American Warlord (18 page)

Typically these arms were Soviet-bloc military variants, but other weapons provided to the recruits, the MP5 and the Smith & Wesson–manufactured MP22, were favored by NATO nations. Robert had purchased much of the nonlethal gear in the United States, Menephar came to learn, including uniforms, boots, camouflage tents, and night-vision goggles. “All was American made,” he said.

The trainees already knew how to fire weapons, as well as clean and reload them, but few, if any, had had any training in marksmanship. While conducting weapons training, Dave demonstrated how to fire accurately by hitting the stars on an American flag. Menephar, who confessed to being unable to strike a target from ten yards out, had never seen accurate fire. “He’s making magic!” he recalled exclaiming. “Wow, we have a witch!”

The influx of weapons wasn’t limited to the new security unit. The defense attaché at the U.S. embassy began tracking rumors that the RUF in Sierra Leone was continuing to receive support from Taylor.
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In one incident, the attaché reported, peacekeepers in eastern Sierra Leone had “exchanged fire with soldiers disembarking from a Mi-B helicopter.” The fighters, wearing green battle uniforms not typically seen on rebels, began firing before the peacekeepers could identify them. The U.S. embassy had been tracking reports of a “phantom rebel helicopter” in Sierra Leone fitting the Mi-B’s profile; it believed one of Taylor’s generals and “an American citizen who is a former UK Special Air Services officer”—a description consistent with Smith—was “providing arms and recruits for the RUF.”

After a month at Gbatala, the recruits received orders to return to Monrovia. The men suited up in their new black uniforms and traveled to White Flower, where Chucky met them. The group then convoyed to Hotel Africa, where the president was hosting the All Liberia Conference, a perennial gathering that had sought to bring together the various tribes and political groups. Taylor wanted to take the opportunity to make a show of strength. When Menephar and the other recruits arrived at the hotel, they were ordered to spread out in formation. The group was given a name: the Executive Mansion Special Security Unit (EMSSU).

Taylor appeared from the hotel to review his new force, in pressed uniforms, holding new weapons. Menephar, in the formation, stood at attention before the man he’d been fighting for since he was a child. “He was proud,” Menephar recalled.

Lynn too could feel the momentum of the unit. Many of the recruits were drawn from the Small Boys Unit, which gave them reputations from the civil war “as killers and murderers,” but she simply saw a lot of them as “boys.” Everyone referred to them that way, even though a number of the “boys”—like Menephar—already had young families. As the recruits passed through the house, she came to know some of them. “All these people know is war,” she later said, “and now they had an opportunity to be a part of something special. Like a special unit. Protecting the president. They’d jump at that. They were very proud of it.”

Chucky’s role was changing as well. He was no longer simply the president’s son. He had begun to command his own men. Liberia was a fiercely hierarchical and nepotistic society; the authority Chucky had over new recruits reflected that. What he lacked in experience, he made up for in familial ties and proximity to power. Lynn saw what this meant to the young men who were deeply experienced in the civil war but otherwise disenfranchised from the society.
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“They loved him,” she recalled.

Yet in order to lead an elite unit, Chucky needed to command respect from his men—a task accomplished among the younger recruits more easily than among the older NPFL veterans. In Taylor’s inner circle, respect often went hand in hand with fear—Yeaten was the quintessential example. But unlike Yeaten, Chucky brought very little fear to the command position. He was just twenty-one, an American citizen who had spent only a handful of years in Liberia. He had no military training to speak of. Whatever love his men felt for him would not be enough to sustain them through training and eventual combat. He needed to find a reason for men who had already seen some of humanity’s worst behavior to fear him.

Taylor had fortified himself with myriad security forces, but he had not purged the capital of his former enemies. His chief domestic antagonist was the Krahn leader Roosevelt Johnson, who had several hundred followers, including former members of his ULIMO-K faction as well as their wives and children.
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They had holed up in a one-block-long apartment compound on a crowded stretch of downtown Monrovia, hard between the Executive Mansion and Mamba Point, called Camp Johnson Road. There the group was guarded by a platoon of Nigerian peacekeepers.

Johnson’s presence was a persistent reminder of Taylor’s lack of complete authority over the capital—and the country. He had been given an ornamental role in Taylor’s administration—as the rural development minister—but he remained a faction leader who pursued his own agenda. In February 1998 Johnson took a trip to Nigeria, where he met with President Sani Abacha.
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Taylor saw the visit as evidence of a plot between the Nigerians and Johnson to destabilize his new government. Upon Johnson’s arrival back at Robertsfield, the Liberians sought to arrest him. A physical altercation broke out between Taylor’s SSS members and Johnson’s retinue. Eventually the Krahn leader was escorted back to Monrovia by a convoy of heavily armed Nigerian peacekeepers. Johnson’s followers clashed again with the SSS in late March, and when the Krahn leader took a medical trip to the United States, Taylor again suspected that he was plotting to overthrow the government.

Shortly before dusk on September 18, 1998, more than one hundred uniformed soldiers—an unruly conglomeration of Special Operation Division fighters and members of Chucky’s newly formed outfit—approached the Camp Johnson Road compound from both sides.
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The peacekeepers had withdrawn, leaving Roosevelt and his followers vulnerable. Taylor’s forces began firing on the compound with automatic weapons and RPGs, according to the embassy. Throughout the night the Krahn were under fire. They phoned the U.S. embassy, pleading for the remaining West African peacekeeping detachment to intercede and create a buffer zone, but to no avail. By daybreak nearly three hundred Krahn had been killed, including dozens of women and children.

The target of the assault, Roosevelt Johnson, slipped the cordon with a handful of followers—armed Krahn fighters—and bolted for the U.S. embassy to ask for shelter. The embassy gate lay several hundred meters away, but by the time Johnson and his fighters made it there, Taylor’s forces were upon them.
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The confrontation thrust the United States into the center of a domestic power struggle between Charles Taylor and his last significant factional rival. If the Clinton administration had hoped that Taylor would shed his warlord instincts, the unfolding drama at their embassy gate proved otherwise. The United States had had little interest mediating between these warring parties during the civil war—and even less during an active firefight.

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.”
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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.
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The U.S. government responded forcefully to the assault on its embassy, demanding an apology from Taylor’s government and seeking a UN investigation.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.

A bell sounded across the camp. An order was shouted: “Movement, cease!”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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