Adventurer knew threat to rally was real

By Rob Miech

Saturday, Feb. 23, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Ronn Bailey transformed into Indiana Jones and James Bond last month when his sense of adventure and espionage took over at the Dakar Rally in Lisbon, Portugal.

The Las Vegas resident and three-time Dakar participant never made it to the starting line. Nor did anyone else.

Rally organizers had initially reported an incident in Mauritania — a country that constitutes a major portion of the Dakar course — as a burglary. Bailey, thanks to his extensive resources, knew better.

Al-Qaida-linked militants had gunned down a French family of five, killing four, at a picnic. Bailey had received additional confidential information about two other fatal attacks that followed a call from Ayman al-Zawahiri, second in command to Osama bin Laden, to cleanse the region of Westerners.

“And here come all these Europeans and Westerners driving through their front yard? Like, ‘Screw you,’ ” said Bailey, 57. “Not a smart thing to do.”

Race director Etienne Lavigne ultimately did the smart thing, canceling the demanding 30-year-old Europe-to-Africa race for the first time, sending about 550 racers — and the motorcycles, trucks and souped-up cars in which they compete — home.

Bailey has made a fortune gathering, disseminating and protecting vital information. He started Vanguard Integrity Professionals Inc., which specializes in software security and counts IBM among its 500 clients, in 1986 in Las Vegas.

Bailey’s intelligence sources — he calls them “assets” — in Washington, D.C., and Virginia called his Boulder City shop to keep him informed of escalating threats to the rally.

But the decision to cancel it wasn’t made until Bailey already had made his way to Lisbon to prepare for the start of what he feared would be a bloodbath.

All of Bailey’s assets were tested in Portugal.

He obtained phone communications from a French intelligence agency in which suicide bombers were saying goodbye to their parents before embarking on missions to blow up themselves and racers in bivouacs along the Dakar route. Aircraft also would be targeted.

He bought a dozen bullet-proof vests for his team and devised a secret evacuation plan with the help of a contact in Mauritania. Clothed in turbans and robes, Bailey and his crew hoped to breeze by terrorists in pickup trucks to the U.S. Embassy in Nouakchott, on the Atlantic coast.

“Like movie stuff,” Bailey said.

In front of thousands of officials, competitors and media members, Lavigne canceled the rally at a news conference just hours before the race was scheduled to start. Lavigne had informed Bailey of the verdict two hours earlier.

“It was absolutely the right decision,” Bailey said. “It caused a lot of problems for them and a lot of lost money for a lot of people. But I’m proud of them. There was no choice.”

The terrorist threats are so credible that the race will take place in South America for the first time in January.

It will start in Buenos Aires, head south to Patagonia and Chile — and into the Atacama Desert, the driest in the world — and finish back in Buenos Aires.

“It’ll probably be some time before the Dakar returns to Africa,” said Bailey, who is preparing for South America in a grand way.

In May, he will practice in Tunisia and Libya, then return to his shop in Paris. In June, he will participate in the 10,000-kilometer, 17-day Transorientale Rally that starts in St. Petersburg, Russia, and goes through treacherous mountain passes in Kazakhstan and over the Gobi Desert before ending in Beijing.

Bailey is 0-for-3 in finishing the Dakar, but he’s becoming something of a legend.

He unveiled a carbon-fiber race car shell that made headlines in Europe two years ago. He finished one race after getting lost for three days, which disqualified him but endeared him to Dakar veterans.

When the race was canceled Jan. 4, Bailey revealed his private intelligence reports and evacuation plan to German television reporters. A friend in Germany said the feedback from the stories of Bailey being prepared for trouble was mostly positive.

“Everyone thought it was cool,” she exuberantly told Bailey. “Typical American.”