Prologue

The Prince alighted from his gleaming silver-blue jet, his mind firmly on the task at hand: to persuade his close friend to go to war.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington, was in Crawford, Texas, in August 2002 to visit the President of the United States, his close friend George W. Bush. At the President’s ranch the two men, comfortable in one another’s company, chatted for an hour. The President was in determined mood. Bandar’s exhortation that he should not back off, that he should complete what his father had failed to do, that he should destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein once and for all, gratified the President. Satisfied by their mutual reinforcement, the dapper enigmatic Prince and the cowboy President took lunch with their wives and seven of Bandar’s eight children.

A few weeks later, President Bush met the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, at Camp David. The two leaders declared they had sufficient evidence that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction to justify their acting against Saddam, with or without the support of the United Nations.

Prince Bandar’s role in Washington and London was unique: diplomat, peacemaker, bagman for covert CIA operations and arms dealer extraordinaire. He constructed a special relationship between Washington, Riyadh and London, and made himself very, very wealthy in the process.

The £75m Airbus, painted in the colours of the Prince’s beloved Dallas Cowboys, was a gift from the British arms company BAE Systems. It was a token of gratitude for the Prince’s role, as son of the country’s Defence Minister, in the biggest arms deal the world has seen. The Al Yamamah – ‘the dove’ – deal signed between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia in 1985 was worth over £40bn. It was also arguably the most corrupt transaction in trading history. Over £1bn was paid into accounts controlled by Bandar. The Airbus – maintained and operated by BAE at least until 2007 – was a little extra, presented to Bandar on his birthday in 1988.

A significant portion of the more than £1bn was paid into personal and Saudi embassy accounts at the venerable Riggs Bank opposite the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. The bank of choice for Presidents, ambassadors and embassies had close ties to the CIA, with several bank officers holding full agency security clearance. Jonathan Bush, uncle of the President, was a senior executive of the bank at the time. But Riggs and the White House were stunned by the revelation that from 1999 money had inadvertently flowed from the account of Prince Bandar’s wife to two of the fifteen Saudis among the 9/11 hijackers.

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On the night of 4 August 2000, police barged into Room 341 of a tawdry hotel in Cinisello Balsamo, a nondescript working-class town in northern Italy, just outside Milan. There they found a pale, fleshy 53-year-old man lying amidst a jumble of bedclothes and underwear, a pornographic film flickering on the wall in the background. He was surrounded by four prostitutes: Russian, Albanian, Kenyan and Italian. Cocaine littered the floor, together with half a million dollars’ worth of diamonds.

Leonid Minin, a Ukrainian-born Israeli and part owner of the Europa hotel, used his two-room suite as a bedroom, office and den of debauchery. A cursory search unearthed hundreds of pages of documents in English, Russian, German, Dutch and French. They revealed Minin’s role in an extraordinary network of defence companies, arms dealers, banks, front companies, drug runners, bent politicians, intelligence agents, government officials, ex-Nazis and militant Islamists.

Among the documents was correspondence detailing the sale of millions of dollars of weapons to the Liberian government in exchange for diamond and timber concessions. Investigators used the flight logs and end-user certificates they found to reconstruct numerous deliveries of weapons and matériel into West Africa and other conflict zones. A number of these deliveries were made using Leonid Minin’s personal British Aircraft Corporation 1-11 jet, which still bore the insignia of the Seattle Sonics basketball team, which had previously owned the plane.

Manufactured by a company in the BAE group, Minin’s jet was more basic than Prince Bandar’s opulent gift, but its journeys were no less significant in their impact.

*   *   *

The horror descended on Freetown at 3 a.m. on 6 January 1999.

Rebel elements of the army joined forces with troops of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) to invade the capital of Sierra Leone in an orgy of killing and destruction. They called it ‘Operation No Living Thing’.

This most horrific civil war on a continent of civil wars had begun in March 1991 as a spill-over from Liberia, which itself had been wracked by internecine violence since an invasion on Christmas Eve 1989 by a small group of armed men led by a former government junior minister, Charles Ghankay Taylor, with purported links to the CIA. He extended his war into neighbouring Sierra Leone to exploit that country’s massive diamond wealth through the RUF and its psychopath leader, Foday Sankoh, a dismissed army corporal and sometime photographer.

Throughout its eleven-year campaign the RUF killed and mutilated the very civilians it claimed to champion in an orgy of bewildering cruelty, while looting the country’s rich diamond reserves and trading them profitably with outsiders through Charles Taylor and his network that included Leonid Minin.

After Sankoh was captured in late 1998, his deputy commander, Sam Bockarie (aka ‘Mosquito’), declared that to free his imprisoned leader he was going to kill everyone in the country ‘to the last chicken’. In the first few days of 1999, the rebels infiltrated Freetown by joining civilians flocking into the city from the violence-ravaged surrounding towns. Their weapons were wrapped in dirty bundles. Another small group had fought its way to Mount Aureol overlooking the east end of Freetown. A rugged bush road winds from the top of the hill down to Savage Square, the heart of the east end. All they needed was extra weaponry.

On 22 December 1998, Leonid Minin had personally ferried guns and other equipment in his BAC 1-11 from Niamey in Niger to Monrovia, Liberia, where they were offloaded onto vehicles of President Charles Taylor’s armed forces and ferried to the outskirts of Freetown. With the safe arrival of the illegal arms, the order to attack was given.

In the early hours of 6 January, under cover of near-total darkness, the rebels made for Pademba Road Prison. They blasted open the gates and freed and armed the detainees. Foday Sankoh, however, had been removed from the prison two weeks before.

What followed was a two-day apocalyptic horror. Thousands of armed teenage soldiers, almost all of them wearing thick bandages on the side of the head where incisions had been made to pack crack cocaine under their skin, swarmed the city. Insane and delirious, they attacked the homes of civilians, killing those who refused to give them money, who were insufficiently welcoming, who looked well fed, or whose face they simply disliked. Thousands of innocent people were gunned down in their houses, rounded up and massacred on the streets, thrown from the upper floors of buildings, used as human shields and burned alive in cars and houses. They had their limbs hacked off with machetes, eyes gouged out with knives, hands and jaws smashed with hammers and bodies burned with boiling water. Women and girls were systematically sexually abused and children and young people abducted by the hundreds.

A group of rebels raided a World Food Programme warehouse looking for sustenance, but instead discovered hundreds of brand-new machetes intended for the cultivation of food. The machetes were used to crudely and methodically cut off the hands of hundreds of people – adults, children, even tiny babies. Because they had heard that an aid agency was sewing up severed hands, they took the hands with them.

At night during the blackout rebels chanting, ‘We want peace! We have come for peace!’ locked up whole families in their houses and set them ablaze so there would be light in the area. Fire was everywhere. Torches – raffia mats rolled and soaked in kerosene – ignited home after home; flames ravished the hills; family after family was burned alive.

Next to a roadblock a female soldier checked the virginity of her captives, prodding with her fingers after the girls were stripped naked and pinned to the ground. Then she made her suggestions to the senior officers of her unit. And in the city, on the grounds of the State House where the rebels ran a command post, hundreds of young women were rounded up, to be raped in the offices or on the walkways. Everywhere, hoping to be undesired, the youthful tried to look haggard, and with mixtures of water, soil and ash the light-skinned tried to make themselves dark.

Distinct units existed for committing particular acts: the Burn House Unit, Cut Hands Commando and Blood Shed Squad. Each had a trademark approach to their task: the Kill Man No Blood Unit who beat people to death without shedding blood or the Born Naked Squad who stripped their victims before killing them.

In less than two weeks almost 100,000 people were driven from their homes. Tens of thousands were left maimed and bloodied. Six thousand civilians were murdered.1

The arms trade did not cause this barbarism, but it facilitated and fuelled it.

At the time, Sierra Leone was the world’s least developed country. Most of its people lived on less than seventy cents a day and life expectancy was thirty-seven. Charles Taylor, Leonid Minin and their associates, who included the Al Qaeda network, made tens of millions of dollars out of the gun-running and diamond-trading operations associated with the brutal civil war.