AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
The cat and the coup rerelease4/2/2023 ![]() The captain of the hijacked plane, Umesh Saxena, published his own book about the misadventure. “There was no point in being a dead hero,” he wrote. They were leaving the Seychelles on that passenger plane, and he was coming with them. In Hoare’s telling, his own men informed him that the coup was over. With assistance from shadowy South African intelligence operatives, he signed up men - “tough, adventurous and ready to take an almighty risk” - who agreed to go to battle for an advance of $1,000 each.Īs the plot quickly unraveled inside the airport, a passenger plane whose vacationers were oblivious to the tumult on the ground landed on the darkened Mahé runway. He made the false-bottom suitcases and designed the Froth Blowers’ logo himself - a foaming mug of beer with the group’s initials. He was able to raise only $300,000, he wrote.īut, resourceful and clever, and with a taste for the theatrical, Hoare pressed on with his D.I.Y. ![]() He estimated he would need $5 million to overthrow the Seychelles government. Hoare lived for adventure, and despite his recent time as an accountant, or maybe because of it, he launched “a cut-price coup,” as he described it in his book. Hoare was a passionate anti-Marxist, but politics were only part of the allure. Hoare was decades removed from his high-flying years as a soldier for hire in Congo when, as he recounted it, a well-dressed gentleman, whom he referred to as Monsieur X, approached him at a dinner party in Durban, got him behind a grand piano and, in hushed tones, made him a proposition: How would he like to overthrow the Seychelles government? “I had no choice,” Hoare, the group’s ringleader, wrote. In the mayhem, one Froth Blower fatally shot another. And, well, so much for the plans.Ī fellow mercenary threw the security guard up against the wall gunfire broke out and tourists scattered. ![]() Now the same security guard looked more closely at the next suitcase, which happened to belong to a Froth Blower. But then an airport security guard stopped that French tourist in the customs line and found the tropical contraband in his bag, according to “The Seychelles Affair,” Hoare’s memoir about the debacle. ![]() 25, 1981, Hoare and his Froth Blowers had come to this far-flung island in the middle of the Indian Ocean to overthrow France-Albert René, the Marxist president of the Seychelles. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |