This was no ordinary journey on that summer’s day in 1982, even for the sixty-eight-year-old financier with a fearsome reputation as a predator in the City of London, on Wall Street, and on the stock markets of Europe. Sitting in his hand-tooled tan leather armchair on board his customized jet, feet resting on a $150-a-square-foot carpet, Roland W. Rowland—the name on his gold-embossed business cards—had indeed come a long way from where he had been born in 1917 in a British prison camp in India.
He was the son of a German trader called Fritz Fuhrop. His mother was the daughter of a pillar of the English Raj who had followed her husband into internment. Following their release after the end of World War I, Rowland’s Indian nanny had called him “Tiny.” Even though he would grow to be six feet tall, the nickname stuck. Now it was the only link with his past—those days when he had dug latrines for the British army in World War II and later was a porter at Paddington railway station in London.
Those humble beginnings had fed his determination to join the ranks of the rich and powerful. He sold secondhand cars and refrigerators in postwar London. By the time he was thirty, he was a millionaire. He began to trade in gold in South Africa. His fortune grew. He was hired to “sort out” an ailing company called the London and Rhodesia Mining and Land Corporation—Lonhro. Rowland made it the single most powerful trading company in all Africa. His deals in copper, tin, and other metals made him the darling of Lonhro stockholders.
They did not suspect how Rowland had paid off Lord Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law. Using a secret account in the Cayman Islands, Rowland had given the peer $500,000 for helping to buy the largest gold mine in Ghana. When Duncan Sandys became mired in sexual scandal, the prudish Rowland cut him dead—refusing to send “even a bunch of flowers” to his funeral in 1987. No one, however rich and well connected, was allowed to implicate Tiny Rowland. He treasured his image as the quintessential Englishman. Only in the confines of a small circle of right-wing friends did he reveal his anti-Semitism and contempt for the way Britain was being run.
Already a multimillionaire, Tiny Rowland allowed his hatred for socialism to surface during the British crisis with Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) over its determination to challenge the Wilson government over self-rule. Sanctions had been introduced against what Prime Minister Harold Wilson called “this pariah state.” It later emerged that Rowland broke them. But by then Mrs. Thatcher was in Downing Street and the matter was not pursued.
Tiny looked for new fields to conquer. He bought the
Rowland’s ability to use anybody to further his own interests had earlier led Britain’s then prime minister Ted Heath to castigate him as the “unacceptable face of capitalism.” Tiny Rowland shrugged that off in the same imperious way he dismissed other financiers who came to him with deals. He preferred to work alone, to share his profits with no one—except his Siamese cats. Every day he fed them the same fine caviar that he ate on his Learjet as it headed for Iraq on that June day in 1982. They had curled up at his feet as he worked at his desk preparing his greatest coup yet—hiding Saddam’s fortune.
When Saddam came to power, his pro-West sympathies were welcomed in London and Washington. Their governments, along with those of France and Germany, saw the need to reinforce Iraq’s infrastructure against the looming threat posed by Iran. Baghdad became a vast bazaar. Massive bribes to secure contracts were common. They were siphoned into Saddam’s accounts. More money flowed there for his cut on deals to build superhighways, hospitals, and schools. If anybody suspected, nobody cared.
Saddam’s relationship with Rowland stemmed from the breathtaking theft of the shah of Iran’s personal fortune of $3 billion. In 1979, with the ayatollahs about to seize power in Iran, the shah’s most trusted aides had held secret meetings with the director of the Central Bank of Iraq. Rowland had acted as the go-between, and on his advice, the Shah agreed to transfer his fortune to Baghdad into the Iraqi central bank, beyond the reach of the ayatollahs. Rowland received a “handling fee” of 15 percent.
