February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The company’s “core purpose” is to “increase the business effectiveness of clients by ensuring that they neither underestimate nor exaggerate the risks to their operations, investments and assets.”
Aegis states that it does this by “identifying and analyzing threats to clients’ interests worldwide; explaining clearly the nature of those threats, with a strong practical focus; advising on risk mitigation strategies and implementing and reviewing security measures as required.”
Begob, no wonder the Pentagon was impressed. The lads and lassies by the Potomac doubtless well understand exactly what a “strong practical focus” and a “risk mitigation strategy” might entail.
By way of further impressing clients around the world, the Aegis Web site lists its major players, including its chairman and CEO, Tim Spicer OBE.
The company states that it works to the highest standards of integrity and legal compliance and that its activities are overseen by an advisory council whose members have even more letters after their names than Spicer.
The gentlemen in question are General Sir Roger Wheeler, former chief of the UK General Staff, and Sir John Birch, former UK permanent representative to the United Nations.
Being both permanent and former is one of the wonders of diplomacy. But Aegis ain’t about diplomacy. It’s about action, the more the better.
Spicer, as readers recall, has had an action-packed career that has spanned the globe from Belfast to Papua New Guinea.
And now Washington D.C.
He has moved in a world of English public school old boys, military officers, businessmen and grim dictators. He has had his ups and downs, but he is better shape than some of his old pals, among them Simon Mann, scion of a British brewing family and soldier of misfortune who has just landed himself a seven-year jail cell in Zimbabwe, lately one of Africa’s less desirable holiday spots.
Mann was convicted of leading a group of 67 alleged mercenaries on a mission to topple the less than virtuous government that runs the tiny sliver of land that is oil-rich Equatorial Guinea
Mann and Spicer shared their soldier days in the Scots Guards and the crack Special Air Services.
Mann’s career also involved acting, not least the role of a Parachute Regiment officer in the Paul Greengrass-directed movie about Bloody Sunday.
Greengrass described Mann to the BBC as a “very humane man, very English, a romantic, tremendously good company.”
It’s the type of description that every “Irish terrorist” would envy.
Mann’s fate is not to be envied. He will doubtless dream every night of a cohort from Aegis Defense Services bursting through his cell door on a daring rescue mission and, later perhaps, a leading role in the movie “Raid on Harare.”
But back to Spicer, the one time lieutenant colonel who commanded the Scots Guards in Belfast when teenager Peter McBride was fatally shot in the back in September 1992.
As readers will recall, Spicer led a fast-moving life during the 1990s and his business associates included Mann and one Anthony Buckingham, an oil industry entrepreneur.
The names of Buckingham and Spicer surface frequently in the 1990s in the context of a company called Executive Outcomes, a pioneer in the field of “private military companies” that inserted itself into some sticky situations, including the civil war in Angola.
Executive Outcomes, over time, gave way to another outfit, called Sandline, a more sanitized and refined version of its predecessor.
Sandline’s core business involved the hiring out of “private military companies” to various clients, mostly governments.
Buckingham’s business interests were widespread. They included a company based in Kenya called Branch Energy.
Branch Energy’s board of directors at one point included Sanjivan Ruprah. Ruprah has been linked to a slew of international arms deals and has been arrested more than once in Europe.
After one such arrest, in Belgium, Ruprah was described in a February 2002 report in the British Guardian newspaper as “one of Africa’s most notorious arms dealers, a man who has been banned from entering Britain and been described by the British government as ‘odious’ for his alleged role in illegally supplying weapons to rebel forces in Sierra Leone.”
In an ultimate irony, those same rebels ended up shooting at British paratroopers rushed into the country to save British nationals in what was an especially vicious war even by African standards.
The Guardian reported that the United Nations had linked Ruprah with Victor Bout, a Russian arms dealer known as “Africa’s merchant of death.”
Bout had been separately linked with arms sales to the Taliban, Al Qaeda’s babysitters in pre-9/11 Afghanistan.
Ruprah, banned from Britain, is known to the U.S. government because he also at one point offered to help arm the Northern Alliance, which fought the Taliban alone until the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001.
In the arms and private-military business, working two ends against the middle is an option if circumstances allow — and the potential profits are big enough.
There is only one degree of separation between Ruprah and Tim Spicer, Buckingham being the connecting dot.
This is not to suggest any direct link between Ruprah and Spicer, but suffice it say, all these individuals have been swimming in the same opaque sea.
The Pentagon must be awash with computers, though whether anybody has time to log onto Google must be in some doubt.
Pity. Because if you plug in the names of Spicer and Bout together, bingo, both appear on the Web site of the Center For Public Integrity in Washington, albeit in separate investigative reports.
Still, it would be fair to expect that given the circles that Spicer has been running in for some years, a brow or two might have been furrowed among those in the defense department charged with dishing out contracts in Iraq.
Spicer’s Aegis, of course, managed to snag a rather large one, to the tune of $293 million.
It’s a funny old world. Ex-Provo Joe Black lives a quiet life for more than 20 years and is met by a regiment of Homeland Security agents when he arrives for a wedding in Pittsburgh.
Tim Spicer, international man of mystery and action, gets the red-carpet treatment and a nine-figure U.S. government contract. Go figure indeed.