Licensed to Kill (36 page)

Conveniently, Executive Outcomes still had some men inside Sierra Leone, who had rolled into the country in 1995 and stayed behind to guard the Bambuna dam and the rutile mine after the coup. These mercenaries turned security contractors were to provide intelligence-gathering, training, and support to roughly four thousand of Kabbah's supporters, primarily local Kamajors, a militia primarily drawn from the Mende tribe under Chief Hinga Norman. Sandline had a Russian-made helicopter that would ferry troops into Freetown, as well as bring back casualties, do evacuations, and deliver humanitarian supplies. Sandline also arranged for the air shipment of over thirty tons of weapons to the proxy army of Kamajors.

At that time, UN Resolution 1132 was in effect, which laid out the arms embargo against all sides of the conflict in Sierra Leone. Further, the conservative government in the UK had publicly adopted a new “ethical” foreign policy, which wasn't supposed to include undertaking or approving of things like weapons shipment to a rebel group in Sierra Leone. Not one to give up in the face of complications, Spicer thought he could work his way around the embargo. His men on the ground would liaise with the Nigerian troops who were in-country as part of ECOMOG, the UN-mandated peacekeeping force. The argument would be made that since the weapons were to be delivered to Nigerian soldiers working under a UN mandate, the arms embargo had not been broken. Spicer had discussions with the British foreign office, and he felt he had the tacit approval of the UK government for the plan, and so proceeded.

The plan fell apart when the Nigerians unilaterally decided to roll into Freetown and scare out the rebels in March of 1998. The incident led to the exposure of the arms embargo violation by a British company, and an international “Arms to Africa” scandal erupted. The UK government denied knowing anything about the arms shipment, though Spicer and Grunberg embarrassed the government by steadfastly maintaining that the Foreign Office had been fully briefed. Soon photos surfaced of the Sandline helicopter being serviced by the British military in Sierra Leone, fueling the speculation that it had been an officially sanctioned operation. The British government played its part of diligent enforcer of the rules by calling for an investigation and raiding Sandline's offices and the homes of its top managers. In the end, Tim Spicer and Sandline would be proven right and Peter Penfold, the British high commissioner, would apologize for having not realized that the arms embargo extended to cover weapons shipments to the supporters of Kabbah's democratically elected government-in-exile. This illustrates how in the morally gray area of coups and countercoups, the same incident can be simultaneously viewed by different people as either an example of a resource-hungry criminal hiring mercenaries to overthrow a government in clear violation of international law, or a British company assisting the restoration of a democratically elected government. Sometimes it can be both simultaneously.

The leader of the Kamajors, Sam Hinga Norman, would be later tried for war crimes in his own country, and Saxena still fights his deportation to face trial in Thailand for stealing $73.5 million. Today, Spicer is sanguine in his recollections of how his company's project in Sierra Leone had become the “Arms to Africa” scandal and their undertaking in PNG had become the “Sandline Affair.” He admits only that “Sandline stuttered forward into evolution. The growth of Sandline took everyone by surprise.” But he stands by his mantra that “it had to be for a legitimate purpose. It had to be lawful. The purpose was to do something properly and make money at it.” He is also candid about its failures: “Because it was ahead of its time in concept, [Sandline] had a number of operating difficulties and perception problems.”

Others inside Sandline blamed Spicer directly for the screwups. “A large gap between planning and execution” is how one principal describes it. In that general sense, Spicer's problems seemed to last long after the demise of Sandline, and in the ensuing years he rolled through starting up a series of security-related companies—CRM, Sandline Consultancy, Trident, Trident III, Trident Maritime—each of which achieved something between a limited degree of success and total failure. Even so, Spicer forged ahead.

Now in his fifties, Spicer heads one of the industry's most profitable purveyors of security services, Aegis Defence Services. A company he started in late 2002 with little more than a handful of backers and a dubious track record, Aegis sparked a dramatic comeback for Spicer when in March 2004 the company was awarded the most lucrative security contract of the Iraq war. The Pentagon hired Spicer's company at $293 million for a three-year cost-plus contract that will eventually add up to almost half a billion dollars in revenue for Aegis. For 2005, Aegis declared revenue of £62 million, or around $130 million, and the Pentagon extended the contract for an additional year. Now Spicer's start-up is a direct industry competitor to the older generation of British security firms like ArmorGroup, HART, and others, which have all privately expressed shock that Spicer could convince the U.S. government of his qualifications, despite the facts of his past exploits.

Aegis now occupies more than eight thousand square feet of a drab modern office building on Victoria Street in London, in a space that looks more like it should be home to an investment or accounting firm. I sense that the office has the feel of a short-term rental as I make my way down the long hallway to Tim's office. Dash, his black French bulldog, greets me at the door and sniffs me until satisfied I'm no threat to his master and finally retires back to his bed in the corner. Spicer is dressed in standard business attire. His famously boyish long hair has been replaced with a tight business cut, though his baggy eyes and downward glower remain fully in effect.

Before the conversation begins, I have to agree to a list of ground rules his lawyers have had typed up for me: no personal stuff, no answers to suppositions or comments on third-party discussions, and no straying off Spicer's role as leader at Aegis and the financial success of his company. They have arranged the chairs so Tim sits at his desk directly in front of me, with his former Sandline attorney and now Aegis director, Richard Slowe, off to my nine o'clock, and Spicer's biggest investor, Jeffrey Day, staring at the back of my head. Every time Tim starts to stray off message or act pugnacious, his two corporate minders interrupt with polished truisms to keep the conversation on track.

Spicer doesn't trust the press and has good reason not to since they have lambasted, insulted, insinuated, extrapolated, and libeled him ever since he appeared on their radar as the head of Sandline International. The media has had no lack of sources willing to talk dirt about Spicer, since, as one of his ex-associates phrases it, “his career path is littered with the wreckage of friendships past.” Some of what appears in print is invented and most of it mean-spirited, but Spicer made himself a target by continually climbing back into the ring and proclaiming himself the oracle of the neo-mercenary, the tip of the privatized security spear, the vanguard for a new force in world affairs. In his new mantle at Aegis, Spicer seeks to reinvent himself as the sage of privatized security.

Spicer shows a bit of his former style by saying, “My view is the people who this company deals with are not concerned with rather florid stories. Those who matter know what happened. It's irritating…. It's like mosquitoes.” He dismisses his critics with a shrug of his shoulders and a derisive tone. “What we are interested in is being judged on our performance.”

Sensing the old Spicer reemerging, Richard and Jeffrey jump in to steer him back on track, as Jeffrey interjects, “That is the dilemma of this industry—how transparent it is, how transparent it should be. We should be as transparent as a private corporation should be. We have armed people who operate in dangerous places. There is an obligation. This is the whole mélange of transparency, regulation, and wish to get sorted out. I am and have always been a fan of regulation.”

Spicer has intelligently approached the idea of ex-soldiers providing value to armed forces (both foreign and domestic) and has very publicly made the case for separating intervention, peacekeeping, and security operations from traditional military capability. His new position as a leader of a multimillion-dollar private security company with first-world clients has led him to recant some of his earlier enthusiasm for mercenary operations. Years of touting armed intervention in foreign lands must now be tempered with politically correct statements and adjustments.

Not surprisingly, with a lucrative U.S. Pentagon contract under his belt and money pouring in, Spicer no longer advocates the use of mercenaries: “My view is there is a distinction. ‘Mercenary' and ‘private military company' are not the same. There are very distinct differences. Essentially a mercenary is there as an individual. The private military company has led to people using the pejorative distinction. Most private security companies will not consider mercenary work. My view has always been that there is plenty of legitimate work to be done.” He continues to insist that Sandline, despite being the spit and polished front man for the armed paladins of Executive Outcomes, was not a mercenary organization. “The crux is, are you working legally or illegally? Overthrowing a government, whether you like it or not, is illegal.” I refrain from pressing him on the point of how Sandline managed to deftly violate an international arms embargo to ship weapons in to a group that intended to overthrow a government, or how the Sandline affair in Papua New Guinea, led to riots and the abrupt downfall of Prime Minister Julius Chan.

Instead, I ask him if winning the Iraq contract shows that his “mercenary” experience with Sandline has paid off. Now magically sensitive to the term, Spicer immediately challenges me with my interpretation of what a mercenary is. He insists again, as his minders bob their heads in support, that he never did anything illegal and points to the long history of the British government providing “loan service officers” or being seconded to fufill foreign contracts in places like Oman.

Before 9/11, Spicer's string of corporate iterations were mostly small ventures trying to chase contracts in maritime security, since at that time the biggest demand came for antipiracy programs. After 9/11, Spicer recognized the major opening for the private security industry to step in and shore up governmental efforts in the War on Terror. Aegis began in 2002, and in its first full year of operations generated £554,000, or about a million dollars in revenue. Tim admits that at the beginning he had to work hard to overcome the huge baggage train from Sandline. “After the Sierra Leone business, which we came out of completely clean, there was a feeling of bruising. We could have done without that.” He defends his controversial history with Sandline and presents Aegis as being unrelated by saying, “We work hard to keep that separation. There is enough time and space and proven track record between the two issues. Our view is we have had to counter a lot of very negative, nonsensical rubbish. Our line is to counter it when we choose to.”

Around the time Aegis won the Iraq contract, a new EO/Sandline-style controversy arose, dragging Spicer into the center of yet another mercenary scandal. Spicer barely managed to avoid implication in a plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. The direct involvement of his former colleagues like Simon Mann made some Spicer-watchers suspicious. When the British government got word of an impending coup, they called Spicer into a meeting in order to find out further details and to issue implicit instructions to warn off his friend Simon Mann.

The first time Spicer had an important meeting with the Foreign Office regarding his involvement in foreign intrigue, neither side kept notes, which led to the post–Arms to Africa confusion as each side called the other's veracity into doubt. The second time, both sides would be careful to keep a detailed record of the conversation. Spicer recalls the event: “We thought we were being asked to talk about some business. I had absolutely no idea, no contact with Simon [Mann] for six months.” Spicer even claims he had to crack an atlas to make sure he knew the exact location of the tiny African republic, since he had been informed in advance that Equatorial Guinea would be the subject of the meeting. This assertion actually creates significant doubt about Spicer's entire claim that he had no foreknowledge of the coup, since it is inconceivable that someone who had been working for years to develop opportunities in Africa and the developing world was unfamiliar with the geographic coordinates of one of the world's fastest-growing and least-secure economies. Further, Richard Bethell (Lord Westbury) says that he had a lunch with Spicer in mid-2002 where Bethell mentioned he would be bidding on some maritime security work down in Equatorial Guinea. Spicer called Bethell a short time afterward to tell him that he was also thinking about pursuing some maritime security contracts in EG and asked if Richard would mind the competition. It is unclear why Spicer would have needed an atlas to refresh his memory about the country's location.

According to Spicer's account, as soon as the meeting started, “they asked did we know anything about a coup in Equatorial Guinea. We were surprised to be asked that question.” Spicer apologized that he didn't have any information for them and was told in response that the UK government had information indicating that former members of Sandline and Executive Outcomes were involved in planning a coup to take down the Equatoguinean government.

When, a matter of weeks later, Simon Mann was arrested in Zimbabwe picking up a weapons cache to take into Equatorial Guinea, the British government initially tried to claim it had no foreknowledge of any coup attempt. Again, the truth would ultimately surface, and minutes of the meeting with Spicer would be released. Despite the involvement of a number of his former cohorts, and persistent rumors that he had been informed through his relationship with Mann, Spicer insists: “We had nothing to do with the coup. We have never been down there.” Once again Spicer would be vindicated, even though both times the Foreign Office has had to “clarify” its initial recollection.