American Warlord (16 page)

On the evening of March 23, 1998,
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President Clinton picked up the phone aboard
Air Force One.
Clinton was two days into a ten-day presidential visit to Africa, the first of its kind in nearly twenty years, that would take him to six nations. He had been greeted by an estimated crowd of half a million in Ghana’s capital, then proceeded on to Kampala and meetings with the leaders of nine nations. Unlike similar trips taken by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Liberia was not a destination. Charles Taylor would have to settle for a twelve-minute phone call.

“Hello, President Clinton. How do you do?” Taylor asked when connected to the U.S. president.

“President Taylor, how are you? It’s nice to hear your voice.”

The men shared little in common. They were both heads of state, but each was the product of fundamentally different politics. Taylor was a warlord who had induced his own election through revolution, a facet of his political trajectory that he described to Clinton as “unfortunate.”

At that moment, the U.S. government was hedging its bets with Taylor. The Clinton administration hoped he could pivot from being an “unrepentant but legitimized factional leader,” as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wrote, to a true national leader.
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A few months earlier U.S. policy on Liberia had formed with two objectives: encouraging domestic reforms and discouraging foreign interference.
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The latter became a focus of the first conversation between Presidents Clinton and Taylor: the Liberian leader’s continued involvement in Sierra Leone.

After seemingly endless cycles of atrocities in Sierra Leone, the violence had become politically difficult for the Clinton administration, which had sat largely idle during the Rwandan genocide just four years earlier. The bloodshed in Sierra Leone culminated in February 1998, when Nigerian peacekeepers ousted the rebel government and reinstalled President Ahmed Kabbah. The junta leaders, not surprisingly, almost immediately fled to Monrovia. Taylor had long been viewed as the primary agent driving the violence. Washington understood this but also felt he might be able to help end the violence. President Clinton had appointed Reverend Jesse Jackson as a special envoy on the issue; in the background, the U.S. military staged Special Operations forces in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
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For months prior to the call, American diplomats had met Liberian officials and President Taylor to discuss concerns regarding human rights, freedom of the press, and Liberia’s ambitions in Sierra Leone. Reporting by the State Department indicated that Taylor was receiving weapons shipments from Taiwan and had also been involved in the assassination of a political opponent, Samuel Dokie.

Yet Clinton told Taylor he was “very pleased” with his progress on human rights, even saying, “Some of the difficulties we had in the last few years have probably been our fault as well.”

Clinton did not accuse Taylor of supporting the rebels in Sierra Leone. But he made clear where the Liberian leader fit within the crisis. “You can be of particular assistance in building the relationship with the Revolutionary United Front and urging all factions to disarm and demobilize in a peaceful way,” he said.

Taylor listened as the president worked through his talking points. It was a softened reiteration of the message that the Liberians had received from State Department officials just days earlier.
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But Taylor didn’t let the world’s most powerful leader off the phone without making his own request, as outlandish as it might have been.

“I’d like to get your assistance in the military situation here, training our army and helping train our police force,” Taylor asked.

President Clinton parried the request. But it didn’t matter: Charles Taylor had his own plans for reclaiming his military might.

Gbatala is a tiny quarry village along the Kakata Highway, three-quarters the distance from Monrovia to Gbarnga. The name, which means “near the creek Gba” in the Kpelle language, is pronounced BAH (and is not to be confused with Gbalatuah, the stopover along the St. Paul River). The village appears first as a collection of tin-roofed market shacks with hand-painted signs hugging the roadway. A hundred meters above the roadway, past a stand of narrow trees, sits the Gbatala homestead: a huddle of gray zinc huts clustered around a thatch-roofed A-frame palm-leaf shelter that serves as the community kitchen. A bush path overgrown with yawning green leaves and hibiscus flowers leads up a rocky hillside to a shaded overlook, revealing an unobstructed view of the roadway below. Farther on up the hillside looms a tall, granite cliff where the locals—men, women, and children—take part in the local industry: rock breaking. Overgrown and largely abandoned during the early stages of Taylor’s revolution, the central but isolated overlook was once called Cobra Base.

It was on this vacant span of rocks that Chucky would make his imprint on Liberian history. Charles Taylor handed this location over to his son to fashion a training camp for what he hoped would become a new elite security force. Years earlier in the midst of the civil war, at a moment when Nigerian Alpha jets were targeting Taylor’s other encampments, Taylor’s forces had decamped to the quarry.
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Gbatala was isolated and relatively secure, and importantly, it sat in the Taylor heartland. The Gbatala locals belonged to the Kpelle tribe, traditional supporters of Taylor, who could be counted on to not betray the base’s existence. The location was also proximate to Taylor’s headquarters a short distance up the highway at the nearby Center for Agriculture Research Institute, yet it was concealed enough to not draw attention from enemy forces passing along the highway or from the jets searching out targets.

In the mid-1990s Taylor’s fighters began training at the base—not only Liberians but also Sierra Leoneans enlisted by the warlord to fight a proxy war in their homeland.
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The fighting in both conflicts ebbed and flowed for nearly a decade before Taylor ascended to the presidency. For a time Cobra Base was left to the elements, a clandestine artifact of Taylorland that had no apparent use to Charles Taylor’s new government in Monrovia. But when Chucky set to the task of creating a new unit, the site was selected as the ideal location.

When Chucky arrived there in 1998, Liberia was enjoying a degree of peace for the first time in several years. But peace did not mean security. President Taylor saw himself as surrounded by threats and living under the thumb of Nigeria, the regional power. Even after the election, Nigerian regional peacekeepers remained. This force was intended to act as a buffer between any armed groups that sprang out of the postwar chaos. Chucky’s father remained bitterly at odds with the Nigerians, whom he viewed as an imperial power in West Africa. The Nigerians also played a significant military role in Sierra Leone, fighting the Taylor-backed RUF. Liberia’s official military force, the Armed Forces of Liberia, presented another liability for Taylor: of the thirteen thousand soldiers who mustered following the election, more than half were untrained conscripts who had been brought in by President Doe to fight Taylor.
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Taylor’s victory at the polls hadn’t converted his political rivals. Many of them were in exile in Guinea, Europe, and the United States. Forces within the scattered Liberian opposition began to galvanize behind a common goal: removing Taylor from power.

Taylor also had reason to be wary of external threats. Guinea, which boasted a large conventional military, was a largely Muslim nation with strong tribal ties to Liberia, including a significant population of Mandingos sympathetic to those marginalized by Taylor. Ivory Coast had its own fomenting tribal conflict that would lure fighters from Taylor’s faction to attempt to depose that government. But Sierra Leone remained Taylor’s chief regional adversary; and he remained deeply allied with the insurgent RUF and its leaders, Foday Sankoh and Sam Bockarie.

The idea of a new security force became common ground between Chucky and his father. Taylor felt the pressing need for a loyal presidential security detail. He could not trust this responsibility to any of the legacy security forces. Instead, he decided to build a new force, man by man. He consented to his son’s involvement but did not entrust the task to him alone. Instead, to lead the effort, he chose someone who had been with him throughout the civil war, a mercenary known as Gambian Jacques.
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Gambian fighters were a fixture of Taylor’s inner circle—they were loyal to him rather than to a tribe or to the nation of Liberia. Many were holdovers from revolutionary camps in Libya, where Liberian rebels trained alongside counterparts from throughout Africa. Chucky appeared to share one quality with men like this: he could be counted on for his loyalty.

The first task was recruitment. In 1997, after the election, a small group gathered at Chucky’s house, near the KISS-FM radio station in Congo Town.
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The men were Taylor loyalists, former fighters including Montgomery Dolo, Benny Warner, Eddie “Murphy” Karpolea, and Alex Voker, as well as a former commander of the Small Boys Unit named Zupon Johnson; the Small Boys Unit was a protective detail, comprised exclusively of children, that carried a reputation for brutality. Chucky hosted the inaugural meeting, but it was clear that Jacques was leading the effort. The men discussed how to go about forming a unit, deciding that they would need to proceed covertly. At that time, Liberia remained under a UN arms embargo, established by the Security Council in 1992 and held over from the civil war.
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Any militarization that Taylor pursued would draw scrutiny from the Security Council and, potentially, sanctions.

Typical of the recruits was Christopher Menephar, a fifteen-year-old Kpelle boy from Yekepa, in Nimba County.
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Few outside his family knew him by that name—since he was a child, he’d taken the nom de guerre “Cooper Teah,” for a legendary commander from Taylor’s militia who had fallen during the war. Menephar had been taken as a child soldier in the opening months of the war, when he was just seven years old, by a Taylor commander he could only identify as “Reagan.” Eventually he was assigned to the Small Boys Unit. Separated from his parents and sisters, Menephar became a child of the war, finding a father figure in his commander and spending much of the fighting tasked to a BM-21, a Soviet-made forty-barrel truck-mounted multiple-rocket-launching system. After the war ended, he drifted back to his home village, where his one surviving parent welcomed him—his mother. There he received a letter asking him to join Chucky’s unit. He had seen Chucky during the summer of 1992, though “he did not know me because I was a kid like him,” Menephar recalled.

Menephar traveled to Monrovia and reported directly to Taylor’s residence. Other former fighters had gathered outside the compound. Gambian Jacques scrutinized the recruits as they passed through the compound’s entrance. Menephar recognized Chucky standing with him, no longer the boy he’d seen in Gbarnga five years earlier. Chucky now stood taller than his father. He was barrel-chested, with strong forearms and biceps. The recruits were processed individually; Jacques photographed them and asked a series of questions about their experiences during the war and their understanding of “VIP protection” and security issues. Chucky remained as this process inched forward. Menephar was only fifteen, but he had had experience with all these things.

Soon afterward Menephar received word that he had passed the first recruitment screening. Training would begin in July. Menephar and the other recruits were considered among the best of Taylor’s forces, but in fact, by and large they were untrained fighters in their mid-teens to early twenties drawn from Taylor’s NPFL or the Small Boys Unit. Many of the men were Kpelle, the tribe that Taylor continued to enjoy support from. In July the men would be returning to Taylorland, to Gbatala, in the heavily Kpelle Bong County. When Chucky arrived early in the spring of 1998, little or nothing remained of the former base; it was simply a rocky, barren hillside, a blank canvas.

From the safe remove of Chucky’s house in the capital, Lynn watched him being swept up in creating the unit.
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As a couple, they seemed to be growing up extraordinarily quickly. She had two lives: one in Orlando, where little had changed since she’d left for high school, and the other in Monrovia, where she and Chucky lived essentially as a married couple, albeit in the cloistered reality they were allowed to create. The days took on a familiar rhythm: they would wake up and eat a breakfast prepared by their cook, and he would head out for the day. She rarely accompanied him, spending much of her time with the cook.

Even as Lynn was being exposed to a remarkable new world, she began to catch glimmers of the reality under the surface. After the election, a circle of strange personalities began to surround Charles Taylor: former rebel commanders from his forces looking for official roles, the faithful party hacks seeking concessions from his newfound fortune, the foreign businessmen—Israelis, French, Russians, and Americans—looking to strike deals with the new head of state. Taylor did not discourage any of it. Liberia was finally open for business.

Taylor had experience working with organized crime from his time as a warlord. As early as 1992, he had forged an arms-for-diamonds network with international conflict profiteers.
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According to the transcript of an interrogation with Italian investigators, an American named Roger d’Onofrio Ruggerio had partnered with Taylor; so had Nicholas Oman, a Slovenian-Australian arms trafficker; Ibrahim Bah, a former mujahideen; and an Italian attorney, Michele Papa, in the benign-sounding International Business Consult.
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(None of the men would be convicted for crimes related to Liberia.) According to
The Shadow World
by Andrew Feinstein, the partnership opened a pipeline of weapons from Bulgarian manufacturers to West Africa, using a semilegitimate trade in timber to mask some profits; later it would dissolve under the scrutiny of international authorities.
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The traditional weapons pipeline into Liberia ran through Burkina Faso, where Taylor remained closely allied with President Blaise Compaoré. At times during the civil war, Qaddafi, who had built a massive arsenal of Soviet weaponry, provided arms directly to Taylor through Burkina Faso. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, arms dealers from Eastern Europe began to flood West Africa with weapons, replacing the quasi-official channels of state-sponsored support with a robust black market. After the election, Taylor faced the task of rebuilding his network.