Hoare was one of several white mercenaries who made international headlines in post-colonial Africa, selling their services to rebel factions and anti-communist regimes. His death was announced by his son and biographer, Chris Hoare, who said Mr. Hoare died at a care facility in Durban, South Africa, but did not give a cause. Posted by: Frank G 2020-02-11 |
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