Nestling in the folds of the Hampshire hills,
the hamlet of Faccombe sits in splendid isolation. Cab drivers working
just five miles away are not aware of it; bar staff in the Marco Pierre
White restaurant up the road can barely pronounce its name. A sense of
eerie solitude exudes from the village's quaint pond-side pub, clipped
lawns and carefully-tended lanes.
Until last week, the whole of
Faccombe was owned by just one man. He was known locally as Timothy
Landon, but in the Middle East, where he spent much of his adult life,
they called him the White Sultan. Brigadier Landon, to use his proper
title, was one of the richest and most secretive men in Britain, and the
inhabitants of his Arcadian kingdom were told never to discuss his
affairs.
On Friday, Landon died, after a protracted battle with lung
cancer, aged 64. His funeral yesterday was a typically private affair.
Only a handful of close acquaintances were invited, plus a few
representatives from the oil-rich Kingdom of Oman, where they fκted him
as a modern-day Lawrence of Arabia. Six of Landon's estate workers, clad
in his personal tweed, carried the coffin.
He leaves behind £500m,
the hamlet of Faccombe, and an extraordinary tale about how he acquired
a fortune that made him twice as wealthy as the Queen.
Only one
picture of Landon has ever been published. He is photographed in his
svelte youth, sitting in a Land-Rover with gun-toting associates of the
Sultan of Oman, whom he helped lead a bloodless coup in the oil-rich
nation in 1970. He is wearing a local head-dress, the picture
cryptically annotated with the words "an intelligence Land-Rover". The
grainy black-and-white photo carried on these pages, is, perhaps, the
fitting footnote to his remarkable life.
Landon was, after all, a man
whose murky fortune was created from a conflict in which he helped the
current Sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Sa'id, seize power from his own
father in a coup surreptitiously orchestrated by the British government.
He was a lifelong adventurer and arms dealer who filled his coffers
through a close friendship with the secretive Arabian dictator, and
later became a crucial strategic link between the UK and the Arab world.
Today, with the West in historic conflict with radical Islam, his legacy
is more important than ever.
More controversial, too. Earlier this
year Landon was named as a key figure in the BAE Systems affair,
allegedly passing money to an Austrian aristocrat to ease an arms deal
between the firm and the Czech government. The sale is being
investigated in three European countries. Questions have been raised in
the Hungarian parliament over Landon's international business
activities. He is alleged to have been involved in arms deals to dubious
regimes over several decades, and has been accused of breaking oil
embargos to South Africa and Rhodesia.
Little wonder, then, that
Landon's legacy should be one of sinister secrecy, as well as
extraordinary wealth. In Faccombe, where the neoclassical barns are
deceptively welcoming and the pub is wreathed in ivy, strangers are not
just bamboozled by secrecy, they are made unwelcome. Walk past St
Barnabas church, with several generations of the same family buried side
by side, and the noise of twitching curtains becomes deafening. Those
asking difficult questions in the Jack Russell pub are sent on their way
before the local brew even wets their lips.
In his later years,
Landon would drive around London and Hampshire in a privately-owned
black cab to avoid exposure. Some speculate this was due to security
concerns accompanying someone rich enough to be regarded as one of
Britain's 100 wealthiest men, and to have built up a property portfolio
that contained around 50,000 acres of England, including several
historic grouse moors. Others thought it laid bare paranoia that
surrounded the manner in which his fortune was accumulated. To
understand who was right, we must return to the beginning of his
colourful and mysterious life.
James Timothy Whittington Landon was
born on 20 August 1942 on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. He came to
England for his secondary education at 11 and attended Eastbourne
College, where he was an unassuming pupil of stocky build who decided to
follow the military footsteps of his father, who served in the Canadian
army. Landon junior went on to Sandhurst and graduated in August
1962.
According to Army records he was at best a mediocre soldier,
coming 182nd out of the 208 cadets in his year. Despite this, he managed
to secure a three-year commission as a second lieutenant in a cavalry
regiment, the 10th Hussars, where again, he failed to
excel.
Everything changed, however, when Landon was seconded to
Muscat, the capital of Oman, towards the end of his commission in the
mid-1960s. Here, he got lucky: Britain had become embroiled in a
guerrilla war with Communist rebels, trained and armed by Russia, who
were trying to overthrow the incumbent ruler, Sultan Sa'id Taimur.
Thanks in part to Landon's military nous, the rebels were kept at
bay.
Shortly afterwards, talk turned to the Omani succession: the
ultra-conservative Sa'id Taimur was developing what was branded a
"worrying independent streak" by Whitehall apparatchiks, who were
fearful that he would not play ball with British oil companies anxious
to cash in on Oman's recently discovered oil reserves. The British
forces were instructed to begin plotting with Sa'id Taimur's son,
Qaboos, about deposing his father. This, it was hoped, would secure the
UK's national interests.
Intrinsic to this plan was Landon, who
claimed (possibly apocryphally) to have first met Qaboos while at
Sandhurst, and was therefore seen as key to the success of the plan.
London's chief intelligence officer in Muscat, Brigadier Malcolm
Dennison, convinced Sa'id that he needed to let Landon visit Qaboos, who
pined for the kind of contacts he had made while studying to be a
soldier in the UK.
At the time, the Sultan's son was living in the
Salalah Royal Palace, in the south of the country. He was under house
arrest, since Sa'id was worried that Qaboos would orchestrate a military
coup to depose him. His fears were later proven right.
"I worked for
Sa'id. He didn't trust his family because they had a history of doing
each other in," said the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who is a distant
relation of Landon's and coincidentally spent two years fighting Marxist
guerrillas in Oman during the same period. "The British, through Tim,
could meet Qaboos. They made him realise that if his father was to
remain in control and be as reactionary as he was it would be bad for
the country."
Even in his role as a junior intelligence office,
Landon provided useful military intelligence to those fighting the
guerrillas, including Fiennes. "We'd never had good intelligence," said
Fiennes. "But as soon as Tim came in we started getting the right
information. We started killing people." He added: "I had nearly been
killed through useless intelligence and it could be a bit worrying
sitting in a cave somewhere wondering if they'd got things right. But
Tim made a point of getting to know the locals; he learned their
language and his information was reliable."
The bloodless coup,
around the time of which Landon was photographed in that Land-Rover,
happened on 23 July 1970. One popular and colourful story records Landon
storming a staircase at the palace with an automatic pistol in his hand.
However, local experts maintain that this is almost certainly
untrue.
Either way, Sai'd was forced from power. Two years after his
deposition, he died in a suite on the top floor of The Dorchester Hotel
in Park Lane, London, where he had been living. When asked once what his
greatest regret was shortly before his death, he is believed to have
said: "Not having Landon shot."
Qaboos' regime, for its part, began
to prosper, thanks in no small part to Oman's burgeoning oil revenue.
Landon meanwhile broke from the British military and became a senior
personal adviser to Qaboos. According to Fiennes, Landon acted as a
"generalist", advising the Sultan whom to consult on specific military
and economic issues and other matters of governmental concern.
At
this time Landon began his work in the arms trade and started receiving
commission from state oil deals. The subject was disclosed in 2002 by
the writer John Beasant, who is one of the foremost experts on Oman, and
who was at the time working on a book called The True-life Drama and
Intrigue of an Arab State.
Speaking this week, Beasant recalled being
offered a substantial sum not to go ahead with his book. When he
refused, he was expelled from the country. Since its publication, the
book has been officially banned by the Omani regime, which is
notoriously sensitive to criticism. When Robin Allen, the Financial
Times' highly respected former Gulf correspondent reported troubling
financial waters ahead for the nation, he was also banished.
Soon
Landon began to accrue his fortune. Beasant said: "Landon was of
enormous help to Sultan Qaboos in establishing the modern Omani state at
a time when the Sultan lacked experience of government and was
desperately short of local talent on which to draw." Landon built up
Oman's military as one of the best-armed small forces in the Middle
East, and was well rewarded for his efforts by the Sultan. This trend
continued apace. In 1980 alone, £400m was spent on defence in the
country, which has a population of just over two million people.
According to Beasant's book, the arms purchases were handled by David
Bayley, another former British Army officer who would later become
Landon's business partner.
When in Oman, Landon is believed to have
worked with Mark Thatcher, the politician's son who was no stranger to
controversy in the Middle East. An infamous construction contract was
awarded to British firm Cementation, a subsidiary of property
conglomerate Trafalgar House, after Thatcher's mother, then Prime
Minister, lobbied the sultan while Mark was on the company payroll.
Beasant writes that Landon helped one firm break oil sanctions to
Rhodesia and South Africa in the 1970s.
Landon's relationship with
Qaboos continued throughout his life. Although it was a risky business
to be in, the Sultan apparently sent Landon cheques for £1m every
birthday until his death. "Who wouldn't have taken the chance to get
that much money," said Beasant.
In the early 1980s Landon returned to
Britain. He left Oman, according to Beasant, because, "rather like
Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair, he became the story", but continued to
work for Qaboos from an office in London, where business dealings were
kept intensely secret. He ran an offshore company, Valurex, which was
allegedly used in the BAE System arms deals to Prague. He is also
believed to have kept an office in Washington, managed by a former CIA
operative.
Around this time Landon married his wife, Katerina, a
member of the ancient Hungarian Esterhazy family. There were also
rumours that she was related to the even more aristocratic Austrian
Hapsburgs, which earned Landon the title: "Mr Perhapsburg".
Mark
Hollingsworth and Paul Halloran's 1995 book Thatcher's Gold claims that
in 1982, Landon was given an honorary knighthood after Sultan Qaboos
lobbied Thatcher. Because some in government were concerned about
Landon's business dealings, the honour was given to him as a foreign
citizen: he was not allowed to use the title "Sir".
A loophole
allowed this because Landon often travelled on his Omani passport, given
to him by the Sultan as a special diplomatic privilege. The Duke of
Edinburgh has also reportedly voiced "distaste" at Landon's
affairs.
Away from the office, Landon's greatest passion was country
pursuits. Faccombe boasts a fine pheasant shoot, and during the 1990s he
also began buying up grouse moors across the north of England. He is
known to have given at least £210,000 to the Countryside Alliance, which
has fought high-profile battles in favour of hunting.
"He liked the
challenge he was interested in conservation and management," said one
sporting agent. "He also liked the people who did it the beaters, the
pickers-up, the gamekeepers. Whatever you are successful at in life,
grouse moors create a levelling out process, because you are subject to
the will of nature."
Landon's name was linked several years ago the
purchase of Viscount Lambton's 12,000-acre Muggleswick estate near
Durham, and he is known to have purchased and sold-on Knarsdale and
Asholme moors in Northumberland, all for a price approaching £10m. His
other grouse moors at the time of his death stretched to North Yorkshire
and Scotland.
Landon's aparent affinity with the environment even
provoked him to install one of the country's first wind turbines at
Faccombe. He was also rumoured bizarrely to have embraced Buddhism,
although this has been dismissed by another of Landon's close friends,
who has known him socially since the 1970s. "He was a pretty
conventional Christian gentleman. He might have done some meditation,
but that's all," he said.
For many, Landon was simply a bon viveur.
He was friends in equal measure with the landed gentry and the farmers
near Faccombe. He owned in his time a number of yachts, one of which,
Leander, was sold to National Car Parks founder Sir Donald Gosling for
£18m in the early 1990s.
Landon was a great fan of opera and
supported a number of opera groups, including the Pavilion Opera,
London's premier touring chamber opera. After a day's shooting, he would
often pay young classical musicians to perform concerts at his lavish
estate. He also was fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, and would mix
his shooting with skiing in Canada, tennis, and riding.
Landon left
behind a son, Arthur, believed to have been educated at Ampleforth
College and Bristol University, who will inherit much of his father's
fortune and is now taking some time off from university before
considering his many options. "It's going to have a profound effect on
his life," said the friend. "But no doubt he will rise to the
occasion."
Arthur has one man to thank for his new-found financial
fortune. But that one man Qaboos is believed to have stayed away
from yesterday's funeral.
In Faccombe, the leaves are being blasted
from the verges, and the clipped lawns near the Jack Russell are almost
unbelievably verdant. It is silent, apart from the massed braying of
sheep and guard dogs disturbed by the brazenness of a stranger. Locals
remain undeterred by the potential changes that Landon's death will have
on their future.
"We can only hope that it will have no effect," one
said. "We'd be very surprised if it did. I think people here believe
that life will just continue on as normal." Nothing, it seems, can
pierce Faccombe's hermetic seal not even death. It's presumably just
what the White Sultan would have commanded.
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