Watch Out

If so, he should have known better. After a more than a decade supplying South African mercenaries for African wars, he had been given South African citizenship on condition that he would lead a quiet life. According to one source he was removed to a safe house and debriefed thoroughly about his past before being allowed his passport. Recruiting mercenaries was now illegal in South Africa, which wanted to rid itself of its old reputation as a haven for “dogs of war”.

“They told him that he must not be involved in any military adventures any more. He agreed,” says a South African with connections in the intelligence world.

Yet Mann passed paperwork to Morgan and dined with him 22 times in the months before the coup. After large tumblers of pink gin they moved on to steaks and heavy red wine, chatting lightly and cracking jokes. One moment it was trivial, then Mann would slip in serious questions. A thinly disguised discussion of his plot followed. It was, recalls Morgan, as if Mann were writing a film script and discussing fictional characters, not plotting a real event. Mann half-jokingly threatened to kill Morgan if he leaked a word. The next minute, however, he was asking for advice.

Morgan passed on information, documents and detailed warnings to South African officials. He produced 10 intelligence reports about a coup — or, as he termed it, a “catalyst for regime change” — in Equatorial Guinea. These were read by South African intelligence, an organisation that, working under a black government, was eager to distance itself from the sinister Boss security service of the apartheid era.

Morgan faced a moral quandary. Although he helped to foil the coup plot, and thus helped South Africa’s government score an impressive intelligence victory, strengthening its moral credentials in the region, he effectively betrayed friends who believed they could trust him. However one judges this morally, the coup was doomed from the start.

Into this intrigue fell the luckless — and apparently clueless — figure of Mark Thatcher. None of the plotters trusted or liked him enough to tell him what was really going on, but they were happy to take his money.

Although others went to prison, he ended up as the most high-profile casualty — poorer by hundreds of thousands of pounds, branded a felon, divorced, barred from America where his children live and even asked to move on by the Monaco authorities when he attempted to settle there.

How did he get himself into this mess? The story of the Wonga Coup has been much enjoyed by students of coup plots, African adventures and high jinks in the tropics. But Thatcher’s role has never been fully explained.

Like a man waving a golf club in a thunderstorm, Mark Thatcher invites intense and unwelcome attention. In conversation he can be affable enough, though aggressive, too. When thinking hard he puffs out his cheeks and glares. In the course of three interviews with me he joked that any unflattering comments published about him would lead to my needing “a new dental surgeon”, and if I dared identify him with the Equatorial Guinea plot I would end up “as Mr Stumpy” — walking around on stumps for legs.

EQUATORIAL Guinea, a tiny former Spanish colony, might reasonably claim to be the most wretched nation on earth. It sits in the armpit of Africa, divided between a square of mainland territory and a scattering of islands. Almost nobody has a good word for it. If you see a man limping on both legs, quipped one American ambassador, you know he has been to Equatorial Guinea.

Senior churchmen and politicians talk of the “magical powers” of its rulers; there are said to be regular witch-burnings. Most commentators rank Obiang Nguema, its president, as one of the worst leaders anywhere in the world. But he is also an extremely rich man thanks to the oil reserves found in abundance around his islands.

The Cape Town plotters planned to replace Obiang with an exiled Guinean politician, Severo Moto, and then to keep such a grip on the weak new government that they would be able to run the nation like a company, reaping huge rewards from their “investment”.