Iraq's Mercenary King (Vanity Fair, via CorpWatch)

US: Iraq's Mercenary King

by Robert Baer , Vanity Fair
March 31st, 2007

Last spring, in Los Angeles, I met with a producer and a screenwriter who were trolling for a good story to turn into a movie—specifically, a story about a pair of colorful adventurers, maybe mercenaries, who get into serious trouble seeking a fortune in Africa. I wasn't much help. I had spent little time in Africa—only a couple of brief trips to Nigeria and Liberia during my time in the C.I.A. But I promised them I'd ask around when I got to London, a city with more colorful adventurers per block than anywhere else in the world.

I knew my share of them: rogue oil traders, art forgers, exiled presidents, disgraced journalists, arms dealers. There was also the Jordanian prince who had once offered to smuggle me into Ramadi, in Iraq's anarchic Anbar Province, in exchange for 100 sheep. People like these are pretty much the currency of C.I.A. agents.

In London, the consensus was that if I wanted a good African yarn I needed to talk to Tim Spicer. He knew or could get to every mercenary, adventurer, or promoter who had ever cast a shadow on that continent.

I knew who Spicer was. He'd popped up on the C.I.A.'s radar after he retired from the British Army and went to work, in 1996, as the C.E.O. of Sandline International, a private military company offering "operational support" to "legitimate governments." A year later Spicer was in Papua New Guinea, where he fielded a mercenary army for the government in order to protect a multi-national copper-mining company. After Spicer was expelled, he moved on to Sierra Leone, this time helping to ship arms to coup plotters. Spicer's name resurfaced in 2004 in connection with a putsch aimed at Equatorial Guinea, allegedly led by Simon Mann, his friend, former army colleague, and onetime business associate. Though questioned by British officials, Spicer was not implicated in the incident. ....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14402