American Warlord (35 page)

For Special Agent Matthew Baechtle, it began with a stack of papers on his desk in Washington, D.C.
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Grimly titled dispatches from NGOs and human rights groups like Global Witness, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. Newspaper and magazine articles dating back through the last decade. Reports from investigators with the UN Security Council. In the fall of 2003, this was the history of the Liberian civil war: a disjointed maze of names, dates, acronyms, incidents, and allegations. The first step was to make sense of it. Only after doing that could he even think of walking out the door to do the job he’d been trained to do: to investigate crimes, to find suspects, to bring back cases that could be prosecuted. As beginnings go, it was a just that—a beginning—and not much else.

Baechtle was a rookie who had only recently joined Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, as it was then becoming known. He’d been assigned to the Arms and Strategic Technology Investigations Unit (ASTI), housed in the agency’s Washington field office. When he walked into work, he looked like a clean-cut, well-mannered fraternity brother, twenty-three years old with jet-black hair, a placekicker’s build, and a bemused smile. Customs enforcement wasn’t the obvious career path for Baechtle. None of his family members were in law enforcement. (Nor were any of his fraternity brothers, for that matter.) He didn’t expect to get rich in this line of work, but he’d always had an interest in solving crimes. He split his childhood between Kingston, Jamaica, where his father worked for Colgate-Palmolive, and Monmouth County, in what he fondly called “the greatest state in the union,” New Jersey. When it came time to go to college, he already knew the direction he wanted his life to take. He enrolled at the University of Richmond, majoring in criminal justice.

As graduation approached, he considered his next steps. He ventured with a group of friends to a job fair in Washington. Walking through the booths, he came across a recruiter for the U.S. Customs Service. The agent, at six foot seven, stood about a foot taller than Baechtle; in fact, he was an ex-NFL player who’d blown out his knee before joining the service. He delivered his pitch explaining that the customs service was the investigative arm of the Treasury Department, with a mandate that covered everything from confiscating counterfeit goods to drug interdiction. For many criminal justice majors, the FBI was the obvious dream job, but Baechtle saw that customs’ crime base was broad and varied—it seemed an ideal opportunity to break into federal law enforcement. He applied on the spot.

Shortly after September 11, the government’s investigative agencies had entered a period of uncertainty. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington represented a systemic failure not only of intelligence but also of law enforcement. As the Bush administration was forced to confront this, the foundations began to shift underneath the sprawling infrastructure of agencies and administrations charged with enforcing American laws. Bureaucracies that had hardened into territorial and self-perpetuating entities now had to reassess how best to protect the United States. President Bush hastily created an Office of Homeland Security, appointing Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge to head up the effort.
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Until the summer of 2002, Bush resisted creating a cabinet-level homeland security position, as he sought to balance national security imperatives against the politically unwieldy notion of a massive bureaucratic overhaul. Eventually, the overhaul won out. In November, the Homeland Security Act was passed. When Bush signed the act into law, more than twenty federal agencies and offices were subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security, ballooning into the third-largest government department, with more than 180,000 employees and an annual budget upward of $33 billion.

The changes in Washington had a direct impact on Baechtle’s career. When he entered the Customs Basic Enforcement School in the spring of 2003, he joined the final class hired into the service. By the time he graduated, the service simply no longer existed. He would be joining the principal investigative arm of the new Department of Homeland Security, an agency with a sprawling mandate called Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Baechtle showed up at the Washington field office for his first assignment. It was a grim seven-story box-shaped federal building that had housed the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The drab surroundings contradicted the urgency of his first assignment with ASTI. The unit’s priority, especially important following 9/11, was investigating the transfer of weapons of mass destruction or any related sensitive technologies, from fissile material, chemicals, and germs that could be weaponized to materials that would be potentially used to construct centrifuges. At its disposal was a set of extraterritorial laws that allowed ICE to pursue crimes that were committed outside the United States.

Unwittingly, Baechtle had been placed not only on the front lines of the post-9/11 domestic security effort but also at the cusp of American law enforcement. Just as terror threats had to be addressed at their source, criminals falling under the increasingly broad jurisdiction of U.S. laws had to be confronted where they operated. This presented an exciting, if daunting, challenge for junior agents. It certainly beat raiding poultry plants in Iowa to roust illegal aliens. But in terms of the career he was undertaking, it also broadened the crimes that the rookie could pursue. Baechtle had little idea of what sort of cases he’d be working or where they would take him. The answer to that lay in the stack of papers his boss had tossed on his desk.

“Hey, why don’t you look at what’s here,” the supervisor who handed him the stack of papers said, then walked away.
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Baechtle started reading through the pile. One common link that ran through the documents: Liberia, a country that was barely familiar to him but would define his career for years to come.

Baechtle’s assignment did not simply appear from the ether. After Charles Taylor stepped down, American policy continued to isolate him in his exile in Nigeria. This position was articulated as policy several months later with Executive Order 13348, in which the White House had identified Taylor as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States” and declared “a national emergency to deal with that threat.”
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The order forbade American citizens or businesses to have dealings with Taylor or his insiders and family members, including Chucky. It was one of 291 such orders Bush issued during his presidency that were promulgated to the departments and agencies responsible for enforcing the provisions.

Meanwhile Agent Baechtle started to absorb information about Liberia.
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He would eventually refer to this process as “schooling up”: he pored through every available document and public source report to develop an expertise. The process was imperative. He knew very little about Liberia, having caught his first glimpses of the country just months earlier in between summer classes at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at Glynco, Georgia, where he was finishing his training. That summer fighting in Liberia had, for a moment, shouldered aside images of the war in Iraq on CNN. Reports on the violence were otherworldly—footage of T-shirt-clad fighters haplessly spraying automatic weapons in the middle of the deserted streets of the capital. Baechtle had no reason to believe that his career would have anything to do with it.

In some regards, his assignment—to sort through the shattered pieces of the Liberian crisis to determine whether any American citizens bore any responsibility for the suffering there—was strange. Washington’s attitude toward Liberia had long been marked by indifference, inaction, and ineptitude; Liberians, on the other hand, had looked to the United States to solve problems that were uniquely theirs. But the civil war had married the two countries in a manner that a century of relative stability had not. Over the course of the 1990s, thousands of Liberian refugees had fled to New York, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Providence under temporary protected status, a designation that recognized their unique need for haven during the crisis.
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Those who arrived could be counted as fortunate. Hundreds of thousands of others remained behind in sprawling refugee camps in Guinea and Ghana, waiting to be resettled in any Western nation that would take them.

The name “Charles Taylor” loomed large in all the research Baechtle had been provided. Taylor had long thrived in an impunity gap, where neither the laws of his own nation nor those of the international community could touch him. Even after he had been pushed from power, he and his followers were indignant at the accusations levied against him. What was the crime? Where was the evidence? Had he ever been convicted in a court of law?

The answer was simple: Taylor’s wars had destroyed nearly all mechanisms of accountability in Liberia. The nation’s legal institutions had collapsed during the civil war; the brightest legal minds had fled the country or been forced to the periphery of political life. After the Special Court in Freetown indicted Taylor, it appeared he’d remain comfortably out of reach in his exile. Meanwhile his isolation proved something of a success for U.S. policy makers, the culmination of a two-year campaign by State Department officials to marginalize him.

Yet as Taylor settled into exile in Nigeria, and as Liberia found an uneasy peace, the deposed leader remained a threat to U.S. interests in the region. He enjoyed considerable support in Liberia, particularly among an entire generation of recently disarmed combatants. His ex-wife quietly assumed a place in the country’s legislature. As many continued to feel his influence over affairs within the country, it seemed a distinct possibility he would keep his promise to return to Liberia.

What was at stake in Liberia for the United States? Officially, the government would cite “regional security.” Taylor’s continued freedom was clearly incompatible with this goal. He and his inner circle, however, read darkly into American motives: the United States wanted Liberia’s resources—not just its rubber and iron ore, which were known quantities, but its yet-to-be-discovered oil, which they believed lay offshore in the Gulf of Guinea. In either case, the White House’s executive order directly targeted Taylor and the threat he posed.

Still, Taylor could never be Baechtle’s target. Federal statutes clearly spelled out the rules of engagement for his investigation: he could pursue American citizens regardless of where they had committed a crime, or he could pursue foreign nationals who had entered the United States. A typical ASTI case involved an individual or a company located in the United States that was attempting to sell weapons or technology to another country, whether that meant assault rifles for a Colombian drug organization or nuclear detonators for engineers in nations trying to develop the bomb. Taylor had clearly and repeatedly violated UN sanctions with multiple parties, but ICE had no clear jurisdictional claim in any of these cases; the weapons hadn’t passed through the United States, and Taylor was not American.

Other countries had undertaken cases involving timber-, diamond-, and arms-trafficking violations in Liberia. Italy attempted to prosecute Leonid Minin for trading in conflict diamonds and timber following his 2001 arrest near Milan. That prosecution was made possible only by the fact that Minin had entered Italy. Nonetheless, the court found that since none of the contraband transited through Italy, it had no jurisdiction. Minin received a two-year sentence for narcotics offenses and disappeared soon after his release. Meanwhile Dutch officials began targeting one of their own citizens, Gus Kouwenhoven, who had operated a hotel in Monrovia and a timber company in the bush before fleeing Liberia in 2003. Both Greenpeace and Global Witness had linked Kouwenhoven not only to the trade in timber in Liberia, in violation of UN sanctions, but also to providing weapons to Taylor’s forces.

There was no corollary target for Baechtle and the United States. While a few American businessmen had tried their hand in Taylor’s Liberia, none graduated to the president’s inner circle. But in the tangle of material before Baechtle, there were two references that could be easily overlooked. Deep in a report by UN experts, there was a curious mention:

Then, in a separate report, Chucky and Minin were linked in an ammunition shipment originating in Ukraine. “The final delivery to Liberia was arranged between the military at Abidjan airport, Sanjivan Ruprah, Mohamed Salamé and Charles Taylor Jr. Minin said a special plane was organized from Monrovia to pick up the ammunition,” according to a report by UN investigators. The name “Chucky Taylor” was one strand among many to follow. Taylor had nearly a dozen children, and the reporting on Chucky was scant. But Baechtle thought that, if anything, Chucky might be a potential source for information to further his investigation.

His focus remained on arms and trying to determine whether a violation of U.S. law had occurred in any of the weapons transactions that kept the civil war in Liberia going. The UN Panel of Experts and NGOs like Global Witness and Amnesty International had reported extensively on weapons trafficking and sanctions busting in Liberia, but this work had not produced relevant evidence of any crimes.

The concerns of the human rights investigators differed from Baechtle’s; NGOs worked primarily to generate publicity and political pressure. Law enforcement agencies, however, needed to focus on specific elements of a crime. Moreover, they were not at liberty to discuss the status of any investigation without authorization. Federal agents like Baechtle thus maintained cordial but not particularly close relationships with independent investigators and researchers, who eagerly submitted reports and facilitated contacts with potential witnesses.
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In this case, the third-party reporting on Taylor’s rise to power filled in the historical record on Liberia, but none of it identified a specific target that he could hope to put in front of a grand jury.