Pentagon link to Guinea coup plot

Bush official was warned of trouble brewing in oil-rich state

David Leigh, David Pallister and Jamie Wilson
Monday September 27, 2004
The Guardian
Snip:

Links have been discovered between senior American military officials and the failed coup plot in Equatorial Guinea that has left Sir Mark Thatcher facing trial in South Africa. Theresa Whelan, a member of the Bush administration in charge of African affairs at the Pentagon, twice met a London-based businessman, Greg Wales, in Washington before the coup attempt. Mr Wales has been accused of being one of its organisers, but has denied any involvement.

A US defence official told Newsweek magazine yesterday: "Mr Wales mentioned in passing _ there might be some trouble brewing in Equatorial Guinea. Specifically, he had heard from some business associates of his that wealthy citizens of the country were planning to flee in case of a crisis."

The regime of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea has accused the US of backing the plot, but the Pentagon denies supporting it. US officials say it was Mr Wales who made all the approaches to them.

Equatorial Guinea official sources claim that last November, when the plot was in its early stages, an Old Etonian mercenary, Simon Mann, paid Mr Wales about $8,000. Mann was subsequently jailed for seven years in Zimbabwe on charges linked to the coup plot.

A few days after the alleged payment, Mr Wales went to Washington for a dinner and conference organised by an influential group of US "private military companies", the IPOA (International Peace Operations Association). Ms Whelan told the group the Pentagon was keen to see them operate in Africa, saying: "Contractors are here to stay in supporting US national security objectives overseas." They were cheaper, and saved the use of US forces in peacekeeping and training.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/equatorialguinea/story/0,15013,1313672,00.html

What West Africa does have is oil – a lot of it. Nigeria is the world's seventh-largest oil producer, and accounts for 70 percent of the continent's oil. Equatorial Guinea, as well as Angola, Senegal and São Tomé and Príncipe are all being eyed hungrily by Western oil majors, who've made sizable investments throughout the region.

Yet West Africa also has in abundance the same complexities that have stymied American efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq: inscrutable singularities of ethnicity, cultures and customs; a bevy of banana republics and informal statelets run by torture-prone, anti-democratic regimes marked by extreme corruption and violence, and an infinitely more difficult natural environment. In short, West Africa is Afghanistan and Iraq to the power of ten, and American troops stationed there are no doubt going to be feeling the heat.

Adventures in Anti-Terrorism

Now, the U.S. avers, West Africa also has terrorists of the Islamic, al-Qaeda variety. As usual, American leaders are not interested in severing terrorism at its roots – that is, addressing the lack of education, economic opportunity and basic social welfare that inevitably give rise to inter-ethnic conflict and ideological (in today's world, religious) fanaticism. As usual, the remedy for the perceived growth of terrorism is to arm and train the various clans and factions that pass for governments in the area – disregarding their own connections with rogue arms dealers and organized crime, as well as their often precarious grip on power.

And so has the Pentagon undertaken another multi-million dollar project for training the armies of weak states in the war on terror – now, the central-west African states of Niger, Chad, Mali and Mauritania. The American acronym for the operation is TSCTI (Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorist Initiative), and it is, according to Reuters, "aimed at stopping militant groups gaining a foothold in a region which already provides 15 percent of U.S. oil supplies." In short, as mission commander Major Paul Baker recently told the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) in Chad, "e're looking at Africa as a place of growth for the Marine Corps and the Department of Defense."

Indeed. The CSM article points to the ongoing joint U.S. naval exercises with Nigeria, reported anti-terror patrols along the Kenya-Somalia border, and the "expansion of the Chad program from a four-nation, $7 million project to a nine-country plan with an expected budget of up to $125 million." More great news for the U.S. taxpayer, just as Iraq continues to empty imperial coffers.

more
http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=3658

wing of the Republican party:


MI6 chief’s nephew was partner of coup leader
Nicholas Rufford
Sunday Times


A CLOSE relative of a former head of MI6 has emerged as having business links with Simon Mann, the former SAS officer involved in the plot to overthrow the head of an oil-rich African state.
Justin Longley, the nephew of Sir Richard Dearlove — chief of MI6 at the time the coup attempt was staged last March — was a friend and associate of Mann, the Eton-educated former soldier jailed for seven years in Zimbabwe last Friday. Longley was working closely with Mann on goldmining, forestry and engineering ventures in Africa. He visited the continent as a representative of Logo Logistics, the company through which Mann later financed the attempt in March to overthrow Teodoro Obiang Nguema, president of Equatorial Guinea.
One mining venture in Sudan also involved Sir Mark Thatcher, who was arrested last month by South African police and accused of being among the backers of the coup.

Dearlove is likely to be unhappy that controversy is dogging him even into retirement. He told the Cambridge college of which he became master last month that he was hoping for a “calmer existence” after several fraught final months as head of MI6. A picture — the first to be published — showing him dark-suited and balding in a new edition of the Pembroke College Gazette suggests he believed he had finally escaped public attention. As “C”, Dearlove took strenuous steps throughout his career to protect his identity and gave evidence to the Hutton inquiry over a voice link. Documents seen by The Sunday Times show Longley — the son of Dearlove’s sister — and Mann were corresponding on ventures in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon and Angola. Longley accompanied Mann on a trip to Sudan in December 2002 to inspect a mining and forestry area that could have yielded millions of pounds worth of gold and teak. A report of the visit identified Mann as “CEO of Logo while Justin Longley is a senior project manager”. At one point Mann wrote to Longley about the fantastic potential wealth in an African gold deposit: “The grade is awesome — ounces per ton.”

Longley was connected with several business ventures that the Foreign Office was aware of or intervened in. He worked with Mann at DiamondWorks, an Angola-based diamond mining enterprise, in the 1990s. The company had links through investors to Sandline International, the private military company that supplied arms to unseat a group of rebels who had seized power in Sierra Leone. The Foreign Office knew in advance of the operation. Longley also worked as a manager for Oryx Natural Resources, the mining concern that had controversial links to Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe. Oryx’s attempts to get a London stock exchange listing collapsed when the Foreign Office criticised the company’s plans for mining in the Congo — a source of “blood diamonds”. Oryx denied any wrongdoing.

Mann was jailed for attempting illegally to buy weapons for use in the coup in Equatorial Guinea. The Zimbabwean authorities claimed he confessed under interrogation that MI6 was behind his attempt to seize power in Africa’s third biggest oil producer. The Foreign Office denied it had advance knowledge. There is no suggestion that Longley had any knowledge of or involvement in the plot. As well as Dearlove, Longley had uncles from both sides of his family in MI6. His mother was headmistress of Roedean, the girls’ public school. He also had connections with other members of the coup conspiracy. He was a close contact of Greg Wales, who allegedly helped plan the mission. Longley is said to have regarded Wales as a “spook” and described him to an acquaintance as a man with influential connections in Washington who “worked for the CIA and the commercial wing of the Republican party”.


In February, Wales met a senior Pentagon official in the Africa department and was in touch with an analyst who worked for the CIA.
Longley left Angola in 1998 after a diamond mine where he was working was attacked by suspected Unita rebels. Eight mining personnel were killed, 24 injured and 10 went missing — presumed taken hostage during the raid. He now works with a relative of Mann for a technical services company based in Brighton, East Sussex. Last week he declined to comment in detail on his relationship with Mann. “I have no comment on Simon Mann and the allegations against him. My relationship with him was through DiamondWorks,” he said. “I was general manager and he was chief operations officer. That is public record. I’ve got nothing further to say in any way, shape or form, and I would be very disappointed if any of this discussion appears in the press.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1268917_2,00.html

one way or the other.

I always wondered since it seemed far fetched.

kkkkkkkkick

But you are!

Link to my link to the Newsweek article:

Trouble on Oily Waters (DoD/Feith link to EG coup)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=866406

Also, Emad, was discussing your neighbor the horse thief in there.

The dead horse was collateral on the Riggs loan.

That just about sums up the business ethos of the Riggs Bank I think. It would make a great movie although I think the dead horse part may have been done somewhere else before.....Godfather?

:kick: