Philippines tale that needs to be told

4 October 2014. Mike O’Brien’s life was turned upside down by a four month spell in the Philippines in 1983. Now he wants your help to tell his amazing story. He talks to NewsPronto.com about his incredible ordeal.

Shaun Curran interview with Mike O'Brien

Australia, August 1983. Mike O’Brien is just a regular guy, working for an accountancy practice specialising in retirement village development projects; the sort of job where there is little scope for either excitement or danger.

Or so you would have thought. What would happen to O’Brien during the following four months, exiled in the Philippines as his life was turned upside down, is a story that almost defies belief: a story of greed, corruption, political power, entrapment, espionage and near death, the consequences of which O’Brien lives with to this very day.

It is a story that, 31 years after the event, O’Brien is looking to document fully in print, finally telling his great untold, terrifying ordeal of “walking out of a totally normal life into a situation closer to a James Bond movie”.

It all started in late summer 1983, when O’Brien, a self-confessed “innocent abroad”, began, on behalf of his company, what “seemed like a straightforward search for off‑shore loans to fund retirement village development projects in Australia”, one based in Miami, the other in Tweed Heads.

Unfavourable commercial rates had forced him and his associate, who O’Brien refuses to name, to explore other avenues of funding, and “after two failed and expensive funding forays to London and Singapore” they were, to O’Brien’s surprise, offered not just funding but commodity deals from contacts in Manila. The only reasonable offer on the table - “what other alternative did we have?” - O’Brien and partner decided to proceed despite a political climate in the Philippines of deep uncertainty and economic strife, where a lack of morality came from the very top via the controversial figure of President Marcos.

Even still, there was little clue at first of what was to come.

“The initial commodity contracts seemed to be progressing very smoothly,” O’Brien says. “I went to Manila only when there seemed to be problems with them, but on assurances from the principal brokers that a brief formal meeting with the sellers and a re-scheduling of the contacts would resolve all matters for all parties”.

Those principal brokers, Clemente and Laurel, were in fact not interested in the construction of retirement housing, but were involved in their own agenda: bullion trading. The trade was rife in the Philippines, and far from legal. Legend has it President Marcos funded his rise to power selling the gold treasure horde of General Yamashita, stored in the country post-World War 2. The practice gave rise to the opportunity for those clever enough to scam the gullible and the desperate by flushing out their business associates. O’Brien might not have been either, but he was about to fall foul in a manner he could never have imagined.

“There was a series of very sudden, unexpected and alarming events, either self-generated or introduced by other parties. After a series of unfulfilled promises, unattended meetings and total evasiveness I realised that Clemente and Laurel, the principal brokers, had simply used our contracts to identify reputable bullion buyers/banks and were also, perhaps, double-dealing their principal. We had them arrested, interrogated and imprisoned.”

Events escalated quickly as the web became ever more complicated. Interested American parties “became belligerent”, O’Brien was “tapped up by a German intelligence operative who was investigating illegal bullion transactions out of the Philippines, and who was of the view that our banking information, coupled with his cargo manifests, contained proof positive that President Marcos was indeed engaged in transporting large volumes of bullion out of the country.” He was “then taken into the confidence of Joven Pulido, Vice-President of the Land Bank in Makati, whose ‘other job’ was to sniff out illegal financial transactions. He was extremely concerned at the turn of events involving the American parties.” Most shocking of all (at this point), O’Brien’s colleague “decided to abandon our partnership and align himself with the Americans.”
As the deal - if indeed, it ever existed - was disintegrating, O’Brien soon had more pressing issues. “This is where death threats intensified. I had no idea where the death threats were coming from – but they were constant phone threats, perhaps orchestrated by my ex-colleague and the Americans, perhaps by the CIA, who also introduced themselves on to the scene, or perhaps disaffected Philippino brokers.  I know I was constantly under surveillance, that they all knew exactly where I was and what I had been doing – and with whom. Very, very scary stuff to live with.”

A series of meetings, both clandestine and otherwise, with a range of unsavoury characters, all purporting to be able to aid and abet O’Brien, followed, from what he describes as two “American heavies” to Ben Cailo, a supposed associate of President Marcos who turned up unexpectedly at his hotel room with an alleged contract of employment from the President and a stark warning. “He was at pains to point out life is cheap in the Philippines and I could be taken out at any time.”

His words were nearly tragically prophetic. “One evening I was visited by a couple of balaclava-clad thugs who burst into my room and put a gun to my head and demanded our bullion contracts. I felt moments away from death – and, yes, you do piss your pants. That was the major brush with death.”

The incident wasn’t an isolated one. “On another occasion, I was caught up in a firefight when trying to finesse a meeting with President Marcos. I was attacked by some militants and we had to take shelter under a table until things calmed down. And on several other occasions, I exposed myself to needless danger by going unthinkingly into unknown territory: like letting myself be blindfolded and driven, by guys I’d never met before, to see evidence of bullion in some warehouse near the airport….and meeting Colonel Derpo and his thugs in Military Intelligence in a seedy apartment block. I could have as easily been taken out to be shot. It was extremely foolhardy – and chilling in retrospect.”

Days became weeks and weeks became months, O’Brien as good as a prisoner as his mental wellbeing deteriorated. “It's near-impossible to convey just how psychologically pulverising, how physically debilitating, and how terrifying - ultimately - that waiting was for an ordinary bloke. The sense of isolation, of exposure, of powerlessness and of insignificance was enormously brutalising. My days were a dreadful, gut-cramping cocktail of anger, frustration, helplessness, at-times-uncontrollable terror, bewilderment and gross confusion, lost in a Rubix-cubed maze.” 

And then…. well, nothing. A Hold Order ground all the strands of the story to a halt and four tortuous months came to an end almost as haphazardly as they began. “Everything just fizzled out. Naturally, after all that time, it was unsatisfactory – certainly not the happy ending that would have secured me a better life!”

O’Brien flew home on 23rd December 1983 under the assumed identity of German freight pilot Rainer Ehmann and four months of hell was over. The scars would take much longer to heal.
“Nightmares persist to this very day. My wife was inclined to disbelieve much of what happened to me and my sense of total failure, gullibility, the brush with hard-core goons, and what could have been an unwitting suicidal stubbornness in a world of unknown uncertainties and dangers created nightmares from which I still suffer.”

Even three decades later, O’Brien, who works in education, still wrestles with what happened, inquisitorial of the motives of the tale’s main players.

“The unanswered questions that then took up every minute of every waking day remain unanswered 30 years on. Was I simply a foreign pawn in a local scam, helping scam artists to fleece their countrymen? If so, why was it so elaborate? Why were three international intelligence agencies so interested in our Remington contracts and cargo manifests? Was the scam, in fact, a perfect front for Marcos to conceal his gold bullion transactions?”

O’Brien now wants to document the event in minute detail by releasing a book, for which he is asking for donations via Kickstarter. It has been a long-held ambition, but failure to publish as of yet “is not for want of trying. I wrote the first draft in the early mornings of 1984 in long-hand as a means of, essentially, psychotherapy in an attempt to expunge some of the scars, some of the baggage. Over the years, I have variously tried to re-enter that strange world of psycho-terror – to re-edit the diary, to write a fictionalised screenplay version - and failed miserably, because it is such a damaging experience each time”. A ghostwriter will take up the reins. “It is my belief that it needs to be professionally written, ‘translated’ if you like, by a writer who can fully and freely enter my old worlds without the destructive impact they have on me.”

There are three reasons O’Brien thinks the book needs to be written. “It is a cautionary tale, for starters. It also lifts the lid off some of the scandalous, devious financial mega-misappropriations perpetrated by dictators, political opportunists and their military and financial henchmen – situations which are exploited the world over in developing countries with the apparent collusion of Western banking institutions and ‘sympathetic’ governments and to the absolute detriment of their poverty-stricken populations.”

And thirdly? Well, that’s obvious. “It’s a cracking true yarn, isn’t it?”

Link to the Kickstarter campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tomorrowthepalace/tomorrow-the-palace-an-amazing-untold-true-story