In a fresh roundup, I came across a random film of the day — The Wild Geese (1978). I roughly knew the plot: mercenaries rescue an African president, their employer abandons them, the plane leaves without them. I started with the boring part — the credits. Under “military and technical consultant” was a man who, in 1981, tried to stage a coup in the Seychelles and went to prison.
Then it got more interesting. The same consultant’s assistant on the film was his future deputy in the coup. The man who introduced the consultant to the producer was also in the film — and received no credit for it. There is no gap at all here between a movie about mercenaries and mercenaries themselves: it is one list of names.
I went looking for a direct connection in the other direction — that the film inspired someone and sent them off to war. I found none. But I found something more interesting.
The title is not a bird metaphor. “Wild Geese” (Flight of the Wild Geese) refers to the departure of the Irish Jacobite army for France under the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, and more broadly to Irishmen serving in foreign armies for three centuries afterward. Under the treaty, soldiers had three options: swear allegiance to William III and remain, join his army, or leave for France with their weapons and banners. More than 14,000 men left, along with another 4–6 thousand wives, children, and camp followers. There was not enough transport; officers sharply restricted the number of noncombatants, and at the Limerick docks, contemporary accounts suggest, scenes unfolded that are described as scenes of desperation.
More than two centuries later, Yeats used the name in a poem about the futility of sacrifice — “September 1913”: “Was it for this the wild geese spread / The grey wing upon every tide.” The word thus carried reproach from the start, not romance.
Mike Hoare, Irish by descent, a former British Army officer and hereditary accountant, took the name and the patch for 5 Commando in the Congo in 1964. That was what his men came to be called, while Simba units had a simpler name for them — Les Affreux, “the Terrible Ones”: the rebels’ magic charms did not turn bullets into water, and the nickname grew out of disappointment. Fame came after Stanleyville, where the “geese” pulled more than 1,800 Europeans and Americans out of the city.
Filming took place in South Africa in the summer and autumn of 1977: Tshipise in the Northern Transvaal, a camp at a former spa hotel, studio work at Twickenham near London. The South African army supplied the military hardware, while some special weapons were brought in from Britain — and this is where it gets interesting. Producer Euan Lloyd recalled: “Even though the stuff could not fire live ammunition, the British Government held it up for weeks because it was going to South Africa.” On 4 November 1977, at the height of preparations, the UN Security Council imposed a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa (Resolution 418). Prop weapons for a film passed through the same bureaucracy as real guns.
The casting of the Irishman Hoare as consultant was arranged by local actor Ian Yule — an actual soldier of fortune, who had fought in the Congo at the end of the campaign and was cast as Sergeant Tosh. Hoare repaid him in his own way: he recommended him to Lloyd as his assistant and weapons instructor. Yule played two roles at once — one on screen and one behind the scenes — and was left uncredited: “You don’t wear two hats on a major project because it upsets someone. I was never officially announced and I didn’t get a credit, so half the guys on set thought I was sticking my nose in where it didn’t belong.”
The third man in this chain was Tullio Moneta — “Chifambausiku,” “the one who walks at night” in Zulu, a veteran of 5 Commando, badly wounded by a Claymore mine in the Congo. By the time of filming, he was a South African actor with two dozen films behind him, usually cast as “heavies.” Hoare made him his military assistant.
By all accounts, Hoare treated the set like a training camp. John Kani, already a Tony winner by then, recalled: “The mad colonel took an incredible interest in this... He was really making a soldier out of me.” Once, Kani was talking to Hoare, having left his rifle by a tree, and got shouted at: “You are married to that rifle. A soldier never, never puts down his weapon.” The director, according to Kani, looked at the result and said: “God, you look like the real thing.”
The South African premiere was on 28 June 1978, before the London premiere (6 July, Royal Film Performance) and the British release (17 September). The advertising promised “50 battle-hardened mercenaries,” and no one needed the Zaire parallel spelled out: General Ndofa was a disguised Mobutu, the captive President Limbani was Moise Tshombe.
The cast was integrated, which in South Africa in 1977 did not mean a gesture of goodwill but a risk. Kani and Winston Ntshona — Broadway-level stars — initially turned down the roles when they heard the film was about mercenaries, then accepted after reading the script. Kani: “We were warned: please don’t walk around at night. The local whites are not happy at all... there was a danger that we might be killed. That was the atmosphere.”
The London premiere was picketed by anti-apartheid protesters; Lloyd arrived carrying newspaper clippings about the film being shown in Soweto, where, according to those reports, it had been received enthusiastically. In Dublin, cinemas were picketed by the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement. Gene Siskel called the film “the dog of the year,” “deadly dull,” and accused it of “exploiting racism as a spectator sport,” while Hardy Krüger believed until the end of his life that the director had chopped up his role for pacing. At the same time, in Germany, the film received the Golden Screen award for selling three million tickets.
Hoare, according to the record, approved of the film and called it a realistic depiction of the mercenary subculture. Real veterans of 5 Commando appeared as extras.
In 1978, as the film was only just coming out, Hoare received an offer brought to him by Seychellois exiles and the deposed president James Mancham. Thus began the operation known as “Angela” to South African agencies and as “Anvil” to its participants.
At first glance, Hoare’s plan looks like a theatrical production. Fly in on a charter from Swaziland, pass for members of a charitable beer club and, at the same time, rugby players; pack Kalashnikov rifles into the false bottoms of bags, filling the empty spaces with stuffed toys for local orphanages — Hoare specifically ordered the toys as bulky as possible, to offset the weight of the weapons. Then disperse to hotels, wait until President René left for Paris, and simultaneously seize parliament, the radio station, police headquarters, the airport, and the barracks. Hoare did not ask the SADF for live weapons but for stun grenades: he wanted a bloodless coup.
He took the cover name from a real London society — Ye Ancient Order of Froth Blowers. It was a genuine charity, active from 1924 to 1931: a five-shilling subscription, silver cufflinks, the motto “Lubrication in Moderation,” local chapters called “vats,” men “froth blowers,” women “fairies.” By the end of 1928 it had 700,000 members and had raised more than a hundred thousand pounds for hospital beds and holidays for East End children.
It fell apart after the death of its patron, the surgeon Alfred Fripp, and its founder, Bert Temple — both died in 1931. Half a century later, Hoare brought back precisely this dead club from oblivion.
The whole thing failed because of a fruit. Of the 47 men, nearly all cleared customs, and the delay came over exactly something unrelated: a French Creole who had boarded the plane in the Comoros had lychees in his bag — fruit forbidden from import into the Seychelles. They searched him, he caused a scene and yelled that he was being searched only because he was Creole, then demanded that they search “those men over there.” Customs officers, worked up by the argument, went after Kevin Beck — and noticed the bag’s overly rigid bottom. Beck punched a customs officer in the jaw, and Peter Duffy jumped into the bus with the message: “They found an AK in a bag. The masquerade is over, boys.”
Then came six hours of fighting at Pointe Larue Airport. At exactly the point where precision was needed, everything went crooked: a shot at the fleeing guard Esparon went awry, the guard managed to lock a door and raise the alarm, while the bullet went through a glass door and killed one of their own — Johan Fritz, a 24-year-old paratrooper from SADF 2 Reconnaissance Regiment. The mercenaries’ only fatality was their own man; the second dead man was a Seychellois soldier. The assault groups had two magazines per man left, the barracks — with Tanzanian machine guns around the perimeter — held out, and an armoured reconnaissance vehicle blocked the gates.
In the middle of the battle, Air India, Flight 224 came in to land — a Boeing 707 from Salisbury to Bombay, carrying 13 crew and 65 passengers. They managed to block the runway with trucks, but the aircraft was already too close and landed, clipping an obstacle with its wing. Within minutes, the mercenaries seized it and forced the captain to fly to Durban.
A few days after the failure, TIME wrote: “The men who bungled the Seychelles coup are a new generation of Hoare’s legendary ‘Wild Geese’: would-be soldiers of fortune, generally of right-wing persuasion.” It also quoted Douglas Lord, a South African veteran of the Congo campaign: “They were goslings, not real Wild Geese. Perhaps that’s why they messed up. But the fact is, there are more potential Wild Geese around now than there were in the sixties.”
The pay, according to contemporary reporting: $1,000 apiece for overthrowing the left-wing regime, with another $10,000 promised in the event of success. TIME noted separately that most participants probably did not know who was behind the contract.
Hoare recruited his core in Durban — where soldiers from the Rhodesian Army had settled after the Rhodesian War ended, with no place for them back home. The Hoare family website specifically debunks the urban legend about the Riviera Hotel pub where the coup was supposedly planned: “Many people in Durban will still say today that it was in that pub that Mike planned the coup and recruited men. Of course, that was not so” — though one man in his inner circle, Barney Carey, did indeed use the pub as a network.
The real meeting took place at the Coastlands apartments on Durban’s beachfront. One of the twelve Rhodesians later wrote that Hoare was “well dressed and spry despite his sixty-two years,” with “infectious optimism, an Irish gift of the gab and an erudite discourse on how the red threat was inexorably spreading across Africa.” Everyone signed up except one.
And here it is worth returning to where I began. Tullio Moneta — that very assistant military consultant on the film — commanded Group “A” in the Seychelles and was Hoare’s deputy; he received five years for the attempted coup. As a consultant on the film, he had been responsible for making the mercenary image on screen look convincing. Three years later, he was doing the same thing, only without a camera.
Indirect confirmation that the operation’s vocabulary came from the past rather than the film: according to accounts of Hoare’s memoirs, the code word for communicating with Seychellois exile Gérard Hoarau was “Cloudburst.” In the real Order of Froth Blowers, “Cloudburst” was an honorary title awarded to activists for recruiting new members. I cannot claim that this was a deliberate reference, and I fully allow for coincidence, but it looks like the work of a man who had read the order’s history, not merely its name.
Durban police arrested Hoare and the others the moment they arrived. And this is where you can see how a state counts its own. The charge was not attempted coup but offences connected to the aircraft; in Pretoria, five men including Hoare were charged not with hijacking — which under South African law carried a mandatory sentence of five to thirty years — but with kidnapping, “a lesser crime without mandatory punishment.” TIME acidly noted that even that charge might not stick: “the mercenaries apparently had no intention of holding the passengers for ransom.”
Then Defence Minister Magnus Malan intervened. He invoked Section 29(1) of the General Law Amendment Act and barred twenty-five defendants and witnesses — all serving or reserve SADF personnel — from testifying about their involvement in army operations until 24 November 1981. Without their testimony, only eight of the forty-three defendants remained before the court. The other thirty-four received five years, with four suspended — effectively six months — and were released after four for good behaviour. Hoare received ten years; the judge called him “a man without principles with an extremely frivolous attitude towards the truth,” and he was released in May 1985 after serving three years, under a general amnesty.
The Seychellois court was harsher: four men — Aubrey Brooks, Gerry Puren, Bernard Carey, and Roger England — were sentenced to death for treason in July 1982; NIS agent Martin Dolinchek received twenty years. In mid-1983, all six were pardoned and deported to South Africa — after the South African government paid President René three million dollars. Pik Botha later confirmed the payment in testimony before a commission, though he could not recall the exact sum and put it at roughly twenty million rand.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission ultimately put it this way: the operation “was conducted by senior operatives of the NIS and military intelligence in collusion with elements within the SADF”; it was a violation of international law and an infringement upon Seychellois sovereignty. Of the fifty-four participants, only eleven had no connection either to the SADF or to Rhodesian military structures. The other forty-three were twenty-five South Africans from reconnaissance regiments and eighteen former members of the Selous Scouts, SAS, Rhodesian Light Infantry, and Special Branch. Some reservists from 2 Reconnaissance Regiment said they joined the operation because they received call-up papers: they believed they were acting with state sanction, and the documents confirmed it.
The British press gave the fiasco a name that outlived every court ruling: “the package-holiday coup.”
In 1984, Richard Burton, who played Faulkner, was preparing to return to the role in a sequel — and died a few days before filming began. Roger Moore refused (“The Wild Geese worked because it was logical. Sending Hess to Spandau is not a logical choice”), and Wild Geese II (1985) had to be built around the hero’s brother, played by Edward Fox, with the mission now to get Rudolf Hess out of Spandau Prison for a press interview. The film flopped. Daniel Carney, the author of the novel, died in 1987 at forty-three; his widow banned reprints, and the books nearly vanished from circulation — the novel The Wild Geese was published at all only because Lloyd bought the rights and, in exchange, published a manuscript that no one had previously wanted.
Ian Yule, that real mercenary who brought Hoare into cinema and went uncredited, died in December 2020 in Chichester. In mid-December 2015, he flew into Heathrow from South Africa in poor health and with no money — carrying a bag, knobkerries, and a couple of shirts and sets of underwear. He was met by a volunteer moved by his situation, who cared for him for two months; later, veterans’ organisations helped with treatment for his heart condition and arthritis. Hoare died in February 2020 in a Durban nursing home, having lived to be one hundred.
Now for what does not add up. I looked for a coherent figure for the number of participants and found none: sources on the same event give 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 52, and 54 men. Wikipedia lists 43 defendants but puts the force at 53–54; TIME cites Seychellois authorities, who counted 52; the Hoare website and GlobalSecurity say 46; Russian accounts based on the memoirs say 47; Hoare himself called his men “50 froth blowers.” Every source counts its own subset: those who landed in Durban, those arrested on the island, those included in the sentence, everyone involved at all. An operation conceived as a controlled experiment modelled on someone else’s success has no agreed participant count to this day.
The second thing that does not add up is the payment. The nearest contemporary source, TIME in December 1981, says $1,000 plus a promised $10,000. A Russian account of the memoirs speaks of fees ranging from $10,000 to $40,000 depending on experience. An American essayist examining Hoare’s psychology writes that he agreed to work without an advance at all and covered part of the expenses out of his own pocket, something he had never done before. Three incompatible pictures, and not one has been refuted by documents.
And the main thing — the reason to pin down this rough edge: I found no evidence that the film recruited anyone. The phrase “goslings, not real Wild Geese” works against the simple version of cinema as a recruitment poster: these men followed Hoare, call-up papers, and money. Something else coincided, and that coincidence is more precise than any causality: in 1977, the same men on a set in the Transvaal rehearsed what a mercenary ought to look like; in 1981, at Pointe Larue Airport, those same men tested what he looked like in reality. Plausibility turned out to be a profession.