Ansel Adams, Photographer

An only child, Adams was born when his mother was nearly forty. His relatively elderly parents, affluent family history, and the live-in presence of his mother's maiden sister and aged father all combined to create an environment that was decidedly Victorian and both socially and emotionally conservative. Adams's mother spent much of her time brooding and fretting over her husband's inability to restore the Adams fortune, leaving an ambivalent imprint on her son. Charles Adams, on the other hand, deeply and patiently influenced, encouraged, and supported his son.



Natural shyness and a certain intensity of genius, coupled with the dramatically "earthquaked" nose, caused Adams to have problems fitting in at school. In later life he noted that he might have been diagnosed as hyperactive. There is also the distinct possibility that he may have suffered from dyslexia. He was not successful in the various schools to which his parents sent him; consequently, his father and aunt tutored him at home. Ultimately, he managed to earn what he termed a "legitimizing diploma" from the Mrs. Kate M. Wilkins Private School — perhaps equivalent to having completed the eighth grade.
The most important result of Adams's somewhat solitary and unmistakably different childhood was the joy that he found in nature, as evidenced by his taking long walks in the still-wild reaches of the Golden Gate. Nearly every day found him hiking the dunes or meandering along Lobos Creek, down to Baker Beach, or out to the very edge of the American continent.
When Adams was twelve he taught himself to play the piano and read music. Soon he was taking lessons, and the ardent pursuit of music became his substitute for formal schooling. For the next dozen years the piano was Adams's primary occupation and, by 1920, his intended profession. Although he ultimately gave up music for photography, the piano brought substance, discipline, and structure to his frustrating and erratic youth. Moreover, the careful training and exacting craft required of a musician profoundly informed his visual artistry, as well as his influential writings and teachings on photography.

If Adams's love of nature was nurtured in the Golden Gate, his life was, in his words, "colored and modulated by the great earth gesture" of the Yosemite Sierra (Adams, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, p. xiv). He spent substantial time there every year from 1916 until his death. From his first visit, Adams was transfixed and transformed. He began using the Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie his parents had given him. He hiked, climbed, and explored, gaining self-esteem and self-confidence. In 1919 he joined the Sierra Club and spent the first of four summers in Yosemite Valley, as "keeper" of the club's LeConte Memorial Lodge. He became friends with many of the club's leaders, who were founders of America's nascent conservation movement. He met his wife, Virginia Best, in Yosemite; they were married in 1928. The couple had two children.

The Sierra Club was vital to Adams's early success as a photographer. His first published photographs and writings appeared in the club's 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one man exhibition in 1928 at the club's San Francisco headquarters. Each summer the club conducted a month-long High Trip, usually in the Sierra Nevada, which attracted up to two hundred members. The participants hiked each day to a new and beautiful campsite accompanied by a large contingent of pack mules, packers, cooks, and the like. As photographer of these outings, in the late 1920s, Adams began to realize that he could earn enough to survive — indeed, that he was far more likely to prosper as a photographer than as a concert pianist. By 1934 Adams had been elected to the club's board of directors and was well established as both the artist of the Sierra Nevada and the defender of Yosemite.

Nineteen twenty seven was the pivotal year of Adams's life. He made his first fully visualized photograph, Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, and took his first High Trip. More important, he came under the influence of Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco insurance magnate and patron of arts and artists. Literally the day after they met, Bender set in motion the preparation and publication of Adams' first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras [sic]. Bender's friendship, encouragement, and tactful financial support changed Adams's life dramatically. His creative energies and abilities as a photographer blossomed, and he began to have the confidence and wherewithal to pursue his dreams. Indeed, Bender's benign patronage triggered the transformation of a journeyman concert pianist into the artist whose photographs, as critic Abigail Foerstner wrote in the Chicago Tribune (Dec. 3, 1992), "did for the national parks something comparable to what Homer's epics did for Odysseus."


Although Adams's transition from musician to photographer did not happen at once, his passion shifted rapidly after Bender came into his life, and the projects and possibilities multiplied. In addition to spending summers photographing in the Sierra Nevada, Adams made several lengthy trips to the Southwest to work with Mary Austin, grande dame of the western literati. Their magnificent limited edition book, Taos Pueblo, was published in 1930. In the same year Adams met photographer Paul Strand, whose images had a powerful impact on Adams and helped to move him away from the "pictorial" style he had favored in the 1920s. Adams began to pursue "straight photography," in which the clarity of the lens was emphasized, and the final print gave no appearance of being manipulated in the camera or the darkroom. Adams was soon to become straight photography's mast articulate and insistent champion. [Ed. Note: Manipulated in this instance meaning altering the clarity or content of the photographed subject matter. Techniques such as "burning" and "dodging", as well as the Zone System, a scientific system developed by Adams, is used specifically to "manipulate" the tonality and give the artist the ability to create as opposed to record.]


Adams, Ansel (Feb. 20 1902 — Apr. 22, 1984), photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. The grandson of a wealthy timber baron, Adams grew up in a house set amid the sand dunes of the Golden Gate. When Adams was only four, an aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of 1906 threw him to the ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life. A year later the family fortune collapsed in the financial panic of 1907, and Adams's father spent the rest of his life doggedly but fruitlessly attempting to recoup.


In 1927 Adams met photographer Edward Weston. They became increasingly important to each other as friends and colleagues. The renowned Group f/64, founded in 1932, coalesced around the recognized greatness of Weston and the dynamic energy of Adams. Although loosely organized and relatively short-lived, Group f/64 brought the new West Coast vision of straight photography to national attention and influence. San Francisco's DeYoung Museum promptly gave f/64 an exhibition and, in that same year, gave Adams his first one-man museum show.

http://www.anseladams.com

Adams's star rose rapidly in the early 1930s, propelled in part by his ability and in part by his effusive energy and activity. He made his first visit to New York in 1933, on a pilgrimage to meet photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the artist whose work and philosophy Adams most admired and whose life of commitment to the medium he consciously emulated. Their relationship was intense and their correspondence frequent, rich, and insightful. Although profoundly a man of the West, Adams spent a considerable amount of time in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, and the Stieglitz circle played a vital role in his artistic life. In 1933 the Delphic Gallery gave Adams his first New York show. His first series of technical articles was published in Camera Craft in 1934, and his first widely distributed book, Making a Photograph, appeared in 1935. Most important, in 1936 Stieglitz gave Adams a one-man show at An American Place.


Recognition, however, did not alleviate Adams's financial pressures. In a letter dated 6 August 1935 he wrote Weston, "I have been busy, but broke. Can't seem to climb over the financial fence." Adams was compelled to spend much of his time as a commercial photographer. Clients ran the gamut, including the Yosemite concessionaire, the National Park Service, Kodak, Zeiss, IBM, AT&T, a small women's college, a dried fruit company, and Life, Fortune, and Arizona Highways magazines — in short, everything from portraits to catalogues to Coloramas. On 2 July 1938 he wrote to friend David McAlpin, "I have to do something in the relatively near future to regain the right track in photography. I am literally swamped with "commercial" work — necessary for practical reasons, but very restraining to my creative work." Although Adams became an unusually skilled commercial photographer, the work was intermittent, and he constantly worried about paying the next month's bills. His financial situation remained precarious and a source of considerable stress until late in life.

Adams's technical mastery was the stuff of legend. More than any creative photographer, before or since, he reveled in the theory and practice of the medium. Weston and Strand frequently consulted him for technical advice. He served as principal photographic consultant to Polaroid and Hasselblad and, informally, to many other photographic concerns. Adams developed the famous and highly complex "zone system" of controlling and relating exposure and development, enabling photographers to creatively visualize an image and produce a photograph that matched and expressed that visualization. He produced ten volumes of technical manuals on photography, which are the most influential books ever written on the subject.


Adams's energy and capacity for work were simply colossal. He often labored for eighteen or more hours per day, for days and weeks on end. There were no vacations, no holidays, no Sundays in Ansel Adams's life. Frequently, after and intense period of work, he would return to San Francisco or Yosemite, promptly contract the "flu," and spend several days in bed. His hyper-kinetic existence was also fueled by alcohol, for which he had a particular fondness, and a constant whirl of social activity, friends, and colleagues. As Beaumont Newhall writes in his FOCUS: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (1993), "Ansel was a great party man and loved to entertain. He had a very dominating personality, and would always be the center of attention" (p. 235).
Adams described himself as a photographer — lecturer — writer. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that he was simply — indeed, compulsively — a communicator. He endlessly traveled the country in pursuit of both the natural beauty he revered and photographed and the audiences he required. Adams felt an intense commitment to promoting photography as a fine art and played a key role in the establishment of the first museum department of photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work at the museum fostered the closest relationships of Adams's life, with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, a historian and museum administrator and a writer-designer, respectively. Their partnership was arguably the most potent collaboration in twentieth-century photography. In the 1950s and 1960s Nancy Newhall and Adams created a number of books and exhibitions of historic significance, particularly the Sierra Club's This is the American Earth (1960), which, with Rachel Carson's classic Silent Spring, played a seminal role in launching the first broad-based citizen environmental movement.
Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. Over the years he attended innumerable meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians. However, his great influence came from his photography. His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America. When people thought about the national parks of the Sierra Club or nature of the environment itself, the often envisioned them in terms of an Ansel Adams photograph. His black-and-white images were not "realistic" documents of nature. Instead, they sought an intensification and purification of the psychological experience of natural beauty. He created a sense of the sublime magnificence of nature that infused the viewer with the emotional equivalent of wilderness, often more powerful than the actual thing.
For Adams, the environmental issues of particular importance were Yosemite National Park, the national park system, and above all, the preservation of wilderness. He focused on what he termed the spiritual-emotional aspects of parks and wilderness and relentlessly resisted the Park Service's "resortism," which had led to the over development of the national parks and their domination by private concessionaires. But the range of issues in which Adams involved himself was encyclopedic. He fought for new parks and wilderness areas, for the Wilderness Act, for wild Alaska and his beloved Big Sur coast of central California, for the mighty redwoods, for endangered sea lions and sea otters, and for clean air and water. An advocate of balanced, restrained use of resources, Adams also fought relentlessly against overbuilt highways, billboards, and all manner of environmental mendacity and shortsightedness. Yet he invariably treated his opponents with respect and courtesy.
Though wilderness and the environment were his grand passions, photography was his calling, his metier, his raison d'etre. Adams never made a creative photograph specifically for environmental purposes. On 12 April 1977 he wrote to his publisher, Tim Hill, "I know I shall be castigated by a large group of people today, but I was trained to assume that art related to the elusive quality of beauty and that the purpose of art was concerned with the elevation of the spirit (horrible Victorian notion!!)" Adams was often criticized for failing to include humans or evidence of "humanity" in his landscape photographs. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson made the well-known comment that "the world is falling to pieces and all Adams and Weston photograph is rocks and trees" (quoted by Adams, Oral History, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, p. 498). Reviewers frequently characterize Adams as a photographer of an idealized wilderness that no longer exists. On the contrary, the places that Adams photographed are, with few exceptions, precisely those wilderness and park areas that have been preserved for all time. There is a vast amount of true and truly protected wilderness in America, much of it saved because of the efforts of Adams and his colleagues.
Seen in a more traditional art history context, Adams was the last and defining figure in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century American landscape painting and photography. Adams always claimed he was not "influenced," but, consciously or unconsciously, he was firmly in the tradition of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Carlton Watkins, and Eadweard Muybridge. And he was the direct philosophical heir of the American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. He grew up in a time and place where his zeitgeist was formed by the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and "muscular" Americanism, by the pervading sense of manifest destiny, and the notion that European civilization was being reinvented — much for the better — in the new nation and, particularly, in the new West. Adams died in Monterey, California.
As John Swarkowski states in the introduction to Adams's Classic Images (1985), "The love that Americans poured out for the work and person of Ansel Adams during his old age, and that they have continued to express with undiminished enthusiasm since his death, is an extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps even unparalleled in our country's response to a visual artist" (p. 5). Why should this be so? What generated this remarkable response? Adams's subject matter, the magnificent natural beauty of the West, was absolutely, unmistakably American, and his chosen instrument, the camera, was a quintessential artifact of the twentieth-century culture. He was blessed with an unusually generous, charismatic personality, and his great faith in people and human nature was amply rewarded. Adams channeled his energies in ways that served his fellow citizens, personified in his lifelong effort to preserve the American wilderness. Above all, Adams's philosophy and optimism struck a chord in the national phsyche. More than any other influential American of his epoch, Adams believed in both the possibility and the probability of humankind living in harmony and balance with its environment. It is difficult to imagine Ansel Adams occurring in a European country or culture and equally difficult to conjure an artist more completely American, either in art of personality.
Adams's vast archive of papers, memorabilia, correspondence, negatives, and many "fine" photographic prints, as well as numerous "work" or proof prints, are in the John P. Schaefer Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson. A portion of his papers relating to the Sierra Club are in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Adams's Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (1985) was unfinished at the time of his death and was subsequently completed by Mary Street Alinder, his editor. An Autobiography offers a somewhat rose-colored and selective view of Adams's life. A selection of correspondence, Letters and Images (1988), contains a small but interesting fraction of the estimated 100,000 letters and cards that Adams wrote during his lifetime. He wrote and contributed photographs to hundreds of articles and reviews from 1922 until 1984. He published eight portfolios of original photographic prints (1927, 1948, 1950, 1960, 1963, 1970, 1974, 1976). Nearly four dozen books bear Adams's name as author and/or artist. Those not mentioned in this article include Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail (1938); Michael and Anne in Yosemite Valley (1941); Born Free and Equal (1944); Illustrated Guide to Yosemite Valley (1946); Camera and Lens (1948); The Negative (1948); Yosemite and the High Sierra (1948); The Print (1950); My Camera in Yosemite Valley (1950); My Camera in the National Parks (1950); The Land of Little Rain (1950, new ed. with Adams's photographs); Natural Light Photography (1952); Death Valley (1954); Mission San Xavier del Bac (1954); The Pageant of History in Northern California (1954); Artificial Light Photography (1956); The Islands of Hawaii (1958); Yosemite Valley (1959); Death Valley and the Creek Called Furnace (1962); These We Inherit: The Parklands of America (1962); Polaroid Land Photography Manual (1963); An Introduction to Hawaii (1964); Fiat Lux: The University of California (1967); The Tetons and the Yellowstone (1970); Ansel Adams (1972); Singular Images (1974); Ansel Adams: Images 1923-1974 (1974); Photographs of the Southwest (1976); The Portfolios of Ansel Adams (1977); Polaroid Land Photography (1978); Yosemite and the Range of Light (1979); a new technical series, including The Camera (1980), The Negative (1981), and The Print (1983); Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (1983); and, posthumously, Andrea G. Stillman, ed., The American Wilderness (1990); Stillman and William A. Turnage, eds. Our National Parks (1992); Harry Callahan, ed., Ansel Adams in Color (1993); and Stillman, ed., Ansel Adams: Yosemite and the High Sierra (1994). More than a decade after his death, there was still no biography covering his entire life. Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light (1963), is a relatively short and adoring biography of Adams's first thirty-six years, written with zest and insight, as well as Adams's full collaboration.

— William A. Turnage

Tiffany Lamps

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) began creating his famous lampshades in the early 1890’s. The public got its first glimpse of these at the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago where Tiffany exhibited two large light fixtures along with his leaded-glass window exhibit.

Tiffany began selling his blown glass shades in the mid-1890’s, then leaded glass shades in 1898, which actually began as a by-product of the stained-glass windows that preceded them. Tiffany used the several thousands of pieces of glass that remained after cutting individual elements for his windows.

Genuine Tiffany Lamps routinely sell for $10,000 or more. Many sell at auction in the six-figure-range up to a staggering $2-million-plus for a single lamp! Not bad considering in 1900 the average Tiffany lamp sold for $100 with some of the smaller examples bringing as little as $40.

A major downside to super-high-priced antiques and collectibles though, is that they continually bring out a fresh crop of reproductions that flood the market. Most are well-intentioned copies not meant to fool anybody; however, there are unscrupulous dealers and out-right forgers that add maker’s marks and use aging techniques to bilk unsuspecting collectors and interior decorators out of hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Identifying a Fake Tiffany Lamp
It is estimated that for every genuine Tiffany lamp there is a fake one. Now, when I use the term “fake” I’m not referring to a newly created Tiffany-style lamp based on an original Tiffany Studios design—I’m referring to a lamp created or altered specifically with the intention of being passed-off as an original coming out of either L. C. Tiffany & Associated Artists, L. C. Tiffany & Co or the Tiffany Studios in New York during the mid-1890’s through 1930’s. Without deliberate attempts to deceive, a newly created Tiffany-style lamp is not a fake in the sense that no one is trying to pass it off as genuine—it’s simply a nice piece of decorative art.

So how can we tell? Well, you first need to realize that it is much easier to tell if a lamp is a fake rather than if it is genuine. This is because true Tiffany originals were hand-made and were not consistently marked and some lack marks altogether. There is no hard-and-fast rule to follow that says they did it “this way” or “that way”. Therefore, you’ll have a better chance of revealing a fake by catching the tell-tale signs of the many methods used to deceive, and eliminate those characteristics from the lamp in question.
Characteristics of a fake Tiffany lamp:
POOR QUALITY AND SHODDY CRAFTSMANSHIP. It’s safe to say that if your lamp was manufactured with low-grade glass and sloppy soldering, or if the base was made of pot metal, chances are it’s a fake. Tiffany only used high-quality materials and expert craftsmen.
APPLIED ANTIQUING TO THE SHADE. Take a look at any dust-soiling or grime covering your lampshade. Was it purposely sprayed on or coated? You should be able to take a Q-tip with some acetone (nail-polish remover) and swab the glass without any dirt or grime coming off that couldn’t also be taken off with soap and water. No coloring should transfer to the Q-tip from any Tiffany leaded glass shade.
ABSENCE OF CRACKS OR LOOSE ELEMENTS. It is rare to find an authentic Tiffany leaded glass shade without at least few cracks. This is because the heat generated by the light-bulb stresses the glass causing it to crack. Also, it is unusual for no pieces to become loose over the years. You can gently tap the individual elements and notice that some will rattle. If all the pieces are tight and without cracks, it doesn’t mean it’s a fake, but I’d be skeptical.
UNEVEN MAKERS MARKS. Although some Tiffany shades were not marked, many were, and almost all lamp bases were. Also, note that there was no consistent method of marking Tiffany lamps, so this can be quite confusing. At any rate, the one tell-tale sign on marked pieces is that all letters and numerals in a single line mark should be of the same height. Forgers sometimes use two different sets of stamps to mark their fakes resulting in uneven markings. Some bases were marked with the TGDCO logo and TIFFANY STUDIOS NEW YORK. If the logo appears without the text, it is likely a fake.
FRESH MAKERS MARKS. When pieces were marked, they were usually die-stamped, and they were usually stamped before the patina was applied. Therefore, if the mark does not have the same patina as the surrounding area, I’d be skeptical. Usually when a fake piece is stamped after the patination process, the marks appear shiny with fresh metal exposed. Be aware too that many of the newer forgeries have the mark casted in the base during the molding process which would mean they would pass the patina test; however, stamped marks have a sharper appearance than molded pieces, and after a while it is pretty easy to tell the difference.
MARKED WITH A MIXTURE OF UPPER AND LOWER CASE LETTERS. All original Tiffany Studios marks are in full capitol letters. If there are any lower case letters, beware.
MARKS CONTAINING SERIFS ON THE LETTERS. Serifs are the little tails or hooks on the letters of some fonts (such as Times New Roman). All original Tiffany Studios marks contain only sans-serif letters—the “T” in Tiffany should consist of only two lines without any little accents. An authentic TGDCO logo however, if it should appear on your piece, does have serifs in its letters.
There are many other ways Tiffany lamps are faked, but just knowing the above clues should greatly reduce the chances you will get taken, and bring you closer to evaluating the authenticity of your piece.
Bibliography (focusing on books known to be in print)
Louis Comfort Tiffany (Library of American Art) / Alastair Duncan, Louis Comfort Tiffany / Hardcover / Published 1992/ - Print status unknown
The Art of Louis Comfort Tiffany Hardcover / Published 1991 / Republication of original book commissioned by Tiffany's family in 1914 as a gift for family, friends, and colleagues / In print, special order
The Jewelry and Enamels of Louis Comfort Tiffany / Janet Zapata / Hardcover / Published 1993 / In print
NEW Tiffany Favrile Art Glass (Schiffer Book for Collectors) Moise S. Steeg / Hardcover / Published 1997 / In print
NEW the authoritative The 'Lost' Treasures of Louis Comfort Tiffany by Hugh McKean is now back in print.
NEW the two classic books mentioned below are now published in a volume of the combined works of Robert Koch.
The following are the first two scholarly works in the field by Robert Koch, out of print but often available used, and well worth acquiring:
Louis C. Tiffany, Rebel in Glass
Louis C. Tiffany's Glass - Bronzes - Lamps
Other classics worth seeking out from used book sources include Tiffany Lamps by Egon Neustadt, Tiffany Windows by Alastair Duncan

Uganda Gold

Idi Amin: London stooge against Sudan
In February 1971, Gen. Idi Amin came to power in Uganda, in a military coup against President Milton Obote. British sponsorship of the semi-literate Amin, son of a sorceress, was quickly evident; Britain was one of the first countries in the world to recognize the Amin government, long before any African country. And when relations with Britain had soured after Amin expelled the Asian business community from Uganda, British intelligence operative Robert Astles remained as Amin's mentor in Uganda until the very end. Amin's tyranny, lasting until 1979, trampled Uganda's political and economic institutions, leaving the country a wreckage from which it has never recovered.
For London, as the book {Ghosts of Kampala} by George Ivan Smith reports, the primary reason for fostering the Amin power grab was Sudan. Idi Amin was willing, in fact eager, to permit Uganda to be used as a base of operations to aid the southern Sudanese in their war against Khartoum; Obote was not.
Nurtured Nilotics
Amin, now safely ensconced in Saudi Arabia, was a member of the Kakwa tribe, which straddles the borders of Uganda, Zaire, and southern Sudan. The tribe supplied Amin with his power base in the Ugandan Army.
As a young man in 1946, Amin joined the King's African Rifles, founded in 1902. The British had traditionally taken soldiers of this outfit from the grouping designated ``Nilotic peoples,'' particularly southern Sudanese. In London's recipe for colonial rule, minority groups were assigned to the enforcement roles, enhancing reliability. In 1891, contingents of southern Sudanese were recruited by Captain (later Lord) Lugard for service in Uganda on behalf of the Imperial British East Africa Company. After Britain ruled Uganda officially, large numbers of Dinka and Azande troops, then living in Egypt, were sent to Uganda. Although nominally Muslim, they had fought against the Mahdi's army in the 1880s, on the British side. In Uganda, they were called ``Nubis.''
After Amin took power, he staffed all Army command posts with ``Nubis,'' in much the same way that Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army is commanded by Himas, or Tutsis of southern Uganda, and the Banyarwanda, former Rwandan Tutsis. During the Sudanese civil war of 1955 to 1972, southern Sudanese had been brought directly into the Ugandan Army, making Uganda the perfect buttress for the southern Sudanese fighting Khartoum.
Obote bucks policy
In the early years of independence, Obote had invited delegations from Israel to help carry out farming projects in northern Uganda and to assist training the Army. Israel had a specific interest in Uganda: its proximity to Sudan. The Israelis were soon moving into southern Sudan to assist directly the Anyanya movement against Khartoum. In 1966, however, Obote visited Khartoum, and came to an agreement that Uganda would exert every effort to restore peace in the south. But the policy was ignored by the Defense Ministry and by Idi Amin, who was up to his eyeballs in smuggling operations in the Congo (now Zaire) and Sudan. Amin was in charge of an operation which smuggled gold and ivory out of Congo, in exchange for giving weapons to Congolese rebels, and was brought before a commission of inquiry when it was discovered that he was pocketing thousands of dollars in the process. The commission further discovered that Amin had become involved in the Congo venture through Robert Astles, who was making contacts between the Congolese rebels and the Ugandan Army. Astles's private airline company was handling the smuggling.

Amin put in to destabilize the Sudan, who was Egypt's ally
Ugandan Army officers also charged that Amin was working--against government orders--with the Sudan rebels inside Sudan. They alleged he went on a number of unauthorized flights with a foreign pilot--possibly Astles--to meet Sudanese rebels and arranged to supply them with materiel intended for the Ugandan Armed Forces. A German mercenary named Rolf Steiner was an accomplice in the operation. In his autobiography, {The Last Adventurer,} Steiner relates that he had arranged a meeting in Kampala ``under the supervision of General Idi Amin with the purpose of reaching an agreement on the leadership of the [Sudanese] liberation front.'' Out of this meeting, Steiner was given money to buy goods wholesale and ship them across Uganda to the tribal chiefs in southern Sudan. Steiner notes that ``although not all-powerful, he [Amin] was strong enough to order his army to turn a blind eye to my harmless smuggling service.''
Meanwhile, Obote refused to grant Israel landing rights for their supplies to the Anyanya. The crisis over Sudan policy hit in November 1970. Steiner was arrested by Ugandan police upon reentering Uganda from Sudan. Obote stated, in a later interview, ``The government of Uganda as such was not involved in aiding the Anyanya but was involved in finding political solutions in the Sudanese conflict. The arrest of Steiner brought out the fact that Israel was using Uganda to supply Anyanya.'' Obote was couped while he was in Nairobi, on his way back from the Singapore Commonwealth conference. As he relates, ``It is doubtful that Amin, without the urging of the Israelis, would have staged a successful coup in 1971.... Israel wanted a client regime in Uganda which they could manipulate in order to prevent Sudan from sending her troops to Egypt.... The coup succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.... The Israelis set up in Uganda a regime which pivoted in every respect to Amin, who in turn was under the strictest control of the Israelis in Kampala.... The Israelis and Anyanya were hilarious; the regime was under their control.''
When the Sudanese civil war was halted in 1972, Israel quickly lost interest in Amin. Enter Libya. In February 1972, Amin visited Libya, striking a pact with its President Muammar Qaddafi. In March 1972, all Israeli personnel were told to leave Uganda. In August 1972, all Asians were expelled, whereupon Britain withdrew its support for Amin. In September 1972, Libya proffered full military assistance to Uganda and sent 500 technicians to Kampala. By 1974, the intelligence services in Uganda were being run by Libya, and Libya was giving Amin Soviet MiG fighters. Libya even supplied troops to defend Amin when the Tanzanian Armed Forces invaded Uganda to drive Amin out. Overseeing the entire venture, from beginning to end in 1979, was London's Astles.
The Israelis were soon moving into southern Sudan to assist directly the Anyanya movement against Khartoum. In 1966, however, Obote visited Khartoum, and came to an agreement that Uganda would exert every effort to restore peace in the south. But the policy was ignored by the Defense Ministry and by Idi Amin, who was up to his eyeballs in smuggling operations in the Congo (now Zaire) and Sudan. Amin was in charge of an operation which smuggled gold and ivory out of Congo, in exchange for giving weapons to Congolese rebels, and was brought before a commission of inquiry when it was discovered that he was pocketing thousands of dollars in the process. The commission further discovered that Amin had become involved in the Congo venture through Robert Astles, who was making contacts between the Congolese rebels and the Ugandan Army. Astles's private airline company was handling the smuggling.

Congo and Uganda: a rush of gold

In November the UN Security Council adopted sanctions, which include freezing assets and travel restrictions, against anyone breaking the arms embargo on the Democratic Republic of Congo. The east of the country is rife with smuggling, especially in gold. Regional conflict that left 3 million dead between 1998 and 2003 has exhausted the country, and general elections that were due this year have been pushed back to June 2006.
By Stefano Liberti
MONGBWALU, a desolate village in Ituri district in the northeastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), looks like something out of an old western. A single dusty road runs through it, with cafes on either side that resemble saloons, a squalid hotel with a broken-down sign, and groups of youths observing passersby as though they were expecting a shoot-out any minute. The comparison with the Wild West isn’t fanciful, for here, as in the towns that mushroomed in the United States during the gold rush, everything revolves around gold.
Ituri is right in the middle of one of the most important gold deposits on earth (1). Several hundred kilograms are extracted every month from the primitive mines around Mongbwalu. The gold is taken illegally to neighbouring Uganda, from where it is exported to Europe, usually Switzerland. Because of the enormous profits generated, the gold is much coveted - and the cause of the bloody conflict that has plagued the DRC and this region since 1998 (2).
The subsoil of this huge African country - formerly Zaire - is so gorged with minerals that it’s sometimes called a geological outrage. From 1982, when the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko (in power from 1965 to 1997) liberalised gold mining in parts of the country, Mongbwalu became a sort of tropical Klondike. Thousands of small-scale miners threw themselves into a business that continued through the worst moments of the war. The miners still leave the village every day at dawn in battered old 4x4s and follow the earthen tracks to the mines. There they split into teams and start digging. The open pit mine resembles an enormous hive in which thousands of people busy themselves inside mud combs. Some men stand waist deep in water, digging feverishly and putting the earth in plastic crates that are passed along by men pressed against the sides of the embankment.
Each team works for itself. The soaked earth and stones are placed on a sieve above a pool of water. The first stage is to look for gold dust. Then the more promising stones are broken with clubs in the hope of finding veins of gold. “You have to know where to dig,” says Etienne, who spent 10 months in the hills of Mongbwalu. Around him a group of young men are examining stone chips in a sieve, hoping to find a few specks of gold. “No luck today,” says Etienne, “but I’m sure it’ll get better later. If we find a good chunk, we’ll manage to get $5 each.”
At the top of the embankment you can make out the ruins of a building. It is all that is left of the “factory”, the public enterprise set up for gold extraction in the Kilo-Moto region to which Mongbwalu is the gateway. Gold mining was in full swing during Mobutu’s time, when Ituri was under the control of the Kinshasa government. In those days the profits went straight into Mobutu’s pockets, enabling him to amass a fortune in foreign banks. The battle to gain control of this rich piece of land was triggered immediately after his fall in 1997.
Africa’s largest gold seam
Kilo-Moto is one of the most unstable areas in the Great Lakes region. Because of its extraordinary potential - it has the largest gold seam on the continent - it has been coveted by the main players of what has been called “the first African world war” (which pitted government forces supported by Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe against rebels backed by Uganda and Rwanda).
In 1998, when the country was invaded by Rwanda and Uganda, the region was occupied by the Kampala forces, which flew the gold straight back to Uganda. After the 2003 Sun City agreement in South Africa, foreign troops were obliged to leave the country. The area then became the scene of fighting between the Union of Patriotic Congolese (UPC), supported by Rwanda, and the Front for National Integration (FNI), backed by Uganda. Sixty thousand people are thought to have died in these conflicts, despite timid intervention by Monuc, the UN observer mission in the DRC, set up in 1999. After falling to the UPC, the region was taken back by the FNI.
The militiamen stand accused, among other things, of subjecting workers to forced labour. According to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the FNI takes a percentage of the mined gold and extracts one dollar a day from the workers in exchange for allowing them to work the mines (3). The soldiers hotly deny this. “It’s peace, our men are unarmed. All the men here work for themselves and for the good of the country,” says Iribi Pitchou Kasamba.
This small, stocky man became head of the front after its leader, Floribert Ndjabu, was arrested in Kinshasa for killing nine Bangladeshi Monuc troops in Ituri in February. Flanked by his “lieutenants”, Kasamba inspires fear and respect in equal measure in the zone around the mine. He describes the accusations by HRW as “total rubbish”, adding that “the only money we’ve received is the $8,000 that AngloGold Ashanti paid us quite voluntarily.”
This major South African company obtained a 10,000sq km mining concession around Mongbwalu and has recently been accused of bribing the rebel forces. Since 2003 the UN embargo prohibits any support to armed rebels in the DRC (4). The company claims that it was obliged to pay to guarantee the safety of its employees. But the scandal has tarnished its image - particularly since it boasts an ethical policy inspired by a commitment to “corporate social responsibility” (5). In any case AngloGold Ashanti has not yet started to mine gold in its concession.
Shovels and sieves
Mining continues the primitive way, with shovels and sieves. Near the site a crowd of men equipped with scales gets ready to start buying. The luckier gold-washers crowd around them clutching handfuls of their precious find. This is the start of the transaction. The gold dust in placed on a coal heater and mixed with nitric acid to separate any impurities. The remaining gold is then weighed and sold. The price is about $10 a gram. The rate depends on the market and increases the further you get from the mining area. In Bunia, Ituri’s main town, gold fetches $11.5 a gram. The small-time buyers at the source, as well as the dozens of others who gather in Mongbwalu’s main street, are the middlemen for traders in Bunia and Butembo in the neighbouring province of North Kivu.
Numerous small jobs are grafted on to the business of the mine itself. Women sell fruit, potatoes and rice; young motorcyclists ferry people to and from the mining sites and the centre of Mongbwalu. There is also a motley crew of musicians who seem more comfortable with guns than guitars and seem to monitor the comings and goings. The mere presence of Kasamba is enough to deter anybody from speaking.
Only later, and anonymously, does someone from Mongbwalu agree to give us his view: “In the factory and the other mines near the village, the FNI’s control is limited. Since the Monuc forces arrived the militia have had to be more discreet. But you only have to go a few kilometres further out to see them back in their old ways, forcing people to work for them, harassing them and confiscating gold.”
The 140 Pakistani soldiers from Monuc (6) who arrived in April, and who are in charge of disarming the militia, are even more discreet than the rebels. They are confined to their camp outside the village and their actions are limited to a few patrols. One of the leaders of the contingent admitted that he didn’t really know what went on in the mines.
At the Bunia headquarters, this state of affairs is confirmed. “In theory Monuc could supervise the gold traffic,” says Karin Volkner, the mission’s political affairs officer, “but in reality we don’t have the means to carry out that kind of control. There’s only one military contingent in Mongbwalu. We’re thinking of sending a group of civilians but so far we’ve only carried out exploratory missions.” The Monuc forces are occasionally called in for heavy operations and to support the elections that should end to the transition period (7), but they scarcely bother with the gold smuggling that goes on under their very noses.

In broad daylight
In Bunia gold dust is sold in broad daylight. In this village, ravaged by war and poverty where thousands of refugees are crowded into a camp by the airport, the gold trade is the only commercial activity possible. Almost everyone seems to be at it, in one or other of the two markets.

According to the new DRC mining code established in 2002, government authorisation is required for wholesale gold purchasing (8) but nobody bothers about that in a region where the state is totally absent. “Ituri suffers from government failure,” says Volkner. “The Kinshasa government is very far away and has never bothered much about the people to the east. On top of that, some ministers are directly involved in raw materials trafficking and have no interest in establishing peace in the region.”

The entire trade rests on a well-organised network of small-scale miners, buyers and intermediaries. The town’s traders sell the gold to a handful of middlemen, who smuggle it to Kampala. They use a variety of vehicles (trucks, jeeps, motorbikes), or canoes to cross Lake Albert, making the most of a total absence of controls at the Congolese border. As the process advances, the number of people involved is reduced. In Kampala only three companies buy the gold; all are managed by Indian entrepreneurs. The largest company, Uganda Commercial Impex Ltd (UCI) (9), has its headquarters in the suburb of Kamutckia.

According to Jamnadas Vasanji Lodhia, the owner of UCI: “We buy approximately 350kg of gold for a total of $5m. Our suppliers are always the same six or seven people, all Congolese from Bunia and Butembo.” The best known of these is Kambala Kisoni, owner of the Congocom Trading House. Kisoni also owns a small Antonov plane that flies between Mongbwalu and Butembo almost daily under the name of Butembo Airlines. According to UN experts, Kisoni has breached the arms embargo many times and has transported arms and FNI personnel to Mongbwalu (10).

When we reached Kisoni by telephone, he denied the accusations. “They consider us accomplices or rebels but, in fact, we’re hostage to the FNI people, who behave as though they run the area. They charge us $60 every time we land at Mongbwalu. We’d like the Congolese army to regain control of the region and establish some order.”

Kisoni did not deny exporting gold without authorisation from the mining ministry in Kinshasa. “It’s become dangerous to export with a licence,” he explained. “Given the level of corruption in the government, we’d risk losing everything. We used to have a licence but our gold cargo was stolen three times. And we know that the thieves were connected to the government.” Kisoni added that Congocom is simply an unofficial bank. “Gold is the currency here. With our clients’ gold we buy merchandise, which they sell in Congo. The Kampala buyers like UCI open lines of credit for the big companies that supply our clients with the products. We restrict ourselves to working as middlemen between the Ugandan companies and the traders in eastern Congo.”

The gold bought by UCI is melted down in the company’s Kampala headquarters. The small ingots are then sent every month to Metalor Technologies SA in Switzerland, a leading European dealer in precious metals. But since June the market has apparently ground to a halt. Following the publication of the HRW report, the Swiss company decided to stop gold imports. The UCI boss, Lodhia, was furious. “This trade has carried on for a century,” he said. “I don’t understand why they are making such a fuss. They accuse us of stealing wealth from Congo, but our suppliers are Congolese. With the money they earn from us they buy goods to sell in their country where there is nothing. They don’t buy arms, but sugar, coffee, blankets and clothes. What’s the point of buying arms anyway? Congo is full of them. That’s what earns the least money.”

Offshore bank accounts
Lodhia said he knew nothing about the supposed links between his suppliers and the armed rebels in Ituri. He confirmed visiting Bunia and Butembo, but denied ever having been to Mongbwalu. “I’ve occasionally been to see clients in the east of the country,” he admits, “but I’ve never visited the mines.” He showed us the company accounts that record transactions with Congolese clients worth millions of dollars. Most of the money is stored in offshore bank accounts in places like Mauritius or Hong Kong. “Our clients don’t trust local banks,” he explained, “so we pay the money into the accounts they choose. Which is totally legal.”

Indeed, the trade is legal. The Ugandan government does not require certificates of origin. It merely levies a 0.5% duty on gold exports and an annual licence fee of $1,200. In theory imported metals should be declared at the border, but it is so easy to cross the Congo-Uganda border that nobody bothers with customs declarations.

The numbers reveal the extent of this vast trade. In 2003 local gold production was worth $23,000. Officially imported gold totalled $2,000 while exported gold reached $45bn. The same data, supplied by the ministry for energy and development in Kampala, reveals that Uganda’s gold production totalled 40kg for that year, yet exports were more than four tonnes. In 2002 official production stood at 2.6kg with exports of 7.6 tonnes (11).

As a result of this vast legalised smuggling operation, gold is the second biggest Ugandan export after coffee. “That’s no secret,” said Lodhia. “Everybody knows that the gold in Kampala comes from Congo. In any case the government is virtually non-existent in former Zaire, especially in the east, and there are no controls. It’s been like that since the Mobutu era.”

Uganda has been the hub for Congolese gold since 1994, when the Kampala government decided to withdraw the central bank’s monopoly in buying precious metals, to scrap high export duties (of between 3% and 5%), and to make the regulations on trading companies more flexible. Previously, gold from Ituri transited through Kenya where the trade had already been liberalised. Lodhia admits to having switched from Nairobi to Kampala. “From a logistical point of view, it’s much easier to work out of Uganda,” explained the Indian entrepreneur. “The country is nearer to the DRC and security is excellent.”

The value of the gold increases as it travels from the Congolese towns to the Ugandan capital. UCI buys at $13.5 per gram. The selling price abroad depends on fluctuations on the international markets. “But we work on the basis of a profit margin of 0.5%,” explained Lodhia. “Gold mining is a living for thousands of people in eastern Congo. Those Human Rights Watch militants are lobbying intensively to stop it, but their ideological thinking will end up hurting the very people they think they’re defending. I’m losing money myself, but I’m not going to starve. If the Swiss stop buying and I don’t find other outlets, then sooner or later I’ll have to stop buying.”

There are thousands of people involved in gold smuggling, from the miners in Mongbwalu to the big traders in Kampala and the middlemen in Bunia and Butembo. Although there is no doubt that gold mining has supported - and continues to support - the rebels in the east of the country, it would be difficult to prevent this through embargoes or other means. UN experts believe that, given the size of the country, a total export ban on natural resources would be an extremely costly measure and hard to enforce (12). For them the ideal solution would be to set up a “traceability” process that would prevent smuggling to Uganda. But a system like the Kimberley process for diamonds (13) has not yet been devised for precious metals.
According to Enrico Carisch, a UN finance expert: “The only way to stop the warlords from making money would be to put pressure on the region’s governments to end this regime of impunity. The Ugandans, in particular, should normalise bilateral trade with Congo. But to do that, the Kinshasa government must regain control over the east of the country with the help of the international community.” In a region where the state is notable for its absence and gold is the only source of revenue for the majority of people, it is hard to imagine how the gold mining business could be changed at one stroke - particularly with the strong international demand for gold.

Who Put Gen. Idi Amin in Power?

The following extract is from an article published by The Monitor (Uganda) on March 31, 2002

There has long been suspicion that Britain organised the 1971 coup in Uganda which brought Idi Amin to power. Recently released Foreign Office papers show that the Israelis were more likely to have been the culprits. But Britain and Israel rushed to help Amin and sold him weapons.

In early January 1971 a plot is being hatched in Uganda that will unleash a terror that has become a byword for evil in Africa. General Idi Amin is about to become the military dictator of Uganda, throwing out President Milton Obote. Amin and Obote have been at daggers drawn for months. Obote has demoted his chief of staff, and is now preparing to have him arrested, possibly murdered.

As the crisis mounts, the Foreign Office in London and its representative in Kampala are engaged in another serious matter. One of Obote's ministers has said in a speech that during colonial rule the British had punished Obote's grandfather by hanging him up by the hair for several hours. The High Commission in Kampala want to know if this could be true and ask the Foreign office in London if there is any evidence. The chaps in the Foreign Office in London, languid, patronising, wonder if you can hang someone up by "woolly African hair". "I suppose it is just possible that unorthodox punishment might have been meted out to him I will bear the story in mind when I speak to my Langi historian friend at Oxford", writes the Uganda desk officer on Jan. 5.

In their cynical world-weary way they exchange messages on the subject until January 25th when the Foreign Office finally sends a note saying it can find no evidence for the allegation. Someone has scribbled in the margin that it all seems a bit irrelevant now. Obote was overthrown that morning.

Obote had gone to Singapore attending a summit of Commonwealth leaders. The Ugandan president was no friend of the British. He bitterly criticised British arms sales to South Africa and he had nationalised British companies in Uganda worth millions of pounds. He was expected to give Ted Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister, a hard time at the Commonwealth meeting.

There has long been a suggestion that the British government engineered the coup. If true, the plotters certainly did not tell the Foreign Office. Richard Slater, the High Commissioner in Kampala, was caught completely unawares.

His early telegrams suggest bewilderment. But he immediately goes to the embassy that he believes to be close to Amin, the Israeli. He is right. Colonel Bar Lev, the Israeli military attaché, has already met Amin on the day of the coup and has been out on the streets of Kampala. Officially the First Secretary at the Embassy, Bar Lev has been in Uganda for five years and has recently been responsible for setting up a paramilitary police force and training the army and police.

All the British High Commission telegrams immediately after the coup quote Colonel Bar Lev. He says that Amin had all pro Obote officers in the army arrested because Obote was going to have Amin arrested on his return from Singapore. Bar Lev discounts any possibility of any moves against Amin by army units up country. "It appears that Amin is now firmly in control of all elements of army (sic) which controls vital points."

London is excited. "There is a good deal of interest here and we are receiving a number of enquiries," writes Sir Alex Douglas-Home, the Foreign Secretary.

By the end of the first day the Foreign Office is already considering recognising Amin's rule. But in Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere is already accusing Britain of organising the coup and the British are afraid of being too close to Amin too soon. They decide not to lead the way in recognition but be close behind others that do. After a few days they persuade Kenya to lead the way in recognising the new regime.

The day after the coup, Slater says he has been to talk to Colonel Bar Lev who has just been talking to Amin again. "He made it clear at once that (Amin) wanted me to be made aware of his intentions" says Slater. Amin, Bar Lev tells him, wants to hold elections and restore multi party democracy to Uganda within three or five months. Bar Lev also lists the advice he is giving to Amin. In London the Foreign Office concludes: "We now have a thoroughly pro-Western set up in Uganda of which we should take prompt advantage. Amin needs our help."

Britain let Israel or rather Colonel Bar Lev take the lead and avoid being seen as too close to the Israelis in Uganda while increasing contact in Tel Aviv. Bar Lev informs the British that "all potential foci of resistance have been eliminated". A number of pro-Obote officers are shot but Bar Lev explains to the British that "Amin's plan" had been "to let Obote return and then shoot him at the airport, together with a number of those who had gone to meet him. This plan was abandoned because of the difficulty of synchronising it with the liquidation of pro-Obote elements in the army."

Bar Lev also says that the police chief, Erinayo Oryema, was being chased by Amin's troops and took refuge in Bar Lev's residence. The Israeli boasts that he persuaded Oryema to surrender and persuaded Amin to forgive him and include him in the new regime. (Oryema was later murdered by Amin in 1977 together with fellow minister Oboth Ofumbi and Anglican Archbishop Janan Luwum).

In London the British want to know why Uganda is so important to Israel. The High Commissioner spells it out: "The main Israeli objective here is to ensure that the rebellion in southern Sudan keeps on simmering for as long as conditions require the exploitation of any weakness in the Arab world. They do not want the rebels to win. They want them to keep on fighting."

Sudan supports the Palestinian cause against Israel and Israel is determined to make Sudan pay by providing arms and ammunition to the southern Sudanese rebellion. Uganda's co-operation is vital. Israel also wants Uganda's vote at the United Nations.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Britain's Foreign Secretary and chief advocate of arming apartheid South Africa, is keen for Britain to back the new government. When British intelligence reports that Obote has arrived in Khartoum on Jan. 29 and may try to re-enter Uganda from the northern border, the foreign secretary orders that a warning message be sent to Amin through the Kenyans.

Soon after a more sinister Briton turns up in Kampala. Bruce Mackenzie is a British intelligence officer resident in Kenya who was also a roving ambassador for President Jomo Kenyatta. It was also certainly Mackenzie who persuaded Kenya to recognise Amin, though Kenya's other neighbours; Somalia and Tanzania treat the coup as mutiny.

Mackenzie is a cantankerous former fighter pilot with a handlebar moustache and firm views about who is on "our side" and who is an enemy. He immediately urges London to back Amin, telling the Foreign Office to sell him armoured cars.

Two days later an internal Foreign Office assessment reads: "General Amin has certainly removed from the African scene one of our most implacable enemies in matters affecting Southern Africa Our prospects in Uganda have no doubt been considerably enhanced providing we take the opportunities open to us "

Amin is certainly making all the right noises for the British. He has said he will tell other African leaders not to criticise Rhodesia or South Africa, he will not nationalise British firms in Uganda and sees Britain as an ally that has done much for Uganda.

To pursue these "opportunities" an increasingly sceptical Slater is ordered "to get as close to Amin as you can and see whether you can develop a degree of familiarity which would enable you to feed a certain amount of advice."

But what are these opportunities? Britain sends out a Foreign Office minister, Lord Boyd, who meets Amin on April 3. Amin, he reports, wants a signed portrait of Queen Elizabeth and a royal visit as soon as possible. Amin tells Lord Boyd that he has written her Majesty "a very nice letter".

The British like this. Even more they like Amin's desire for guns. He wants to be able to hit Khartoum with bombers. The Israelis have already obliged by providing ten refurbished American-made Sherman tanks and lots of small arms. But Amin wants armoured cars and aircraft. He likes the new Harrier jump jet that Britain is developing and, incredibly, the British think of selling them as well as Phantoms and Jaguars, all of them heavyweight fighter bombers.

With a haste that upsets the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office brings over some senior officers to observe a display of British weaponry in action. From Kampala Slater's warnings to proceed cautiously are swept aside by the likes of Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

He writes: "The P(rime) M(inister) will be watching this and will, I am sure, want us to take quick advantage of any opportunity of selling arms. Don't overdo the caution."

But it transpires Amin is playing a double game. Slater's caution is proved right. Amin told the British how much he admired them and their weapons. He has told the Americans exactly the same thing. This worries Britain less than the possibility that he will approach the French with a similar request.

On March 3, Mackenzie urges Britain to supply them quickly. He says Amin is relying primarily on Israel, then on Britain and lastly on Kenya. He then flies off to Israel to see Prime Minister, Golda Meir and General Moshe Dayan. Seven years later Amin had Mackenzie murdered, placing a bomb on his plane as he left Uganda after a brief visit, ironically to try to sell Amin weapons.

In Kampala Slater seems to give up. He even begins to warm to Amin, noting his popularity and his clownishness. "He has the wherewithal to provide a satisfactory administration and has shown great qualities of leadership and a marked flair for PR..." though he admits he is "Large, ungainly, inarticulate and prone to gout He has earned a great deal of popularity by mixing freely driving his own jeep, ignoring security precautions. I believe him sincere in his wish to hold elections." Slater concludes that there is no alternative. "I had reached the end of the road with Obote", he writes.

Yet his caution about Amin had been right. Amin's love affair with Britain and Israel lasted just over a year. Israel overplayed its hand in helping to put Amin in power and thought he was their puppet. He resented that, especially when they demanded payment for the help they were giving Uganda.

Israel gives Amin a jet

Secondly in February 1972 peace was established in Sudan. An important reason for the Israelis to be in Uganda was removed. In the end neither Israel nor Britain would give Amin the weapons he wanted, though the Israelis did give him an executive jet.

Idi Amin's plane
Carl Taylor was a corporate pilot. His career covered 30-something years and the world.He had several "adventures", maybe none to compare with this one. Betty remembers hearing that he piloted planes for people like John F. Kennedy in Wisconsin during his presidential campaign, for Actress Elizabeth Taylor when she was married to Senator John Warner. And, also for the Pro-basketball team, Lakers, way back before they moved to California. The family had a scare when he piloted with the Lakers...They heard one day in early 60's, that their plane had crash-landed in a cornfield in Iowa. Knowing he was their pilot at the time, they were really scared!! But, turns out, he was sick and stayed in New York City that day and his co-pilot had taken the flight. No serious injuries in the crash landing and Carl got to go and fly the plane out of the cornfield!! He commented that it was harder to fly the plane out than the landing might have been!! Sadly, Carl's career and life ended in April 1981, just 5 years after the Idi Amin incident, when the plane with he and two businessmen crashed on landing approach near the Alpena, Michigan airport. He is buried in the Ft. Snelling National Cemetery in Minneapolis, MN.
Carl Taylor was the pilot who flew Idi Amin's president's Westwind jet back to it's Israeli builders. Carl was at the Uganda airport when Idi Amin came to the airport on a bicycle to meet them. This was just 2 months after the 4th of July Israeli raid on Entebbe to free more than 100 hostages from an Air France jet that was hijacked.
http://www.rcpbml.org.uk/wdie-02/d02-62.htm#idi
By Richard Dowden
17 August 2003
When Radio Uganda announced at dawn on 25 January 1971 that Idi Amin was Uganda's new ruler, many people suspected that Britain had a hand in the coup. However, Foreign Office papers released last year point to a different conspirator: Israel.
The first telegrams to London from the British High Commissioner in Kampala, Richard Slater, show a man shocked and bewildered by the coup. But he quickly turned to the man who he thought might know what was going on; Colonel Bar-Lev, the Israeli defence attaché.
Golda Meir
He found the Israeli colonel with Amin. They had spent the morning of the coup together. Slater's next telegram says that according to Colonel Bar-Lev: "In the course of last night General Amin caused to be arrested all officers in the armed forces sympathetic to Obote ... Amin is now firmly in control of all elements of [the] army which controls vital points in Uganda ... the Israeli defence attaché discounts any possibility of moves against Amin."

The Israelis moved quickly to consolidate the coup. In the following days Bar-Lev was in constant contact with Amin and giving him advice. Slater told London that Bar-Lev had explained "in considerable detail [how] ... all potential foci of resistance, both up country and in Kampala, had been eliminated". Shortly afterwards Amin made his first foreign trip; a state visit to Israel. Golda Meir, the Prime Minister, was reportedly "shocked at his shopping list" for arms.
But why was Israel so interested in a landlocked country in Central Africa? The reason is spelt out by Slater in a later telegram. Israel was backing rebellion in southern Sudan to punish Sudan for supporting the Arab cause in the Six-Day War. "They do not want the rebels to win. They want to keep them fighting."
The Israelis had helped train the new Uganda army in the 1960s. Shortly after independence Amin was sent to Israel on a training course. When he became chief of staff of the new army Amin also ran a sideline operation for the Israelis, supplying arms and ammunition to the rebels in southern Sudan. Amin had his own motive for helping them: many of his own people, the Kakwa, live in southern Sudan. Obote, however, wanted peace in southern Sudan. That worried the Israelis and they were even more worried when, in November 1970 Obote sacked Amin. Their stick for beating Sudan was suddenly taken away.
The British may have had little to do with the coup but they welcomed it enthusiastically. "General Amin has certainly removed from the African scene one of our most implacable enemies in matters affecting Southern Africa...," wrote an enthusiastic Foreign Office official in London.
The man who argued most vehemently for Britain to back Amin with arms was Bruce McKenzie, a former RAF pilot turned MI6 agent. (Amin murdered him seven years later.) He flew to Israel shortly after the coup and, as if getting permission to back Amin, he reported to Douglas-Home: "The way is now clear for our High Commission in Kampala to get close to Amin."
But the cautious Mr Slater in Kampala remained reluctant. Urged on by McKenzie, Douglas-Home gave Slater his orders: "The PM will be watching this and will, I am sure, want us to take quick advantage of any opportunity of selling arms. Don't overdo the caution."
Shortly afterwards Amin was invited for a state visit to London and dinner at Buckingham Palace.
This is an excellent documentary film that captures the man in his true colours, exactly as he would like to have been seen. A favourite line from the film is when Amin describes how Golda Meir of Israel would provide “very good entertainments” for him when he visited Israel. There are innumerable moments that ought to have the viewer splits; the bits when he is chatting to the animals, the bit when he explains how he is at one with the people and how much they love him, the bit when he explains his own brand of democracy

The the first tele grams to London from the British överkommissarien in Kampala, Richard Slater, shows a man as been shocked and been confused of kuppen. But he turned himself fast to the man he believed knew what as was taking place; Colonel Bara lives, the Israeli Defence Attaché. He striked on the Israeli Colonel with the muffler. The had paid the morning then kuppen was implemented together ". “the Israelis acted quickly in order to reinforce kuppen. The the following days each Bara lives in constant contact with the muffler and gave him councils. Slater told for London that Bara lives had explained 'in detailed details [how]… all potential concentrations of obstruction, both in the country and in Kampala, had been eliminated”. “shortly then the done muffler their first utlandsresa; a government visit in Israeli. Golda Meir, premiärministern, each according to information received “shocked over his purchase list” of weapons”.
Coup in Uganda (Idi Amin)
Idi Amin, a UK and Israeli backed general, replaces the elected government of Uganda in a military coup.
The Israeli attaché, Colonel Rar-Lev, spends the day of the coup advising the new dictator. Eric le Tocq, of the UK Foreign Office, writes "Our prospects in Uganda have no boubt been considerably enhanced".
Amin had been running British concentration camps in Kenya during the independence movement in the 1950s, where he earned the title of "The Strangler".
He begins one of Africa's most brutal reigns of terror killing his friends, the clergy, soldiers, and ordinary citizens. His first state visits are to UK and Israel, who sell him arms. The West continues to finance his regime until 1979.
Old telegrams unearthed by The Independent revealed that Israel helped Amin to take power in the 1971 coup. Find out the reasons behind it.
Comments
A traditionally anti-Israel newspaper unearthed telegrams supposedly made by another historically anti-Israel diplomat to Ida Amin whom before even his coup already supported Palestinians and incited violence against the Jews? And all this while any news about Ida Amin in Israel is negative? If this is true and got out on Israel's press at that time, it would be the end of the current civilian government.
And as the only ally in Africa, Israel help Uganda with its army, not specifically Amin. Ida Amin rose to power in the military in the first place because of Obote, the person he stole power from when he was in Singapore. Amin had a rich military history, first serving in the King's African Rifles.
And infighting in Sudan would have continued regardless of Ugandan support. The rebels were of Christian and Animist minority, fighting against the Islamist government who was enslaving them. If they were fighting because of Ugandan support, well, it wouldn't have gone on for years to come. Fighting in fact stop because of American and Egyptian pressure. If Israel wanted fighting to go on, they are better off directly aiding the rebels, like they did with Bangladeshi rebels in the Pakistani civil war.
And who welcomed Amin into their territory as a state visitor? Britain or Israel? The Independent didn't also show proof of the telegrams, and forgets to note Israel is the closest Western country to Uganda, and most from Europe at that time transit via that way. And mind you, Europe was far more supportive of Israel then than now, especially between the six day war and the Yom Kippur War.

ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT

Bilderbergers Want Global Currency Now

American Free Press | Bilderberg has had front-men call anew for creating a global currency and establishing major European Union-style regions for the administrative convenience of a planned world government. Both steps were taken in September, one by the new Bilderberg-crowned prime minister of Japan and one separately by the UN.
The Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) called for a global currency in a report made public on September 7. UN countries should agree on a global reserve bank to issue the currency and to monitor the national exchange rates of its members, UNCTAD said. The dollar’s role in international trade should be reduced to protect emerging markets from the “confidence game” of financial speculation, it said.
Heiner Flassbeck, a former German deputy finance minister, is co-author of the report calling for a global currency. He worked with then U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in 1997-98 to contain the Asian financial crisis. Summers is a longtime Bilderberg luminary and has been photographed by AFP at annual secret Bilderberg confabs.
Eliminating national currencies has long been a goal of Bilderberg as a crucial step in its plan to establish a world government. A nation’s currency is a symbol of sovereignty, so Bilderberg wants to divide the world into three giant regions, each with its regional currency, for the administrative convenience of its world government bureaucrats.
Bilderberg used its immense power to get Yukio Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan elected over the Liberal Democratic Party, which had led the nation for 64 years. Hatoyama obediently called for an Asian economic bloc, similar to the EU, complete with a regional currency.
Bilderberg’s goal is an “Asian-Pacific Union” and an “American Union,” both modeled after the EU. The EU has its common currency, the euro, and a European Parliament that can impose laws on the once sovereign nations of Europe and a European Court superior to the highest courts of member states. The EU is effectively a single super-state.
The “American Union” is to evolve from the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, as it extends throughout the Western Hemisphere. The common currency is to be the “amero.” Fortunately, Bilderberg’s efforts in the Western Hemisphere have been stalled but the campaign continues using “free trade” propaganda.
Ultimately, the UN is to function as a world government with the General Assembly serving as a world parliament. Bilderberg, a secret organization of international financiers and political leaders, will serve as a world shadow government that dictates to the UN.
http://justgetthere.us/blog/categories/Globalization/86

Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue Corrupt Oil Baby

U.S. Government Documents Crime Spree by Dictator’s Son: Why no action by the feds?

In 2004, George W. Bush issued Presidential Proclamation 7750, which barred corrupt foreign officials from entering the United States and ordered the State Department to compile a list of banned individuals. Three years later Congress approved a complementary measure that said the State Department should take special heed to bar officials when there was “credible evidence” to believe they were involved the theft of natural resources revenues. Last July, the State Department issued a report noting that corruption eroded “confidence in democratic institutions” and that fighting it was a central tenet of American foreign policy. The report also stated that the Obama administration would “vigorously” enforce 7750, better known as the Anti-Kleptocracy Intiative, and give particularly close scrutiny to visa requests from individuals involved in corruption involving natural resources.

Why, then, is a notoriously crooked official from oil-rich Equatorial Guinea allowed to enter the country and to hold vast millions in assets here? It’s certainly not because the U.S. government is unaware of the scandalous activities of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue. Previously undisclosed documents — obtained by London-based Global Witness and provided to Harper’s Magazine — reveal an extensive federal investigation of Obiang Mangue was underway at least two years ago. Global Witness’s report on the U.S. investigation into Obiang Mangue is available here.

Obiang Mangue, often called Teodorin, is the son and potential successor to Equatorial Guinea’s long-ruling dictator. The investigation, led by the Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), identified a list of Teodorin’s American assets. They include an estate in Malibu, which sits on sixteen acres of land and boasts a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a four-hole golf course. Teodorin paid $35 million in cash for the property three years ago. He also owns a $33.8 million Gulf Stream V private jet, millions of dollars worth of sports cars, and at least two luxury boats, and has used money laundered through shell corporations to finance his American shopping sprees, according to the documents.


A Justice Department memorandum from September of 2007 noted that Teodorin’s salary as Minister of the Agriculture and Forestry paid only $5,000 per month. “[I]t is suspected that a large portion of Teodoro Nguema OBIANG’s assets have originated from extortion, theft of public funds, or other corrupt conduct,” said the document, which also detailed how between 2005 and 2007 Teodorin had funneled into the United States at least $75 million — nearly twice the amount allocated by Equatorial Guinea for its yearly national education budget.

A PowerPoint prepared by ICE’s lead investigator on the case identified the inquiry’s goals as being to “identify, trace, freeze, and recover assets within the United States illicitly acquired through kleptocracy by Teodoro Obiang and his associates,” and to “deny safe haven in the United States to kleptocrats.”

In September 2007, an American delegation met investigators in France, where Teodorin has also lived (quite well) and been the subject of law enforcement inquiry. At the meeting it was agreed that the U.S. would submit to French authorities a “commission rogatoire internationale,” or a formal request for cross-border legal assistance.

Yet two years later the investigation into Teodorin is stalled, according to two sources that spoke about the case off the record. And though the State Department will not publicly disclose the list of foreign officials barred under Bush’s Proclamation 7750, Teodorin is not on it. An official at Equatorial Guinea’s embassy in Washington, who asked to remain unidentified, said he had traveled to the United States as recently as late-September, when he helped officially inaugurate his country’s consulate in Houston.

I requested an interview with Teodorin through the embassy of Equatorial Guinea and through Qorvis, a Washington public relations and lobbying firm that works for the government, and provided a detailed account of the charges in the U.S. documents. I received no reply other than for this comment from the embassy: “We have not been contacted by any Government Agencies and are not aware of any ongoing investigation into the Government of Equatorial Guinea or any of its representatives.”

Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate counsel who played a key role in investigations into BCCI and the Lockheed Corporation’s overseas bribery scandal, suspects that the lack of action against Teodorin may be tied to Equatorial Guinea’s energy wealth and close ties with American oil firms, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, who have major investments in the country. “The least they could do is cut off his shopping privileges by denying him entry into the United States,” he said. “Where the hell is the U.S. government?”

Teodorin’s father, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has ruled Equatorial Guinea since 1979, when he overthrew and executed his uncle. Since taking the reins of power, Obiang has squashed political opposition and crushed dissent. He has been “elected” three times in balloting marred by fraud (in 1989 with 99 percent of the vote, in 1996 with 97.8 percent, and in 2002 with 97.1 percent).

The State Department’s 2009 global human rights survey, released in February, cited abuses in Equatorial Guinea that included “unlawful killings by security forces; government-sanctioned kidnappings; systematic torture of prisoners and detainees by security forces; life threatening conditions in prisons and detention facilities; impunity; arbitrary arrest, detention, and incommunicado detention.”

Until the mid-1990s, Equatorial Guinea was a pariah state with few international allies. Then American energy firms discovered vast reserves of oil and gas in the waters off Equatorial Guinea. Since then, the country has become the fourth-largest producer of crude in sub-Saharan Africa. Between 1993 and 2007, annual oil revenues shot from $3 million to $4.8 billion.
Equatorial Guinea now enjoys a per capita income of about $37,000, on par with Denmark. Yet a report released earlier this year by Human Rights Watch noted that 77 percent of the population still lives in poverty, 35 percent die before the age of 40, and 57 percent lack access to safe water. “The government of Equatorial Guinea has set new low standards of political and economic malfeasance in handling its billions of dollars in oil revenue,” the report stated. “The dictatorship…has used an oil boom to entrench and enrich itself further at the expense of the country’s people.”
The Obiang family has not been terribly discreet about its plundering of the national treasury. In 1999, Obiang bought a $2.6 million mansion in the Maryland suburbs that has 10 bathrooms and an indoor pool. The following year he bought a second Maryland property for $1.15 million. In 2008, a Spanish civil rights group filed a complaint charging that Obiang and eleven relatives and associates had used laundered money to buy homes and other real estate in the country. An official investigation into those charges is now underway.

A 2004 report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that Obiang had control over some $700 million in state funds, deposited at Riggs National Bank in Washington, D.C. by American oil companies active in Equatorial Guinea. Riggs opened multiple personal accounts for Obiang, his wife and other relatives, which held at least $13 million, and helped establish shell corporations overseas for the president. Riggs, said the report, “turned a blind eye to evidence suggesting the bank was handling the proceeds of foreign corruption, and allowed numerous suspicious transactions to take place without notifying law enforcement.” (Subsequent to the investigation, Riggs Bank paid $41 million in fines for lax oversight, a senior vice president pled guilty to fraud and money laundering, and it was bought by PNC Financial Services.) According to the report, American oil companies “contributed to corrupt practices” by entering into business ventures and making substantial payments to government officials in Equatorial Guinea.
The Obiang regime’s awful record on corruption and human rights has not prevented the United States from cozying up to it. In 2003, following an intense lobbying campaign by the oil industry, President Bush decided to reopen the American embassy in the country, which had been shut down eight years earlier for budgetary reasons and human rights violations. In 2006, Obiang met with then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who called him “a good friend” to the United States.

Teodorin has had ties to the Los Angeles area since at least 1991, when he attended an English as a Second Language course at Pepperdine University in Malibu. Elisa Wax, director of the course during that time, recalled Teodorin arriving to campus in sports cars or limousines. “He was there to party,” she said. “He rarely came to class.”
Teodorin’s tuition of $3,400 for the non-degree course included boarding at Pepperdine, but he shuttled between the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and a house he rented in Malibu. Wax received a steady stream of phone calls from the hotel as well as shops in Beverly Hills trying to track down Teodorin to settle outstanding bills. She would direct these calls to a representative at Walter International, a Houston-based firm that then had a stake in Equatorial Guinea’s offshore fields and that financed Teodorin’s “studies” at Pepperdine. The woman assigned by Walter to handle these complaints was “pulling out her hair,” Wax said. “There were people trying to locate him from all directions.”
After five months, Teodorin dropped out of the program. John Bennett, the American ambassador in Equatorial Guinea at the time, said that Walter International covered $50,000 in expenses racked up by Teodorin during his brief stay.
Teodorin has owned several estates in Los Angeles. Before purchasing his current property, he bought a house for $5.8 million in Bel Air, where he lived across the street from Farrah Fawcett. For a time he owned and operated a hip-hop label called TNO Entertainment, which produced two albums before going out of business. In an effort to woo the rapper Eve, Teodorin reportedly rented a 300-foot yacht from Microsoft founder Paul Allen for about $700,000. News accounts said Eve dated Teodorin for a time but dumped him after learning that his father had been accused of being a cannibal who ate his political rivals. (A request for comment sent to Eve’s publicist was declined.)
In France, a TV crew filmed Teodorin driving down the Champs-Elysees in a Bentley and on a shopping spree during which he bought 30 designer suits in a single afternoon. A Western businessman who had dealings with Teodorin recalled meeting him in Paris, where he was staying at the Plaza Athenee, one of the city’s most luxurious hotels. Teodorin had commandeered three of the biggest suites there—the current rate for such suites runs to thousands of dollars a night — and booked a number of other rooms for his entourage, including bodyguards and girlfriends.
Teodorin also invited this person (who asked not to be identified in this article) to a large dinner party at La Maison du Caviar. “He had a private room and he ordered a lot of champagne and so much caviar you could have scooped it with a shovel,” the source said. “All he knows is how to spend money, that’s how he measures success.”
A 2007 French police investigation uncovered tens of millions of dollars worth of assets belonging to the rulers and family members of Equatorial Guinea, Congo, and Gabon. The investigation showed that Teodorin controlled multiple accounts at blue chip banks such as Barclays, BNP Paribas, and HSBC, and that his car purchases alone had come to $6.3 million over the prior decade.
In South Africa, Teodorin bought two estates in Cape Town in 2004 for $7 million. The Times of South Africa reported that he spent millions more on renovations, including a home-theater sound system and spa baths and marble surfaces for the bathrooms. An unnamed security guard who had worked for Teodorin told the newspaper that his employer was never without a briefcase full of cash and spent thousands of dollars on champagne for his female companions.
On September 4, 2007, Stewart C. Robinson, deputy director of the criminal division at the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs, sent French investigators an urgent “Request for Assistance” in an investigation of “suspected criminal conduct of Teodoro Nguema OBIANG and his associates.” It asked that “the subject of this request and the existence of a U.S. investigation on this subject be kept strictly confidential.”
In addition to Teodorin, the “targets of the investigation” were Michael Jay Berger, a Los Angeles-based attorney who “serves as an intermediary for funds wired from Equatorial Guinea,” and Somagui Forestal, a forestry company “beneficially owned by [Teodorin] from which large money transfers to the United States have originated.” Teodorin’s home in Malibu was purchased in the name of a shell corporation, Sweetwater Management, Inc., of which he is the president. His Gulfstream jet was purchased by another of Teodorin’s shell corporations, Ebony Shine International, Ltd., which is registered in the British Virgin Islands.
The U.S. investigation of Teodorin and his associates, wrote Robinson, had “identified numerous suspicious transactions”:
—In April 2005, Teodorin “was the originator on at least five separate wire transfers,” each for $5.9 million. The money moved from a bank account in Equatorial Guinea, through a French bank and then “to a correspondent account at Wachovia Corporation Atlantic to [an account] at First American Trust FSB in the name of First American Title.” Investigators believe he used those funds to purchase the mansion in Malibu.
—In April 2006, Teodorin “was the originator on three wire transfers” that moved through the same banks, except the final destination now was a Bank of America account in the name of McAfee & Taft. Through those three transfers, Teodorin moved $10.3 million into the United States.
—From May to June 2006, Teodorin and his associates executed six wire transfers from a French bank to a correspondent account at Wachovia Atlantic and then to a UBS account in New York, in the name of Insured Aircraft Title Service Correspondent. The funds, $33.8 million in all, were used by Teodorin to purchase his luxury jet.
—Between November 2006 and June 2007, the “suspected money laundering continued …through the use of an intermediary,” identified as Michael Jay Berger. He was said to be the recipient of at least four wire transfers totaling about $800,000. The evidence suggested that the wires originated from an account for Somagui Forestal bank in Equatorial Guinea and were transferred through French banks to Berger’s attorney/client trust account at Union Bank of California. (Berger declined multiple requests for comment.)
Walter Moran, then Special Agent in Charge of ICE’s Miami bureau, sent the French a PowerPoint presentation in support of the request for assistance. It said that Teodorin’s Malibu mansion was “undergoing multi-million dollar renovation,” and that he had “multiple luxury vehicles stored at the Peterson Automobile Museum in Los Angeles,” including two Rolls Royce Phantoms worth $350,000 each; two Maybachs worth $350,000 each; four Ferraris worth $250,000 each; and one Rolls Royce Park Ward.
It identified other American assets of Teodorin’s, including two speedboats of unknown value. Furthermore, two independent sources had told investigators that Teodorin was building a 200-foot custom luxury yacht, complete with a shark tank. He had also recently sought to purchase an apartment at the Ritz Carlton in New York for $20 million in cash and was looking to purchase residential property in Miami.
The PowerPoint said further that Teodorin:
—was a “Recreational drug user (3 to 4 day binges with friends).”
—frequently traveled to the United States as an A-1 diplomat, “although he is seldom on official business.”
—“allegedly received large wire transfers weekly through a ‘fictitious’ corporate account at Union Bank in California.”
—was the target of multiple Suspicious Activities Reports for suspected money laundering from financial institutions including Bank of America and Wachovia. “As a result of his activities, both banks have closed all accounts associated with Obiang and his associates,” the document said.
After being informed of the contents of the government documents, Lawrence Barcella, a former federal prosecutor, said:
“To build a case like this you have to prove that his money comes from the proceeds of corruption. That would generally require the cooperation of the foreign government in order to gather sufficient evidence, and in this case Equatorial Guinea is obviously not going to cooperate. It looks like they [prosecutors] have grounds for probable cause, which would be enough to get a warrant and an indictment, but they have to get over the hump of probable cause to beyond a reasonable doubt and that’s a lot tougher. Justice Department guidelines say you should not seek an indictment unless you believe you can meet the reasonable doubt standard.”
However, Barcella said that even if Justice could not prosecute Teodorin, the State Department could bar him from entering the country. “Traveling into the United States is not a right, it’s a gift. He could very easily be declared PNG and denied entry. For years, John Lennon couldn’t enter the United States because he smoked marijuana. You can deny a visa for any reason.”
Jack Blum shared much of Barcella’s assessment. “Gathering the evidentiary material to prove the illegal origins of [Teodorin’s] money would not be easy and [bringing a case] would turn the U.S. relationship with Equatorial Guinea on its head, and that’s of some interest given all the oil.” However, barring Teodorin from the country would be a simple matter, adding, “That is a sensible step that would have real impact, as it would put off limits to him all of his assets in the United States,” he said.
Blum believed the failure to take action against Obiang could be politically motivated. He noted that several other Justice Department cases involving oil kleptocracies — including the so-called “Kazakhgate” scandal, in which the president of Kazakhstan allegedly received tens of millions of dollars in payoffs from an American businessman representing U.S. oil companies—have been mysteriously bogged down for years. “It’s quite possible that there is high-level political interference,” he said. “As U.S. citizens, we have the right to know what’s going on here. If they are going to drop the cases, they need to lay out the facts and explain why.”
Alexandre Wrage, the president of TRACE, which advises multinational companies on compliance with anti-bribery laws, offered this comment: “To deny a visa under 7750, the State Department needs to determine that there is ‘reason to believe’ a public official has misappropriated public funds. That’s a very low standard to meet. Teodorin Obiang owns real estate and cars valued in excess of $80 million. That certainly gives me reason to believe that the funds have come from some source other than his official salary. There’s a second part to the test [of denying a visa under 7750]: has the misappropriation had serious adverse effects on the national interests of the United States? Massive theft by the kleptocrats of the world undermines U.S. long-terms interests; it undermines democratization efforts and poverty alleviation, and contributes to the collapse of some states, making the world less safe. I would hope that it is this standard that applies, and not the short-term national interest of access to oil.”
Barring a coup d’etat, it is likely that President Obiang, age 67, will rule until his death and then hand off power to a chosen successor. Teodorin is widely considered to be the leading candidate to succeed him. “The guy knows how to play politics,” says Bennett, the former American ambassador. “He’s seen as the junior Big Man.”
One can argue about the legal obstacles involved in prosecuting Teodorin or seizing his assets. There is no doubt at all, though, that he is ineligible to enter the United States under 7750. Despite the U.S. government’s public commitment to keeping corrupt foreign officials out of the country, the State Department appears to be reluctant to make use of 7750. The list of those banned under the proclamation is classified, but two confidential sources I spoke to said there are only about three dozen names on it. These include, according to a few foreign press accounts and my sources, officials from Cambodia, Kenya and Nigeria.

Could the lack of action against Teodorin stem from political pressure to ignore the crimes and corruption of a possible future president of an oil-friendly ally? It’s impossible to say with certainty, and the Department of State declined comment for this article. Both the Justice Department and ICE also declined comment, saying they could not confirm or deny the existence of any investigation.
By Ken Silverstein