by Johnny Dwyer
When Taylor met with a European Union delegation in June 2001 regarding the violence in Lofa that summer, he did little to restrain his growing anger. The United Nations had just slapped Liberia with a round of sanctions on travel of senior officials, as well as on the trade in diamonds and arms; it further boxed Taylor in, ratcheting up the tension between his administration and Western powers. The U.S. embassy source present at the meeting, whose name has been redacted from the cable, noticed that “Taylor appeared tired and his face puffy.”17
Taylor stopped short of directly accusing the Americans of supporting the rebels, instead directing his allegations to the British, who had taken an active role in enforcing the peace accords in Sierra Leone. To make his point clear, he placed a spent mortar shell and empty ammunition box on the table with what appeared to be British markings—though the embassy source present questioned their authenticity. This was not the first time Taylor had made this accusation, but the response to it in the past had been tepid.
“If Guinea wants war,” Taylor warned the European delegation, “we will give it to them.” As he stormed out of the meeting, the embassy officer noticed the president was wearing a bulletproof vest.
After receiving the call in Singapore, Chucky had returned to the war effort as the general officer commanding the ATU, an impressive title but of no real military significance. The responsibility of managing the war against the insurgents had been given to Benjamin Yeaten, leading a set of former militia commanders.
By early 2002, Taylor’s options were rapidly diminishing; he had underestimated the enemy. The group that Conté backed had quickly graduated from a loose band of exiled dissidents to an existential threat to Taylor’s presidency.
The rebels’ confidence proved that Taylor’s war effort in Lofa had not gone well. To a visiting U.S. congressional delegation in April 2002, Taylor acknowledged that his militia fighters were ill trained and, on good days, given more to harassing and looting civilians than to fighting.18 Rather than take responsibility, however, he sought to tie the threat of war to the lack of support from the international community. The United Nations had launched a program to disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate Liberian rebels in 1997, but it was ineffective. Yet similar programs in nearly a dozen other African nations including Congo, Angola, Mozambique, and Rwanda had had more success in disarming and redirecting the fighters who had made civil war a way of life. It was a vintage Taylorism: he had created the war machine that had initiated the destruction of his country, including his son’s ATU, but he couldn’t be held responsible for the ongoing consequences.
As the countryside began to fall to rebel control, the war consumed Taylor’s presidency. At times he summoned the language the Bush administration had introduced following 9/11, referring to the rebels as “terrorists” and calling prisoners “illegal combatants,” hoping to paint his fight against the insurgents with the antiterrorist brush.19 In February 2002 he declared a state of emergency. He justified it by pointing to an ambush that had occurred at Kle Junction, less than twenty miles from Monrovia, but some saw it as an effort to forestall the elections that were scheduled to take place the following year.
Taylor was also making drastic defense decisions. Much over Chucky’s objection, he reconstituted the civil war–era militia divisions under commanders he could trust: Roland Duo, Benjamin Yeaten, and Coocoo Dennis.20 Years later Chucky would point this out to distance himself from the increasingly disorganized military force backing Taylor. “I held no authority over the reinstated untrained militia division commanders and there [sic] men,” he wrote in a letter. “Nor was I responsible for the mixing of trained & untrained forces, the hyperexpansion of ATU, dismissal of stringent recruitment standards, total breakdown of discipline and return of some ATU personnel back to fight under these various untrained, structurally unsound militia commands.”
The reemergence of the militias represented something of an abdication for Taylor. Other than Yeaten, these men had played a marginal role in the early years of Taylor’s administration. But now as frontline commanders, they were given the mandate to reactivate the network of fighters they had led during the civil war. These men had brought him to power but also caused great destruction to Liberia. “I held the presidents [sic] ear as many others did,” Chucky reflected in a letter. “I along with others should have pushed for a strong mandate of greater discipline, oversight among the forces engaged in the war.”
Even as they grew apart strategically, father and son were driven together by circumstance. In only a few months, the sanctions had depressed the already ravaged economy, and defending the capital became the priority. Neither man could leave the country without defying the travel ban. The limitless opportunity that both had seemed to relish when Taylor entered office five years earlier had been reduced to a binary choice: fight or surrender. The men were in a position to do neither.
Over the prior year, the collapse of his father’s power was mirrored by Chucky’s personal decline. He would periodically binge on drugs—what those close to him believed was cocaine and heroin—then sleep for days on end, disappearing from public view. His already small circle of friends dwindled to the handful of men who did not fear him. But even those friends willing to endure his company were not immune to his violent temper. One day his car broke down in traffic while he and a friend, Wisam Fawaz, were driving in downtown Monrovia.21 As they inspected the engine, the hood accidentally slammed down on Chucky’s head. Humiliated and furious, Chucky lashed out, beating Fawaz in the middle of traffic.
As trivial as the incident seemed compared with other acts of violence, the beating marked the watershed moment for those surrounding Chucky. According to Samuel “Pi” Nimley, an ATU commander and confidant of Chucky, Liberians who had read about the abuses at Gbatala and heard rumors of Chucky’s predatory behavior came to view him as categorically evil. They believed that “he was born a demon.… He was just born bad. He make the people fear him so much,” Nimley recalled. “They have a saying, ‘When his mom gave birth to him, he slapped the doctor instead of the doctor slapping him.’ ”
The notion that Chucky bore a curse became popular in Monrovia, reinforced by the birth of a disabled son by a Liberian girlfriend. Chucky and Lynn remained estranged, and she had no knowledge of the child. Many took the boy’s birth defect—a shortened arm—to be a mark of his father’s transgressions. Chucky rejected the boy, refusing to acknowledge that he was the father; the mother later left the country, to raise the child in England.
In April LURD rebels launched another attack on the capital, surprising Taylor’s forces with an assault that swept down from Bomi Hills to Bushrod Island within Monrovia in a matter of hours. The rebels quickly withdrew, but the attack had demonstrated how vulnerable the capital was.
Chucky and an ATU unit of approximately two hundred fighters scrambled to assess the damage that had been done to one of President Taylor’s properties.22 A convoy of trucks departed Monrovia, including a pickup truck with an antiaircraft weapon mounted in the cab, following the Bomi Hills highway into the bush. Ferguson, the American diplomat, trailed the group out to the countryside.
A larger force awaited the ATU, and a firefight broke out. Very quickly, the ATU members realized that the rebels outgunned them and that they were on the verge of being overrun. “We need to go,” Ferguson, who witnessed the fight, recalled one of the fighters shouting.23 But Chucky continued firing on the enemy, either oblivious to or unconcerned with the danger.
In the confusion, the ATU convoy staged a hasty retreat, fleeing back toward Monrovia, stranding Chucky. Fearing the consequence of the president’s son being captured, the unit turned back into the fire to retrieve him. By the time they reached him, he had been hit in the hand with a ricochet. Nimley, an ATU commander who was present, laughed as he recalled how the situation quickly deteriorated and Chucky and his men found themselves fighting for their lives.24 “He handled himself well and took control of the day,” he re
called. “That saved lives.”
Ferguson disagreed, saying that Chucky had been “playing Rambo.” He considered the mission in Bomi Hills an ill-advised armed adventure characteristic of the slipshod and unprofessional approach of Taylor’s military. He had an equally withering assessment of the ATU: “This was just a bunch of people who had weapons in a country that nobody cared about.”
The incident was too much for Charles Taylor; fearing the propaganda coup should his son fall into enemy hands, he forbade Chucky to return to the front. The ATU also learned from the incident. No longer would it run headlong into a fight with an unknown number of enemy. Later, when the rebels attempted to breach the city again, the ATU drew them into an effective ambush along the road leading into Bushrod Island; attacking from the rear, they trapped the rebels. But the victory was modest. It did little to forestall the inevitable rebel march on Monrovia.
In May 2002 a Washington, D.C.–based security company, GlobalOptions, approached President Taylor forwarding a “Proposal for Services.”25 Taylor’s ascendance to power had lured plenty of opportunists seeking to make money off of Liberia’s misery, but GlobalOptions stood out as an American company with a unique pedigree. The company’s proposal offered the services of Tom Coulter, “a former Commanding Officer of SEAL Team Three, and Chief Staff Officer of Naval Special Warfare, Group Two”; and of Randy Lubischer, “a retired US Marine combat veteran with 20 years of service.” Lubischer’s biography listed experience in conducting “numerous vulnerability and force protection assessments of many U.S. Embassies and Military facilities throughout the world”—a point Chucky underlined. The proposal put forward a three-step approach to Taylor’s security situation: an evaluation of Liberia’s fighting forces, a sixty-to-ninety-day intensive training course, and a reevaluation and appraisal of next steps. “Conflict does not take place within the sterile confines of a classroom and our training will reflect this,” the proposal read. The company proposed training in “sniping,” “demolitions,” and “parachuting” but was also—paradoxically—careful to indicate it wished to “assist President Charles Taylor and the Government of Liberia, in a manner consistent with United Nations directives.”
Chucky’s father needed to find an upper hand against the new rebels. It wasn’t clear whether a team of American ex–Special Operations would provide that. Nor was it completely clear that these men could be trusted. From his earliest days as a warlord, Taylor had sought an official U.S. military presence in Liberia; GlobalOptions was the antithesis of that—private, ideologically opaque, and of little political value. And it was expensive: GlobalOptions quoted several proposals, from ninety-day to one-year engagements involving from six to twelve trainers at a cost of $373,462.50 to $2,437,310. On the last page of the proposal, Chucky underlined a recommendation that Taylor should “at least consider entering into preliminary negations [sic] with Liberian United for Reconciliation and Development [sic],” saying “these negotiations will allow the Liberian government time to train and equip its forces for defensive purposes, with the assistance of GlobalOptions.”
That recommendation, tucked at the tail end of the document, neatly dovetailed with the developing strategy of the U.S. embassy to head off an armed fight for Monrovia with a political solution. Taylor came to suspect the American contractors were working with his enemies, so the engagement never went further, and Taylor was left to prosecute the war on his own.26 The fighting persisted with a familiar cadence: the rebels would overrun a town, and then Taylor would send in the ATU to flush them out. The rebels, however, wanted more than a seat at the table—they wanted Taylor gone. In Liberia the options for Charles Taylor—and Chucky—had narrowed to one: a fight for survival.
The war, as it had in the past, became an end unto itself—a paycheck for the rebels, opposition leaders, and freelance militia fighters. The rebels used their gains against Taylor to rally support from outside governments, who wished to keep the pressure on him leading into the elections scheduled for 2004. The rebels, while politically geared toward deposing Taylor, hardly represented a force for good in Liberia: they sacked villages and massacred civilians just as the government forces did. Taylor also faced internal pressure. Members of the militias that had been brought in to augment the ATU were not loyal to him. Many saw the fighting as a platform to pillage—and switched sides as soon as the momentum shifted against Taylor.
In June 2002 the war took a more personal turn for Taylor.27 The rebels overran and sacked his home village of Arthington, where Chucky’s ancestors had first arrived more than a century earlier. The rebels torched a home belonging to Taylor’s family. The fighting in the president’s ancestral home was both a strategic and a symbolic defeat, but the fear it created in Monrovia was real—the distant sound of the mortars could be heard within the capital, which was already swollen with civilians fleeing the fighting in the countryside. The ATU swept into Arthington soon afterward to flush out the LURD fighters, but the psychological damage had been done. The town had nearly been destroyed.
That month Charles Taylor’s convoy appeared on the horizon in Margibi County, just outside Monrovia, a menacing train of tinted-window sports utility vehicles and trucks bristling with more than one hundred fighters clad in black fatigues. The procession was bookended by two pickups outfitted with Soviet-vintage antiaircraft guns. As much as these convoys represented a show of force, they also signified Taylor’s weakness as a head of state: he could not travel within fifty miles of his home without enough firepower to hold back a battalion.
In an address to the nation, the president offered a candid, if not entirely sincere, perspective on the violence plaguing his country: “This government has no desire for conflict and violence, neither war. We do not wish to fight our own brothers and sisters nor do we believe that military success of the troops will bring lasting peace. We believe that dialogue through the process of reconciliation will bring peace through the grace of almighty God.”28
Taylor’s choice of language was appropriate; yet again Liberia had turned on itself. Legions of disenfranchised men and women—particularly from the Mandingo and Krahn tribes—eagerly joined in the fight to unseat the president, while others were forced into servitude by the new faction. Within Taylor’s inner ring of security, there was also tension: Taylor did not trust the ATU and relied instead on the black-clad “ninjas” from the Special Security Service for close protection.
Chucky sat shotgun in his BMW along the roadside in Kakata, a market town east of the Monrovia suburb of Paynesville.29 His and several other vehicles full of ATU officers waited to escort the president back to the capital, through the rubber plantations and glowing green plains of Margibi County, into the choked commercial district of Red Light at the edge of Monrovia. An ATU lieutenant named Isaac Gono sat behind the wheel of Chucky’s car, watching the convoy approach. Gono—known as “Papa”—had been by Chucky’s side ever since he was a troubled American teenager venturing into Africa for the first time. He was just one of a handful of drivers Chucky trusted to carry him throughout Monrovia and on trips like this, a rare and increasingly dangerous trip out of the capital.
President Taylor was en route from Gbarnga, Bong County. At one time, Bong County had been the center of his power, but it had since suffered assaults by LURD forces raiding from Lofa County. Just days earlier the rebels had staged a tactical retreat from Gbarpolu, an inland town that had once served as the NPFL headquarters after fighting with government forces left hundreds of civilians dead.30
As Taylor’s convoy approached, the waiting ATU vehicles cut a slow U-turn across the roadway to join it, Gono following the other vehicles. A dog darted across the road, and Gono hit the animal with full force, killing it, smashing the car’s headlight.
It was an accident, perhaps careless, but it nonetheless enraged Chucky. On the journey back to Monrovia, he seethed. When the convoy arrived back in Congo Town, the ATU detachment peeled off toward Chucky’s beachfront villa. As the group
dismounted from their vehicles, he surprised many by his response to the minor incident: he ordered Gono placed under arrest.
He could have had his driver thrown into the cell behind the Executive Mansion for a few days—that sort of punishment wasn’t uncommon in his father’s forces. But Chucky wanted something more immediate—he wanted to see Gono punished. According to a human rights report detailing the incident, he ordered his men to beat the lieutenant “ ’til you see his bones and shit.”31 Two ATU officers—Maj. George Davis and Capt. D. Histine Teaiyer—complied, thrashing the driver with long sticks. Before long Gono lay in the grass in front of Chucky’s house, dead.
Chucky would later insist that he did not intend for his driver to die, but the evidence showed that he did nothing to stop it.32 As soon as he realized the gravity of what he had done, he began making panicked phone calls to other ATU officers. The Liberian National Police arrived on the scene and arrested the two ATU officers who had carried out the order. One ATU commander recalled Chucky’s state when he arrived at the villa: “He was dejected. He was confused. He couldn’t believe it. That Isaac was dead. I’m sure he was under the influence of something. I’m very sure.… He was sweating.… [He] couldn’t get over it.”33
