American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  “Oh, Taylor,” Quiwonkpa said.

  Taylor responded, “Yes, general.”

  “Sit down, let’s work.” Quiwonkpa looked over at him. “Do you remember us?”

  Taylor did not.

  Quiwonkpa recounted an incident from a trip to Nimba County that Taylor had taken with President Tolbert several days before the coup. When Taylor had returned to Liberia at the president’s invitation in March 1980, he had pressed Tolbert to visit imprisoned activists. The president demurred, instead asking the young activist to accompany the presidential delegation on a tour to the interior, to a village called Gbutuo in Nimba County, near the border with the Ivory Coast. By coincidence or design, Taylor would launch his revolution from there nearly a decade later.

  Taylor had followed along on the junket, playing the critic to the president. Tolbert understood that Liberian society demanded reform. What he failed to identify was the source of the most potent discontent: it wasn’t progressive leaders like Taylor but rather Tolbert’s own military. The president wasn’t alone in this miscalculation—Taylor too had failed to anticipate that the military would play the pivotal role in restructuring Liberia’s society. While it may not have been clear from within Liberia’s political culture, it was hardly surprising. West Africa had experienced a series of military coups, beginning in 1963 with the killing of Togo’s president Sylvanus Olympio, outside the U.S. embassy in Lomé, and leading up to the military takeover of Ghana in 1979.3 Moreover, the Armed Forces of Liberia had all the elements of ferment: they were staffed in large part by semiliterate soldiers of a tribal background, who were well trained and reasonably well equipped but poor, hungry, and not incentivized to remain loyal to the existing power.

  Even under the president’s wing, during the weeks before the coup, Taylor held to his activist instincts. In one incident on the tour of Nimba County, he witnessed a government minister insulting a local legislator. Rather than let the incident pass as a fact of life in Liberia’s provincial society, he called the minister to task, castigating him for patronizing the legislator within his own community. It was a minor incident that Taylor had forgotten. But it provided the basis for the working relationship between a junior bureaucrat and the military officer. The soldiers providing security for the delegation had looked on quietly, taking note of this young activist.

  Now as Taylor settled into Quiwonkpa’s office at Barclay Training Center, the soldiers reminded him of a press conference Taylor had later held criticizing the president’s party. “We know that you have come and you want to be fair, this is why we have called you down to work,” a soldier told him.

  The junta government, known as the People’s Redemption Council (PRC), became the center of power in the new Liberia, making decisions out of public view and ruling by decree.4 The PRC did not exist prior to the April coup. When it came together, it consisted of twenty members of the “revolution” and functioned similarly to a cabinet, with Samuel Doe as the de facto head. Ideology was a tertiary concern within the PRC, particularly since there were so few civilians in leadership positions. Some members had Marxist-socialist leanings, while others, like Taylor, were market-oriented. But predominantly the cabinet members were military officers—sergeants and captains from the Armed Forces of Liberia who saw their rank within the service transposed to ministerial positions within the government—roles in which the men had no expertise. “By all rights, this government should trip over its own feet and fall under its own weight,” the U.S. ambassador at the time wrote.5 “But the fact is that Liberians have grown accustomed over the years to government which provides little of the substantive support that Western standards assume.”

  Taylor’s admission to this group was remarkable in that he was the only member with Americo-Liberian lineage among a group dominated by members of the Krahn, Gio, and other tribes. He was put in charge of the General Services Agency (GSA), which became his fiefdom. GSA was the procurement arm of the Liberian government; his position as its head made even government ministers beholden to him. The GSA job “was a very, very powerful position,” Taylor recalled.6 He brought in Blamoh Nelson as a deputy, an old friend from his student days in the United States whom Taylor recalled as a natural-born bureaucrat, “a man who really loves paper.” Taylor quickly moved to centralize all government purchasing decisions within the GSA rather than within each individual ministry—a system he borrowed from the American bureaucratic model. The policy change came with an inherent benefit, he said: “I then had the authority to make certain decisions regarding supplies that ministries received.”

  With his new authority came a legion of enemies. Taylor found government vehicles to be a particularly controversial issue. He took a hard line regarding cabinet ministers’ use of these vehicles for personal purposes. The decision, while sound, was politically risky, particularly within the ethnic context of the coup. “Here is this Congo man, who is the head of the GSA, who does not want us to gain some status,” he recalled ministers griping.

  The leader of the coup, Samuel Kanyon Doe, could not have been a starker deviation from Liberia’s traditional government leaders.7 He was young—just thirty—educated only through eleventh grade, and coming from the Krahn tribe. He hailed from Tuzon, a village in Liberia’s Grand Gedeh County, along the southeastern border with Ivory Coast. Though he was from a relatively remote corner of the country, American influences reached him from an early age. His village benefited from a stream of Peace Corps volunteers from the early 1970s, and by the time Doe joined the Armed Forces of Liberia in 1969, the military was an American-style force, supplied, trained, and in part funded by American taxpayers.

  As president, Doe morphed from a suggestible and illiterate soldier into a paranoid, superstitious, and insular despot. He relied on two sources of power, in arguably equal parts: the Reagan administration and tribal magic (juju).8 Among his earliest orders of business, as the first indigenous Liberian head of state, was the public execution of thirteen largely Americo-Liberian government ministers charged with treason (only four of whom received even perfunctory trials). In April 1980, before a crowd of international press and other observers who had been invited hours earlier at a government press conference, the men died facing a firing squad of drunken soldiers. In the first fusillade, many of the gunmen missed their mark, and the survivors had to be executed at close range. The soldiers then implored the media to photograph the corpses. One State Department official described it as “one of the most grisly and horrifying things ever seen.”9

  For Taylor, it was an object lesson in the political stakes in the new Liberia; the dark side of tribal ascendency in Liberia had shown its ugly face. This tribal anger was directed not only outward to the settlers but also inward at other tribes competing for position in the new government. The Krahn junta leadership’s response to threats—or perceived threats—took on tribal and religious aspects. In one instance, Doe’s men singled out a community that they believed to be sympathetic to the former regime. They chose to punish the leader of the tribal secret society, a Zoe, by forcing him to eat his own ear—akin to brutalizing a cardinal as an insult to the Catholic Church.10 The insult radiated throughout the country’s secret societies, disrupting the perennial cycle of “bush schools” that the societies ran to initiate youth into adulthood within tribal communities. For young boys and girls, these schools constituted a crucial hinge point between childhood and adult life: the children were spirited away to locations in the forest for a month to a year, where they underwent a secret education into their roles as men and women within their culture. While the Americo governments had subjugated indigenous peoples, the Doe regime’s targeting of traditional practices of rival tribes marked a new rift in the society.

  A State Department report divined the real danger: “[Though] the various tribes now feel the animosities toward their neighbors which have been suppressed for the past 158 years, there is no evidence of any group or grouping organizing to overthrow the present Kra
hn-Kru coalition. However, the alienation is there. It may not mean anything but it could be a straw in the wind for the future.”11

  Indeed, divisions within the junta emerged quickly. Just eight months after the coup, a mysterious group, “The Committee for a Free and United Liberia,” circulated a six-page letter around the capital.12 In almost Swiftian rhetoric, it accused the government of graft, corruption, and even drug trafficking, specifically calling out Doe’s greed for the construction of a mansion in his home county.

  “Fellow citizens,” the letter read, “you can plainly see this has now become a revolution of personal enrichment and Krahn tribal dominance, with everybody in the PRC together with certain members of government doing everything possible to get more and more.” The letter concluded, “The real enemies of the revolution are those PRC rogues.”

  While the author of the letter was never identified, Doe’s government—whether justified or not—saw Taylor’s hand in it. The two had had a fractious relationship up to that point, with Taylor unafraid to confront Doe’s appointees. The minister of justice ordered Taylor’s arrest on March 11, 1981; soon afterward soldiers arrived at his office, stripped him to his underwear, and loaded him into a jeep.13 Like the ministers who had been detained in the hours after the coup, he was driven to Barclay Training Center and jailed, not far from where he had first been asked to join the coup government a year earlier. After several harrowing hours, Taylor’s patron, Thomas Quiwonkpa, demanded his friend’s release.

  This incident marked the first time the U.S. embassy reported on Charles Taylor to Washington, noting:

  Regarding the problems of political prisoners and due legal process in Liberia, Quiwonkpa called for “fair treatment” for anyone who had committed a crime against the state and said anyone arrested without due process of law must be released. (Comment: Quiwonkpa followed his words with actions that same night. Justice Minister [Chea] Cheapoo summarily ordered the arrest of General Services Agency Director Charles Taylor for “sedition,” based on Taylor’s possession of three mimeographed letters from “The Committee for a Free and United Liberia.” Quiwonkpa maintained he personally saw to Taylor’s release.)14

  While Taylor and Quiwonkpa had forged an alliance, they could not have been more different: Quiwonkpa remained something of a national hero for his role in the coup. He was a jocular military officer and proud son of Nimba County, deep in Liberia’s forest frontier. Furthermore, he had the support of the U.S. government; one diplomat noted shortly after the coup that “his brigadier’s star shines the brightest of all in the current AFL galaxy.”15 As an army officer who enjoyed popularity among both his own soldiers and American officials, Quiwonkpa was on an obvious collision course with the increasingly paranoid Doe.

  It was also clear that Taylor’s mixed heritage was viewed as a liability within the insular government, as was his willingness to use his relatively small government office to exert power. While Taylor was able to return to service in the government, Doe had effectively demoted him. After several public clashes with the president, both Quiwonkpa and the young bureaucrat fled to the United States in the spring of 1983, going their separate ways. Quiwonkpa moved quickly to galvanize fighters to stage a raid on Liberian territory.16

  Taylor was keenly aware of his tenuous position when he arrived back in the United States: he was the guest of a nation that actively supported a leader who sought his arrest. It was a matter of whether the United States would take the initiative to do something about it.

  Knowing that Doe would likely track him to the United States, Taylor hired a lawyer to help him: Ramsey Clark. Clark, a plainspoken Texan whose father had sat on the U.S. Supreme Court for eighteen years, served as attorney general in the Johnson administration, from 1967 to 1969; his career afterward was characterized by the clients he took on, including Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, Leonard Peltier, and David Koresh.

  Clark recalled Taylor’s arrival at his office at 113 University Place in New York’s Greenwich Village. He appeared dressed in a business suit and looking like any number of African students and immigrants whom Clark had represented in the past. When the two sat down, Taylor explained his situation, his role in the government, and why he sought counsel. “He thought he was going to have a problem with the government of Liberia,” Clark said. “He had come to oppose Samuel K. Doe and was concerned about reprisals.”

  Taylor hadn’t been charged with any crime at that time, but after he fled, Liberian officials discovered nearly $1 million missing from GSA coffers. Before leaving Liberia, Taylor had wired funds to several accounts in New York, in what appeared to be legitimate purchases of spare parts from a New Jersey–based company, International Earthmoving Equipment.17 The parts were never delivered, and government auditors grew suspicious that Taylor had orchestrated the scheme to embezzle funds. Before leaving Clark’s office, Taylor left a retainer. Clark didn’t recall the exact amount but said it “couldn’t be more than $5,000.”

  The charges eventually caught up to Taylor on May 24, 1984.18 He had been staying at the apartment of one of his former roommates in Somerville, Massachusetts, not far from the apartment he had once shared with Bernice and Chucky. Federal marshals bearing an order to extradite him to Liberia surprised him there, placed him into custody, and brought him to Plymouth to be jailed. The Liberian government wanted to prosecute him for the bogus transaction involving the equipment. The assistant U.S. attorney who was handed the case, Richard G. Stearns, couldn’t muster FBI resources to look into it, so he traveled down to New York himself to pore over the bank statements. Taylor had made little effort to hide the fraud. When Stearns spoke to his Liberian counterparts, the extradition request did not appear to be political. (In fact, Doe’s fear was that Taylor was using the pilfered money to bankroll the opposition.)

  Taylor could do little to prevent his extradition, other than claim that he would be harmed upon returning to Liberia. When he asked Clark to represent him, he warned that Doe wanted to throw him “into a crocodile stream.” At a succession of hearings, Taylor and the U.S. government made their respective cases. The government had received assurances from the Liberians that Taylor would receive a fair trial following his extradition, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stearns recalled, though he acknowledged that “there was concern at the time [that] the Doe regime didn’t have the most savory of reputations.” Taylor had real reason to fear for his life should he lose the extradition battle. Doe had ordered the execution of colleagues who had been much closer to him than Taylor ever was—though those men had been accused of plotting to overthrow him. Clark put documents into evidence and presented witnesses to build the case against extradition, but Stearns said only that some of the testimony was “pretty weird.”

  The gravity of the decision before the court can easily be perceived in hindsight, but there was little indication of what was on the line during the proceedings. “For a very young guy,” Stearns recalled, “Taylor was in a position of prominence. And he obviously embezzled huge amounts of money, which he wasn’t spending freely, so he was obviously banking something. He was reasonably educated and polished in his own way. But I did not honestly see him at that time as what he became, which was bloodthirsty.”

  Even in his growing paranoia, Doe may have had a lucid sense of the potential threat Taylor posed. His push to extradite Taylor came at a moment when the specter of a coup was becoming more real. The ranks of disaffected government officials were growing, and with them came rumors of hostile governments that were willing to provide sanctuary to members of the Liberian opposition, including Libya, Cuba, Ethiopia, and the USSR.19 The most tangible threat was in the United States, where Thomas Quiwonkpa had found haven before launching the first significant raid into Liberian territory during Doe’s regime in November 1983. Doe may have known well that Taylor and Quiwonkpa were in contact in the United States and that both were plotting a return to Liberia with the shared goal of achieving a Liberia without Samuel Doe.


  To return to Liberia a free man, Taylor needed first to break jail in Massachusetts and avoid extradition. Throughout his later political career, he would offer differing accounts of his escape, varying in detail and attribution but always serving the same purpose: to cultivate his own mystery and lend himself an intangible legitimacy.

  In 1992 he explained vaguely to the American novelist Denis Johnson, who had been sent by The New Yorker to profile the young warlord: “I wouldn’t even be in this country today if not for the CIA. My escape from the American jail in Boston—I think they must have arranged that. One night I was told that the gate to my cell wouldn’t be locked. That I could walk anywhere. I walked out of jail, down the steps, out into America. Nobody stopped me.”20

  In another version, Taylor recounted that a guard simply escorted him to the room where two other inmates had already completed sawing through the bars. “I don’t know who cut it,” he said, “but I think the guards had made these arrangements.”

  But according to one of the men who broke Taylor from jail, the truth was less fantastic. There was no official involvement, either from the government or prison officials. Instead, Taylor had arranged with another inmate, twenty-two-year-old Thomas Devoll, to engineer the escape.

  The jail, which was overcrowded and nearly a century old, had suffered multiple escapes in the decade prior.21 Devoll worked as the “runner,” the inmate responsible for doling out ice-cream sandwiches and microwaveable cheeseburgers from the prison canteen; as such, he had access to the span of the prison.22 The job gave him the opportunity to learn “every inch” of the place, as he recalled. Most important, he could map the daily rituals that made the jail function.