Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (61 page)

The abductions from Nancy’s Bar signaled just how much had changed. ExxonMobil had been warned.

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he seven kidnapped ExxonMobil expatriate contract workers were threatened by their kidnappers but not beaten during their first ten days in captivity. They slept in a makeshift camp deep in the Delta’s palm-shrouded swamps, where muddy creeks and eddies snaked through thick, humid foliage. The kidnappers seemed to be heavy drug users and often preoccupied themselves by getting high. They fed their victims rice and water, but the men felt hot during the day, cold at night, and wet perpetually. They kept up their morale by talking about food and soccer. Their captors opened talks by cell phone with Sparrows’s chief executive and with Victor Attah, the Akwa Ibom governor, a full-faced man who espoused Christian principles, wore business suits, promoted grandiose shopping mall and golf course developments, and owned a luxury home in Lagos. Typically, governors were called in to mediate ransom agreements; it was presumed across the Delta that leading politicians and their security forces often took a piece of the action, although Attah himself had not presided over a kidnapping industry in Akwa Ibom.

In Lagos, ExxonMobil security officers and counterparts from the affected contractor companies formed a crisis management cell and met daily. ExxonMobil retained Controlled Risk Group, one of the major kidnapping management and security firms operating in the Delta. The consultants advised that it was important to “have only one channel of communication between the kidnappers and the government.” Typically, kidnappers would use their victims’ cell phones to reach out to family members to negotiate, issue threats, and raise pressure on the employers. Controlled Risk contacted the families of the victims, passed along cell phone numbers that might be used in this way, and urged the family members not to answer. The Exxon crisis cell also urged Governor Attah to persuade the kidnappers to allow a delivery of humanitarian supplies to the hostages.

The British Foreign Office took a leading role. Washington involved itself as well. After September 11, the State Department set up an enhanced interagency crisis response team that could rapidly deploy to help governments respond to hostage takings, particularly those involving Americans. By 2006 the team had drilled for just the sort of crisis that ExxonMobil now faced. But the idea that American and British intelligence and security officers might parachute into Nigeria to sort out hostage crises made the Nigerian government “uneasy,” as a State Department official involved put it. It did not thrill ExxonMobil, either. The corporation’s security officers were at times reluctant to share information about kidnappings-in-progress with the American government, fearing that sensitive details might be released under the Freedom of Information Act or otherwise leak to the media, compromising negotiations. “Unless serious injury is imminent, companies prefer to negotiate without Embassy intervention unless intervention could be discreet,” a cable to Washington from Abuja reported.

Ransom negotiations reached an impasse and the kidnappers panicked. They beat the four Scotsmen with sticks and slapped them around with machetes. They handed them cell phones and ordered them to tell their corporate bosses that they were “in danger of being shot.”

One morning, the kidnappers beat Graeme Buchan again and then handed him a cell phone. One of the youths threatened him with a loaded gun and instructed him to report, falsely, that his fellow captive, Paul Smith, a father of two, had died of malaria—and that the others were at risk of imminent death as well. “I’m afraid the gun at my head might have uncovered a talent for acting I didn’t know I had,” Buchan said later.
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The kidnappers called Governor Attah to report that Paul Smith had died. Attah was furious, he recalled; the death of a British kidnapping victim snatched from ExxonMobil’s fenced compound would devastate Akwa Ibom’s reputation for business and development. “I do not talk to criminals,” he snapped, as he recalled it. He hung up and ordered an aide to send a message to the kidnapper who had telephoned: “Tell him I hope he knows the cost of transporting a corpse from wherever it is back to the man’s home country, because the man will want the body brought back to be buried.” The governor hoped, he said later, that he might unnerve and rattle the kidnappers with this hard-line attitude.
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In Scotland, British police soon arrived at Paul Smith’s home to convey the news of his death to his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Paula. Their elder son, Jordan, who was four years old, “was suspicious” of why the police had turned up, and so that night, Paula, devastated, decided to tell the boy the truth. “Daddy is just like the Lion King,” she explained. “He’s gone to heaven now and you won’t see him again.”
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The reported death did accelerate ransom negotiations. ExxonMobil maintained a firm public line against payments, but its declared policy could not constrain either its contracting corporations or the governor of Akwa Ibom. Attah recalled that he was besieged by calls from the American, British, Romanian, Malaysian, and Indonesian embassies—they pressed him so hard to resolve the kidnapping that he found it difficult to actually carry out the negotiations. In the end, he conceded, he authorized a ransom payment. It is not clear what advice ExxonMobil offered about this decision or whether it endorsed the payments or supplied funds. As to the kidnappers, Attah said, “They were some misguided boys from my state” who had “invited” and “escorted” elements of a more experienced, hard-core kidnapping gang from another Delta state to attack the ExxonMobil compound.
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State Department officials working with major American oil companies found by 2006 that they “diverged in our paths” on the Delta kidnapping issue, the State official recalled. “They would pay ransoms, and then we felt that was just actually contributing to the problem.”
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Hostage negotiating teams led by State’s Diplomatic Security bureau did deploy to Nigeria, but then sat idle for lack of cooperation from the firms.

The kidnappers packed their hostages back into speedboats and drove them to a rendezvous point with officers of the State Security Service, or S.S.S., the principal national Nigerian police and intelligence force. Assured of their payment, they freed their captives. ExxonMobil helicopters lifted the men to Lagos, where they at last boarded planes for home.

Paul Smith telephoned his wife, Paula, to explain that he was not dead. “He was completely calm,” Paula recalled. “I was beside myself. All the family could hear me on the phone. . . . Everyone was jumping around all over the place.” Once back in Scotland, Paul Smith issued a declaration: “I won’t be going back to Nigeria.”
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I
nfluential scholarship documenting the resource curse emerged from the study of Venezuela’s oil-induced woes, but Nigeria offered perhaps the most striking case study. Nigeria possessed a talented, well-educated elite; fertile land; and, of course, oil revenue. The country’s earnings from oil and gas sales from the early 1970s to 2008 totaled about $400 billion. Yet nearly half a century after independence, the country’s population languished perpetually near the bottom of the United Nations’s human development index. Average Nigerian life expectancy remained only forty-six and one half years. Nine tenths of the population lived on two dollars a day or less. More than a third lacked sanitation and clean water, and the country’s infant mortality rates remained among the world’s highest. Such impoverished but less oil-burdened countries as Papua New Guinea and Zimbabwe ranked higher than Nigeria on the human development scale.
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Corruption, mismanagement, theft, and criminal violence were hallmarks of the government’s performance. During the 1990s, the military dictator General Sani Abacha stole an estimated $4 billion of government funds, in addition to that taken by cabinet officials, state governors, and their affiliated youth gangs. International oil and construction companies conspired in these crimes or tolerated them with see-no-evil policies. Halliburton and its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, agreed early in 2009 to pay $579 million in fines to settle charges related to their participation in a joint venture that systematically bribed Nigerian officials across a decade to secure more than $6 billion in construction contracts; Albert “Jack” Stanley, the chairman of K.B.R., named to his position by Halliburton chief executive Dick Cheney about two years before Cheney departed for the White House, pleaded guilty to criminal charges after personally authorizing a $23 million payment to a Gibraltar consultant to win Nigerian contracts.
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In Abuja, “a tiny number of people have stolen a staggering amount of money,” a Western diplomat there observed. The diplomat’s work in liaison with Nigerian ministers routinely brought him into Abuja homes “that you would be embarrassed to build in Beverly Hills,” mansions decorated with “ostentation that is just jaw-dropping.” John Campbell, the American ambassador, referred to the capital’s better neighborhoods as “an example of Las Vegas baroque.” And this was what Nigeria’s political overlords felt comfortable displaying in their home country, where fellow citizens could see it; they funneled much of the rest of their wealth abroad, into properties in London, New York, and Los Angeles.
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Poverty, disenfranchisement, and environmental degradation in the southern Niger Delta remained acute. Ken Saro-Wiwa led a nonviolent protest movement in the Delta to seek redress during the 1990s; Abacha arrested and executed him. Saro-Wiwa’s idealism was exceptional in a resistance movement that increasingly migrated toward violence and crime. During elections in 2003, Delta political bosses armed youth gangs to compete for power; after the vote, the gangs moved into freelance rackets. They drew members, brand names, and cult practices from college campus fraternities: the Vikings, the Icelanders, the Outlaws, and their female counterparts, the Daughters of Jezebel, the Black Braziers, and the Viqueens.
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They dealt drugs; siphoned oil from pipelines, or stole it in conspiracy with government officials or military officers; and they kidnapped Nigerians and foreigners for ransom. Unemployment ran high among the Niger Delta’s young population; the criminal gangs were hiring, and if you could loll around the swamps, hold a gun, and occasionally take a few physical risks, you could have a paying job. As the gangs raised their political sights and economic ambition after 2006, their picaresque criminality—their head scarves, bandoliers, and speedboats; their bank robbery techniques, which included using massive charges of dynamite to blast away reinforced steel doors—seemed increasingly inspired by Hollywood.

This was the ethos from which the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta arose. M.E.N.D. became, after 2006, the dominant Delta insurgent brand. Central Intelligence Agency reporting from Nigeria during the period of ExxonMobil’s Eket kidnapping episode described M.E.N.D. not as an organization with any true leader or hierarchy, but as “a label—at best an umbrella group or an umbrella label,” as a consumer of the agency’s reporting, who found the C.I.A.’s analysis credible, put it.
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To avoid being targeted, M.E.N.D. lacked a central council that could declare who was an authorized commander and who was not. Its notional leader, Henry Okah, was an arms dealer who seemed to spend much of his time outside Nigeria; his supposed role as a
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served as a convenience for a movement that was, in fact, made up of semiautonomous, extortionate gangs of varied strength and character. Consumers of M.E.N.D.’s press releases and Facebook videos might imagine a tight-knit band of swamp guerrillas fighting for justice against cold-blooded international oil corporations. There was some of that, but the private security analysts who advised ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and other corporations on kidnappings and safety described M.E.N.D. more as a loose collection of armed young men, mainly from the Ijaw ethnic group, who used laptop computers to create an appearance of formidable coherence.
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M.E.N.D. activists or those using their brand name fought at times with Nigerian security services, but they also collaborated with the Nigerian navy in massive thefts of Delta oil from barges and pipelines—“bunkering,” as it was known, a racket that independent analysts estimated generated between $4.5 billion and $6 billion in total thefts during 2008 alone.
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In Irving, the global political mapping exercise revised annually by Rosemarie Forsythe, ExxonMobil’s chief political risk analyst, painted Nigeria as a bright red “transitional” country (as opposed to blue “democracies” and yellow “authoritarian” regimes), a category marked by internal instability. Forsythe had also developed maps showing where all the world’s instances of piracy and similar crimes took place; Nigeria stood near the top of that chart, too. As Rex Tillerson settled into office and assessed the greatest global risks to ExxonMobil’s oil and gas portfolio, Nigeria looked unstable; it was getting worse; it was increasingly influenced by pirates; and yet its oil exports were central to the corporation’s business model. Nigerian violence also stoked volatility in global oil prices and raised questions anew about America’s energy security. ExxonMobil and the United States government, in alignment but each in its sovereign sphere, found themselves adapting after 2006, often in an atmosphere of confusion and argument, to the world that M.E.N.D. had created.

T
illerson was perhaps not ideally suited to assess Nigeria’s moral swamps. His feel for political economies in poor countries was limited. Even during his rise within ExxonMobil’s international divisions, he had never lived outside the United States. In any event, managing ExxonMobil’s position in Nigeria in the post-Aceh era of the Voluntary Principles, heavy media scrutiny, and potential lawsuits would have been challenging even if Tillerson had been an anthropological expert.