American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  Lynn called President Taylor, hysterically crying. Taylor had grown accustomed to these phone calls from his daughter-in-law, according to Lynn. But he grew upset when she relayed Chucky’s threat. Chucky was even more enraged when he heard that Lynn had contacted his father. Taylor warned his son that “he cannot go threatening me or my family, period,” according to Lynn.

  But Charles Taylor’s hands were tied; he could place his son under house arrest, but this was a temporary solution. Taylor was the most powerful man in Liberia, but his power was increasingly limited. He had no influence with or leverage against the foreign powers seeking to isolate him. He had little control over the countryside, where rebels operated relatively freely. And he had even less control over his son, who followed his own violent whims.

  In late 2001 Chucky invited Israel Akinsanya to join him on a trip to Singapore. According to Akinsanya, Chucky told him little about the nature of the trip other than that “he has his business partners he wants to see.”4 Chucky often kept things compartmentalized, Akinsanya said, but his account defies credibility. Not only had Akinsanya been closely involved with the Jeff House deal, he had good reason to deny knowledge of the details of Chucky’s trip. At that time, Chucky, along with dozens of members of Taylor’s government and certain associates, had been barred from international travel under new UN sanctions targeting the regime’s involvement in Sierra Leone.5

  For all his unpredictable behavior, Chucky remained loyal to his father in the face of the sanctions. The travel ban represented the first time the international community tied Chucky to his father’s regime, even though it made no mention of his nationality, which was not a well-known fact. For much of 2001, he simply withdrew from public life, making only occasional appearances at some of the late-night haunts that Taylor’s officials were known to frequent.

  Akinsanya had grown accustomed to Chucky’s tendency to drop out of society, holing up at his house, keeping nocturnal hours, and cutting himself off from outside contact. “I really didn’t have any close friends,” Chucky said. He felt culturally isolated as an American and suspicious that those around him saw something to gain in his friendship.

  Even as Chucky isolated himself, Akinsanya befriended Bernice, whom he described as something like a stage parent. “She was a very nice person, but you could tell that she was manipulative,” he recalled, saying that she was more than happy to use the fact that she was the mother of the president’s son for leverage.

  Mother and son fought bitterly, Akinsanya recalled, often about Chucky’s father. By both Akinsanya’s and his own account, Chucky was the lone voice of truth among the “sycophants” surrounding Charles Taylor. As the end of Taylor’s five-year term loomed, Chucky was candid with his father about the future. “There’s going to be elections in this country,” he told him, according to Akinsanya. “And if there are elections, you’re not going to win.”

  Taylor likely understood that. His administration had accomplished little or nothing in improving the lives of Liberians. The violence of the civil war had devolved into a low-grade conflict that he met with persistent repression of political enemies, dissidents, and journalists. And fear that war would return in force set in.

  When Chucky and Akinsanya landed in Geneva for a stopover en route to Singapore, it was a rare respite outside the region. He filled the few short hours between flights splurging on clothes and luxury watches. While Akinsanya said he wasn’t clear on whom they were traveling to see, a former Defense Department official said that Chucky made multiple trips to Singapore on the dime of Joseph Wong, a businessman connected to the Oriental Timber Company.6 Wong was linked to arms-for-timber transactions by UN investigators in a 2001 report to the Security Council that described large quantities of Liberian timber moving to Asian markets and moving weapons, which eventually fueled RUF offensives in Sierra Leone, to Liberia.7 “Chucky would go there [to Singapore] and drink and play with the girls,” the official said. “It got to the point that he was embarrassing Mr. Wong, so he told the president that he would not pay for [his son] anymore.”

  As the two men arrived in Singapore, Chucky began receiving phone calls from Liberia. Since March 2001, rebels had staged several attacks in Lofa County, and President Taylor was growing concerned. The fighting in the bush was chaotic—government forces engaged the rebels and then, at times, fought one another to secure looting rights over an area. By October the situation briefly stabilized, but the damage was significant. The town of Zorzor was razed, UN investigators passing through the area noted, and on the rural back roads, armed young men crammed into the beds of Isuzu pickups.8

  Taylor wanted his son to return, not just to Liberia but also to his security forces. According to Akinsanya, Chucky—who was typically emotionally reserved—opened up to him for once. He wasn’t comfortable with the identity he had created for himself in Liberia.9 “I didn’t realize how much people were afraid of me until after I left the military,” Chucky told him.

  “How did you realize that?” Akinsanya said.

  “I started to hear about myself … that people were generally afraid of me,” he said. Chucky thought his reputation as his father’s enforcer was unfair. It was a self-serving—if not outright dishonest—response, given how he had gone to great lengths to create an aura of intimidation. Akinsanya nonetheless took the comments at face value.

  “I just sit here, and I’m jealous of my sisters,” Chucky told Akinsanya. “Do you think I don’t want to be in Switzerland going to college?” At least one of Chucky’s stepsisters attended Collége du Léman, an exclusive boarding school in Geneva. “I want to tap into those fruits of the tree.” Chucky appeared like “a wounded animal” to Akinsanya as he explained the impossibility of being relied upon as a military commander, while wanting more from life than war and the struggle for power. “I’m caught,” he told Akinsanya, “between loyalty to my dad and having to protect this thing here and watching my other siblings progress.”

  Akinsanya didn’t know what to tell him. He could see that Chucky was in pain. “This was just a twenty-two- or twenty-three-year-old kid with immense power and responsibility—what was he supposed to do with it?”

  But Chucky didn’t just have power and responsibility—he had privilege and access. He never evinced a crisis of conscience, and he publicly took issue with his father’s failures only after it was too late. He relished his role as a military adviser and strategist, but he wanted no accountability for the results of his father’s policies. As the two prepared to return to Liberia, Chucky told Akinsanya that he didn’t want the path that his father had laid out for him.

  “I want to move on with my life,” Chucky told him “and he’s calling me back to war.”

  11

  Satan and The Prophet

  Wit my tru war soldiers, Army Thugs United, aint no time we divided.

  —United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE-4

  In the summer of 2001, Robert Ferguson, an operations coordinator hired to work for the U.S. embassy’s defense attaché, arrived in Monrovia.1 Ferguson, an ex–Air Force mechanic, had served in the Gulf War maintaining A-10s, but he had seen more action at his prior posting in Jakarta, where he had been when Suharto stepped down in May 1998, causing the capital to erupt in rioting. Apart from receiving a State Department country briefing and doing some of his own research, he arrived in Liberia with limited knowledge of the country. He had never been to sub-Saharan Africa, knew little of the war in Liberia and the developing conflict, and had only a cursory sense of the cast of players he’d encounter in Monrovia. But almost as soon as he landed in town, he heard the name Chucky Taylor.

  Ferguson—whom nearly everyone referred to as Fergy—arrived at a tense moment between the embassy and the Liberian government. The man he was meant to replace had been shot by Taylor’s forces weeks before. Earlier that summer Taylor’s security forces had begun enforcing a curfew throughout Monrovia. In June, Ferguson’s predecessor, Sgt. James Michael Newton, had
been driving through the capital shortly before dawn when, according to the Liberian government, he burst through an ATU checkpoint at high speed.2 The ATU officer on duty opened fire, wounding the sergeant. Newton was later evacuated to Ivory Coast for medical treatment. The U.S. embassy issued a statement saying it “was an isolated incident that was not related to any anti-US sentiment.” Former ATU officers and an American diplomat blamed Newton for disobeying the order to stop. But one former ATU commander, Gen. John Tarnue, said the shooting had been “premeditated” and that Benjamin Yeaten, Momoh Gibba, and Chucky had authorized it because “the US military attachés were spies.”3 The State Department released no further information. So Ferguson had reason to be cautious, but he also had to get close to the leadership of the security forces.

  The Clinton administration had cemented its view of Charles Taylor—the continuing violence in Sierra Leone, not the repression of his own people, had been the breaking point. Several months earlier, in a December 9, 2000, cable titled “Liberia: Undermining Charles Taylor,” Washington indicated that it was working on a “long-term campaign” against Taylor and solicited the Monrovia embassy’s “assistance in developing information required to weaken and discredit the Taylor government internationally.”4 The United States hoped to rally support for sanctions against Taylor’s government, the cable explained. “The success of our efforts at the UN will depend in large measure on our ability to convince other UN members of what we already know—that Charles Taylor is instigating cross-border conflict, trafficking arms, looting resources (Liberia’s and neighboring nations) and, in general, sowing instability throughout West Africa.”

  Washington asked Monrovia for evidence “demonstrating conclusively that Taylor is the driving force behind much of the violence and deepening human misery in the region”; obtaining it “is an important, ongoing [U.S. government] priority,” according to the cable. The author of the cable, William M. Bellamy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said the request was not connected to a prosecution of Taylor; rather, “it was specifically to find a way to stop the bleeding, to get this crisis under control in West Africa.”5

  Not long after his arrival, Ferguson ventured out to test the Monrovia nightlife. Nighttime in Monrovia was unlike nighttime in most capital cities around the world: the lack of electricity turned the streets into black, darkened lanes illuminated only by lights from the homes and apartment buildings that were fortunate enough to be fed by generator power. During the rainy season, a bolt of lightning would momentarily sear the darkness with white light, capturing luminescent still lifes of the urban landscape; then the streets would return to darkness. Night was also the time of activity for Taylor and his son.

  The Pepper Bush, a Monrovia nightclub, was a favored spot for Taylor insiders. And it was there that Ferguson had his first run-in with Chucky. The incident, which would eventually become a part of popular lore, was a clash between two strong personalities. Ferguson made little effort to keep a low profile at the Pepper Bush; he stepped out onto the dance floor and began dancing with one of the women in Chucky’s entourage. The American diplomat had clearly—and perhaps deliberately—crossed a line. Chucky’s colleagues saw it as a gutsy provocation, to which the president’s son was obligated to respond. Chucky called Fergy across the club to threaten him.

  The diplomat was unfazed. “I don’t give a shit,” he recalled telling Chucky. “Look, you’re not going to do anything to a U.S. diplomat. Your daddy would have you killed quicker than shit.” 6

  The interaction ended there. Ferguson had quickly established a reputation as an American diplomat who wasn’t easily intimidated. His response was particularly bold given the fate of his predecessor. Liberia was becoming a more dangerous place by the day, and the pressures on Taylor were increasing. Ferguson was dismissive of his role—he called himself “a secretary”—but few diplomats were willing to engage these men as closely as he did, and he would remain engaged through Taylor’s fall from power.

  Taylor’s concerns were larger than his son’s run-ins at nightclubs. By May 2001 insurgents had overrun much of Lofa County. The Taylor government was unable to ascertain who the fighters were or the exact nature of their grievance. It was clear that the rebels had military support from Guinea, which—in comparison to Sierra Leone and Liberia—more closely resembled a conventional military power. The attacks in Lofa showed a level of sophistication and matériel not typical of a bush army. A Lebanese merchant who witnessed an attack reported to the embassy that an organized ambush on an ATU truck had killed six fighters and wounded more than a dozen.7 In the past, Taylor had retaliated against incursions from Guinea both with Liberian forces and with RUF proxies, attacking towns in Guinea like Macenta and Nzérékoré, killing and forcing the displacement of thousands of civilians. Even if there was something of a moral equivalence to the tit-for-tat fighting, the violence provided the Guineans with a grievance to air to the international community.

  Not surprisingly, this uptick in violence flowing across the Guinean border coincided with an increase in U.S. support for the government in Conakry, Guinea’s capital. American Special Forces began training members of the Beret Rouge, an elite Guinean military unit.8 Earlier that year the Conakry embassy had asked Secretary of State Colin Powell to “put some money on the Guinean forces.”9 It drew the situation in dramatic terms: “Guinea has been under attack by forces consisting primarily of RUF and Liberian combatants but including an assortment of mercenaries and dissidents, orchestrated by Charles Taylor, the root cause (to use USG phraseology) of instability in the sub-region.” The Defense Department ultimately authorized a “lethal (offensive) training” program involving a detachment of U.S. Special Operations forces.10

  William Bellamy, the State Department official who had worked on a strategy to isolate Taylor, visited the Guinean border regions, which suffered from an influx of refugees following cross-border assaults from Liberian and RUF forces. He saw the U.S. Special Forces training missions as a “morale booster” to the Guineans who had reinforced the area. The training, which occurred at Nzérékoré, a Guinean border town closer to Monrovia than to Conakry, alarmed Taylor. Insurgents who were captured by Liberian forces, Taylor later testified, acknowledged that they’d received training by U.S. military personnel in Guinea before staging attacks in Liberia.

  The United States was able to maintain deniability of involvement with the rebels. In his memoir, My Friend the Mercenary, British journalist James Brabazon wrote that an American defense intelligence official known simply as “Frank” directly brokered his access to the rebel group seeking to oust Taylor.11 The Americans were, in part, motivated by the fact that they had no visibility into rebel activities in Liberia and wanted to see the footage Brabazon returned with. The one condition, Brabazon said, was that he “agree not to disclose the details of the armaments the rebels received from the American-backed government in Guinea.”

  But defense officials in Guinea did little to conceal their relationship with the anti-Taylor faction. President Lansana Conté was incensed by the continued assaults on his territory from Liberian-backed Guinean dissidents—they had briefly overtaken the town of Guékédou in December 2000. Conté repudiated the action in a statement to the United Nations, accusing the RUF and Liberian forces of direct responsibility for “625 deaths, 293 seriously wounded, 127 missing and 59,604 displaced.”12 For Conté, Taylor was not a man with whom you could negotiate.

  “Satan has his role to play,” Conté, a Muslim, told the American ambassador to the UN, Thomas Pickering. “But Satan and the prophet don’t understand each other.”13

  The fighting pushed Conté closer to Liberian dissidents in Conakry who sought to depose Taylor. When the group sought Guinean military assistance, Conté insisted that he have a hand in who would be named the leader of the new faction. His favored choice won out: Sekou Conneh, who was married to the president’s spiritual adviser. The dissidents formed under yet another a
cronym in Liberia’s seemingly endless civil war: LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy).

  Around this time, the United States dramatically increased weapons sales to Guinea. Arms sales jumped from $500,000 for 2001 to $3 million for 2002.14 It was a drop in the bucket in terms of overall global military assistance, but in a region where small arms drove much of the conflict, it was significant. The Defense Department also loaned Guinea $3 million under a low-interest grant and loan program to purchase the weapons. All this support was overt. Taylor was well aware of the United States’ sudden interest in his neighbor and suspected the training program provided cover for a covert American support for the rebels attacking Liberia.

  In early 2001 the U.S. military’s objectives in Africa were extraordinarily vague. The official policy was “to increase the number of capable states in Africa … to build stability and peace within their borders and their sub regions,” as the Unified Command Plan for Sub-Saharan Africa stated. There was little room for Taylor’s Liberia within this vision; for Taylor, politics was about war, not governance. He had drawn power not from the people who elected him but by keeping his enemies on their heels and allowing his followers to take financial advantage of regional insecurity. This was entirely at odds with the American vision, which sought stability above all else.

  After September 2001, the U.S. military interest in Africa would shift toward combating terrorism. Taylor historically had never been linked to terror groups, although a December 2002 Washington Post report based on Western intelligence reports alleged that the summer prior to the 9/11 attacks he had hosted two Al Qaeda operatives at the ATU’s Gbatala base. The men—identified by the Post as Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed—were allegedly converting Al Qaeda cash to diamonds in anticipation of an American crackdown. A former ATU commander who learned of the men’s presence said that their motives were apparent only in hindsight. “Nobody knew anything [about] the guys that we were helping them—what their intention [was], who the identity of the guys were,” he said, doubting that Taylor understood the gravity of his involvement with them.15 “Taylor at that time worked very hard to be in America’s favor, so for him to work with Al Qaeda would not have been smart.” In fact, when he met with Ambassador Myrick on September 14, 2001, Taylor appeared “emotionally shaken by the terrorist attacks on the United States.”16 The apparent connection to the terrorist group—as ephemeral as it appeared to be—would only further damage Taylor’s reputation in the eyes of the West. He began to fear that the United States and its allies sought to physically take him out of the equation.