Oh, man, this just keeps getting better and better:
Sealand- In the 1960s, one of Great Britain’s more productive cottage industries was pirate radio. The painfully bland BBC and the painfully bland government of Harold Wilson took umbrage, and soon the pirate transmitters were forced underground. After one pirate station began transmitting from a ship outside the three-mile limit of the UK’s waters, Roy Bates and Ronan O’Rohilly, both owners of pirate radio stations, got to thinking.
The North Sea at this time was littered with Second World War-vintage radar platforms. In 1966, Bates and O’Rohilly occupied one and called it Sealand. They began hatching moneymaking schemes ranging from not just a pirate radio station, but also a gambling resort and a corporate tax haven. As the freshly-minted nation’s prospects rose, so did the tension between the diumvirs of the baseball-diamond sized empire. Bates seized the tower. In June of 1967, O’Rohilly launched an offensive, which Bates and his men repulsed with guns, Molotov cocktails, and a surplus flamethrower. Upon hearing that the Royal Marines were preparing to seize the platform, Bates declared Sealand’s independence on September 2. On a jaunt back to the old country, Bates was arrested and brought before a British court on a variety of charges. He was acquited in October of 1968, since Sealand was outside of British jurisdiction.
Sealand stayed out of the news until a German businessman toured Sealand a few years later. During negotiations, the German’s hired goons kidnapped the crown prince and set him back ashore. Prince Roy rapidly got together an army, hired a helicopter, and retook the tower. Since the German had accepted Sealand citizenship, Bates arrested him for treason. Over the next seven weeks, the German government repeatedly appealed to the British Foreign Office, which insisted that it had no jurisdiction. Further vindicated, Bates eventually released the German without payment of his 75,000 Deutschmark fine.
The next uproar took place during the Falkland Islands War of 1982. Argentina’s initial success rapidly eroded, and the Argentinians conceived of a desperate plan. They contacted Bates and asked to lease Sealand as a missile base, hoping to destroy British morale. Bates swallowed down his mercenary impulses and declined. In a completely unrelated matter, Britain extended its territorial waters to the 20 kilometer limit later that year, soon after dynamiting another tower near Sealand. Sealand’s only permanent residents, a small team of security guards, abandoned the platform after storms in 1991.
http://www.gravy.net/~jim/nats.html
