Licensed to Kill

by Robert Young Pelton

  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.

  Conveniently, Executive Outcomes still had some men inside Sierra Leone, who had rolled into the country in 1995 and stayed beh
ind 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 o
f 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.