Keenie Meenie

The British Mercenaries Who Got Away with War Crimes

Phil Miller

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780745340791
• eBook ISBN: 9781786805843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Keenie Meenie Services - the most powerful mercenary company you've never heard of - was involved in war crimes around the world from Sri Lanka to Nicaragua for which its shadowy directors have never been held accountable.

Like its mysterious name, Keenie Meenie Services escaped definition and to this day has evaded sanctions. Now explosive new evidence - only recently declassified - exposes the extent of these war crimes, and the British government's tacit support for the company's operations. Including testimonies from SAS veterans, spy chiefs and diplomats, we hear from key figures battle-hardened by the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the Iranian Embassy siege. Investigative journalist Phil Miller asks, who were these mercenaries: heroes, terrorists, freedom fighters or war criminals?

This book presents the first ever comprehensive case against Keenie Meenie Services, providing long overdue evidence on the crimes of the people who make a killing from killing.

1

White Sultan of Oman

As the summer of 1970 faded into autumn, a forlorn figure checked in at the Dorchester, a glamorous five-star hotel on London’s prestigious Park Lane. The art deco design, marble clad interior and thick carpets were a welcome change from the austere Royal Air Force (RAF) hospital in Wiltshire, where he had spent six weeks convalescing while his bullet wounds healed. Still, putting him in this hotel was just the latest insult that Whitehall could inflict on him. How this tired old man, Said bin Taimur, yearned to be back at his palace in Muscat, where he was the Sultan of Oman. That was until the British, whose interests he had served so faithfully for decades, decided to depose him. They had stormed into his private chamber, disarmed his guards and shot him three times. He tried to fight back, but only managed to shoot himself in the foot. Then a young British army officer, Tim Landon, finally confiscated his pistol, marking the end of his reign.¹

That man Landon had a lot to answer for. He had shared a room with the Sultan’s son, Qaboos, at Sandhurst. The pair got on well at the military academy – Landon protected the Arab prince from senseless bullying. So when Landon turned up in Oman in 1965, the royal family were relieved to see him again. Oman was going through a tough time. There was a revolution brewing in the southern highlands, a border region near Yemen known as Dhufar. This crescent-shaped mountain ridge was quite unlike anywhere else in the arid Gulf country. Dhufar was a rolling plateau, on average almost a thousand metres above sea level. In the monsoon season, clouds laden with moisture cloaked its escarpments, nourishing a belt of dense woodland. The mist was so thick you could hardly see in front of you. The grasslands along the summit made it look more like the Lake District than southern Arabia. The biodiversity in this region was such that botanists filled a book one inch thick with drawings of the different plants, marvelling at their medicinal properties.² This unusual, blessed ecosystem made Dhufaris feel different to the rest of Oman. ‘Oh Arab people of Dhufar’, a communiqué declared in June 1965. ‘A revolutionary vanguard from amongst your ranks has emerged, believing in God and in the homeland.’ This was the voice of the hitherto unknown Dhufar Liberation Front, proclaiming its existence and ambitions. ‘Taking freedom of the homeland as its principle, it has raised the banner of liberation from the rule of the tyrannical Al Bu Said Sultans whose Sultanate has been connected with the columns of British colonialist invasion’, the group thundered, echoing the cries of Nasser in Egypt a decade before them.³

The people of Dhufar had a proud history of autonomy, and deeply resented being run from Muscat by the Sultan, Said bin Taimur. It was true he had done little for them. Few people in his country could read. Sunglasses were banned, slavery was legal, and there was almost nothing in the way of hospitals or basic infrastructure. There were few schools, and none at all for girls.⁴ But at least this ignorance prevented the youth learning about strange foreign ideas, like democracy or communism. Or so the Sultan thought. The trouble was that Dhufar had come under the spell of neighbouring Yemen, where Arab nationalists and Marxists, backed by Nasser’s Egypt, had overthrown the old pro-British monarchy. Now the Dhufaris were looking to do the same in Oman. Their movement morphed into the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf. It was anti-colonial, anti-caste and anti-class. It stood for gender equality, banning polygamy and female circumcision. The revolutionaries sent girls to school, and women to the battlefield. Slavery was abolished in areas under their control.⁵

Landon was clearly unimpressed by these revolutionary men and women, because when he first showed up in Oman he wanted to keep the Sultan in power. He happily went to work as an intelligence officer in Dhufar. Oman mattered to Britain because of its coastline, especially the northernmost tip at Kumzar, which juts out into the Strait of Hormuz. At its narrowest point, there is just 21 nautical miles separating Oman from Iran – a distance little further than the short ferry ride from Dover to Calais. Through this chicane-shaped channel, a procession of supertankers float a third of the world’s seaborne oil out of the Gulf every day, en route to a petrol station near you. In strategic terms, it was and still is another Suez Canal. Landon had found himself in a part of the world that mattered to Britain’s imperial interests. Accordingly, he paid particularly close attention to what was happening at the other end of the country, in Dhufar, and schemed about how to contain the unruly highlanders. After a while, he claimed to have identified tribal splits among the opposition, which could be exploited under a divide-and-rule strategy. Collaborators could be incentivised through money, and existing conflicts over land would be manipulated.⁶ Apparently the British had done this successfully elsewhere (effectively giving money to traitors to buy back their loyalty), although it seemed a bit elaborate to the ageing Sultan. For years, the RAF had helped him put down rebellions through the aerial bombing of vital lifelines such as wells. The British tactic of ‘water denial’ in Oman normally put a stop to any unrest.⁷ This time it was different though. The revolution in Dhufar was not going away. In fact it was spreading to other parts of the country. Soon it would be in Muscat, at the palace gates.⁸ Landon was growing impatient, although the Sultan did not realise it then. Behind his back, the ambitious British officer was plotting a coup with the Sultan’s son, Qaboos, tapping into their friendship forged at Sandhurst.

On 12 June 1970, Landon told Whitehall that Qaboos was considering taking power. In a country like Oman, where the British wielded enormous military and political power, deposing one of their most loyal client rulers would have to be carefully stage managed.⁹ It took Whitehall weeks of agonising deliberations before the coup was approved. On 23 July, a contingent of English and Irish officers took charge of several Arab soldiers and proceeded to the Sultan’s palace in Muscat. Guards were bribed, others surrendered, and it was not long before the plotters had the old Sultan cornered, wounded, disarmed and forced to abdicate. That was how this lonely old man came to check in at the Dorchester Hotel a few months later. Betrayed by his family and foreign ‘friends’, consigned to live out his final years in obscurity, before they quietly buried him at the Muslim burial ground in Woking. Shortly before his death, he told a confidant that his greatest regret was ‘not having had Landon shot’.¹⁰

* * *

Tim Landon could not have been in a better place at a better time. He had picked the winning side, and backed it from the outset. His foresight was duly rewarded by the new Sultan Qaboos, who made him his equerry, or personal attendant.¹¹ In this prime position, his counter-insurgency advice would now be listened to and implemented. The so-called ‘Landon Plan’, to divide and rule the opposition, swung into action. It also included a ‘hearts and minds’ element. The old Sultan had done little to develop the country. The new one would build basic infrastructure to neutralise his critics’ economic grievances. Within months of the coup, defectors were descending from the revolutionary highlands. The British called them Surrendered Enemy Personnel. They were paid, clothed, armed and fed, before being sent back into the mountains under the control of the SAS to fight their former comrades. These deadly defectors were known in Arabic as the firqat.¹² Landon’s plan was a textbook colonial counter-insurgency strategy. Religion was used to give the defectors a sense of ideological justification for their treachery. The British encouraged them to see their cause as a jihad against infidel communists backed by Moscow. Their units were given the names of Muslim conquerors – the first brigade of defectors was called Salah al-Din, in other words Saladin. By following Landon’s strategy, the new Sultan was able to consolidate his grip on Oman by 1976. The country’s Ministry of Information confidently declared that the rebels had ‘collapsed’, and assured everyone that the armed forces were ‘entrusted with the sacred mission of standing firm in the face of terrorist designs backed by hostile powers, and with the sacred duty of defeating their attempts at aggression and sabotage and ridding the country of them and their vile deeds’.¹³

Despite this military triumph, the growing influence of this lone British officer over the new Sultan of Oman irked some in Whitehall. Landon could come across as an establishment insider, a product of empire born on Vancouver Island to an English soldier and a Canadian mother, but he went to school in Eastbourne, not Eton.¹⁴ Now here he was, suddenly a kingmaker. Some even called him the White Sultan. Qaboos was eternally grateful to Landon and showered him with wealth – cheques for £1 million on each birthday according to some;¹⁵ a share of Oman’s oil sales others suspected. It was easy to be envious. By the time most of the revolution was crushed in 1976, many British soldiers who had spent years serving the Sultan were being sent home, away from the trappings of a colonial lifestyle, to allow native Omani soldiers to take over. It was called ‘Omanization’, and some expats were ‘unprepared for the extent of change and the ruthlessness of the surgery employed in achieving it’.¹⁶ Landon personally promoted this process – effectively dishing out state jobs to locals to reduce unemployment and the potential for unrest. Of course, he had no intention of going anywhere himself. He was practically an Omani now – Qaboos had given him a passport.

With Landon never far from his side, the new Sultan assiduously set up a praetorian guard, to prevent his father’s fate befalling him. A quarter century later, Western writers would reflect how ‘The glaring exception to Omanization of the command structure has been within those forces devoted specifically to the Sultan, such as the Special Forces, Royal Yacht, and Royal Flight Squadrons which are all still under British officers.’¹⁷ Another unit dedicated to the Sultan was the Royal Guard Brigade, whose bodyguards secured his residences. The brigade ‘amasses power quickly, apparently untroubled by financial constraints’, commented a British Ambassador in Muscat.¹⁸ Should the Guard Brigade fail to protect the Sultan, Royal Flight pilots (many of whom had previously worked for Queen Elizabeth) could presumably drop him on board the Royal Yacht, which ‘can act as a safe haven for the ruler and … possesses a multiplicity of Secure Communications and broadcast facilities’.¹⁹

It would never reach that point. The Sultan’s Special Forces were under his personal command and would nip any unrest in the bud. Even if other branches of the military tried to turn against the Sultan, his Special Forces would stand firm, adorned in their distinctive lavender-coloured berets and belts. They were set up in 1976, modelled on Britain’s SAS and trained in their ‘special entry techniques’.²⁰ The unit absorbed many of the firqat, now numbering 3,000, when the fighting began to subside.²¹ ‘Up in the hills of Dhofar [sic] the new Special Force is trained by ex-SAS personnel in conditions of extreme extravagance’, Britain’s ambassador grumbled to the foreign secretary. No expense was spared by the Sultan on this venture. He had hired a company called KMS Ltd, or Keenie Meenie Services, to carry out the job.²²

No one really knew what this name meant, ‘Keenie Meenie’. Perhaps it was Arabic, or Swahili, Maori or even Scottish? One insider claims it was simply a jovial term used by Scots soldiers ‘for people who are very keen and nasty at their jobs and very eager to do well’.²³ A Ministry of Defence official who worked closely with the company has told me it was an Arabic expression for ‘under the counter’, implying that they specialised in clandestine operations – a turn of phrase recognised by one Dhufari I met who associated it with deviousness and intrigue. General Sir Peter de la Billière, a former director of the SAS, has been quoted as saying ‘Kini-Mini, [was] in SAS terms, any undercover activity’.²⁴ Another possibility comes from Michael Asher, a former SAS solider and accomplished linguist. He suggests that Keenie Meenie is a Swahili phrase describing ‘the movement of a snake in the grass’, that was borrowed by British officers during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya to describe the counter-insurgency concept of ‘pseudo-gangs’. These were ‘white policemen, dressed African-style with faces blackened, [who] accompanied teams of “turned” ex-terrorists into the bush’.²⁵ The ideas of deception and facade are powerful images for understanding the firm’s modus operandi. Was KMS really a private company, or was it just a mask worn by the British establishment to carry out deniable operations?

Whatever the name meant, and many Swahili speakers I consulted are also puzzled by it, Tim Landon was an ‘associate’ in this mysterious firm, and so it could be trusted with keeping the Sultan in power.²⁶ Or at least as one civil servant would later put it, Landon ‘appears to be associated with KMS even if he may not be a member of the Board of Directors’.²⁷ The arrangement between Landon and KMS was so secret that the White Sultan would take it to his grave. When he died from lung cancer in 2007 at the age of 64, he was one of Britain’s largest landowners, leaving his son Arthur a £200 million inheritance, making him the richest young man in the UK and a friend of Princes William and Harry. Despite amassing so much wealth, his involvement with KMS remained hidden. By then, KMS had rebranded as Saladin Security, perhaps named after the first group of Dhufari defectors. The company provided Landon with bodyguards up until his passing away.²⁸

Landon’s legacy lives on. His friend since Sandhurst, Sultan Qaboos, still sits on the throne in Muscat. At the time of writing, his reign is headed for a half century, earning him the dubious distinction of being the longest-serving ruler in the Middle East. Such is the Sultan’s fear of unrest, Oman currently spends more money per head on its military than any other country on earth, using its oil wealth to keep a lid on dissent. Although his humble origins may have piqued his classier colleagues, Landon’s work in Oman is widely seen as a success story among the British military and diplomatic elite. By the mid-1970s, a fledgling Arab revolution was in reverse, and a reliable Anglophile Sultan installed on the throne. Other former colonies, however, were proving far more troublesome for the old guard.

* * *

London, 1976

Tucked away down a sleepy and exclusive west London side street is 11 Courtfield Mews, a small terrace in Kensington. Easily mistaken for a residential flat, it was perfect cover for the brigadier who wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Map of the Arabian Peninsula
• Map of Sri Lanka
• Timeline
• Photographs
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction: Return of the Privateers
• 1. White Sultan of Oman
• 2. Bodyguards and Business Building
• 3. Teenage Rebellions
• 4. The Upside Down Jeep
• 5. Oliver North’s British Mercenary
• 6. The Exploding Hospital
• 7. Mercenaries and Mujahideen
• 8. The English Pilot
• 9. Grenades in Wine Glasses
• 10. Bugger Off My Land!
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index