45
WHAT IS GOOD
WHEN WE GOT the news, I grabbed a satellite phone, and for the first and only time in the field, I called my mom and cried.
It had been a long time since I’d turned to my mom. I’d been so busy being a mom myself. But sobbing in the morning heat and humidity, I needed to hear her voice.
She answered right away when I called, even though it was the middle of the night in Texas. “I was lying awake thinking about you,” she said. “Are you safe?”
“Yes, I’m safe,” I told her, but I couldn’t stop crying.
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
I knew my devastation wasn’t just about the missed best opportunity to catch Kony. It went deeper. How could something so certain have failed? I kept hearing the assurances of smoking fires. “We probably won’t get another chance to get Kony,” I said. “But that’s not even why I’m crying. The hardest part is that doubt is taking over and I don’t know who the good guys are anymore.”
“Sweetie,” she said. “I’ve been so worried for you. I can’t tell you how relieved I am that you’re okay.”
“I don’t feel okay.”
My mom met my distress with a verse from the Bible, Micah 6:8, the first verse I had ever selected to memorize when I was young: He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy…“It hurts right now, honey,” she said. “But you know what is good. It’s going to be okay.”
Her words helped. But I was still full of outrage and sadness. It was as though the collective impact of all the awful things I’d witnessed in my humanitarian work—all of the vilest behavior toward innocents, the brothels and war zones, the jungles where mothers couldn’t keep their children safe, where kids were forced to lug a gun around and serve an evil warlord—was crashing over me at once.
The light in me—my joy, my faith, my passion for life—had started out so bright. I grew up believing there was a loving, amazing God who could solve anything, and I’d come at the sorrows of the world with energetic optimism and a belief that despite all the evil, good wins. But with this failed attempt to stop the LRA, it felt like the light in me had dimmed, replaced by a terrible darkness and doubt.
God, where are you? I asked. How are you allowing this?
* * *
—
“Did you get Darth Vader, Mommy?” Brody asked excitedly when I got home. I shook my head and told him, “No, love. No.”
PART THREE
There are victories of the soul and spirit.
Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.
—ELIE WIESEL
46
CUT THE SNAKE OFF THE HEAD
HELLO, MY FRIEND, General Wamala wrote after Operation Merlin. I know you must be as disappointed as I was about the empty camp. I’m yet to overcome the shock and fully understand what could have happened. Anyway, we say, the struggle continues.
It was maddening to be in the dark. But there was no clear explanation, no one to definitively blame, no way to seek recourse. We just had to find a way to go on.
We ceased counter-LRA operations for a few weeks to regroup. My biggest priority was to check in on the SOG who’d been doing the hard work and taking all the risks. Operation Merlin was supposed to have been their last operation, the victory to end their two years of service and sacrifice. The defeat had hit them hard, and I didn’t know how to express my appreciation for their dedication. I would have loved for the brave, committed men who had proved the impossible nearly possible to keep working for another opportunity to catch Kony. But they had fulfilled their two years of service, and done an incredible job.
General Wamala decided that the whole SOG unit would be reassigned to Somalia—a distinct honor for anyone serving in the Ugandan military because of the relatively high pay: about eight hundred dollars a month, thanks to a stipend from the European Union. In addition to the good pay and overall privilege of the post, life in Somalia would offer a welcome relief from the years of tracking and sleeping in the bush. In Somalia, they’d eat well and live in barracks instead of tents. I wasn’t surprised when most of the men chose to be reassigned, and I was glad for them and their families.
Their departure left Laren and me with an obvious question: Was it also time for us to go? On the surface, the answer appeared to be yes. We were physically and financially running on fumes. We’d already bet the farm; we’d used the very last of our resources for the year to charter the helicopters and pilots for Merlin, and we couldn’t afford to keep throwing money at bad intelligence. Then, at the end of March, a coup in the Central African Republic, the country the mission primarily operated in, threw the region into chaos, and the US Special Forces withdrew from their base in Djemah. They took everything sensitive—aircraft, ammunition, computers—but left everything else: tents, generators, and food, including a stack of dozens of unitized group rations (heat-and-serve meals) in a single flavor, turkey and gravy. All the signs seemed to be pointing for us to leave, as well.
I called John Montgomery to see if he agreed.
“I trust you to know what to do,” he said. “But I like to remind people that in investing, the worst mistake we often make is to pull out when the market takes a dive. When you’re at the lowest, that’s when you should double down.”
I remembered what Senator Kirk had said that day at Muneer’s home on Lake Michigan: When you fail, be ready to go after Kony again. It’s going to take three tries. We weren’t quitters. We had set out to stop the LRA, and we hadn’t done that yet. There was still so much in place on which to build success. And we’d learned a lot. We’d become more methodical and confident. We knew how to listen and adjust to help empower our partners. And now wasn’t the time to walk away—now was the time to learn to walk even better beside them.
* * *
—
But if we stayed, we needed a new strategy. Laren and I met with Colonel Kabango in the command tent in Obo. It always struck me how little the Ugandan military had to work with technology-wise. The space, with its long folding tables and portable whiteboards, looked low-tech. Across town, at the US Special Forces base, there were banks of computers, digitized maps and intelligence, Internet access. Here on the Ugandan base, LRA movements and Ugandan military operations were marked with Xs on the map that covered the whiteboard.
“All of this time we’ve been chasing Kony,” Colonel Kabango said, sitting forward in his camp chair. “What if stopping the LRA isn’t about catching Joseph Kony?”
By all recent accounts, Kony had become a hermit in Merlin, growing old and fat, smoking weed, handing out pumpkins to a diminishing group of abducted children who’d become adult fighters. He seemed to have become an afterthought to many of his own commanders, most of whom hadn’t seen him in at least a year. Meanwhile, there were two other International Criminal Court indictees—Dominic Ongwen and Okot Odhiambo—from whom we’d diverted attention in the effort to apprehend Kony.
I saw Colonel Kabango’s point. Instead of trying to take out Kony, what if we targeted Kony’s key officers? Isolated him. Cut his stability out from under him.
“Kony’s nobody without the people directly beneath him,” Laren said. “His top-level commanders are the ones who carry out his orders and command his army. If we exploit divisions within the LRA and encourage more defections, we could topple the LRA from the inside out.”
“We’ve been trying to cut the head off the snake,” I said. “But maybe ending this war is about cutting the snake off the head.”
“Exactly,” Colonel Kabango said.
We had our new strategy: the Ugandan army would militarily pursue Kony’s key leaders, and we would ramp up defection messaging to further erode the LRA from within. The Ugandan military tracking squads were already putting the right kind of pressure on the LRA, and creating more opportunit
ies for people to escape. We would couple the military operations and increased targeted operations against top LRA leadership with strategic defection messaging to emphasize the reasons for LRA soldiers and commanders to choose a different life, to peacefully surrender and begin life anew in Uganda.
An effective defection operation had to start by acknowledging that the problem wasn’t necessarily that LRA soldiers didn’t want to go home; the problem was that they no longer thought they could. For years—even decades—the soldiers had been kept in the LRA by fear, lies, propaganda. “Uganda has been ravaged by AIDS,” Kony told them. “Your family is dead, the defection flyers are poisoned and will kill you, if you leave you’ll be prosecuted or killed by the Ugandan government, those left at home will never forgive you.” They had even been told that Kony’s spirits would follow them and kill them if they managed to escape.
While Kony still made hours-long speeches about his vision of rebuilding strength and returning to Uganda to overthrow Museveni, that goal was so far-flung now, the army’s strength so diminished, life on the run in the bush so difficult, that it was unlikely that even Kony’s most trusted leaders believed that dream anymore. They weren’t staying in the LRA out of loyalty or aspiration. They stayed on because it was what they knew. And they were afraid of the alternative. Perhaps they’d made the calculation: this was a hard life, but at home, if home even still existed, it would be worse. And although there had been a steady rise in defections since the first SOG teams entered the field, we knew that each surrender had been hard-won. One defection flyer, one helo speaker broadcast, didn’t typically entice a man to put down his gun and come home. It took months, even years of evidence for him to finally accept that he’d been fed a false narrative and to take the risk of leaving.
Our friends at Invisible Children had been studying defection efforts in other parts of the world. Of particular interest was what the Colombian government had done to stop the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—the FARC—the longest-running guerrilla force anywhere on the globe. The Colombian government had hired an advertising firm to help encourage the FARC’s six thousand soldiers to put down their weapons and return to their families. They’d run several highly effective “come home for Christmas” campaigns, the first two in 2010 and 2011, capitalizing on the FARC fighters’ homesickness around the holiday, reminding them that before they were rebels, they’d been daughters and sons.
For the first defection campaign, dubbed Operation Christmas, the Colombian ad firm loaded two Black Hawk helicopters with thousands of LED Christmas lights and decorated a seventy-five-foot-tall tree in the walking path of soldiers living in the main FARC camp. The lights were hooked up to a motion sensor, and when a soldier passed in the night, the tree burst into blue light with a sign saying: If Christmas can come to the jungle, you can come home. Demobilize at Christmas. Everything is possible. They’d lit nine more trees in other strategic locations, and defections had increased by 30 percent that year. More than three hundred of the defectors said that the Christmas messaging had motivated them to reclaim their freedom and the warmth of their homes.
The following year, for Operation Rivers of Light, they’d made the campaign even more personal, using the national army’s radio station to invite mothers and fathers, husbands and wives to send loved ones in the FARC an individual Christmas message. Thousands wrote personal notes and gathered keepsakes, placing them in watertight, LED-lit capsules that the army set floating on the rivers near FARC bases. Colombia and your family are waiting for you, the rivers of light said. Your country and your family will welcome you with open arms.
We already knew that an LRA combatant’s defection rarely had a single catalyst. It took more than one isolated message to counter years and years of indoctrination. To cut the snake off the head, we’d need to pace ourselves and be ready to play the long game. Laren and his wife, Courtney, had already moved to Uganda to live closer to Laren’s work in the field. We agreed that we would both take more rotations with our families to avoid burnout. And we decided to expand our team by hiring Adam Finck, who had already partnered with us on the Early Warning Network and piloting defection campaigns. He would help us develop a more robust defection strategy.
* * *
—
“Taking the LRA down from the inside out is going to require better intelligence,” Colonel Kabango said from across the table in the command tent. “And from here on out, I’m not going to rely on anyone else’s intelligence about the LRA. I want to focus on getting our own.”
More defections would thin the ranks of the LRA and also provide the Ugandan military with current intelligence on the LRA’s locations, movements, tactics, and command structure. But we needed to further bolster the Ugandan military’s capacity to gather and analyze intelligence. Colonel Kabango said he planned to recruit informants who traded with the LRA. Then he eyed the bulky HF radio sitting in a dark corner of the tent.
“You want to go low-tech,” Laren said.
Colonel Kabango nodded. We’d thought the aerial surveillance capabilities would be a silver bullet. But they hadn’t proved to be as practical or reliable as we’d hoped. So far in the mission, the intelligence that had made the most difference on the ground was from HF intercepts, GPS tracking devices, and human intelligence. Colonel Kabango suggested bringing GPS tracking devices to Ugandan military informants and tracking squads, and we agreed to help implement that technology.
LRA radio calls were being intercepted but it was impossible to decode the content. LRA communications used a complex brevity code, and the only people in the organization who knew the codes were their radio operators. A huge intelligence breakthrough would come in September 2014, a year and a half after Operation Merlin, when a radio operator defected and shared the codes.
Until then, the content of the broadcasts was impossible to discern, and it was only useful insofar as it could be interpreted to inform decisions in the field. At that time, it was difficult to collate historic and current intelligence. We hired a firm to help build an electronic mapping platform that would bring together intelligence—including radio intercepts, community reporting, and other human intelligence—and allow it to be analyzed all together.
Intelligence could now be digitized daily—sometimes even more often—and now there was the capacity to overlay present movements with historical ones, and see how the current path of movement compared with historical locations of camps or river crossings or wild yam fields, thus allowing for predictive analysis. The picture of the LRA went from static Xs on a map stuck to a whiteboard to a real-time worldview of the LRA.
47
ODHIAMBO THE BUTCHER
THE SUMMER AFTER Operation Merlin, HF-radio intercepts showed that the LRA was on the move again. Kony’s group appeared to be disconnected from the other groups, and it seemed that Okot Odhiambo had been put in charge of moving between the disparate LRA groups to spread Kony’s orders. If the Ugandan army could intercept a reunion rendezvous, there would be a chance of apprehending Odhiambo and Kony. Even if the high-value targets managed to escape, an assault still had the potential to decimate the LRA’s morale, preventing them from fully regrouping, scheduling new rendezvous, or disseminating new radio codes.
This time, the Ugandan army tracked Odhiambo, not Kony. But despite their persistent efforts, Odhiambo and Kony managed to meet without interception, and Kony traveled back to Kafia Kingi. The decision to focus on apprehending LRA top leadership instead of Kony himself hadn’t yet yielded a useful result.
* * *
—
Weeks passed, and the rainy season was in full force. Every stream had become a river. A crossing could hold a group—LRA or the Ugandan military—up for days as they waited for the right moment to risk the potentially fatal mix of crocs, hippos, and racing water.
“Keep ahold of Odhiambo’s trail,” Colonel Kabango told Captain Charles, one
of the most respected new group commanders. “Catch him at a crossing point. And for God’s sake, bring a rope.”
A few days later, Captain Charles’s men found the trail of Odhiambo’s group and began to track them through the wet forest. They were a large group, but nimble, and moving fast. Tracking is about who is more committed, the trackers or the ones being tracked. Captain Charles’s men were as many as three days behind the LRA group when he found the tracks, but he pushed his team to make up ground by walking longer hours during the day, resting less, sleeping less, and maintaining a fast pace, and he ordered his men to carry as little as possible, to leave any unnecessary items behind in the interest of speed. They jettisoned rations, extra clothes, and the thick, heavy rope Colonel Kabango had provided for dicey crossings.
By the next afternoon, Captain Charles’s team tracked Odhiambo’s group to a wide, fast river. The LRA had already crossed, but the trail was fresh and Captain Charles thought they might still be camped on the opposite shore. He prepared his men to cross the river that night and hit the LRA camp at first light. But without a rope, in the dead dark of night, with fast water rushing by, the swim was so daunting that only eleven of his twenty men were able to get across. The two groups hunkered down in silence on opposite sides of the river to wait out the rest of the cold night.
At the first hint of dawn, Captain Charles and the members of his team who’d made it across the river were back on the trail, looking for signs of an encampment. They found Odhiambo’s full camp and assaulted. The LRA fired back and a gun battle ensued, a cacophony of guns, the muddy ground littered with brass. In the chaos of fire and flight it was hard to tell who was winning, and in the thick of the fire Captain Charles got hit—not by a bullet, but by a bee, his eyelid instantly swelling. As the fight continued, the LRA fled; they ran with nothing, leaving food, tarps, and sandals in their wake. The Ugandan army tracked the LRA for five days in their rapid and scattered flight.
To Stop a Warlord Page 23
