Thomas Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare (17 March 1919 – 2 February 2020) was a British-Irish military officer and mercenary who fought during the Simba rebellion and was involved in carrying out the 1981 Seychelles coup d'état attempt.

At the age of eight he was sent to school in England to Margate College and then commenced training for accountancy[4] and, as he was not able to attend Sandhurst, he joined the Territorial Army.

[7] He subsequently emigrated to Durban, Natal Province in the Union of South Africa where he later managed safaris and became a soldier-for-hire in various African countries.

Captured rebels were forced to walk across a minefield [...] The mercenaries had no problems burning entire villages to the ground and killing their populations."

To recruit his force, Hoare placed newspaper advertisements in Johannesburg and Salisbury (modern Harare, Zimbabwe) for physically fit white men capable of marching 20 miles per day who were fond of combat and were "tremendous romantics" to join 5 Commando.

[5] The moniker Mad Mike which was given to him by the British press suggested a "wildman" type of commander, but in fact Hoare was very strict and insisted the men of 5 Commando always be clean-shaven, keep their hair cut short, never swear and attend church services every Sunday.

[5] 5 Commando was a mixture of South Africans, Rhodesians, British, Belgians, Irish and Germans, the last of whom were mostly Second World War veterans who had arrived in the Congo wearing Iron Crosses.

[5] Racist views towards blacks were very common in 5 Commando, but in press interviews, Hoare denied allegations of atrocities against the Congolese.

[18] To the press, Hoare insisted that the 5 Commando were not mercenaries, but rather "volunteers" who were waging an idealistic struggle against Communism in the Congo.

[5] Hoare brought his men south and then turned north in a swiftly moving offensive, assisted with aircraft flown by Cuban emigres.

Venter who covered the Congo crisis wrote as Hoare advanced, "the fighting grew progressively more brutal" with few prisoners taken.

[21] Hoare and the 5 Commando are estimated to have saved the lives of 2,000 Europeans taken hostage by the Simbas, which made him famous around the world.

[5] Many of the hostages had been so badly treated as to barely resemble humans, which added to the fame of Hoare, who was presented in the Western press as a hero.

"[22] Hoare did not stop his men from sacking Stanleyville as the 5 Commando blew open the vaults of every bank and confiscated the alcohol in every tavern in the city.

[26] During the mid-1970s, Hoare was hired as technical adviser for the movie The Wild Geese,[27] the fictional story of a group of mercenary soldiers hired to rescue a deposed African president who resembled Tshombe while the central African nation the story was set in resembled the Congo.

At least one of the actors of the movie, Ian Yule, had been a mercenary commanded by Hoare, before which he had served in the British Parachute Regiment and Special Air Service (SAS).

[30] During November 1981, Hoare dubbed them "Ye Ancient Order of Froth Blowers" (AOFB) after a charitable English social club of the 1920s.

[31] The fighting started prematurely when one of Hoare's men accidentally got into the "something to declare" line at which the customs officer insisted on searching his bag.

One of Hoare's men pulled his own, disassembled AK-47 from the concealed compartment in the luggage, assembled it, loaded it and shot the escaping customs man before he could reach the other side of the building.

[30] In January 1982 an International Commission, appointed by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 496, inquired into the attempted coup d'état.

One of the mercenaries, an American veteran of the Vietnam War, was found not guilty of hijacking, as he had been seriously wounded in the firefight and was loaded aboard while sedated.

[30] Many of the other mercenaries, including the youngest of the group, Raif St Clair, were quietly released after serving three months of their six-month terms in their own prison wing.

A keen sailor, he had a yacht in Durban, then later bought a 23-metre Baltic trader named Sylvia in which he sailed the Western Mediterranean for three years with his family and wrote a book about the travels.

She wrote an account of Hoare's adventures as a mercenary in the Congo,[38] which remained unpublished at the time of her death on Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771.