Licensed to Kill (35 page)

It is fair to say that there was no direct quid pro quo between the provision of mercenaries and the granting of mineral concessions; after all, natural resources need significant development and management. However, having the same people involved in businesses in both areas raises some troubling issues. Cobuss Claassens, a former EO contractor who fought in Sierra Leone, finds it hard to believe that the thirst for valuable resources was not a driving force underlying the company's business model. After a hard fight to liberate the Kono diamond fields in Sierra Leone, he remembers Tony Buckingham arriving in midsummer 1995. “There he was sitting on the hood of the Land Rover wearing a forage cap and drinking a beer at ten o'clock in the morning, while all these geologists he had brought in were showing him chunks of laterite to show how rich the diamond field was.” After seeing that, the connection between the acquisition of precious resources and the use of privatized warfare were cemented in Claassens's mind. Further, a 1995 classified British Defence Intelligence Staff report concluded, “It appears that the company and its associates are able to barter their services for a large share in the employing nation's natural resources and commodities.”

Mann and Buckingham had done well for the countries of Angola and Sierra Leone, and had generated a significant profit from EO. Unfortunately for them the “Have Gun, Will Travel” image of the company had triggered soon to be crippling antimercenary legislation in South Africa, making future potential clients nervous. Their solution was to go upmarket, create a new company with high-profile, first-world leadership, which would then simply subcontract the heavy lifting to the South Africans who had made up EO. Once again, Simon Mann contacted his old friend Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer.

Sandline

In the time since Mann had first asked Tim Spicer to join Executive Outcomes, Spicer had retired from the military and moved on to a lackluster career in the financial world. In their initial meetings, Mann sold Spicer on his new vision to have a new “private military company,” or PMC, designed to add a more palatable layer of Western executive management to outsource the more mercenary concept of EO.

Spicer admitted to me that maybe he was a little naïve about setting up the new iteration of Executive Outcomes. “I was only eleven months out of the military. I had no benefit of hindsight…. It was a risk, but I had been offered a job in the security industry.” Simon offered Spicer about twice what he had made in the army, plus arranged for a loan so Spicer could buy a new Aston Martin. Spicer took the job and set about laying the groundwork for the new company. “I went to visit EO in Sierra Leone. The new company was to be a separate organization. We were going to set it up, and it was going to be onshore. There was a discussion of the moral aspect. Anyone who has talked about Sandline agreed it had to be legitimate.” Although the official version is that Buckingham, Mann, and Spicer first conceived of Sandline during lunch at Chelsea's La Famiglia restaurant in October 1996, inside sources indicate that Tim Spicer had actually begun negotiations on what would come to be Sandline's first contract as early as May 1996, almost seven months earlier.

In the spring of 1996, Richard Bethell (Lord Westbury) and his company DSL had been working in Papua New Guinea (PNG) but had not been terribly impressed with the government's willingness or ability to make payments on their mining security contract. The government had been in a financial crisis since 1989 when secessionist-minded locals on the island of Bougainville (the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, or BRA), irate over the flow of money and resources going away from the local community to enrich the central government, shut down the massive Panguna copper mine. Mishandling of the dispute led to nearly a decade of civil war. Since Panguna had generated nearly half of PNG's hard currency when fully operational, control of the mine was a key strategic objective. When the government asked about DSL's ability to solve this problem, Richard simply passed the inquiry on to his friend Simon Mann. Tim Spicer's first task as head of Sandline was to bring in this bit of business.

Almost immediately, Spicer began communicating with the cash-strapped government of Papua New Guinea about their security problems. Considering the output of the Panguna mine when it was operational, the right negotiations could generate a flow of income that would dwarf any deals Tony had made in Angola or Sierra Leone. The autonomy demands of the island residents and the underlying problem that had led to the shutdown and sabotage of the mine were never a consideration.

During the early discussions with PNG, Spicer used the stationery of Plaza 107, Grunberg's real estate management/business advisory company. Only after it became clear that PNG had the potential to turn into a major contract did they begin to reconsider how this opportunity could best be exploited. Spicer and Mann went to a designer down the hall from Grunberg's office and slapped together a business card and stationery using the name Sandline. The logo they designed for Sandline was essentially little more than two scribbles, almost perfectly symbolizing how quickly companies can be put together to meet a lucrative opportunity.

Though evidence indicates that work on what would eventually become a Sandline operation had begun long before the October 1996 lunch cited by Spicer in his autobiography, that does not mean that the La Famiglia restaurant meeting was of no importance. The first appearance of the term “private military company” in the media a few weeks after the lunch suggests that the conversation may have revolved around a public relations strategy to recast the role of mercenary in what would become one of the most significant developments in hundreds of years of privatized warfighting. EO had tried to develop a new, corporatized model for soldiers-for-hire, but the apartheid-era taint and fear of unrestrained private armies remained. Part of the solution was to rebrand the concept by using EO's Rolodex from behind Sandline's superficial sheen of respectable leadership. The bigger initiative required an aggressive public relations strategy that would alter public perception of the entire concept of mercenaries. While much of the shift may look like mere semantics, the deliberate change in language usage either represents a significant theoretical development, or intentional spin.

The principals involved began working to rebrand a politically correct band of soldiers-for-hire as a “private military company,” and the word “mercenary” was to be replaced with “contractor.” It was to be the new enlightened age of the mercenary. The Sandline sales pitch always privately included the two EO success stories, though Grunberg would work to maintain the public perception of a firewall between Sandline and EO. In a demonstration of their quest for legitimacy and business expansion, in November 1996, EO hired retired U.S. Special Forces Colonel Bernie McCabe as director of Sandline's American office. With a highly respected career as a Delta commander in his past, McCabe could use his contacts and position of authority to generate new business from American clients for Sandline. Before Sandline could start cultivating the Americans for business, however, the men would have to prove themselves.

Spicer's careful cultivation of a possible opportunity in PNG finally paid off in December 1996, when he was given $250,000 to do a security survey on how to quell the rebellion and allow PNG to reopen the mine. He came back to the government with a $36-million estimate for logistics, weapons and manpower, a sum that PNG did not possess.

On January 6, 1997, Spicer met with Prime Minister Julius Chan to convince him that a speedy and covert action to retake Panguna would result in positive results in the upcoming elections. Although there was no budget item for the mercenary operation, called “Operation Oyster,” Michael Grunberg showed Chan how cutting a series of smaller checks would let him escape the need for a parliamentary vote. Much of the money came from cutbacks in current budgets, and half of the amount was to be paid up front. The contract's stated purpose was to “train the State's Special Forces Unit [SFU] in tactical skills specific to the objective; gather intelligence to support effective deployment and operations; conduct offensive operations in Bougainville in conjunction with PNG Defence Forces to render the BRA military ineffective and repossess the Panguna mine; and provide follow-up operational support, to be further specified and agreed between the parties and is subject to separate service provision levels and fee negotiation.” Tim Spicer signed the contract, along with South African EO member Nick van den Bergh as “consultant.” The players behind EO and the company called Sandline were fused contractually and conceptually, though still publicly separated.

Concurrently, negotiations began for Tony Buckingham to purchase depressed shares of the now shuttered but soon-to-be-liberated Panguna mine. Buckingham faxed a letter to PNG's minister of defense about how he currently held $200 million worth of investments, specifically mentioning Sierra Leone and Angola, and stating that “all of the investment has been into the extraction of mineral resources (oil, copper, diamonds, gold) and all have involved high risk security/military situations.” Once again, the parallel tracks of mineral resources and mercenaries were being laid in another country. Without Sandline, there would be no prospect of a reopened mine, and without Tony's direct offer of investment and potential continued provision of security, there would be no payoff.

On February 7, Nick van den Bergh and the first South African mercenaries arrived to begin the training and operational phase, and soon the entire contingent of forty-four had arrived. On Feburary 19, the PNG government mentioned to the Australian government that they had paid for a training program from what was essentially Executive Outcomes. The news was leaked to the Australian press. An uproar began, and the Australian government—which considers PNG within their sphere of influence—pressured the PNG government to get rid of the mercenaries.

The PNG military, which was shocked to find that the cash-strapped government had planned to pay foreign mercenaries $36 million for a three-month operation, began to plot against Chan's leadership. The head of the PNGDF (PNG Defence Forces), Jerry Singarok, decided to round up the Sandline and EO contractors and deport them. At the same time, their leader Tim Spicer would be arrested and jailed. On March 16, they sprang into action. The mercenaries who were already billeted on a military base were quickly put on a plane and flown out of the country. Tim Spicer was lured to a meeting and then roughly forced into detention. Singarok demanded that Chan and his defense and deputy prime minister resign because they had taken kickbacks. Chan responded by firing Singarok, but to defuse the situation, Singarok resigned. As a result, Singarok's soldiers poured into the streets in his support as the situation rolled toward total meltdown. The Sandline operation had accidentally pushed the country to the brink of a military coup.

Despite the government's crackdown to control the fallout of the scandal, massive outcry by citizens still pushed for Chan and his government to step down. The governor general of PNG even took out a newspaper ad accusing the government of corruption. The Australian government threatened to cut off all aid, and finally, on March 25, Chan resigned. Without even firing a shot, Sandline had in effect deposed the government it had been hired to protect.

Spicer was quickly released from jail after Michael Grunberg arrived with a large satchel of money and the UK government got involved. PNG dropped the cursory charges of possessing a pistol and 30 bullets, and Spicer quickly exited the country before his fortunes reversed again. After conducting an investigation, Papua New Guinea's chief ombudsman, Simon Pentanu, described the hiring of Sandline as a “criminal act” and a decision by leaders who were “quite mad.”

Despite the dramatic failure of the endeavor, Spicer still defends his Project Oyster as simply misunderstood. He claims PNG was not a planned mercenary operation, but rather a legitimate support and training gig in which the PNG Defence Forces were supposed to do the fighting, and Sandline would provide the skills and resources to guarantee success. Even though they had not completed the operation, Sandline pursued legal recourse to get their full payment. By May of 1999, Sandline's lawyer, Richard Slowe, and his firm, JS Berwin, had negotiated a settlement with PNG that was paid off in increments.

Tim Spicer was not slowed down by his failure in PNG and quickly moved on to another project, one that would ultimately turn out to cause an even bigger scandal and nearly bring down the British government in its wake.

Rakesh Saxena, a fiftysomething fugitive financier of Indian origins and Thai nationality, had a problem with the government of Sierra Leone. The former prime minister, Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, had promised Saxena generous mineral concessions but had been deposed before the rights could be exploited. Saxena thought he had an easy solution: depose the upstart coup-installed government of Johnny Paul Koroma and restore the democratically elected Kabbah to power so he could exercise his mining options. Saxena had become aware of Sandline's activities through the PNG scandal and thought they might be an outfit that could help. He contacted Spicer and contracted him at $70,000 to formulate a plan on how to accomplish his objective.

From the beginning, it was clear that this would be an interesting project. When Tim Spicer arrived in Vancouver, B.C., for his first meeting, he was briefly detained and questioned by the Canadian police about the purpose of his visit. When Spicer arrived at Saxena's oceanfront apartment, he couldn't help but notice Saxena was surrounded by Serbian bodyguards, who each reportedly earned $10,000 a week. It appeared that Saxena was under court-mandated but self-financed house arrest.

Although Saxena was not technically a criminal, he had been arrested at a business meeting in a luxury off-season ski resort in Whistler, Canada, on July 7, 1996. Freed on $2-million bail, he was fighting extradition for embezzling money from a Thai bank. He complained that many of his assets were frozen, making him that much more eager to get his hands on Sierra Leone's mineral resources. Despite his hardship, Saxena committed to pay $10 million to the Kabbah government in exile, which Kabbah would then use to pay Sandline to restore him to power. Saxena could only scrounge up $1.5 million immediately, but Spicer decided that was sufficient to get the plan under way.