Licensed to Kill

Home > Other > Licensed to Kill > Page 32
Licensed to Kill Page 32

by Robert Young Pelton


  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.

  After the Arms to Africa scandal, the former senator Jesse Helms had Spicer’s passport flagged and required a personal interview before he could enter the United States. Reportedly, Spicer was once chained to a chair while American officials sorted out his purpose in the country. It was only after the intervention of high-powered friends of friends that Spicer’s black flag as an arms dealer was lifted. In their rush to field hired guns in Iraq, the Pentagon and State Department found it convenient to turn a blind eye to the more questionable aspects of Spicer’s past.

  Even with Spicer’s “colorful” business history and long list of professional and personal enemies sharpening their knives, the former head of Sandline leads a charmed life. No one, not even Spicer, has been able to adequately explain how his fledgling company won the largest single-security contract ever awarded in Iraq.

  As Spicer explained it to me during the interview, he found the RFP (request for proposal) while surfing the Internet looking for work opportunities in Iraq. However, multiple sources with intimate knowledge of Aegis’s bid have alleged to me that PMO (Project Management Office) security chief Brigadier General Anthony Hunter-Choat and Brigadier General James Ellery helped formulate the specifications for the RFP with Aegis in mind. Some security insiders claim that Spicer had a personal relationship with the two brigadiers from their days as contemporaries in the British military, but others are of the opinion that the awarding of the Aegis contract arose from a wish to have more British companies profiting off the reconstruction. Not surprisingly, Spicer vehemently denies all insinuations and charges, and claims, “it is a standard U.S. tender issued by the northern region. They wrote the spec.”

  The one RFP specification that Spicer’s Aegis did not match would seem to be the most important qualification: experience. Spicer admits he had no previous experience in Iraq, even though the RFP asks for proof of similar jobs within a recent timeframe, but dismisses that as a problem: “The weighting on each part is different. They put more emphasis on the other parts.” So if Spicer’s company had an idea for response that exactly fit the expectations of the RFP, instead of actual experience, those evaluating the proposal would have ranked him ahead of DynCorp, Olive, CRG, and other companies also bidding on the job that already had extensive operations in Iraq.

  If Spicer didn’t have advance notice, or at least inside assurances that Aegis would be selected for the job, I am curious why he had advertised job openings for ex-military Arabic-speaking radio operators a full month before the contract was awarded. Spicer machine-guns me with a stream of responses: “We had put in place some anticipatory measures. If we get the call, how are going to do it. That increased in tempo. We were getting more and more queries. Foolish to put in place things related to winning. We were sort of prepared. We have an action list ready for implementation.” Spicer continues to reel off reasons: “We put out feelers to the people who recruit. We knew before it was made public. Because we were very keen to get things in place.”

  It is understandable that Aegis would want to simplify the public understanding of how they won their singular contract. But the story of Aegis’s ascent becomes far more convoluted and questionable when talking to insiders who were in Baghdad while the decision process to award the contract was taking place. A former State Department official who was working in Baghdad at the time surprised me with the bluntness of his view: “Spicer should never have gotten that contract. He got that contract because of Hunter-Choat.”

  The awarding of the Aegis contract shocked even Baghdad-based Coalition security insiders, and intense discussions developed revolving around how the vast differential in experience between Aegis and the bidders could have possibly led to Spicer’s company being the one selected as most qualified to take on such a massive responsibility. To the State Department official, it was obvious how it happened. “I tipped a few back with [Hunter-Choat] and I think I know him well,” he continues talking about the decision process that took place in Baghdad. “You put Hunter-Choat in a room with four other junior [military] people and he can s
teer the decision. He wrote the specs, he knew Spicer, and he should have recused himself from that process. It was just Hunter-Choat, Steve Barton, an air force guy, and three other junior guys going over those proposals.”

  Pressing him for a direct connection between Hunter-Choat’s alleged influence and the awarding of the contract, I ask if he has any proof of his claim: “No, it’s more of a negative proof.” He laughs at my naïveté. “We just assumed he would end up working for Aegis when he left here. We had a saying there like those Las Vegas commercials: ‘What happens in Baghdad, stays in Baghdad.’”

  There is no proof that Hunter-Choat went on to significantly profit from Aegis’s new business, but his associate at the PCO, Brigadier General James Ellery, did. Ellery had been in charge of managing security for the reconstruction of the power industry, and was most likely not present at the meetings where the decision to award the Aegis contract was taken. However, a former employee of the PMO who worked with Ellery on a day-to-day basis has said that Ellery did advise Spicer throughout the bidding process. Very soon after completing his official assignment in Iraq, Ellery returned to set up Aegis’s Baghdad office. He began encountering problems almost immediately. The State Department official said that he had caught Ellery lying about certain benchmarks of progress. According to the official, coalition officials warned Ellery on a few occasions, but after he ignored a specific request by the U.S. embassy regional security officer (RSO) to not travel, the State Department reportedly used that as the reason to demand that Ellery be fired. Ellery did leave Baghdad, but instead of firing him, Spicer promoted him to the board of directors. When I ask my State Department source if Ellery’s almost immediate return as the Aegis project manager should have raised questions of impropriety, he thinks about it for a second and says, “You know, I never really thought about that.”

  So Ellery got a promotion, even though he had been essentially expelled from Baghdad and the operation he set up was criticized on many levels. Since they began with no existing apparatus on the ground in Iraq, it should have been expected that they would encounter significant problems as a result of their sudden requirement for over six hundred trained armed men, a fleet of vehicles, a dozen intelligence centers, and much more. To be fair, one insider sets the scene: “The insurgency was cooking; there was not an armored car to be found; getting weapons was equally difficult. On a daily operational level it was a clusterfuck. They didn’t even have an office…. Aegis was essentially building an airplane in flight.”

  Even though there was intense pressure on Aegis to get their operation up and running, a lack of manpower available in Baghdad to manage oversight had made it difficult to keep track of their progress. “People were coming and going, things were hectic, contract managers handled an average of sixty to seventy contracts each…. The Aegis contract was handled by a fifty-two-year-old woman who wouldn’t know which end of a gun was which. The PCO had no security officials managing that contract.”

  Despite the failure of official oversight, it became widely known that Aegis was having serious problems getting up to speed, and the State Department started to investigate. One visit made Aegis’s problems obvious. “They were not prepared when I came and walked down there…. They had nothing. They didn’t have people. They didn’t have standards…. Aegis people didn’t have skills, tactics, or even vetting. They [Aegis] would take people out to the range and have them fire a few shots with no judging. [Aegis] started hiring Iraqis and giving them guns and giving them passes to enter the Green Zone. That gave us a heart attack.” He laughs. “We were doing everything we could to keep armed Iraqis out and he was inviting them in.” As a result, the RSO triggered an audit.

  According to Spicer’s version of events, the Office of the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, as a matter of course, would audit contractors beginning from the biggest and working their way down the food chain. “Aegis deployed on the fifth or sixth of June and was audited in October.” Spicer partially attributes the negative report they received after the audit to the rapidity with which Aegis was trying to get their operations up and running in Iraq. “Two people came in with a statement of work and said they wanted weapons training records. In that mad kerfuffle, they were not complete. Show me an army that has complete records.”

  Spicer’s claim that the main problem was just with recordkeeping contradicts the recollection of the State Department official and the Inspector General’s report. The audit report released in early 2005 indicated that Aegis had not thoroughly vetted or even trained a significant portion of their personnel. The audit also confirmed publicly what many detractors were saying privately—that Aegis was cutting corners to get people in the field, doing things like showing up with taxis and Iraqi guards instead of armored cars and Tier One operators. One competitor jokes that based on the professionalism he has seen in Aegis contractors, Spicer must have “cleaned out the jails” to ramp up as quickly as he had.

  Dissension inside the company had grown so extreme that an ex-employee set up a website to air grievances of drunkenness, incompetence, and Aegis’s negligent and remote management. Spicer’s most recent controversy first arose when a video posted on that employee website surfaced, showing unidentified contractors—though presumably employed by Aegis—in a security convoy shooting at Iraqi civilians. It’s not unusual for a PSD to shoot at cars that come too close to a security convoy, but the Aegis-hired South African contractor in the controversial video did not appear to be going through the mandated warning steps before spraying nearing cars with bullets. The Elvis soundtrack didn’t add any sense of propriety to the actions, either.

  “The video came out and you know you can put anything together. This was not good,” says Spicer. Although Spicer does not officially claim ownership, he is careful not to disown it. “We needed to establish what are the specific incidents. We want to find out what is going on, and we want to do it as objectively as possible.”

  Spicer assures me that “there will be a public explanation, in due course. [Aegis’ internal] board of inquiry consists of a senior lawyer and recorder of the crown court, a retired deputy chief constable who had also been a police advisor in Iraq, and a former special air service warrant officer who had recently left the army. They conducted a frame-by-frame analysis: Was it Aegis? What were the circumstances? What systems and procedures should be implemented? They spent a week or ten days in Iraq formulating and writing a hundred-page report with a hundred-page annex.” Tim seems so proud of the way he has managed his latest controversy that I grow to expect he is building my anticipation to reveal that the results of the inquiry completely absolve him or his company of any wrongdoing. So I find it curious when he concludes discussion of the subject with an abrupt “You will never see that report because we are contracted with the U.S. It is confidential to the client. The report may never be released.” On June 10, 2006, the Pentagon Criminal Investigative Division ruled that “no one will be charged with a crime.” No report will be released.

  It’s obvious that that line of inquiry has closed, which brings me again to a confrontation with the lack of accountability, shielded by a complete lack of transparency, for security contractors working in Iraq. According to most of the security contractors I have spoken to about working in Iraq, the vast majority of incidents involving contractors and civilians go unreported and unexposed. When news of the “Aegis PSD” video first broke publicly, it seemed for an instant that the public controversy could force a reckoning with these issues. However, Spicer may have learned a little PR savvy since the fallout of Sandline and quickly issued statements that the company would undertake an immediate and complete investigation. Despite the lip service he pays to regulation and accountability, it appears that Spicer would be the last one to push the Pentagon toward reforming the system. He owns nearly 40 percent of a company that just grossed over $120 million (75 percent from his Iraq contracts) and has a private army of nine hundred men on the ground in Iraq. With his U.
S. contract up to just under half a billion dollars and extended for another year, he doesn’t need anything to upset his current position.

  The future of Aegis may be rosy if their UN contracts and other business continue to grow. However, it seems their single biggest contract—set to expire in May 2007—may be in jeopardy. According to the former State Department official: “They [DoD] are looking to dump Aegis as fast as they can.” Spicer has created enemies and, reportedly, he’s started to look like a potential liability to those who hold the purse strings. At the end of the day “he is an unsavory character. He [Spicer] is a snake. We have a joke around here when we talk about that contract—‘Didn’t anybody Google him?’”

  The former State Department official takes it further, summing up his view of the recent boom in the private security industry: “Contractors at the end of the day are mercenaries. They are self-interested. They work for money. You can dress up a pig but they are still a pig…. Spicer at the end of the day is a snake.”

  Despite his early love affair with the controversial idea of PMCs providing offensive fighting capabilities, Tim Spicer has achieved an extraordinary degree of success as a legitimate purveyor of freelance armed men. Spicer could be said to have proceeded down the “respectable” route with Aegis Defence, while his former partner Simon Mann reverted to the more traditional mercenary route. However, to hear Spicer and other industry leaders talk about the future, it’s difficult to not wonder if these post-9/11 iterations are attempts to find the sweet spot—the balance between naked aggression and passive peacekeeping—the neo-mercenary, if you will.

 

‹ Prev