On this day in 1982

Well, really, there wasn't one. 1982 was not a leap year. So, in 1982, looking back at the events of the last Saturday and Sunday of that February, it was actually Monday, March 1st.

On the preceding evening Margaret Thatcher stood outside number 10 Downing Street and waxed poetic about how, "We handled it superbly." That would be a "royal" we. She was referring to the outcome of a hijacked aircraft sitting in the middle of Stansted airport which saw passengers and crew released and the hijackers taken into custody after a relatively long set of negotiations. The aircraft was never stormed by the waiting SAS unit and Thatcher, while she gave credit to the police, couldn't resist giving her Home Secretary a nice firm stroking.

First it was handled right by the police in the field and then by Willie Whitelaw at the centre.

... were her words. She had been at the Royal College of Music that night and Willie Whitelaw to whom she referred had become notorious for his largely ineffectual "law and order" agenda which, along with a prison-building effort, included a regurgitation of the 1824 Sus Law which allowed police to stop, search and arrest anyone they thought suspicious for any reason.

The 28th of February 1982 had seen some activity in New York. The Puerto Rican nationalist group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional bombed Wall Street. Not that such bothered anyone in the UK much. Since Thatcher had gone all crunchy on Northern Ireland bombings by the IRA Provos had become epidemic in England. 


The other thing that had happened in New York over the weekend was a meeting between British and Argentinian representatives in an effort to sort out the differences that existed over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. Thatcher had something to say about them too. Productive and cordial was her description. We were all well aware that the Argentinians didn't see it that way. 


Heading into March we were aware of other things. HMS Invincible, one of three anti-submarine warfare aircraft carriers, was about to be sold to the Australians. And we had just heard that the Antarctic patrol ship, HMS Endurance, was to be permanently withdrawn from the south Atlantic at the end of her deployment. 


Thatcher, now profoundly unpopular in Britain, had embarked on a "thinning" of the armed services which were to add redundant service personnel to the burgeoning ranks of the unemployed. In fact, she was about to rip the guts out of the British forces in being despite her continuing rhetoric demanding that Britain be viewed as a world military power. 


What we now know, thanks to the expiry of the 30 year rule prohibiting publishing internal British government documents, is that Thatcher was intent on dismantling the Royal Navy and was locked in a heated fight with then-First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Leach. If you were there at the time you had a fairly good understanding that things were not well between the RN and Thatcher, but Leach, in keeping with solid RN tradition, uttered not a word outside his office. 


Not so a young colour sergeant who was having a heated exchange with an armourer back in garrision. The week before had seen him and his men spending more time clearing stoppages on weapons than putting ordnance on targets. He was complaining that if he had to use them to actually fight, a lot of people other than the enemy would be getting killed. 


The armourer was sympathetic but tried to quell the NCO's fears by suggesting that nobody was going to war anytime soon. He would take a look at the weapons. 


The NCO replied with, "You know, mate, with Mugsy (Thatcher) on her belly the way she is, the only way out for her is to get us into a shooting match. It wouldn't surprise me if I'm somewhere in the Middle East aiming at Arabs by the start of Summer."


He had the enemy and the location wrong. 

Brain death is no excuse for stupidty

My god, where did they dig up this twit?

Mrs. Thatcher was a tough, adversarial leader. She was never liked, even by those who supported her policies, and she was hated by those who opposed her.

Actually, she was the embodiment of pure evil.
She looked to her country's former enemies for solutions to her economic problems.

Privatisation did not feature in the 1979 Tory manifesto and her first term brought only small-scale sell-offs such as Amersham International, the medical diagnostics group.

Nor was it wholly new. The term was coined in the 1930s to describe aspects of Nazi Germany’s economic policy (Reprivatisierung).

Now, the weirdness in government in the UK is planning to give her a state funeral.

Here's an idea.

Parade her rotting corpse through Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Thatcher, big oil (minerals) and the mercenaries. Part Three.

When Lt-Colonel Tim Spicer returned from Papua New Guinea the links between resource companies and mercenaries had been firmly established. While corporate identities remained visibly separate, the optics did not disguise the reality: the companies were woven together, both in operations and personnel. Executive Outcomes, Heritage Oil, Branch Energy, Sandline and DiamondWorks were not just linked, but sharing the same personnel and being operated by the same people, often working towards the same end - resource concessions.

It's worth taking a step back in the timeline for a moment to look at a small coincidence. Take a look at this archived Executive Outcomes website. Note the company logo: a chesspiece known as a "knight". Now take a look at this YouTube video of a 1957 television series. Notice anything?

Have gun - Will travel.

Regardless of the intention, the message is there. It was that kind of message that modern mercenaries were trying to camouflage. They were looking for some degree of legitimacy (and work) without diluting their brand. If they went too far down the "consultancy" road they would be viewed as little more than security guards relying on outside political support from western governments to prop up their activities. That would shrink their client base. If they went the other way, down the blatant "army for hire" path, they would be characterized with the likes of Bob Denard and Mad Mike Hoare who had ravaged Africa in the four decades following the 2nd World War.

Although Spicer denies it was ever discussed between himself, Buckingham and Mann, the emergence of Sandline also saw the injection of new language describing mercenary groups - Private Military Companies (PMCs).

When Spicer was released after the Papua New Guinea fiasco Buckingham and Mann went into a mode not before seen in the mercenary world - they engaged a PR firm started to spin the whole story. It was damage control which would have been unnecessary in the world of Denard and Hoare. The older mercenaries didn't worry about how the world viewed them beyond the ability to acquire clients. The newer breed was worried about their public image.

The latter reflects two things:

The new mercenaries were actually the owners of "legitimate" resource companies. They were a part of a diverse corporate enterprise. Secondly, they had become sophisticated with a clear knowledge of the necessity to keep their brand clean without scaring away their customer-base. They were utilizing 5th Avenue marketing in the same manner as a major consumer brand and for exactly the same reasons - spin the "bad" part of the brand until it disappears; pump the "good" part of the brand into public view. Thus, Sandline, with Spicer, Buckingham, Mann, Barlow and others appeared at several conferences and meetings as representatives of a PMC which declared that they possessed a strong corporate sense of morality. They actually helped countries.

What they were looking for was solid international approval of their activities. The PNG fiasco had taught them that without a greater level of international support they could not operate out in the open. Australia played a major role in bringing the PNG/Bougainville mission to a failed end. Britain, although it remained silent, provided no support, moral or otherwise. And without a more legitimized private army the resource companies would be unable to lock down the concessions their private armies won for them.

------------

On the 25th of May, 1997, Sierra Leone Major General Paul Koroma overthrew the democratically elected government of Sierra Leone, led by Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, and established a military government from the so-called Armed Forces Revolutionary Council. The Kabbah government had been in power for a little more than a year after the previous military junta had restored the country's constitution and re-established democratic government. The military junta which had restored Sierra Leone's democracy had themselves ousted Valentine Strasser who had himself come to power through a coup in 1992.

It was Strasser with whom Tony Buckingham's Executive Outcomes and Branch Energy had, in 1995, worked a lucrative deal for diamond concessions in exchange for ridding the country of the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF).

Koroma established a brutal rule and invited the RUF to join his government. The UN, backed solidly by the British government of Tony Blair, called for the immediate restoration of Kabbah. In the offices of Plaza 107, Tony Buckingham must have blanched. His diamond concessions would surely be in jeopardy with the RUF, which he had pushed to the country's borders only two years before, in the halls of Sierra Leone power.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) maintained in Sierra Leone, through their military arm the Economic Community of West Africa Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), a force made up of primarily Nigerian army troops. While many were taken prisoner during the coup, the Nigerians managed to maintain control of their barracks and the Freetown airport, just outside the city.

The staff at Plaza 107 had been hard at work. In the small world of diamond mining they had secured possible financing for a venture to oust Koroma and restore Kabbah's presidency. A meeting was organized in Guinea, just east of Sierra Leone, between Kabbah (now in exile), Nigerian army officials and Sandline. Looking on was the British High Commissioner, Peter Penfold.

Spicer's Sandline offered, in breach of a British-procured UN arms embargo, to enter Sierra Leone as an active participant. They would provide in-country airlift in the form of helicopters to ECOMOG and, in complete breach of the UN embargo, 36 tons of Bulgarian-made assault rifles, mortars and ammunition to the Kabbah loyal Kamajor tribesmen, a virulently anti-RUF group.

The mission was self-financing. Sandline had secured the financing of Vancouver Canada based Rakesh Saxena who, in return for lucrative mineral concessions in Sierra Leone would provide $10 million in support of the mission.

Saxena was anything but a legitimate businessman. The government of Thailand accused him, along with two accomplices, (the bank's then-president and chairman Krirk-kiat Jalichandra and the world's most notorious arms dealer, Adnan Khashoggi), of embezzling $2.2 billion from the Bangkok Bank of Thailand, an event which led to the collapse of the bank. He was finally arrested in Whistler, British Columbia in July 1997, just after the deal with Sandline had been established.
But Saxena wasn't even legal in Canada. In November 2003 he had been ordered deported and had been fighting that order ever since. His arrest in 1997 led to house-arrest which was converted to jail after he is alleged to have threatened a witness and to obtain a false passport.

[There is a side twist to Saxena's involvement with Sandline. In 2001 Global Securities, a Vancouver-based brokerage firm, launched a lawsuit against West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast member of parliament John Reynolds, then number two man in the Alliance Party of Canada. The claim was that he had left a $484,000 debit with the brokerage after becoming a director in Saxena's WaveTech Networks Inc. By the time the Reynolds had become involved with Saxena's business activities, Saxena had been the subject of the longest extradition hearing in Canadian history and had been publicly involved in an attempt to employ mercenaries to violate a United Nations arms embargo. Reynolds is not connected in any way with Sandline's activities but the relationship, business or otherwise, with Saxena should serve to raise a question of judgment.]

With the backing of Saxena, Spicer went into action. The payoff would be further diamond mining concessions. At the time there did not seem to be anything in the way of British government involvement. What transpired, however, would change that view.

The British High Commissioner, Peter Penfold, was certainly aware of Sandline's intentions. While there is some dispute as to whether aiding ECOMOG was in violation of the UN embargo against weapons shipments and brokerage, there is no question that the arming of irregular forces, the Kamajor, was a flagrant violation. There was also a reluctance deep inside Whitehall to allow Kabbah to be returned solely through the actions of the Nigerians. By injecting another armed element Kabbah would not become beholden to Nigeria for the restoration of the democracy. Another level of awareness started to dawn on the British: If Sandline and the Kamajor retook Freetown successfully defeating Koroma and the RUF the after-effects would likely be a crackdown on Koroma's supporters ending in a bloodbath. The UN weapons embargo had been generated for the very purpose of keeping the Kamajor unarmed in the first place.

In an event which can only be described as odd, without orders from ECOMOG or the UN, the Nigerians left their barracks and, after a week's fighting, retook Freetown in February 1998. They had pre-empted the arrival of the Bulgarian arms by a few days. When the shipment arrived, they impounded it.

Saxena, true to form, had failed to provide the $10 million. His total contribution was $1.2 million. The whole affair might have stayed off the front pages of the world's major newspapers if a photographer, on March 1st, 1998, hadn't captured something significant.

On 10 May 1998 the world woke up to a Sunday Times front page which put question to British government involvement in Sandline's operation. They were treated to a picture of Sandline's Russian-built MI-17 military helicopter being serviced by Royal Navy aviation technicians from HMS Cornwall - alongside in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

While Cornwall's mission was probably exactly what the Blair government said it was, (humanitarian assistance post-action), the photograph set off a public firestorm. There is the further question of Cornwall's ability to be so close to Freetown as the Nigerians were securing the city. It just happened to be there. Why? The British government must have been aware of events to have positioned a frigate off the west coast of Africa, close enough to Freetown to arrive within a day of the Nigerian retaking of the city.

In the end, Spicer argued that he was acting with both UK and US government approval. The US denied knowledge and the British government pointed fingers at senior civil servants who had failed to inform the minister. Peter Penfold, the British High Commissioner who clearly did know what Sandline was up to, and approved, was held responsible. He was laterally transfered out of his post. A slap on the wrist for being party to a flagrant violation of international convention.

Inquiries were held. The Blair government was in crisis over the whole affair. Papua New Guinea was moved back into the spotlight. And at at the end of it all, Sandline was declared to have operated on their own recognizance neither with nor without British government approval. The British government took a small amount of responsibility for not having explicitly warning Spicer away from Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone, despite the inquiries and studies and finger pointing, was a shambles. Kabbah had sworn that he was going to do something about the mineral leases to foreign owners and either buy them back or outright nullify them if he was returned to power. However, his promise never came to pass. What did happen is that the Kamajor tribesmen, whose Sandline-supplied weapons had been intercepted by the Nigerian army, eventually ended up assisting the Nigerians and were given the weapons originally intended for them. Kabbah's promise to clean up the operation of the diamond concessions would have prompted an even more violent situation - and Sandline had an interest which needed to be protected.

Something happened behind the close doors of Plaza 107. After the "Arms to Africa" affair, the reputation of Sandline, despite a concerted PR effort, simply tanked. Spicer, who despises being called a mercenary, found himself outside the boundaries of respectable Private Military Company. Buckingham, Mann and Barlow had also been dragged into the whole thing. So, in 1999, Spicer, in an attempt to re-establish a public image as something other than a country-killing mercenary, left Sandline.

With Spicer gone the Sandline operation spent a lot of time trying to rebuild a reputation. Spicer himself was determined to take the modern mercenary to a respectable level and gain government and international approval for private armies. He set out as a military and security consultant, establishing two companies which quickly ran into trouble with the British government. Not for his activities, but for failing to meet corporate administrative requirements. He had some successes in the security survey field and took some credit, (although it was overblown), for increasing Sri Lanka port security. Just as often however, he was criticized for providing information that was substantively incorrect. In the case of Sri Lanka, he took credit for stabilizing the security situation enough to have Lloyd's announce the lifting of the "War Risk Surcharge" on vessels trading in Sri Lanka. What Spicer never mentioned in his final report was that a ceasefire between the Tamil Tigers and the Colombo, Sri Lanka government had been achieved by a Norwegian effort which had brought the eight-year conflict to a halt.

Spicer was firm in his statements that "PMCs" only worked for legitimate governments. A sort of force multiplier and consultant to under-staffed and poorly trained national armed forces. He even went so far as to state that such companies, at least the transparent ones, would refuse to work for an insurgent rebel cause no matter how right they may be.

That position apparently changed. In 2001 he said that his company "would look carefully on a case-by-case basis at working for liberation movements in overseas countries."

He tried to relate his apparent conflict with previous statements by suggesting that the international community would have no trouble with a mercenary force assisting a resistance movement attempting to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq or the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Spicer was reading the wind. He had declared himself to exist at the "respectable end of the spectrum". Despite all of that, Spicer's companies failed in quick succession, either because they were afoul of Britain's corporate regulations or because they simply could not acquire enough business.

As his other companies nose-dived into the dirt, Spicer set up Aegis Defence Services. It was around the time George Bush and Tony Blair decided to invade Iraq.

After Bush had declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq, Tony Blair is said to have complained that British companies were not getting their share of contracts awarded for Iraqi reconstruction. It was shortly after that that Spicer's Aegis Defence Services won a $293 million, three year prime contract to provide security support to the US Department of Defense Project and Contracting Office in Iraq.

Spicer had achieved the legitimacy he was looking for. His mercenary company was working for a western government albeit in an area and a war which has turned the world against the very government which employs him. Far from being the solution to any problem, his company has become a problem. When trophy videos appeared showing his personnel shooting vehicles as they traveled Route Irish in Baghdad serious questions were raised about the conduct of all mercenary companies performing in Iraq.

What became very clear however, is that the mercenaries, despite their claim to legitimacy and moral foundation had not changed. They still had few, if any, rules of engagement and they still worked for foreign governments. Spicer's Aegis is a British group working for an American government in a place where the Iraqi government has little authority over them.

While we have skipped ahead to illustrate the culmination of Spicer's attempts to spin a new definition around mercenaries, he remains a mercenary. While he was being granted his lucrative US government contract Buckingham, Mann and Barlow were still busy. Sandline eventually closed up shop, their reputation destroyed and governments, particularly the British government, unwilling to engage them.

Mann, sometimes described as a romantic adventurer, had been operating behind the scenes. While many thought he had given up the life of a mercenary, that wasn't quite the case. He left the UK in 1999 and moved to South Africa. Having acquired a fortune from his holdings in DiamondWorks and Branch energy, he is reported to have earned $10 million when those companies were floated on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Mann purchased Villa Musica in the exclusive Cape Town suburb of Constantia. After moving in he set up a new company - Logo Logistics - a mercenary support operation specializing in air movement.

In 1999 Simon Mann met the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, by the pool of her son's house. It was early and Mann was dressed rather grubbily. Thatcher, who did not approve of Mann's slovenly appearance, softened to Mann when he gave his personal military history to her. She liked the SAS, particularly 22 SAS. She was pleased that her son Mark had such a friend.

Mann would meet Margaret Thatcher again, around Christmas of 2003, next to the same pool. Except that, instead of a small gathering there would be, at that evening party, a group of people who had already started planning on overthrowing the government of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. Mark Thatcher, who would declare, "Simon is my best friend," was in on the conspiracy.
Any legitimacy which mercenary companies had been trying to gain through marketing and PR would be unraveled by the events which would soon unfold. This was a classic Buckingham operation being run by Mann. It would involve Mark Thatcher and the author of The Dogs of War, Fredrick Forsythe.

Continued in Part Four.

Part one.

Part two.

Credit: Cheryl contributed hugely to the research in this series. The web of companies and personalities involved have required a great deal of sorting and following trails. There have been, in fact, so many sidetracks associated with mercenary companies and their resource subsidiaries that she is planning on doing a separate series of posts on Canadian resource companies overseas.

Thatcher, big oil (minerals) and the mercenaries. Part Two.

Former Scots Guards Lt-Col. Tim Spicer is not a member of the highly exclusive Special Forces Club in London. We don't know if he applied for membership and was rejected or if he even applied at all. It would stand to reason however, that he would want to take advantage of the networking opportunities such membership would afford. Not that it matters. Spicer is probably laughing at the fact that the secretive Special Forces Club is imploding over finances and internal political squabbling.

In part one we found Spicer brought into a rebranded Executive Outcomes (EO), a well equipped, well organized, professional mercenary army made up primarily of former South African soldiers. Spicer was tasked by Tony Buckingham and Simon Mann to lead Sandline International, little more than a repackaged EO.

The M.O. of Executive Outcomes had become wholly visible. Buckingham would offer his counter-insurgency army to weak African governments facing guerrilla activity in return for lucrative diamond and oil concessions. Buckingham's resource companies, Canadian-based Heritage Oil and DiamondWorks came along after EO had done their work.

The creation of Sandline and the appointment of Mann's former Scots Guard colleague, Spicer, was intended to provide the optical illusion of a respectable "private military company", the sanitized language for mercenaries.

Spicer's first mission was a colossal flop.

The government of Papua New Guinea under the leadership of Prime Minister Julius Chan was having trouble with a rebel insurgency on the island of Bougainville. Chan had been refused troops by both New Zealand and Australia and repeated assaults on the rebels produced no appreciable results. Through a shadowy series of international contacts PNG defence minister, Mathias Ijape made contact with Sandline International.

A deal was struck which would secure Sandline's services for $36 million and Spicer's troops started to arrive on 7 February 1997. The money was never authorized by the PNG parliament. Instead Chan ran the expense through the National Security Council. Budget cuts were imposed on a majority of government ministries. Unfortunately for both Spicer and Chan, the deal soon became public and the PNG army grew incredibly angry. So did the Australians who were demanding that Chan kill the deal. Unaware of the public and army outrage at the contracting of mercenaries Spicer and his force of South African mercenaries were arrested a little over a month after landing. The Royal Australian Air Force intercepted the Russian-built cargo plane that was carrying the mercenaries weapons and helicopters and detained it. The PNG army then overthrew Chan's government. Spicer and his mercenaries were jailed.

Sandline International, had stepped into a hornets nest. Papua New Guinea, despite serious internal problems, operated as a democracy. Even the ousting of Chan resulted in a civilian parliamentary government. What Sandline and Spicer had accomplished was to destabilize a government and create a constitutional crisis.

During the period that Spicer was in PNG, prior to his arrest, he spent a good deal of time in meetings with Deputy Prime Minister Chris Haiveta organizing a deal. True to the Buckingham model established with Executive Outcomes, Spicer appeared to be attempting to gain control of Bougainville Copper Ltd.

Charges against Spicer were set aside in return for his promise to cooperate with a government inquiry into the whole event. Spicer was released on 27 March 1997. As Spicer was on his way home, Buckingham, Mann and Sandline International went into overdrive, hiring a public relations firm to manage what can only be described as a PR disaster. It was all being handled from a front company known as Plaza 107 based in Chelsea. Behind that company operated Buckingham, Heritage Oil, Branch Energy, Executive Outcomes and Sandline International. In the subsequent inquiry by PNG into the whole affair the link between EO, Sandline and Buckingham were established beyond question. At an April 1996 meeting in Cairns Australia, between Spicer and PNG officials exploring a possible mercenary action on Bougainville, Buckingham was present. Another revelation at the inquiry was that Heritage Oil was described as the owner of Sandline International.

In August 1996, Spicer sent a letter to the PNG government offering mercenaries in exchange for a stake in the Bougainville mine.

And then things get really messy. In October of 1996 Tim Spicer was given an option of 10,000 shares in DiamondWorks. The share offering was made under the British Columbia Securities Act and specifies that such options are granted only to directors and employees of a corporation.

In February 1997, as Sandline/EO mercenaries were landing in Papua New Guinea, Eeben Barlow of Executive Outcomes was also made a shareholder of DiamondWorks. Simon Mann retained holdings in some of Buckingham's other companies although it is unclear whether he became a holder of DiamondWorks stock.

What is known, however, is that as Buckingham and Spicer were meeting with PNG government officials in Cairns Australia, Buckingham was putting the final touches on a deal that would raise cash for his Branch Energy. He was in contact with Robert Freidland, a Canadian with dual citizenship in the US, the owner of Ivanhoe Mines and a supposedly small holder of DiamondWorks shares. Freidland is also known as "Toxic Bob" after his gold mine in Summitville Colorado caused one of the worst cyanide spills in US history in 1993. In 1995 his Omai gold mine in Guyana burst its tailing pond and totally wiped out the life in two rivers. He has operations in Mongolia, Burma and a variety of other countries. Accusations have been leveled at him that his operations include child labour, near zero occupational health and safety standards and a clearly abysmal level of environmental responsibility.

Buckingham arranged to have DiamondWorks purchase Branch Energy and take over the lucrative diamond concessions in Africa. That wasn't going to leave Buckingham out in the cold, however. When the deal closed DiamondWorks took over Branch Energy and Buckingham took possession of 125,000 shares of DiamondWorks, making him a director and the principle shareholder with about 30 percent holding. An array of others from Plaza 107, Buckingham's front company, also became shareholders in DiamondWorks.

Freidland's PR agency, when confronted with this information after the PNG fiasco claimed that Freidland's personal holdings in DiamondWorks amounted to three percent. However, Freidland's brother, Eric, was the president of DiamondWorks and Robert Freidland's holding company, Ivanhoe Capital Corporation, actually owned a 21 percent share of the company.

When the due diligence report on Branch Energy was issued to the company which would become DiamondWorks, detailing worth and potential, a line in the report made a statement which Buckingham, Mann and Barlow had always previously denied: "Both Sierra Leone and Angola have been under the duress of civil war, but peace has been achieved largely through military assistance provided by Executive Outcomes, Branch Energy's parent company, to the government of these countries." That due diligence report has oddly gone missing from the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Not, however, before Australian news outlets got their hands on it.

There it was. The mercenary army owned the mining company. And Freidland couldn't help but be aware of it and acknowledge it. Sandline was run by the same people and its operators were brought into DiamondWorks as shareholders. While Freidland is described as a pragmatist, he probably did not give a second thought to the mercenary activities of Buckingham, Mann, Barlow and Spicer. If they accomplished his goals, how they did it was probably of little concern. Freidland was used to dealing ignoring the habits of others. He had, after all, been heavily involved with a group of corrupt Burmese generals and had gone so far as to add them to the board of his interested mining companies. That was his style. His interest was in resource extraction and Bougainville had a highly viable copper mine. The same mine in which Spicer would attempt to negotiate a stake.

Bougainville Copper was perhaps more central to the Sandline/PNG operation than is obvious.

After the PNG fiasco Robert Freidland appointed two executives from the Hong Kong offices of the Jardine Fleming Bank to his executive management team at Ivanhoe. Julian Chan had coincidentally approached Jardin Fleming to manage a PNG government buy-out of Bougainville Copper and put control of the Panguna Copper Mine in the hands of the PNG government - before the deal had been sealed with Sandline for a mercenary operation and after the initial meeting with Buckingham and Spicer in Cairns Australia. In October 1996, PNG finance minister, Chris Havieta, traveled to London to meet with Spicer and further talks on having Sandline International mount a mercenary operation against Bougainville. Havieta was accompanied by one Rupert McGowan. Rupert McGowan was a banker - with the Hong Kong offices of the Jardine Fleming Bank. And Tim Spicer was now a shareholder in DiamondWorks with whom Freidland had much more than a passing association.

Spicer cooperated with the inquiry into the PNG "Sandline Affair" inasmuch as he answered questions of the judicial panel. However, he was anything but fully truthful. He managed to dodge some of the more serious questions and he offered up little in the way of precise details. During the PNG judicial inquiry however, he consistently lied and attempted to obfuscate the relationship of Sandline and Executive Outcomes. He made every effort to suggest that EO (UK) was a totally separate enterprise from EO (South Africa) even though Eeben Barlow was clearly and deeply involved in both.

Papua New Guinea Judge Warwick Andrew was having none of it. He stated that Spicer's claim that Sandline was separate from Executive Outcomes could not possibly be true and that even though Sandline and EO operated through a tangled web of front companies and ownership, they all came together at one particular spot - and that spot was occupied by Tony Buckingham, Simon Mann and Eeben Barlow.

What should be evident at this point is that the operators of these mercenary armies are quite prepared to go to any length to get what they want and hide the truth. Lies, distortion and subterfuge are all a part of the greater game.

Even more obvious however, is that these mercenaries are not satisfied with a simple payday from the highest bidder at the end of a dirty little war. That's how the mercenaries of old went broke. These guys are much more savvy. They expect a permanent stake in the country from the side they choose to support providing them with long term income and expanding wealth. For the most part they won't even consider going into a country unless it has substantial resource wealth which they can plunder. In that sense, backers and investors in their adventures, like Mark Thatcher, aren't in for a penny. The idea is to violently create an environment which will produce a massive return on investment. The risk is that it doesn't work out, as in Papua New Guinea or, more recently, Equatorial Guinea.

We're not finished with Tim Spicer. Before he left Sandline International he managed to get himself tangled up in an even more spectacular mess which ran afoul of the UK government, the United Nations, involved a mega-fraudster living in Canada and, by association, a Canadian member of parliament.

Of course, Buckingham, Mann and Barlow, along with a few others will round out the entire story.

Continued in Part Three.

(Part One is here)

Thatcher, big oil and the mercenaries.

Three years ago, Sir Mark Thatcher, son of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, pleaded guilty in South Africa to negligently investing in a helicopter used in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. The charge and plea were the result of a bargain made with South African prosecutors which saw Thatcher avoid jail (and more serious charges) and pay a hefty fine instead.

Thatcher has long been suspected of being one of the principles behind the attempted coup of Equatorial Guinea's president Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. This last Saturday rumours started to circulate that Equatorial Guinea had issued an arrest warrant for Thatcher. Those have turned out to be untrue.

However, it appears a mercenary at the centre of the attempted coup has fingered Thatcher and says his involvement was more than just "negligent investment". According to ex-SAS officer and mercenary Simon Mann, Thatcher knew everything.

A British mercenary awaiting trial in Equatorial Guinea for leading a failed 2004 coup has said the son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was involved in the plot, the public prosecutor said on Sunday.

Jose Olo said former British special forces officer Simon Mann had testified that Mark Thatcher knew all about the scheme to overthrow President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who has ruled the oil-rich West African country since 1979.

Of course Mann himself had no reason to overthrow Obiang. He was the hired help. The fact that Obiang runs an oppressive and corrupt regime factored little in Mann's presence during the coup attempt. It was all about oil and that would interest Thatcher.

What makes this interesting is the kind of people with whom Thatcher obviously associates, (aside from the fact that he, a private citizen of the UK with notable family connections, is prepared to become involved in overthrowing governments and starting wars). Mann is real piece of work with a long and sordid history.

Mann had been an officer in the Scots Guards, a connection with some later significance, who went on to become a member of the Special Air Service. He left the British army in 1985 to enter the computer security field. Recalled from the reserves for the 1991 Gulf War, Mann completed that particular service and entered the oil industry with one Tony Buckingham, a former member of the British Special Boat Service. Tony Buckingham today is the CEO of the Canadian gas and oil exploration company, Heritage Oil Company. His short bio indicates he was once a security adviser to various governments. Polite language for something far more complex. (As an aside Heritage Oil has announced it is planning on de-listing its shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange and listing them in the UK as a Jersey-based parent company.)

When UNITA rebels, in 1993, took and held the Angolan port of Soyo, closing Angola's oil production facilities, the Angolan government asked Buckingham for assistance. Buckingham called Executive Outcomes for direct military assistance. Actually, Buckingham was one of the founders of Executive Outcomes. In 1993 Buckingham, along with Mann and one other individual, registered Executive Outcomes in the UK as a private security company. The other individual? Eeben Barlow.

Eeben Barlow became the first leader of Executive Outcomes and his history should have set off alarm bells around the world. Barlow was the former head of the apartheid-era South African Civil Cooperation Bureau - a polite name for an organization which engaged in the assassination of political opponents and developed European-based covers for companies intended to work around UN anti-apartheid sanctions. What made Barlow particularly attractive to Executive Outcomes was his high-level contacts in the South African government and access to personnel from the soon-to-be-disbanded South African 32nd Battalion and from South African special forces and paramilitary units which were being drawn down as apartheid crumbled. Within a year of being established Executive Outcomes, led by Barlow, Buckingham and Mann, could offer close to 500 quasi-military officers and over 3000 hardened combat troops, most of whom had extensive counter-insurgency training and experience fighting Angolan rebels. Further, many of the South Africans had been engaged supporting UNITA and knew their inner workings.

Executive Outcomes cleaned up, if more on a public relations front than anything else. UNITA was crushed (the Angolan army played a significant role) and Angola's oil production was back in the hands of the oil companies, including Ranger Oil, another Canadian company with whom Buckingham had been doing business since 1991, and eventually Heritage Oil. Buckingham, Mann and Barlow had secured the Angolan oil supply and they were deeply entwined with one Canadian oil exploration company and would soon be connected directly with one which Buckingham himself would found.

Then Sierra Leone called in Barlow, Buckingham and Mann. Executive Outcomes was tasked with quelling an insurgency led by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). Once again Executive Outcomes succeeded. They did it by securing the diamond fields and they showed up as a professional and fully air-mobile brigade, complete with armoured fighting vehicles.

It was shortly afterwards that Buckingham was accused of purposely introducing Executive Outcomes to weak governments plagued with guerrilla insurgencies but with extensive oil and diamond resources. Buckingham has denied it, but once again one of his companies maneuvered its way into control of diamond concession in the very fields which Executive Outcomes had taken to lever out the RUF. Branch Energy, a mining development company owned by Buckingham and registered in the Isle of Man, gained control of extensive diamond resources in Sierra Leone. Branch Energy was sold to Canadian DiamondWorks of Vancouver, British Columbia. Buckingham retained 30 percent control of that company and the diamond production he had secured in Sierra Leone.

Executive Outcomes had some serious exposure problems. First was the dirty connection with South Africa. Secondly, the connection with African mineral and oil concessions was becoming obvious enough that questions were being raised. Executive Outcomes had engagements in seven African countries, all of which held the incentive of mineral or petroleum wealth.

To optically break this link, in December 1996, the same three principles incorporated a British company called Sandline International. They brought with them Nic van der Berg and Michael Grunberg. And they added another person who would actually head up the company: A former Lieutenant Colonel in the Scots Guards, Simon Mann's former regiment.

Enter Tim Spicer.

Spicer's first major outing as a mercenary leader would result in two things: The mission would end in failure and, the organic links between Executive Outcomes, Sandline International and large mineral/petroleum extraction companies would be firmly established.

Continued in Part Two.