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	"The threat of extortion is a risk of doing business in Southeast Asia."

Leclerc is now a consultant living in Palm Desert, California. He denies speaking with Laird about the Philippines' terrorists in a post-September 11 meeting or asking him to hand over the documents, and he calls the very idea a "fiction" and "absolutely insane." In fact, he denies any knowledge at all of Kingking's security issues during Laird's tenure, even though his name appears on the routing list of internal documents that candidly detail the nature of the threat faced by Echo Bay personnel. "There is not a single thing that this company would even consider hiding, concealing, or falsifying," Leclerc says. When confronted with the e-mail from Echo Bay's corporate secretary, he suggests that "disposed of" and "purged" did not mean "destroyed."

After the September 11 attacks, Laird couldn't bring himself to leave the firm, but his conscience continued to bother him, he says. He was finally moved to contact authorities outside the company after Abu Sayyaf beheaded American tourist Guillermo Sobero, who was kidnapped in the Philippines along with the American missionaries Gracia and Martin Burnham in 2001 (Martin Burnham died in a police rescue attempt), and the subsequent deaths of American Special Forces during the search for Abu Sayyaf fighters on Mindanao.

In April 2003, Allan and Arneille Laird met in Denver with Special Agent Matthew Peterson of the Department of Homeland Security. The two provided a general summary of Echo Bay's activities in the Philippines and a 1996 memo from Laird to his boss that contained weekly security reports and accounting records of payments to insurgents. Laird says he offered to hand over the rest of the documents-"all told, more than an inch thick"-but Peterson never asked him to forward them.

Laird also contacted his congressman, Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), during this period and provided him with the same summary. And then he waited. He had good reason to believe they might jump on the case. Since the October 2001 passage of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act), various individuals and front groups have been charged with terrorism-related crimes by Attorney General John Ashcroft's team of U.S. Attorneys.

As recently as January 21, 2004, for example, the United States indicted a Canadian citizen of Somali descent, who lived in Minnesota, for attending an Afghan training camp in 2000. According to Jeffrey Breinholt, coordinator of the Terrorism Financing Task Force at the Department of Justice, as of the end of February 2004, 57 individuals had been charged with crimes involving material support for terrorist organizations. ("Material support," or "providing something of value" to terrorists has been a crime since 1994, but its definition was broadened in 1996 and again under the PATRIOT Act.)

Breinholt adds that three entities have also been charged by the DOJ with financially aiding terrorists: InfoCom, Help the Needy, and Benevolence International Foundation. In the InfoCom case, four Palestinian brothers are accused of using the Texas computer firm as a front for the militant Islamic group Hamas. Help the Needy and Benevolence International Foundation were both Muslim charities accused of illegally sending money to suspected terrorist groups.

But no mining companies or other non-Arab-related enterprises were on the list. Why? Political influence may be one reason. According to Federal Election Commission documents compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, in the 2000 election cycle the mining industry gave more than $6 million, 86 percent of it to Republicans. Echo Bay Mines Limited was a partisan giver as well. In 1995 and 1996, the company contributed $22,500, all of it to Republican causes.

On January 8, 2004, Laird received an e-mail from Special Agent Peterson. "With regard to our investigation, I spoke with the US Attorney's Office, District of Colorado...Based on the information I was able to gather, we have determined that the statute of limitations has tolled on all violations alleged. Due to this, there is no prosecutive venue available even if the allegations were proven."

Jeff Dorschner, spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Denver, says his office does not discuss "declinations," so it's impossible to know the full reasoning behind the decision. But it's puzzling, especially since DOJ headquarters in Washington has a different interpretation of the statute of limitations as it relates to material support to terrorists.

According to DOJ spokesperson Bryan Sierra, the PATRIOT Act extended the statute of limitations for financial crimes like material support from five to eight years. More important, "Any conduct that occurred four years and 11 months prior to the PATRIOT Act would not be time barred for another three years," he says. This means that payments to terrorists from November 1996 on may be prosecuted up to eight years after they were made. The bell has not yet tolled on Echo Bay.

Echo Bay Mines Limited has morphed into Kinross Gold; its executives scattered to different companies on different continents. Echo Bay's junior partner at Kingking, TVI, remains in the Philippines, with six properties on Mindanao alone. One, on the western side of the island, has seen bitter struggles between the company and indigenous communities that accuse it of polluting ancestral lands and waters. TVI has other problems at this mine site as well.

In 2002, MILF soldiers attacked a company truck, killing 13 people, including women and children, and wounding 12. According to the Edmonton Journal in Alberta, Canada, "TVI denied reports that MILF rebels were extorting money from the firm, although it acknowledged the threat of extortion is a risk of doing business in Southeast Asia." The world is cinched by gold belts like the one on Mindanao. Companies from the United States and elsewhere continue to operate along them in the Philippines, but also in Indonesia, Africa, and the former Soviet Union-areas where extremist groups are active, and gaining power.

Marilyn Berlin Snell is Sierra's writer/editor.

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