From prison isolation to solitary Atlantic crossing; 'Wonga' coup plotter Simon Mann on battling mental illness

Sitting alone in his tiny cell in the African state of Equatorial Guinea, one of Simon Mann’s constant fears was that at any point he might be taken out and shot. The other was that he would be driven mad by the months of solitary confinement to which he had been sentenced for his part in the notorious 2004 ‘Wonga’ coup attempt against the country’s president.

As he paced his tiny cell, Mann, overcome by solitude and anxiety, contemplated suicide, before remembering his wife and children back home.

Banned as a political prisoner from receiving newspapers, one of his few pieces of reading material was a yachting magazine – and it was while reading this that he hit on an impossible dream: rowing across the sea to freedom.

Now, eight years after he was released, following a presidential pardon, the former soldier and mercenary is planning to do just that. Except this time, he intends to spend months on his own, braving Atlantic storms to row 3,000 nautical miles from Spain to the Caribbean, to raise money – for Princes William and Harry’s fight against mental illness.

“That’s the joke,” says Mann, now 65. “I spent 18 months in solitary worried about my mental health, and now I want to spend weeks on my own out at sea to raise money for mental health.”

Mann was arrested in Zimbabwe in March 2004 for his part in a plot to overthrow Equatorial Guinea’s president, Teodoro Obiang. The plot – which prosecutors said would have seen preferential oil rights granted by the new government to financiers linked to those involved with the coup – was funded in part by Sir Mark Thatcher, son of the former prime minister. Among those said to have stood to benefit from the oil deal was Ely Calil, a London-based Lebanese oil millionaire, though he denied knowing about the plot.

The plotters justification was that Obiang was a dictator whose overthrow would not be mourned by his people. Following his arrest at Harare airport, where he and his fellow plotters were loading £100,000 worth of weapons and equipment onto a Boeing 727, footage of Mann in chains and khaki cell clothes in the exercise yard of a maximum security prison was beamed around the world.

He spent four years in a Zimbabwean prison before being extradited to Equatorial Guinea, where he was sentenced to 34 years in jail and thrown into solitary confinement, until he was unexpectedly released on humanitarian grounds 18 months later, in November 2009.

“I didn’t know if I’d ever get out. Or if they would just hang me or take me out and shoot me,” he says. “I was very frightened of losing my mind.”

In prison Mann kept the prospect of going mad at bay with a strict regime. He would exercise daily, even when he was periodically put in chains – using the hatch in the door through which the guards would pass food to lever himself up. To keep his brain active and his mind stable, he would learn poems off by heart, particularly A.E Housman, after being allowed access to a few books, and would sketch flowers to send to his wife Amanda at home.

An account of his days in prison, from his book Cry Havoc, gives a sense of the intense isolation he experienced, cut off from the world. He writes: “There are times that I feel so lost and alone that I fear my sadness will stop my heart from beating... Suicide raises its head. I test myself: if they offered me a pill by which to willingly kill myself, would I take it? No, I answer, despite the thought that Yes might make things easier for Amanda and the children.”

Mann now says: “You have to learn how to become a prisoner, how to push time. Part of my strategy to stay sane was to keep my body fit and my mind occupied.”

Looking out of his cell window, Mann could see the ocean, and in his darkest moments began fantasising about escaping across the water. “I would dream of using a fold-up rowing boat that I’d hide somewhere,” he says.

After eighteen months in solitary confinement, however, adjusting to life as a free man with Amanda in their comfortable home in Hampshire was far from easy. He describes his nervousness at being reunited with her as akin to the anxiety he felt when they first dated.

‘I thought I was super fit and super strong. I wasn’t. It was hard to cope with family and family arrangements. I could only think about one thing at a time and I wanted Amanda all to myself.”

At first he struggled on, badly advised by a doctor not to have emotional therapy unless he ‘really needed it’. That time came some years later when things became very muddled. ‘I saw then the doctor’s advice had been wrong. I did need therapy, but then I couldn’t possibly see that I needed it.’ Today, as well as a number of business interests and speaking engagements he is writing a book about the process of putting himself back together and getting reaquainted with his seven children from two marriages, a large chunk of whose life he had missed.

The “crazy idea” to enter the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, however, came while he was still incarcerated and he read about in the copies of Yachting World passed to him by his guards. Next year, he will row around the Isle of Wight in preparation for the 2019 race.

Mann, whose son Jack served in the Household Cavalry’s Blues and Royals regiment and is a close friend of William and Harry, hopes to raise “a seven-figure sum” for the Heads Together initiative set up by the princes to help combat the stigma of mental illness. Mann, who served in the Scots Guards and SAS, and rejoined the army to fight in the first Gulf War says: “My grandfather fought in the First World War and my father in the Second, and they were massively traumatised. They hid it, but it came out in a disproportionate response to things like a dog barking.

“What the Princes have done is fantastic, to say: ‘Look, don’t be scared to talk about it because you’re not going to get better on your own.’ The act of talking about this stuff with someone else is massively healing.”

The mercenary turned businessman and public speaker says that society also needs to face up to the mental health issues likely to result from an ageing population.

“ I can reasonably expect to have another 30 years to live. How do you deal with the fact that time will be available to you?” he says. “Once you’ve stopped working, do you sit there waiting to die, or do you go out there do something?”

Crossing the Atlantic could take more than 80 days of gruelling, solitary, effort, accompanied by the ever present risk of capsize. Mann is sanguine about the prospect of leaving his family and spending so much time, once again, on his own, facing the mental as well as the physical challenge of reaching the other side without losing everything.

“People ask my son, Jack, whether my experience in prison had an effect on me, and he tells them: ‘He was crazy before he went inside’,” he said. “Perhaps this proves it.”