Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (38 page)

O
biang traveled to the United States in February on one of his regular private visits—apart from his occasional medical treatment, he seemed to enjoy spending time in America—and he checked into the Four Seasons hotel in Washington, a modern brown-brick building on the southeastern edge of cobblestoned Georgetown. On a gray Monday afternoon, five executives arrived from Riggs, Obiang’s principal bank, whose branch across from the White House had first attracted the president’s attention as a place where he might store his oil wealth while deepening ties to American corridors of power. Equatorial Guinea’s deposits now totaled about $750 million, by far the largest of any of the bank’s clients.

Auditors from the regulatory Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were crawling all over Riggs that winter, however. A probe had been sparked by other accounts held at Riggs for Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Washington and for the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The regulators were now asking questions about Equatorial Guinea’s accounts. They had recently raised concerns about offshore transactions in the accounts controlled by Obiang. Riggs and its management could face fines or worse if they did not come up with convincing answers. At the Four Seasons, the bank’s delegation announced that it was particularly focused on several relatively modest wire transfers—totaling less than $1 million—to offshore companies that appeared to be linked to Simon Kareri, the Riggs account executive who serviced Obiang.

Obiang waved them off. The transactions were authorized to support the economic development of his country, he said vaguely. He refused to be drawn on specifics. When the bankers pressed, Obiang sent one of his sons, Gabriel, along with several aides, to go off and review the matter.

The two delegations bundled into cars and rolled over to Pennsylvania Avenue. Inside the columned Riggs branch, Gabriel looked over the records and explained that some of the transactions involving Kareri had been authorized, but at lesser amounts than had actually been transferred to the offshore accounts. This raised the possibility that someone, possibly Kareri, had been skimming money. The Riggs executives asked what the offshore companies receiving funds actually did. Gabriel was vague.

The bankers warned him that if he could not provide specific, verifiable descriptions of what the money sent offshore had been used for, Riggs might have to end its entire relationship with Equatorial Guinea, notwithstanding the great financial pain it would cause the bank. In the post–September 11 world it was unacceptable for American banks to host accounts making international wire transfers to unknown front companies, they explained. Nobody was suggesting that Equatorial Guinea was financing terrorists, but the rules were inviolable.

Gabriel declined to explain. The transfers were “authorized by the government to pay for services,” he said.

That afternoon, Riggs’s risk management committee met to terminate the bank’s relationship with Obiang. The bank’s executives announced that $40 million in Obiang’s accounts—an amount equal to the balance of his outstanding loans—would be frozen, pending resolution of the debts. The rest of his funds—about $700 million altogether—would be released in the form of cashier’s checks, which authorized individuals, including the president himself, would be free to pick up at the branch across from the White House, so they could hand carry the checks to another bank of their choice for deposit.
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T
he Dodson family sold airplanes and parts from hangars and warehouses outside of Kansas City. One way they acquired inventory was by monitoring sales of surplus U.S. government airplanes by the General Services Administration, the agency responsible for federal buildings and property. In 2003, Dodson Aviation, Inc., purchased a 727-100 jet that had been put up for sale on a Web site called GSAAuctions.gov. They spruced the plane up and listed it for resale. About six months passed before an English firm, Logo Logistics, contacted them about a purchase. “Normal business guys in suits” turned up in Kansas to inspect the aircraft, as J. R. Dodson recalled it. They had foreign accents.
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The Dodsons handled sales through an escrow firm in Oklahoma City—typically, the buyers transferred cash into an escrow account, and when the conditions of the sale were met, the escrow firm released the funds to the Dodsons. The deal for the 727 closed on March 3, 2004; the Dodsons did not know the origins of the cash, only that it had arrived to the satisfaction of the escrow agent.
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Colleagues of Simon Mann arrived in Kansas and flew the plane to South Africa. They landed at a small airport outside of Pretoria, where Mann and about five dozen mercenaries boarded in darkness.

From Spain, Severo Moto flew to the Canary Islands. Greg Wales and other conspirators joined him there at the Steigenberger hotel. On March 7, they boarded a leased Beechcraft King Air and lifted off for Africa, intending to rendezvous in the air with Mann’s American-purchased jet. In Malabo, Du Toit’s local recruits prepositioned cars and other vehicles at the airport, so the arriving armed mercenaries would have transport into town. Moto and Wales would circle so as to land in Malabo an hour after the coup plotters arrived and seized the capital. Moto had even written a speech in advance promising to transform Equatorial Guinea into the “star of Africa.”
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En route, Mann and his crew flew to Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, where he intended to pick up weapons and fuel before flying on toward Equatorial Guinea.

They never left the Harare tarmac. Zimbabwe police stormed the plane and arrested all of its passengers; they had been tipped off by South African intelligence. Mann managed to get a phone call through to Du Toit in Malabo to let him know that “problems had arisen.” Mann and his mercenaries were taken to prison and, according to Mann, beaten and tortured into making confessions.
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In Malabo, Obiang’s security forces arrested Du Toit and many others who had worked with him. They paraded the South African before diplomats and television cameras. He confessed that his purpose was to “carry out a coup against the Obiang regime” and to bring in Severo Moto from Spain “as the country’s new leader.”
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“The terrorists who have been arrested will go through a fair trial,” Obiang declared to his people. If convicted, however, “because Equatorial Guinea has not abolished the death penalty, we won’t forgive them. If we have to kill them, we will kill them.” He urged his countrymen to watch out for other conspiracies, to “eliminate these terrorists. . . . Whoever presents themselves as a mercenary, there will be no need to let the President know. They must be liquidated—they must be killed because they are devils.”
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O
biang might be accustomed to coup plots, but this one was enough to make any insecure, oil-endowed dictator’s head spin. Its external tentacles ran around the world. Spain seemed to be involved—Obiang required little proof to conclude that Madrid was out to get him, but here the evidence looked substantial. There was circumstantial evidence to suggest that the United States might also have been covertly involved—the American origins of the plane carrying the mercenaries was one suggestive indicator, and the common statements of Bush and Aznar about ridding the world of dictators suggested the potential for secret collusion between them. Yet, hadn’t he, Obiang, been generous again and again to ExxonMobil and the other American oil corporations gorging on Equatorial Guinea’s oil? Weren’t his contract terms among the most generous to American oil firms in Africa, or indeed the world?

Simon Kareri, the Riggs account executive, who would soon be indicted for his dealings with Equatorial Guinea’s deposits and wire transfers, told Obiang that he suspected the Bush administration had been involved, according to an associate of Kareri’s. The coup attempt explained all the pressure Obiang had faced over his Washington bank accounts, Kareri argued. How else could the events at the bank that winter be explained? The closure of Obiang’s accounts just as the plot was moving toward execution suggested that the Bush administration had created conditions in which the Malabo regime would lose control over Obiang’s $750 million in deposits just as Moto seized power, Kareri speculated. Was it a coincidence that Obiang had been told to move his money and that fungible cashier’s checks were issued just as the coup attempt was being prepared?
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At least one of Obiang’s Washington advisers believed that the Bush administration must have been involved, but the adviser could not turn up proof. Obiang was not entirely sure what to believe, but he could not in the end bring himself to conclude that the Americans had joined Spain in the conspiracy to oust him. About Spain’s culpability, he had no doubt. Bush, Blair, and Aznar “discussed the need to get rid of dictators,” he reflected later. “When you talk about something like dictators, you have to do an analysis: Which governments are dictators and which are not? Aznar took advantage of this . . . to advance the concept of bringing down the ‘dictatorship’ of Equatorial Guinea.” Obiang doubted that the Bush administration knew about the plot in advance because “the American companies are the ones with the primary investments here.” Spain was “jealous of American success here. . . . The mercenaries and Spanish companies were going to take over. For that reason, I can’t say the Americans were involved. They would lose business to the Spanish and the British.”
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The Bush administration’s attitude toward Obiang’s government nonetheless mystified him. More than $5 billion of investments by American oil companies were at risk in his country. The Mann coup made clear just how diverse, creative, and determined were the potential jackals circling tiny Equatorial Guinea, waiting for a chance to snatch its riches. Yet Obiang had been asking for security assistance from the United States, to protect the wealth of its oil corporations, and all he had been given was an M.P.R.I. license to train a coast guard. What good would a coast guard do if mercenaries or a neighboring military invaded Malabo and voided ExxonMobil’s contracts? The oil-endowed autocracies of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates had poor human rights records and hardly a whiff of democracy, yet they were treated in Washington as important strategic partners and received billions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated defense systems—jet fighters, missile interceptors, the works. Why not Equatorial Guinea?

Obiang paid a handful of lobbyists to represent him in Washington. They advised him about political reforms and image management, but they had not resolved the basic problem, as he saw it, that he lacked sufficient access to the Bush administration. The oil companies operating in Equatorial Guinea told Obiang that he needed to upgrade his Washington presence. They could support his cause, but they could not conduct his lobbying for him. If ExxonMobil’s Washington office, or those of Hess and Marathon, “oiled” Obiang’s efforts to win favor from the Bush administration by becoming too directly involved in Malabo’s rehabilitation, it would only discredit Equatorial Guinea further. Obiang reached out to two of the most successful lobbying firms in Bush’s Washington: Barbour Griffith & Rogers and Cassidy & Associates.

Richard Burt, a former
New York
Times
reporter who had served as the American ambassador to West Germany during the Reagan administration, helped to manage the Obiang account under contract for Barbour Griffith. At Cassidy, one of Obiang’s aides called Amos Hochstein, a young former Capitol Hill aide. Intrigued, Hochstein used Google to research Equatorial Guinea; the search returns were not particularly encouraging.

He traveled to New York to meet with Obiang’s prime minister, Miguel Borico, at The Pierre hotel. The president was in a mood for fresh thinking, the prime minister reported. Obiang had been “embarking on an American strategy,” as his oil wealth grew, to protect and align himself with the world’s most formidable oil-consuming superpower, and yet “he wasn’t getting anywhere,” one of Obiang’s advisers recalled.

“You’re in deep trouble,” the Cassidy lobbyist told them. Hochstein was a liberal Democrat. He was uncomfortable with the account, but his firm had decided to go forward. “I’m not going to lobby for you. What I can do is help you understand what you need to do to change your relationship with the United States government. I’ll try to be the translator between you and the American government.” Cassidy accepted Obiang as its client for a retainer of more than $1 million a year, a handsome sum in the Washington lobbying arena.
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T
he question of whether the Bush administration had winked in advance at the Mann-led coup plot lingered, sowing distrust and uncertainty in the U.S.-Equato-Guinean oil partnership on which ExxonMobil depended. At an African counterterrorism conference for regional intelligence leaders held in Libya around this time, Obiang’s director of internal security approached Mel Gamble, the Africa division chief of the C.I.A., and accused him outright of sponsoring the Simon Mann–led coup plot against Obiang.

“It was a U.S. aircraft,” Obiang’s spy chief pointed out.

“Look, you can buy a lot of things in the United States,” Gamble answered. He denied that the United States had any involvement. “You can buy weapons from the U.S., too,” he said, but that didn’t mean that the Bush administration was involved or even aware.

Senior intelligence officers from Angola and Algeria overheard Gamble’s pleading. They joined the discussion and backed their American colleague: Just because African coup plotters bought equipment in the United States did not mean that the Bush administration knew what was going on. They knew this from their own experiences, they affirmed.