From SAS to Blood Diamond Wars

by Ross, Hamish

  Happy New Year,

  Yours ever

  Peter (P. A. Penfold)13

  It could be argued that a letter can get lost in the Christmas mail, but less convincingly that, separately, two individuals intuitively could assume that there was concern over the honours’ awards. However, denial, when under stress, in order to cover one’s back is one thing – and to some extent an understandable human failing –, but to spread disinformation into the public domain, clearly with the intention of discrediting someone, is sinister. And that is what subsequently appears to have been engineered.

  Again it happened when Peter Penfold was in the UK and the inquiry was underway into what was known and by whom about Sandline.

  I was at home here, and a friend telephoned from London, and said, ‘Have you seen the article in today’s Times?’ I said, ‘What article?’ He said, ‘There’s an article in today’s Times attacking you; well the Foreign Office attacking you, talking about how when you were in Conakry all that time and you never kept the government and the Foreign Office informed about what was going on.’ And I get the Times and I checked it and said to him, ‘Are you sure?’ He said, ‘Yes, page so and so.’ I looked again. It’s not here. What had happened, I pieced it all together later, the Foreign Office fed this story in to the Times, and they printed it in the first edition. Clearly someone in Customs and Excise, who was investigating at the time, picked it up immediately and they must have telephoned them to say this looks rather strange because Peter Penfold has left on our desk all these reports that he sent to you daily from Conakry, which Customs and Excise had. So the news people realised that they’d gone too far and they withdrew the article before it got into the second edition.14

  Who would have fed that disinformation to the Times? ‘Somebody in their news department who was working with Robin Cook.’15

  However, Peter Penfold’s friend retained the article that appeared in the first edition, and only in the first edition, before it was pulled. And it is fascinating to look closely at the text and do an analysis of the technique and elements that were chosen to isolate and discredit their man in Sierra Leone. It appeared on page 15 under the Politics and Government section of the paper.

  The ‘missing’ telegram that was never sent

  By Michael Evans, Defence Correspondent

  The mystery of the ‘missing’ telegram from Peter Penfold, the High Commissioner in Sierra Leone, was resolved yesterday when it emerged that he had not cabled London between May last year and April this year.

  Recent reports had suggested that Mr Penfold sent a telegram to the Foreign Office last December giving warning that Sandline International, the security company at the centre of the arms-for-Africa affair, wanted to break the arms embargo, but that this cable had not been found. It was also reported that Mr Penfold had sent a second telegram in January pointing out that there had been no reply to his first one.

  Senior Whitehall sources dismissed this version of events. They said that as soon as the military junta took over in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, in May last year, Mr Penfold became High Commissioner-in-exile in Conakry in neighbouring Guinea

  In the 11 months he spent there Mr Penfold had no way of communicating confidential reports by telegram, the sources said. He had a fax machine in his hotel but it was an open system and therefore not suitable for sending classified material to the Foreign Office. Throughout his exile in Guinea, the High Commissioner, now in Britain to help with the Customs and Excise investigation, was able to communicate with London only by an open telephone line.

  One Whitehall source said, ‘There is very little in writing from Mr Penfold during the time he was stuck in Conakry. Far from there being one missing telegram, there weren’t any telegrams at all from May 1997 to April.’

  This belies the impression given that the Foreign Office is awash with telegrams from the High Commissioner.

  However, Mr Penfold returned to London on at least one occasion. Sandline claimed in its letter to the Foreign Secretary on April 24 that the High Commissioner had visited its premises in January and had been briefed about its plans to send arms and personnel to Sierra Leone and its tactics on helping to overthrow the junta.16

  The paper’s defence correspondent was fed the details. The sequence of the material had been carefully crafted. It begins with the vague and imprecise ‘recent reports had suggested’ to introduce the fallacious claim that the communication was a telegram – thus creating a man of straw − which allows an authoritative source to knock it down with the true statement that no telegram had been sent. Peter Penfold never said he sent a telegram, but because the source can demolish the fabrication it set up in the first place, the reader is nudged into a position with regard to the High Commissioner’s integrity. And the significance of inverted commas round the word ‘missing’ now becomes apparent. However, what was most damaging is the line, ‘One Whitehall source said: “There is very little in writing from Mr Penfold during the time he was stuck in Conakry.”’

  The fact is that practically every day I had sent a hand written report, often graded Restricted, to the African department by fax from the hotel in Conakry keeping London fully up to date with what was going on. All these reports were on file in London and had been passed to Customs and Excise.17

  Civil servants were traditionally the grey people in the background; they served their political masters who took the credit but also took the blame. So it was a new departure to have a civil servant named − and his reputation besmirched by his own department in the press – on what was insider disinformation, dutifully relayed by a lackey close to the horse’s mouth (or some orifice of the horse). And it was a new experience for Peter Penfold to have the press milling outside his home.

  We had to slip out through the garage to go shopping. Quite frankly, we had very little support for the Foreign Office. I had tremendous support from individual colleagues, but from the African Department and Personnel Department, two key departments, support was minimal.18

  For the first time too the public became aware of the drama being played involving a civil servant and politicians. The public would become very much aware of this naming and shaming five years later when the government scientist Dr David Kelly, a weapons expert in the MoD, was traced by the press after information had been leaked by his department as a result of political pressure to discredit him because of his views that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. His family also felt he had no support from his department. Indeed, at the time that David Kelly was being hounded, Peter Penfold felt for him.

  I said to my wife at the time, and to many friends, that I felt a great empathy with David Kelly. He had more publicity than I had, but I know exactly how he felt because I too had to go through the foreign affairs grilling. And apart from the Legg inquiry, I had to appear for four hours. And you’re sitting there having all those questions fired at you, and you’re saying to yourself, ‘What am I doing here? This is not my job.’ The way we run our country is that we’re the civil servants, we get on and do what our political masters tell us to do. They set the agenda, the policy; they get all the kudos when it goes right, but equally they have to take the flak when it goes wrong. And we are the faceless people; we just get on with it. And equally, you’re having questions fired by MPs, who a week previously had probably never known where Sierra Leone was, whose agenda purely is to score points against the other party, couldn’t really give a toss about the actual situation. And there you are, you’re being used as a punch-bag for this.

  I really had a go back at them when they were going on and on at me, and I said to them, I said, ‘Look, quite honestly the people in Sierra Leone do not understand what all this is about. As far as they’re concerned, we, Britain, have helped bring back peace and democracy to their country.’ I said, ‘Out there we’re regarded as heroes,’ and I said, ‘the essence is the restoration of democracy, because we, Britain, had told them a couple of years ago that this is
the way to solve all your problems. They look to you and this parliament as the mother of democracy.’ I said, ‘It just doesn’t make any sense to them that the mother of democracy is now saying it’s a scandal now that democracy has been returned to their country.’ And I said, ‘And the point about all this is that it’s the suffering of these people that is important’, I said, ‘I should not be having to spend all my time here answering questions to you, when there are people there trying to get back on their feet out there, and I’m supposed to be out in that country helping them.’ And I said, ‘They just don’t understand it.’19

  At one point, Robin Cook told the House of Commons that he had doubled the number of people working in Sierra Leone. ‘What he didn’t say was that all the extra people were working on the Sandline case; they weren’t actually helping Sierra Leone.20

  Out of the blue, Customs and Excise decided to drop the case. ‘They said it was not in the public interest to pursue this.’21

  Both my solicitor and I were disappointed that we did not go to court so that I could clear my name, and I am sure that Tim Spicer felt the same, although I suppose that I should not speak for him.22 The point is that we both maintained that we had not breached the UN Sanctions Order (a point subsequently corroborated by the Legal Department of the UN in a letter). Because HM Customs and Excise dropped the case against us, we never had the chance to prove this in court.23

  Sir Thomas Legg’s inquiry was the first to report. Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, presented its findings to the House of Commons. He reiterated that ‘Sandline International and its arms played little or no part in the removal of the junta from Sierra Leone.’24 Within the limits of the inquiry’s remit that may have been the case: the consignment of arms destined for the Kamajors/CDF as part of the contract signed by President Kabbah had been seized by ECOMOG at Lungi. But in the overall picture of what actually happened, the inquiry’s findings on Sandline’s role fall short.

  However you view the contract arrangements with ECOMOG and Juba Incorporated, Bokkie was owned by Sandline. It was the only aircraft providing logistical support for ECOMOG − without which they could not have mounted a battlefield campaign − , and it ferried an entire battalion of soldiers and their arms to Kossoh, from where they launched the attack on the junta. Then the company itself had the capacity to operate at a sophisticated level; it was not a group limited to a gung-ho mentality. It had been in contact with Kabbah from July 1997, and it had involvement in the ECOMOG planning group at the highest level, up to and during the invasion of Freetown and the recapture of the main rural towns. This task was conducted on a daily basis. The ‘Sandline Affair’ made their task and influence much more difficult in terms of liaison, nevertheless, it continued out of operational necessity. In addition, it was able to provide discreet tactical intelligence to both UN and US agencies.

  At political level, there was an implied difference in the attitude of the USA. It too, officially, took the line that the junta should be removed by peaceful means. However, its State Department, as we saw, contracted the US company PAE to provide logistical support to ECOMOG. Although (at this stage) PAE did not fly into Sierra Leone, when ECOMOG began its build up of troops and munitions for the attack on the junta, there would have been a grey area in which PAE, in Liberia ferrying Nigerian troops redeployed for battle, was providing the first leg of a relay of men and arms which would then be flown by Juba Incorporated in the Sandline helicopter from Monrovia to Lungi. The US lived with this ambivalence without any breast-beating in public. But then no US secretary of state had painted himself into a corner. Little wonder that Customs and Excise decided to drop the case on the grounds that to pursue it further was not in the public interest.

  None of that, however, was central − or indeed of the least interest − to the political motivators who initiated and shaped the remit of the inquiry.

  All that became superfluous to what it then became, a political thing in Britain, and essentially it was not a question of whether the sanctions had been busted or not, it was a question of saving Robin Cook’s face. I remember Diane Abbott standing up in the House, when the Commission of Inquiry was set up; and she was absolutely right when she said, ‘The Commission of Inquiry is a nonsense because they’re already pre-set by what it is they are being asked to do.’25

  From the standpoint of politicians, the main focus of interest was on personalities and the Foreign Office. Referring to Peter Penfold, Robin Cook paid tribute to his courage and commitment to staying at his post during the coup, and he recognized the high standing he had won for Britain in Sierra Leone. However, the Foreign Secretary found fault with him over Sandline.26 The inquiry also noted flawed communication channels in the Foreign Office: information was not passed on; the African Department had not been aware of the precise wording of the Order in Council, which included Kabbah’s government in the arms ban. It was evident too that both ministers and officials had played down the comprehensiveness of the ban in news lines; the junta was always referred to, but not the legitimate government of Sierra Leone. Hence Peter Penfold was not aware that the ban applied to Kabbah’s government. But he was to bear the brunt of it. He received a written reprimand from the Permanent Under Secretary on the grounds that he should have been more judicious in his meetings with Tim Spicer, and he should have reported more fully. But there was no reprimand for the other officials in the Foreign Office, who had met Tim Spicer.27

  The debate in the House of Commons gave some members the opportunity to express righteous indignation about the role of private military companies. Robin Cook assured the House that in future, ‘contact with such firms occurs only with permission and with a full report on a written record.’28 The Foreign Secretary was now off the hook, and Peter Penfold was allowed to return to his post in Sierra Leone. But on one of his return trips to Freetown from a session at the Foreign Office, quite by chance the first two people he met were Fred and Juba.

  Peter Penfold came back to Sierra Leone with two BBC reporters, and Juba and myself happened to be there to meet one of our American friends, but he was not in the first flight. But when Peter Penfold got off the helicopter followed by the two BBC reporters, Juba and myself were the first people Peter met, and our meeting appeared to have been arranged! There we were shaking hands, hugging and smiling and welcoming each other, oblivious to all the rest of the people. We were genuinely so pleased and proud to see Peter on Freetown soil, and so was everyone there that evening.

  The Foreign Office guidelines about no contact with private military companies without permission, which, of course, had only been introduced after the Sandline inquiries, were unworkable, given the situation in Sierra Leone. The UN was now entering the scene; the UK was emerging as the dominant provider of support and training; and ECOMOG, still reluctant to commit its helicopters, was urging Juba to make the Mi-24 gunship serviceable for combat. It was inevitable that there would be liaison and discussion among representatives of those three elements and the Sierra Leone government. On one occasion, Juba found himself standing next to Peter Penfold, who, trying to keep a straight face, turned to him and said, ‘I’m not supposed to be speaking to you.’29

  The political holier than thou stance in relation to dealings with private military companies did not last long. Two years later, with Britain committed to retraining the Sierra Leone army, the RAF would have a liaison officer attached to the private military company which comprised the Sierra Leone air wing, and during the spectacular British raid on a rebel base to free hostages, the same PMC would be called upon to give assistance.

  Before that came about, however, there was yet more drama to be played out when the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs − without the warm enthusiasm of the Foreign Secretary − opened its inquiry. The Select Committee’s view was that ‘it is important not to be mesmerised by the Legg report: theirs is not necessarily the last word in this affair.’ 30 True, but neither would its report be the last word on Sandl
ine; it could not be: the committee was refused access to intelligence reports, and it was not allowed to interview, or take evidence in private from the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). However, it did focus on the machinery of government, and it had a forceful go at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

  The committee found that ‘senior officials who received both Mr Penfold’s minute of 2 February and Sandline’s Project Python document (Ms Grant and Mr Dales) made serious errors of judgement and failed in their duty to Ministers by not acting promptly and decisively on the information it contained.’31 Officials who met Tim Spicer took inadequate notes of meeting, considering the import of the agenda. A senior official was referred to as, ‘the dog who did not bark.’32 Nor did the Permanent Under Secretary escape censure. In his statement to the committee, Sir John Kerr, said that Peter Penfold had a duty to understand thoroughly government policy,

  as it affects the country to which he is accredited (‘he should have made it his business to find out’), though he did concede that ‘it was also the responsibility of the Department to make sure he came across all [relevant] information.’33

  Some concession – in bureaucracy it is a fundamental tenet that hierarchy has such responsibility. However, the committee’s next sentence could have come from the script of the TV series Yes Minister.