Tim Spicer

Career in brief

1974 Joined army, 21 SAS

1976 Sandhurst, Scots Guards

1982 Falklands. Becomes major in :1985

1986-87 Company commander in Northern Ireland

1990 Joint planning group Desert Storm

1991 Military assistant to Gen Peter de la Billière

1991-93 Special Forces

1994 MA for Gen Sir Michael Rose in Sarajevo

1996 Leaves army. Sets up Sandline International

1997 Arrested during military coup in Papua New Guinea, which prevents Sandline intervention in Bougainville conflict.

1998 Arms to Africa Affair. Testifies to House of Commons over Sandline intervention in Sierra Leone.

2002 Chief executive, Aegis Defence Services

2004 Aegis wins major US security contract in Iraq.

2007 Aegis Iraq contract renewed.

The Peter Mc Bride case

18-year-old Peter Mc Bride was murdered in Belfast on 4 September 1992 by Mark Wright and James Fisher, members of a Scots Guards battalion commanded by Tim Spicer. The unarmed father of two was shot dead minutes after being stopped and searched by a British Army patrol.

Local police were not able to speak to the two soldiers until some hours after the shooting. In the meantime, the men were interviewed by Spicer along with three other officers. Spicer later wrote "I thought between us we could reach a balanced judgement on what happened."

Lt Col Spicer has since maintained the same version of events as Wright and Fisher, that the two soldiers believed McBride was about to throw a coffee jar bomb contained in a plastic bag he was carrying. This in spite of the fact that McBride had been searched moments earlier by members of the same patrol. The bag was subsequently found to contain a t-shirt.

At the subsequent trial, the judge said: "I am satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that there was no reasonable possibility that Guardsman Fisher held or may have held an honest belief that the deceased carried or may have carried a coffee jar bomb".

Wright and Fisher were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. An appeal was dismissed in 1995, and the pair were denied leave to appeal to the House of Lords a year later.

Spicer was heavily involved in a lobbying campaign which contributed to the British Government's decision to free Wright and Fisher in 1998. The pair were subsequently allowed to return to their unit, and fought in the Iraq War. Their murder conviction has never been overturned.

Papua New Guinea - The Sandline Affair

In January 1997, the Government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) hired Sandline International, a mercenary firm run by Tim Spicer, to put down a secessionist movement on the copper-rich island of Bougainville. The Sandline plan, Operation Contravene, envisaged the use of two Soviet-made Mi-24 attack helicopters and two Mi-17assault helicopters as part of a strike force to retake the island in a massive escalation of the conflict.

Many of the troops brought to PNG turned out to be employees of Executive Outcomes, a South African mercenary firm founded by veterans of the Apartheid-era army. A mining firm linked to Executive Outcomes was reportedly represented at the initial meeting between Sandline and the PNG Government.

The Sandline contract was never approved by the PNG Parliament, and military opposition to the deal provoked a political crisis. Following the resignation of the Prime Minister, Spicer was briefly detained for illiegal possession of a firearm and illegal importation of cash.

After the departure of Sandline, a peaceful political solution to the Bougainville situation was achieved. Although Sandline never carried out its mission, it nevertheless succeeded in suing the new PNG Government for full payment on its contract.

Sierra Leone - The Arms to Africa Affair

In 1998, Sandline imported 100 tons of weapons into Sierra Leone in violation of a UN arms embargo. Spicer's company had been hired by ousted President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah to return him to power. It later emerged that the deal was to be financed by Rakesh Saxena, a financier facing extradition from Canada to Thailand on fraud charges. In return, Saxena hoped to gain diamond concessions in Sierra Leone.

The episode provoked a major political scandal in Britain, where the Government was accused of conniving at the breach of the arms embargo. During hearings in the House of Commons, the Deputy Head of the FCO's Equatorial Africa Department, Craig Murray, said he found Spicer "extremely difficult to pin down and shifty," and had recommended his officials not keep contact with him.

Iraq - The Trophy Video Scandal

In 2004, Spicer's new mercenary firm Aegis won a major security in Iraq. It has been alleged that two former British officers working for the Coalition Provisonal Authority, Brigadier General Anthony Hunter-Choat and Brigadier General James Ellery, were instrumental in the award of the contract to Aegis.

Ellery went on to head the Baghdad office of Aegis, which was later heavily criticised by US Government auditors who found the company could not prove that its armed employees received proper weapons training or that it had vetted Iraqi employees.

The problems within the company were further highlighted in 2005 by the emergence of claims of poor weapons handling and widespread drink and drug abuse on a message board run by an Aegis employee.

Most significantly, this message board became the source for the so-called trophy videos, which appeared to show Aegis employees firing randomly at Iraqi civilians. A US Department of Defence investigation later concluded there was no evidence of activity outside the rules of engagement by Aegis employees. However, information available to the Pat Finucane Centre suggests that the individual who filmed the video, and who was present during the shootings, was never interviewed by the investigation.

Also in 2005, An Aegis employee was sacked after a British newspaper revealed he was a key individual in implicated in a bullying scandal at the British Army's Deepcut Barracks.

In February this year, US Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur heavily criticised the Aegis contract, at a House Committee hearing. She stated:

I will say this, both in closed door meetings and in public, I have yet to find a person other than the auditor, who is able to shed any light on how it was that Aegis, a foreign corporation, was given a contract where now we have the second-largest force in Iraq, larger than the Brits, headed by someone named Tim Spicer.

Who signed that contract, and what are those 20,000 people doing, many of whom are foreign mercenaries? What are they doing? Why can't I get any answers out of our Government? What is happening inside the Department of Defence? What are those people doing over there?

The last answer I got was, well Congresswoman, youll have to go over to Central Command over in Baghdad. OK, I'll go, but why can't I get answers on that as a member of this committee?

Affiliations

• Sandline International
• Aegis Defence Services

Connections

• Tony Buckingham
• Simon Mann

External Resources

• Robert Baer, Iraq's Mercenary King, Vanity Fair, April 2007
• Stephen Armstrong, The enforcer, The Guardian, 20 May 2006.
• Pratap Chatterjee, Give War a Chance: The Life and Times of Tim Spicer, Corpwatch, 9 June 2004.

Aegis contracts challenged on both sides of the Atlantic Pat Finucane Centre, accessed 11 April 2006.

Aegis contracts challenged on both sides of the Atlantic Pat Finucane Centre, accessed 11 April 2006.

Aegis contracts challenged on both sides of the Atlantic Pat Finucane Centre, accessed 11 April 2006.

Aegis contracts challenged on both sides of the Atlantic Pat Finucane Centre, accessed 11 April 2006.