Michael Hodges:
My own investigations into the weapons business have been concerned with the worldwide proliferation of small arms, but the UK mainly flogs big-ticket stuff: fighter bombers, tanks and radar systems.
Many of these, unlike AK-47s, remain unused and it can be argued that the real damage they do is in their commission and sale. Take South Africa where, Gilby suggests, the money siphoned from the national budget and into corrupt arms deals was directly responsible for the death of thousands.
In 1999, South Africa signed up for defence contracts costing $5bn; at the same time, President Thabo Mbeki said that the country couldn’t afford to extend antiretroviral medication to five million HIV-infected citizens. Between 2000 and 2005, according to Harvard University research cited by Gilby, 330,000 South Africans died because they could not afford treatment for HIV or Aids.
Few, though, can compare for entertainment value with Sir Shapoor Reporter, a conduit in the 1970s for British payments (through a front company) to secure a deal to equip the Iranian army with Chieftain tanks.
Negotiations were carried out in an atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue, much of which was attributable to the eccentricity of the shah but also because Reporter was working for both the UK and Tehran.
An Iranian with British citizenship, he taught the shah’s second wife to speak English and was regarded as onside by Brits – mainly because he was an SIS agent. He was also on a large commission.
An American politician emerges as one of the few heroes in this book. Within a year of coming to office in 1977, President Jimmy Carter pushed through the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This was as much a practical measure as a product of the Georgia Baptist’s moral character. As a Congress report put it: “Improper payments . . . lend credence to the suspicions sown by foreign opponents of the United States that American enterprises exert a corrupting influence on the political processes of their nations.”
