American Warlord (22 page)

Lynn Henderson pulled off of Tennessee State Route 18 later that summer. The car eased onto a private dirt road marked only by a handful of weathered fence posts. The closest town, a hamlet of five thousand named Bolivar, lay four miles down the road along the Hatchie River in the southwestern corner of the state. Her destination was set back at the far end of a mowed field: the house and barn that made up Rolling H Farm, a tiny breeder.
¹
This would be her last stop on a journey to find the perfect gift—something fit for a president—for the man who would be her father-in-law.

A year earlier Lynn’s relationship with Chucky nearly came apart. Her visits were infrequent and brief, and when she arrived in Liberia on one trip, it became clear that he had been cheating on her.
²
Fed up and disgusted, she confronted him.
³
She was prepared to leave him and Liberia forever, but he wasn’t ready to give up the relationship. Before she could leave, he appeared at the Hotel Africa, on the far side of Monrovia, where she had holed up. She recognized that getting out of the country wouldn’t be easy—at least not without his help. As angry as she was, she agreed to take a drive with him to the beach. When he stopped the car, he presented her with a small, nondescript pouch. Inside was a piece of folded paper. Inside, she found a handful of dull, uncut diamonds.

Chucky asked her to marry him.

It was a decidedly unromantic moment; for Lynn, the raw gems only contributed to the unreality of it. (They “probably came right off the river,” she recalled.) She wasn’t holding a ring but instead artifacts emblematic of the dysfunction of the place and situation she found herself in. Lynn was eighteen years old, very far from home, and without Chucky, very much alone. Her emotions collided in waves of happiness and sadness. She wanted many things in life that she could not have in Liberia. But she also wanted Chucky. If her future in the United States was relatively predictable—she would go to college like her older sisters—Liberia was not. There was the promise of wealth—Chucky always talked about his plans—but also the real possibility that everything would fall apart. Lynn made the decision that she felt made the most sense: she said yes.

So finding a gift for Charles Taylor carried new significance. She had flown in from Orlando to collect something unique, a purebred white German shepherd. Charles Taylor already had several dogs, but he had asked Lynn for the specific breed to complement his spotless white safari suits. A purebred was a sign of status, since the animals had to be imported; dingos and mutts could be found all over Monrovia and the countryside. Chucky had also asked for a dog—one more suited to his personality. Lynn found a pit bull puppy for him in Titusville, a city on the coast, an hour’s drive from Orlando.

Even though she had not been back to Liberia in several months, Lynn felt closer to Chucky’s father with each visit. The more time she spent with him, the more she came to see him not as a warlord—or even necessarily the president of Liberia—but as a well-educated, well-spoken father figure.
⁴
In moments of volatility and crisis with Chucky, she felt she could always turn to his father for comfort and support.

“He really loved me,” she said. She began to feel the same toward him.

Liberia remained far from the home she had once hoped it could be. There were some signs that Chucky’s station had improved—such as a Land Rover provided by prospective diamond miners who wished to curry favor with his father. Despite his growing responsibility with the ATU, however, Chucky hadn’t progressed significantly into building a life for himself there.

His father had made little headway on addressing the devastating problems most Liberians faced every day: the lack of clean water, electricity, medical care, educational opportunities, and jobs.
⁵
The nation remained fragile. It was at peace, but the specter of war loomed large—and the donor states from the international community who had an interest in rebuilding postwar Liberia were wary of partnering with Charles Taylor, the man considered the author of much of the destruction in the first place. The only clear progress he had made was toward establishing Liberia as a security state—and positioning himself for the outbreak of another war.

This was cause for increasing concern among American officials.
⁶
On a Sunday afternoon in late June 1999, U.S. chargé d’affaires Donald Petterson arrived at White Flower to meet with Charles Taylor. The Liberian president’s relationship with the U.S. government remained cordial, despite increasing disgust from Washington over his role in the Sierra Leonean conflict. Taylor hoped to restore the political, economic, and military connections of his predecessor, Samuel K. Doe, and an opportunity had presented itself. President Clinton had named a new ambassador to Monrovia, Bismarck Myrick, a career Foreign Service officer who had done stints throughout Africa—Lesotho, Somalia, South Africa—even Liberia in the mid-1980s, where he served in Monrovia as a political officer.
⁷
He, like Liberia’s first president, was an African-American, from Norfolk, Virginia.

In the weeks following the August 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the embassy in Monrovia was one of several closed by the State Department out of security concerns—a fact that troubled Taylor.
⁸
He told Petterson that the U.S. government should not be concerned about a similar incident in Monrovia, saying that “foreign experts had been training an antiterrorist unit in Ganta and that if in the future the embassy needed support, this unit would be available.” But these very forces were among the concerns Petterson wished to address. The embassy had been receiving reports about Taylor’s security forces being the source of
insecurity
—being attached to violence, looting, and intimidation on the border. Though Petterson already knew the answer to his question, he asked: is the unit under Chucky Taylor?

The president acknowledged this obvious fact. Chucky had become a visible figure in Monrovia, tearing through traffic in a Land Rover with a license plate that read “DEMON.”
⁹
Direct appeals to Taylor to protect human rights might not be effective, but Petterson knew that he might be receptive to the argument that his soldiers’ excesses ran counter to his interests and could, for example, scare away foreign investors and donors. Taylor listened for a moment, then offered the diplomat the familiar solution to the problem of his undisciplined security forces: training support from the U.S. military, but problems of indiscipline and human rights violations among Taylor’s force had worsened, rather than improved since Taylor made the same request of President Clinton months earlier. Petterson made it clear that the United States would not be taking on this project and that Taylor “needed to take the initiative to improve the quality of his forces.”

Over the course of 1999, the U.S. embassy had learned increasingly more about Chucky and his unit—not only the news emerging out of Voinjama, but the sudden, unannounced presence of his fighters outside their compound. Yet his nationality figured into none of the reporting on him. The evening his father met with Petterson, Chucky’s soldiers took control of three checkpoints located near the embassy.
¹⁰
Whether this was a deliberate show of force is not clear. The move, nonetheless, immediately sparked concern among American officials.

What followed was a series of confrontations between embassy security and Chucky’s unit. His intentions were never clear, but the ATU fighters at Mamba Point heightened tensions, and Chucky further alarmed embassy security when he personally conducted a search patrol along the beach at the south perimeter of their compound, explaining obliquely that he was searching for “criminals.”
¹¹
Chucky’s commanders, meanwhile, began harassing Liberian security officers working for the embassy, prompting the American regional security officer’s intervention. Eventually Chucky met with the embassy’s temporary defense attaché, Michael Bajek, and handed over a copy of the orders he’d given to ATU officers to set up checkpoints, search vehicles, and detail the occupants.
¹²

This offered little comfort to the embassy or the local staff responsible for guarding the compound’s entryway. Chucky did little to clarify why he was engaged in this game of chicken with the embassy. “At present, some embassy personnel are expressing concerns about having this unit on the compound’s perimeter because of their lack of discipline and training,” a cable reported. “According to one embassy officer, mercenaries have trained this group.”
¹³

Chucky’s men kept up the pressure on the embassy into July 1999. “The Liberian government continues to deploy elements of the so-called Anti-Terrorist Unit,” the embassy noted, as it began to learn more about these fighters.
¹⁴
“The ATU is the new name which the Liberian government has given to Chucky Taylor’s notorious ‘Demus Force’ (also known as the Demon Brigade).”
¹⁵
Embassy officials continued to implore senior Taylor officials, including Jonathan Taylor, the minister of state and first cousin of the president, and Freddy Taylor, the head of the National Security Agency (not related), to turn the checkpoints over to the Liberian National Police. The requests went nowhere; the Liberian officials were not “willing to cross President Taylor or his son, Chucky, on the issue,” an embassy official wrote at the time.
¹⁶

Lynn was aware of the fearsome reputation Chucky and his men had developed. “Some of those boys were pure evil,” she recalled.
¹⁷
Many of the fighters were drawn from the Small Boys Unit. Chucky’s bodyguards bantered openly about cannibalism—shocking her by describing how human hands were the best part of the body to eat. Yet most interactions with Chucky’s men gave her no reason to fear them. “I never saw the evil side of them, but I suppose it was there when [they were] confronted with the enemy. Killing, torture, I’m sure it takes a toll on the soul. I’m sure my boys [bodyguards] like Humphrey, Bobby, Tarnue, were considered evil. But I loved them, and they loved me.”
¹⁸
Lynn understood why people feared Chucky: “He kind of had, I don’t know, maybe a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde personality.”
¹⁹
But she had been immune from his outbursts. She says that he had never harmed her; in fact, she always felt safer around him. “I always thought I brought out the better side in him because I’m a good person. I always thought that I made him a better person.”
²⁰
The truth was that Chucky led a separate life, characterized not only by the violence of the ATU but by his lying and womanizing.

Lynn wasn’t the only person in Chucky’s life to feel a pull to Liberia. Bernice regularly shuttled back and forth between Florida and Monrovia, living with her son and carrying out semiofficial duties—like visiting orphanages—typically associated with the first lady.
²¹
As Bernice’s attachments to Liberia grew, her marriage to Roy Belfast began to splinter.

The exact nature of her renewed affection for Taylor wasn’t clear; nor was it entirely remarkable. Taylor’s wives, current and past, orbited around him, drifting in and out of his residence and benefiting from being connected with him. Bernice eventually openly associated herself as a member of the Taylor family. She went as far as adopting an alternate identity: Yassazoe Emmanuel Taylor.
²²
The name drew from Charles Taylor’s mother’s first name. Liberia was a break from the other narratives in her life: middle age, divorce, suburbia. Monrovia offered a different sort of drama, the petty jealousies and affections of Taylor’s wives set against the backdrop of political intrigue.

Lynn’s view on it was clear: “She was obsessed with Charles Taylor.… She wanted to be there. She wanted to be Liberian.”

Lynn arrived with her sister for another summer vacation in Monrovia in early August 1999, bearing two puppies as gifts.
²³
Charles Taylor named his German shepherd “Rex,” while Chucky chose to name his pit bull “Danger,” borrowing the middle name from
Austin Powers
, the Mike Myers spy comedy.

Chucky indulged the two women in the little sightseeing Monrovia afforded: the dense business district along Broad Street where tailors and jewelers crafted their wares in open-air storefronts; the embassy neighborhood on Mamba Point, which centered on the American compound; the sprawling markets along the Mesurado River in Waterside and Duala, where tin-roofed shops hawked essentials: dried fish, bush meat, plastic bottles filled with gasoline, tiny bundles of hot peppers. The group walked along the beach in Congo Town, near Chucky’s villa, snapping photos, with his bodyguard, Bobby Dixon, standing in the distance. Wherever he went, Lynn noticed, boys and young men saluted him, saying, “Yes, sir, Chief.”
²⁴

The group ventured out of the city on day trips, even dropping in on a chimpanzee-testing facility near Harbel, operated by the New York Blood Bank—a strange artifact left over from pre–civil war Liberia—for an unannounced tour.
²⁵
On the way back to Monrovia one afternoon, the group pulled off the road to an isolated berm littered with broken bottles.
²⁶
Chucky retrieved a pistol and sawed-off shotgun from the truck for impromptu target practice. He filmed Lynn and her sister with a camcorder as they took turns firing the weapons, providing commentary.

At night, the group hit the clubs in downtown Monrovia, like the Pepper Bush, a threadbare spot on Warren Street that attracted those who could afford to drink—foreign businessmen, government officials, Lebanese merchants, and security officers. Chucky had a reputation for throwing his weight around at clubs. In one incident, on September 22, 1999, he walked into a nightclub and noticed several members of the National Police’s Special Operations Division (SOD) drinking with three clean-cut Americans—U.S. Marines attached to the embassy.
²⁷
He approached the table where the men sat in front of their beers and drinks and demanded to know why the SOD officers were drinking on duty. He then looked at the Americans and asked the men “why the U.S. ambassador would allow Marines to drink late at night?” and demanded to know their names and rank. Rather than engage, the table of Marines stood up and walked out of the nightclub.