Flickr/airwolfhound
, CC BY-SA 2.0
In December 1965,
the government of Saudi Arabia
signed a ‘Letter of Intent’, confirming its desire to buy arms from UK companies as
part of the Saudi Arabian Air Defence Scheme. The letter paved the way for the
purchase of “Forty Lightning fighter jets and twenty-five Jet Provost training
aircraft from BAC [the British Aircraft Corporation]; nine radar stations from
Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) and training, logistics and other
support services from Airwork.”
Just over fifty
years since this “Letter of Intent”, what can we learn from the history of
British arms deals with Saudi
Arabia?
1)
“Bribery has always played a role in the sale of weapons”
The largest arms
deal ever reached between the two countries – and the biggest in British
history – was outlined on September 26, 1985, in a ‘Memorandum of Understanding for the Provision of Equipment and
Services for the Royal Saudi Air Force.’ As Nicholas Gilby points out in his
book Deception in High Places, the memo promised:
“The Government of the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia will purchase, and the Government of the United Kingdom will supply 48
Tornado IDS aircraft, 24 Tornado ADV aircraft, 30 Hawk aircraft and 30 PC-9
basic training aircraft together with associated support services, equipment,
weapons, ammunition and electronic warfare systems for the use of the Royal
Saudi Air Force. The total costs of the
programme will be of the order of three to four billion pounds sterling.”
Over twenty
years, the set of arms deals stemming from the memo – known as al-Yamamah (‘the dove’ in Arabic) – is estimated to have “brought [in] £43bn in revenue” for BAE Systems, the
world’s third-largest arms company, with over
83,000 employees and an annual profit of $1.2bn in 2014.
The specifics of al-Yamamah are complex. Because “the
Saudi government indicated that it intended to pay for the contract in oil
sales rather than in hard currency”, Siri Schubert of Frontline explains, a variety of actors were involved:
“Since the oil had to be shipped out of Saudi Arabia and sold on the
world market, BP and Royal Dutch Shell became part of the negotiations and were
asked, with a commission, to ship the hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil
per day from the Saudi peninsula and sell it on the world market. The oil
companies then deposited the proceeds from the oil sale into a specially
created British Ministry of Defence (MOD) account. From this account, BAE was
paid for the arms and support services. It was reported in the British press
and later confirmed by our reporting, that the British government took a 2
percent fee from the Al-Yamamah accounts, which amounts to close to $1.6
billion over the life of the 20-plus year contract.”
Aside from the
financial gains that al-Yamamah
provided for the British government, BP, Shell and above all BAE, there is
substantial evidence that Saudi Prince Turki bin Nasser
was also a beneficiary of a specially-created BAE “slush fund.”
Peter Gardiner,
one of the men “who lavished luxury on Prince Turki for more than a decade”
through his travel agency, revealed
to the BBC in 2004 how “on BAE's instructions,
he would lay on a seemingly endless stream of five-star hotels, chartered
aircraft, luxury limousines, personal security and exotic holidays for Prince
Turki and his entourage”, initially costing BAE “two hundred thousand pounds or
three hundred thousand pounds” a year, before increasing “to about a million
pounds a year and quickly to two and three and by the time it was completed it
was moving up towards seven million pounds a year."
Prince Bandar bin
Sultan – Saudi Ambassador to the US for twenty years and nicknamed “Bandar
Bush” for his closeness to the American political dynasty – played a key role
in negotiating the al-Yamamah deal,
as the son of the then Defence Minister, Prince Sultan. He was asked by Frontline’s Lowell Bergman about
corruption in Saudi Arabia
in 2001, to
which he replied:
“You know what? I would be offended if I thought we had a
monopoly on corruption… If you tell me that building this whole country, and
spending $350 billion out of $400 billion, that we misused or got corrupted
with $50 billion, I'll tell you, ‘Yes.’ But I'll take that any time… What I'm
trying to tell you is, so what?”
For
his part, Prince Bandar allegedly “got corrupted with” BAE’s money
to pay the expenses of his private Airbus. And in a 2007 Guardian interview the late Labour defence
secretary, Denis Healey, demonstrated how Saudi royals like Bandar have been
able to find common ground with UK
weapons manufacturers:
"Bribery has
always played a role in the sale of weapons – I think almost no role in the
sale we made to the Americans or the Germans or our western allies. But in the
Middle East people couldn't buy weapons unless you bribed them to do so, and
that was particularly true in Saudi
Arabia."
While BAE maintained that there was “nothing untoward”
about payments associated with the al-Yamamah
deal, it did agree to pay
fines of more than £250m in 2010 after the US Department of
Justice found the company guilty of “intentionally failing to put appropriate
anti-bribery preventative measures in place", while making “hundreds of
millions of dollars in payments to third parties, while knowing of a high probability
that money would be passed on to foreign government decision-makers to favour
BAE in the award of defence contracts."
2) The Saudi Kingdom
can successfully intimidate British politicians and officials
As the US DOJ was investigating BAE, the UK’s Serious
Fraud Office (SFO) launched an investigation of its own. In December 2006,
however, the SFO abruptly ended
its probe, stating that “this decision has been taken following
representations that have been made both to the attorney general and the director
[of the SFO] concerning the need to safeguard national and international
security.”
A judicial deview (the documents from which are accessible here) into the SFO’s
decision revealed its main source. The SFO’s director, Robert Wardle, said in
his witness statement that Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, had spoken in meetings of potential
“sanctions in respect of political-relations and counter-terrorism cooperation
that would be imposed by Saudi
Arabia if the investigation continued.” “Put
shortly”, Wardle concluded, “I understood that the assessment of the government
was that the Saudi Arabian government was extremely serious when it had given
warnings to the UK about its withdrawal of cooperation… should the SFO
investigation continue.”
Tony Blair clearly also took Saudi threats seriously, stating
in June 2007 that the "investigation, if it had gone ahead, would have
involved the most serious allegations in investigations being made into the
Saudi royal family," and would not “have led anywhere except to the
complete wreckage of a vital strategic relationship for our country.”
Although Blair’s attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, “was concerned
that halting the investigation would send a bad message about the credibility
of the law in this area, and look like giving in to threats”, the Prime
Minister bluntly argued that “higher considerations were at stake.” The SFO
itself subsequently managed to lose 32,000 pages of data
and 81 audio tapes linked to the abortive probe.
3) The British arms industry has extensive
political connections
Ambassador Cowper-Coles and Tony Blair were not the only people
warning Goldsmith about the SFO’s investigation into the al-Yamamah deal. Documents released in the High Court on 14
February 2008 revealed
that BAE, too, “wrote to the Attorney General on a ‘strictly private and
confidential’ basis urging him to halt the Serious Fraud Office investigation.”
Five years later, the person at the centre of pressuring the
SFO – Ambassador Cowper-Coles –
was appointed “BAE's international business development director, focusing
on the Middle East and south-east Asia.”
According to the Guardian, “when he
left the Foreign Office [in 2010], Cowper-Coles wrote to BAE… to ask about
opportunities with the group, and was surprised to be offered a full-time job.”
To many, this case exemplifies the ease with which
high-level public servants can transition to major arms companies, and vice
versa. Indeed, in 2012, freedom
of information requests by Guardian journalists
indicated that “senior military officers and MoD officials had received approval
for 3,572 jobs in arms companies since 1996.”
Beyond the military and the MoD, members of the House of
Windsor have long
been willing to do favours for the arms industry, while the
Vice-Chair of the BBC Trust is also the Chairman of BAE.
4) British military equipment will be used
When it comes to arms sales, “the
UK mainly flogs big-ticket stuff” like “fighter bombers, tanks and radar
systems” and these weapons, unlike small arms such as AK rifles, often “remain
unused and it can be argued that the real damage they do is in their commission
and sale.”
Though this is to some extent true, Britain’s relatively silent
but significant support for Saudi military intervention in Yemen suggests
that “big-ticket” British equipment will indeed be used. For example, field
research by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch into a September
23 strike on a Yemeni ceramics factory “identified the munition used as a
PGM-500 ‘Hakim’ air-launched missile, supplied in the mid-1990s and
manufactured by the UK
firm Marconi Dynamics.” Amnesty and HRW suggest that “[t]he attack on the
factory in the Sana’a governorate, which appeared to be producing only civilian
goods”, and killed one person, “was in apparent violation of international
humanitarian law”, and that “[t]his strike, using a British missile supplied in
the 1990s, undermines the claim of ministers that the Saudi Arabia-led
coalition’s use of UK military equipment is consistent with IHL, and that the
UK monitors such compliance ‘very carefully.’”
Human rights organisations and the UN have produced
ample evidence of Saudi war crimes in Yemen, including air strikes on
schools and a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital. A comprehensive
legal opinion issued by lawyers from Matrix Chambers additionally states
that the UK government is likely to have had "actual knowledge… of the
use by Saudi Arabia of weapons, including UK-supplied weapons, in attacks
directed against civilians and civilian objects, in violation of international
law" since May 2015. Despite this, the UK
“has issued more than 100 licences for arms exports to Saudi Arabia”
since bombing began in March, including “more than £1.75 billion worth of
combat aircraft and bombs for the use of the Royal Saudi Air Force.”
There is also video evidence
suggesting that Saudi Arabia
used UK-made armoured vehicles in its 2011 intervention in Bahrain, when
its forces were sent in to help protect the Bahraini monarchy from
pro-democracy protests.
Why does this all
matter?
Leaving aside the moral questions of selling arms to a
regime that both brutally suppresses its own people and is seriously implicated
in war crimes abroad, a calculating pragmatist may retort that politics is
politics, not a morality play. Nations act in their own self-interest: Russia and Iran
unashamedly support the Assad regime in Syria; if we didn’t arm the Saudis,
someone else probably would. Such arguments are not without a grain of truth,
but often ignore the fact that Western officials themselves frequently question
whether the Saudi monarchy can be trusted and whether the strategic
relationship actually serves British and American interests.
“[D]onors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant
source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide”, Hillary Clinton wrote
in a 2009
memo to US diplomats, adding that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical
financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT [Pakistan-based
Lashkar-e-Taiba], and other terrorist groups… which probably raise millions of
dollars annually from Saudi sources.”
Clinton’s
memo was meant to be private, unlike U.S. Defence Secretary Ash Carter’s recent
rebuke of what he described as the “so-called” anti-ISIS “coalition.” “Many
of them are not doing enough, or are doing nothing at all,” he said in an
interview with CNBC. “We need others to carry their weight; there should be no
free riders.” In October 2014, General Jonathan Shaw, Britain's former
assistant chief of the defence staff, accused
Saudi Arabia and Qatar of “ignit[ing] a time-bomb” by “funding global spread of
radical Islam”, while a former British Ambassador to the U.S. and Germany has even
suggested that Britain’s strategic interests now lie in closer relations
with Iran rather than Saudi Arabia.
All of this
begs the question: will another fifty years of arms deals clean up the mess?
Our journalism is always free to read but not free to produce. If you enjoy our material and would like to contribute you can do so here.