Brigadier Timothy Landon: The extraordinary life of the white sultan

Brigadier Timothy Landon was no ordinary military man. For nearly 40 years he brokered oil and arms deals for one of the most powerful rulers in the Middle East, amassing a £500m fortune in almost total secrecy. Rob Sharp investigates the life and death of a latter-day Lawrence of Arabia

Thursday, 12 July 2007 

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 fêted 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.    

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/brigadier-timothy-landon-the-extraordinary-life-of-the-white-sultan-456942.html