by Johnny Dwyer
The embassy guards refused Johnson’s men entry into the compound. But when it became clear that the lives of the fighters were in imminent danger, U.S. security officers allowed the men behind a retaining wall shielding the entryway. They were safe for a time, but Taylor’s forces gathered outside demanding their release, ratcheting up the pressure on the diplomats.
That tension quickly boiled over. According to a State Department account, Taylor’s police chief ordered his forces to “go get them.”38 The soldiers’ fusillade of fire cut down three of Roosevelt’s men in an instant, while a fourth died moments after slipping through a turnstile into the embassy compound. Two American contractors were hit in the exchange—one returned fire, killing two of Taylor’s men. In the frantic fire, a lone RPG arced over the embassy compound, falling harmlessly into the ocean. Six survivors—Roosevelt Johnson included—leaped through the turnstile to the safety of the embassy grounds and, effectively, into the care of the United States. (The U.S. government would later evacuate the men to Ghana, despite Taylor’s government’s calls for them to be turned over into Liberian custody.39)
The U.S. government responded forcefully to the assault on its embassy, demanding an apology from Taylor’s government and seeking a UN investigation.40 A detachment of seventeen Navy SEALs was sent to take up a position two thousand yards offshore, poised to intercede in any further threats on the embassy.41
American officials directly implicated Taylor’s fighters in the incident. “There is a concern that Liberian security forces are ill-disciplined and potentially dangerous,” Deputy Secretary of Defense for Africa Vicki Huddleston told Taylor’s foreign minister.42
It was the first public atrocity connected to the president’s son. The incident illustrated both the breadth and the limits of Taylor’s new power. The force that assaulted Camp Johnson Road had easily overwhelmed the Krahn opposition, although it was not an elite security unit. In the days afterward, witnesses reported executions of Krahn men carried out in broad daylight near the U.S. embassy. Members of the Krahn community accused Chucky and his men of “killing hundreds of innocent people including women, children and the elderly.”43
The firefight at the gates of the embassy demonstrated not only Taylor’s lack of control over his fighters and commanders but also their complete lack of respect for the international law that protected the embassy from such assaults. The embassy quickly evacuated much of its staff, including those wounded in the attack. American officials spent the next two months soliciting a reluctant apology from Taylor for the behavior of his security forces. The question of whether Taylor could convert his militias into professional fighting forces—and whether his son was in any position to be a leader—became particularly acute.
But shortly after the incident, the training cycle at Gbatala, so recently begun, ended. Once the initial batch of recruits had been deployed to Monrovia, Dave and Robert never returned to the base.44 One senior commander insisted that the men had quit out of frustration. Lynn learned that there had been an altercation—Chucky and Dave had come to blows—though Chucky wouldn’t reveal exactly what had happened. When Christopher Menephar later returned to Gbatala, he was told that Taylor had provided Dave and Robert with $3 million to purchase additional equipment and weapons. They disappeared, never to be heard from again.
7
Uprising
So when you see in the streets with the killers dat be, have your mother fuckin soldiers reportin to me.
—United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE-4
A bell sounded across the camp. An order was shouted: “Movement, cease!”1 This meant to those training at Gbatala that Chucky had arrived. Word passed quickly over the rocky hillside, and recruits mustered in a field at the foot of a granite cliff face, standing to attention as they were addressed by their commanding officer, the president’s son.
By early 1999, Chucky had emerged as the leader of the unit—the “Chief,” as he was referred to. He began sculpting the group’s identity. Initially it had been named the Executive Mansion Special Security Unit, but it took on a new name that reflected more than a protective detail: the Anti-Terrorist Unit, or ATU. Chucky oversaw the creation of an emblem that each fighter would wear: a crest with a cartoonish rendering of a red-eyed cobra and a green scorpion under the unit’s name.2
The departure of Dave and Robert had left the ATU without the professional military training it badly needed. Chucky’s father moved ahead anyway with the clandestine recruitment of both low-level fighters and new trainers. When the members of the unit returned to Gbatala in January 1999, they were accompanied by a new class of recruits and met at the base by a squad of white South African mercenaries, hired to shape them into a professional force.
In the 1990s military expertise was just another item for sale on the West African black market. Violence in Angola and Sierra Leone was standard fare, within essentially illicit economies. Mercenaries thrived, enjoying quasi-legitimacy as weak governments like that of Sierra Leone hired professional soldiers to succeed where their own military forces had failed.
The South Africans whom Charles Taylor had hired as trainers included Oscar, a short man with an awkward hopping limp from a bullet wound; Menno Uys, a tall, muscular former member of the South African Special Forces Brigade (“the Recces”) with a cleanly shaved head and a slightly twisted sense of humor; and Phelps, a barrel-chested bantam with enormous hands. Two others, Faber and Gerry, oversaw the training program and syllabi.3 These men came to the job as veterans of Angola and Sierra Leone, having served in both the regular South African military and in the infamous mercenary group Executive Outcomes.4
Taylor had learned a painful lesson about the effectiveness of mercenary forces in Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leonean government engaged in a novel solution to confront the RUF: it contracted Executive Outcomes to mount an offensive against the rebel group.5 Comprised largely of apartheid-era veterans of the South African Defense Forces, Executive Outcomes achieved a quick victory. It overwhelmed the rebels through a decisive combination of superior tactics and firepower, including the use of helicopter gunships, armored vehicles, and tanks. In 1997, when Taylor started looking to improve his own security forces, according to UN investigators, a business associate suggested a former South African Defense Force colonel named Fred Rindel who was not connected directly to Executive Outcomes but shared a similar background and experience.6
Rindel had become a fixture in African countries where war and diamonds found a nexus.7 He had fought in Angola with the South African Defense Forces in support of an anticommunist rebel group, UNITA, which was also supported by the United States. That conflict reflected the typical Cold War antagonism, as Cuba and the Soviet Union threw their arms and expertise behind the Socialist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the diamond trade drove the economics of the war. In 1994, according to a book by Executive Outcomes founder Eeben Barlow, Rindel graduated from fighting to serving as a liaison between the diamond giant De Beers and the Angolan rebels trafficking gems out of the war zone. Later he, like many of his colleagues in search of diamonds, gravitated toward Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The South Africans’ experience in Angola provided an example for the crises he encountered there: both were resource-rich nations enduring upheaval after being detached from their international patrons. These men brought with them not only combat experience but business acumen—especially in the diamond business. Many former members of the apartheid-era military were urgently seeking economic opportunities outside South Africa in the postapartheid mid-1990s.8
These private military companies were also controversial: the South African government responded to their emergence by passing the Foreign Military Assistance Act in 1998, requiring the outfits to register for authorization to provide military training to other governments.9 The Mandela government effectively put overt mercenary operations out of business. Yet there remained some gray area for t
he groups to continue operating. When Charles Taylor hired Fred Rindel, the South African did not seek authorization because, in his view, “his services were purely of a protective nature and did not include any combat training, or training of armed forces in Liberia.”10
The scene at the Gbatala training base directly contradicted this assertion. The South Africans attempted to re-create conventional military-quality basic training, beginning with a course on hygiene, drill and ceremony, and self- and regimental discipline.11 After a breakfast of oatmeal or Cream of Wheat and hot tea, the recruits sat for lectures on codes of conduct, communications, and marksmanship—what recruits called “sniping.” For weeks, the training was limited to physical conditioning and classroom instruction. Eventually, the trainers permitted the men to handle weapons, training them in how to clean and disassemble AK-47s, Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, and American-made Glock 9mm pistols.
Ultimately, the South Africans split the recruits into two companies: Alpha and Bravo. The training progressed with squad, platoon, and company leadership courses. The objective was not only to develop a well-trained force but also to create a leadership pool that could train future recruits.
But these fighters weren’t fresh-faced volunteers—they had already experienced combat, of the chaotic, disorganized, and brutal type characteristic of Liberia’s bush war. Their experience on the battlefield was a liability: they were not disciplined fighters and had no proficiency with their weapons and minimal understanding of tactics. Many had witnessed, if not committed, atrocities unbecoming to any member of a professional fighting force. Violence bound these men together, and it would be the primary language in which Chucky communicated to them. On one visit to the base, Chucky warned his recruits, “Gentlemen, this is training base. When you come here, you abide by our own law. When you go above the law, the law will lay hand on you.”12
Western militaries favored humiliation, intimidation, work, and exercise as tools to control the behavior of recruits, but Chucky’s preferred method was corporal punishment. He wanted the ATU to be held to a higher standard than the previous security forces surrounding his father, but lacking any military training himself, he did not understand the deleterious impact of force. As a result, the Liberian commanders employed a training regimen even harsher than that of the South Africans. Recruits arriving at Gbatala were subjected to “Zero Week,” a combination of starvation, intense physical training, and dangerous—and in some cases fatal—obstacle courses. Sometimes men were mowed down in live-fire exercises; others, according to one former fighter, were burned alive during rope drills over flaming barrels of gasoline. Still others were beaten as they were forced to carry massive logs. One recruit described receiving twenty-five lashes from his own best friend, on Chucky’s orders.13 His crime: failing to hit a bottle during target practice. It was violent hazing under the guise of military training. The trainees came away with little more than fear of Chucky.
Veterans of Taylor’s revolution who underwent the training at Gbatala didn’t take the president’s son seriously, but they were obligated to follow his orders.14 He was young and inexperienced and seemed to have little idea of the realities of fighting a bush war in West Africa. At one point, he appeared on the base with DVDs of the Hollywood action movies Delta Force and Air Force One and made the men watch the films to give them something to emulate.
The NPFL veterans weren’t the only ones skeptical of Chucky. Fred Rindel also had little regard for the president’s son.15 He didn’t let that feeling get in the way of his business interests, however. When corresponding with Chucky, he struck a respectful tone—though likely out of deference to Charles Taylor rather than the son.16
Despite the ongoing arms embargo, President Taylor hoped to grow and arm the force quickly, but Rindel cautioned Chucky against this expectation: “I think we need to sit down and plan this through for the government so that we have a total approach. You are the client and we will supply what you request but in the last 7 months we have gained insight and experience of the situation so we too have a far better idea on how to approach the situation. We are also aware of the restrictions that you have to live with and we now know ways and means of assisting you in getting around them.”17 While Rindel wouldn’t comment in detail, the “restrictions” that both he and the Taylor administration faced were clear: neither man could allow the military training to become public while it was active lest it draw scrutiny from the South African government and from the UN Security Council, which was monitoring Liberia’s compliance with the arms embargo.
For Taylor, domestic political concerns also drove the secrecy. First and foremost, the creation of a new unit was a clear violation of the Liberian constitution. In December 1999 Taylor opened a personal account to bankroll arms purchases and pay his security forces.18 Years later he would testify before the Special Court for Sierra Leone that he had done so with the acquiescence of the legislature. But by creating, operating, and funding his own unit, the president circumvented the government payroll, avoiding the politically sticky fact that his new recruits were being paid salaries of $250 per month—more than most government ministers made at that time. He also avoided the issue of the Armed Forces of Liberia. The AFL had the legal authority to act as the nation’s military force, but it remained staffed by traditional opponents of Taylor.19 Rather than dissolve the AFL and provoke a potential public clash, he sought to emasculate it by forcing veterans into retirement and depriving the remaining combatants of funding, training, and weapons.
The source of the money flowing into Taylor’s account for the Anti-Terrorist Unit was also necessarily covert. To bankroll this account, he relied on timber revenues, taxes, and donations from the Taiwanese government.20 The Taiwanese motives were plain: they sought official recognition of their statehood from Liberia.21 Taiwanese officials had contributed approximately $1 million to Taylor’s political campaign to this end, and as Taylor assumed power, Taiwan became the largest international donor to the Liberian government (a position for which there was little competition).22
International aid was intended for infrastructure and relief costs, but some of it was diverted to Taylor’s increasingly expensive covert security program. The South African trainers alone cost more than $100,000 each month.23 Even so, the training program suffered from what Rindel saw as a lack of internal leadership.24 “I only have one concern that I would care to highlight and that is the leader group … they do not have the necessary leadership skills and this is something that is essential.” Rindel, who tolerated Chucky only because President Taylor wanted his son involved, thought the problem extended up the chain of command.
“Taylor Jr. had no capabilities as anything,” he later said.25
Charles Taylor, meanwhile, hadn’t yielded leadership of the new unit entirely to his son. In late 1998 or early 1999, he appointed a base commandant to work under Chucky and oversee the day-to-day training of the two companies at Gbatala.26 But he did not choose a Liberian. Again, as with Jacques, he relied on a Gambian, a mercenary named David Campari, to live at the site and serve as the disciplinarian. Campari, formerly posted to Maryland County, had a reputation for being “wicked”—a Liberian word for extreme evil. In his forties, more than two decades older than many of the recruits, Campari was nonetheless menacing. To the consternation of the South African trainers, he announced his arrival on base by firing off a fusillade of live rounds over the recruits’ heads.
Campari soon further set the tone for his presence on the base. He had brought two other Gambians with him, an aide and a personal medicine man. He believed strongly in juju, and as the recruits watched, the medicine man prepared his quarters by slaughtering a goat and spreading the animal’s blood over the doorway. Campari was suspicious of other spiritual practices on the base. Many of the recruits were Christians, but he would allow them only thirty minutes for Sunday morning services, posting a military police detail to watch over them, weapons ready. “You are praying against
me,” he accused the men.
Campari shared one belief with Chucky: the necessity of harsh punishment. He enforced discipline using recruits designated as military police, or MPs. These soldiers were responsible for carrying out any order given by the commanders. Many recruits tried to avoid this type of detail, as well as serving at checkpoints and acting as a bodyguard, because as one trainee explained, you were required to “implement orders that I may not want to implement and I [would] be forced to implement them.”27
The structured training regimen that the South Africans had established at Gbatala soon gave way to the arbitrary and impulsive whims of Campari. Daily life was governed by his moods and the amount of liquor he had consumed. On some days recruits were ordered to stand at attention for four or five hours at a time, but the punishment didn’t lead to better discipline in the ranks. Some fighters sneaked off into the village to drink or consort with local women; when one senior officer, Morris Gbleh, returned to the camp drunk, walking up a darkened path, rather than identify himself to the sentry, he simply shot the man.
The true face of Chucky’s leadership became apparent not long after Campari’s arrival. In early 1999 Taylor entrusted his son with $50,000 in cash to cover the expenses of the base: construction, food, and payroll for the fighters. This infusion was necessary to maintain the secrecy of the training program, but it came with inherent risks; before long, Chucky discovered several recruits pilfering funds.
Christopher Menephar was posted at Gbatala sometime later when he received a call from an aide to Chucky named Tarnue Gizzie. The aide asked Menephar who was on the base at that time. Menephar responded that at that moment, he was the ranking officer, since the other leaders were absent. Gizzie told Menephar he would be driving from Monrovia, bringing prisoners.
