American Warlord (37 page)

In the interview, Bernice repeated a fact that was well known to those in Liberia: Charles Taylor had directly appointed his son to lead his personal security force, the ATU. Any number of witnesses could have established that fact, but for Chucky’s mother to corroborate it was powerful. Baechtle left Orlando with the thing that had eluded him since he began his investigation: a viable target. He needed to determine whether Chucky had played a role in any of the crimes his father had been implicated in. The answer wasn’t in the stack of documents on his desk in Washington, and it couldn’t be established solely by the testimony of exiles living in the United States. He would have to go to the scene of those crimes.

Baechtle landed at Robertsfield several weeks later, setting foot on West African soil for the first time. Over the course of his investigation, he had conjured a mental picture of Liberia from his own experiences growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, and passing through its impoverished Third World corridors. But Liberia was different. Even after two years of relative peace, it remained one of the poorest nations on earth, with a weak interim government propped up by a legion of international donors and NGOs and secured by a UN peacekeeping force. The airfield was a single, cracked concrete runway, bordered by fields of palms, a handful of white Soviet-era UN choppers, and a lone single-story terminal. He climbed down the stairwell to the tarmac, stepping into the dense humidity.

Driving into Monrovia for the first time, the absence of infrastructure was immediately apparent. Each UN checkpoint he passed through revealed the desperate conditions—the teeming crowds at ELWA Junction at the edge of the capital, the air thick and sweet with decaying vegetation and generator exhaust.

Monrovia, it became apparent, was a small town, both geographically and politically. Baechtle received a briefing from the regional security officer at the U.S. embassy, who sketched the current security situation and dramatis personae. The ATU had officially disbanded, but many of the men remained tied to the leadership—in particular, Momoh Gibba, one of several Taylor enforcers who had survived and remained in Monrovia.
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(Benjamin Yeaten had fled to Togo, where he was given a role in the presidential security force. He eventually agreed to cooperate with the Special Court, according to the court’s chief investigator, but was barred from leaving the country by Togolese officials.) Word of foreigners in Monrovia, particularly those asking questions about members of the Taylor family, traveled fast. But the not-too-distant past remained concealed.

Baechtle was struck by one facet of Liberia: how friendly and open those he met were. Eager to meet an American federal agent, many contacts dove in with the Liberian handshake, the fluid sequence from a traditional clasp to an arm wrestler’s palm grip punctuated by a forefinger-to-thumb snap. It was not easily mastered, but once the agent got the movements down, it helped him begin to establish a rapport with the Liberians he met. In conversation, he found that even though he’d introduce himself as “Matt,” more often than not he became “Mac.” The resilience of the people also resonated with Baechtle. The impact of the war was clearly felt in Monrovia, but he noticed a remarkable strength in those he met—the will to pick up and move on. Baechtle began establishing contacts within local law enforcement, many of whom were former police officials run out by Taylor. Baechtle began to develop a sense for the culture and people, something that would prove critical to his investigation.

On March 16, 2006, the embassy in Port of Spain issued a passport to Chucky in the name “Charles McArther Emmanuel.”
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He had appeared at the Port of Spain embassy with a notarized copy of the same birth certificate from St. Margaret’s Hospital that agent Baechtle had obtained and applied for a passport, explaining to a consulate worker that his had been stolen. Chucky filled out an application to renew his passport under his birth name. The form also asked for the name, birth date, and birthplace of his parents. When it came to the identity of his father, Chucky lied, listing his parent as “Steven Daniel Smith,” born on June 4, 1952, on the island of St. Vincent.
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For years, Chucky had sought a negotiated return to the United States, offering himself to State Department officials in hopes that they could remove him from the UN travel ban. At any time he could have applied for an American passport, although it would alert officials to his presence and his intentions to return. In the end, Chucky took a risk, not because of events unfolding in Trinidad but rather because of developments in Washington, Monrovia, and Abuja, Nigeria, where his father’s fate was being decided by officials in the respective governments.

Liberia’s newly elected president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, had landed in the United States for the first state visit of a Liberian leader since Ronald Reagan hosted Samuel Doe in 1983. Her candidacy and election represented a rare piece of good news from Liberia. She had the pedigree of a Harvard-educated, former World Bank economist, which immediately set her apart from her predecessors. But more than that, she carried little outward baggage from the civil war. Even though she had been an early supporter of Taylor, she was considered her own person.
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The United States hoped to persuade her to solve the most pressing problem they saw in Liberia: Charles Taylor.

Even before Sirleaf arrived in the United States, Washington made clear the terms of U.S. support for her government—principally that Taylor had to be brought to justice. In order for that to happen, she would have to formally request that Nigeria renege on the terms of Taylor’s exile. This was potentially explosive for Sirleaf. Taylor’s influence still reached into the fledgling postwar government, where his ex-wife, Jewel Howard Taylor, was a legislator and his former son-in-law, Edwin Snowe, served as the speaker of the House.
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Thousands of former fighters, most unemployed, remained in the capital, easily organized and incited by their former commanders. Sirleaf was forced to calculate the risk of aggravating Taylor’s base against the loss of up to $50 million in supplemental funds that Congress was considering.

On the day Chucky arrived at the embassy, Sirleaf addressed a joint session of Congress.
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She thanked the members for the $445 million the United States had given to Liberia in the prior two years. Liberia would need more U.S. aid, she knew, and she was willing to make concessions.

The clock then began ticking for Charles Taylor. With arrest imminent, the former president plotted an escape from his exile in Nigeria. Like Chucky, he faced restrictions on flying internationally with a Liberian passport; he felt his best chance was to flee Nigeria on the ground. Meanwhile in Trinidad, Chucky was plotting his next move. He decided this was the moment, regardless of the risks he faced returning.

On March 29 one of Chucky’s aliases popped up on a Department of Homeland Security list of individuals scheduled to fly into the United States.
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ICE immediately phoned the regional security officer at the U.S. embassy in Port of Spain to confirm that a passport had been issued. According to his itinerary, Chucky planned to arrive in Miami on an American Airlines flight from Trinidad the following evening. Exile, for Chucky, was finally coming to an end.

Chucky’s imminent arrival forced Baechtle to react. Despite the abundance of allegations in the press, in nongovernmental organization reports, and in the rumors that had become part of Liberian lore, he wasn’t prepared to charge Chucky with a crime more significant than an immigration violation. In front of him was potentially the only opportunity he would have to interrogate Chucky and develop evidence for another charge. But it was possible that Chucky could land in Miami and drive up Florida highway 91 all the way home to Pine Hills unimpeded and then disappear.

Baechtle needed to find another clear violation of U.S. law. While Chucky had left twelve years earlier with four felony charges, the statute of limitations for those had long expired. Any new charge would have to have occurred outside the country. Turning over the question with another agent of whether there was a crime that would potentially interest a prosecutor, Baechtle recalled one witness—a Liberian—he’d met with a year earlier. The man was one of many refugees from Taylor’s Liberia who had found sanctuary in the United States. Baechtle’s meeting with him had been almost coincidental—they weren’t discussing his investigation into weapons trafficking.

“There was this one guy who said he was tortured by Chucky,” he recalled to his colleague.
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It was an interesting allegation, but was it a crime? The alleged act had occurred in Liberia, not in the United States. It seemed a somewhat strange question, but the agents wondered aloud whether American citizens could be charged for committing torture outside the United States.

Baechtle retrieved a copy of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, a car battery of a volume, detailing crimes and criminal procedure covered under U.S. law. He rifled through the pages, searching for a reference to “torture.” Deep in the text, between chapters on terrorism and another on trafficking in contraband cigarettes and smokeless tobacco, he found chapter 113C, section 2340, on torture. The entry was brief—just under four hundred words—and Baechtle began reading:

To Baechtle’s mind, the statute applied directly to what the witness had suffered. The crime carried severe penalties: a twenty-year sentence for each count or, in instances where death resulted, the potential for life imprisonment or the death penalty. But the most significant language in the statute described the jurisdiction:

In that bland phrasing, the statute provided for “extraterritorial jurisdiction,” meaning it gave Baechtle the authority to pursue any crime of torture that Chucky might have committed in Liberia.

Suddenly countless avenues opened for an investigation, but prosecuting torture was complicated. It had simply never happened. Congress had enacted the law in 1994, yet the government had never brought a case under the statute.
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Its origins lay in the UN Convention Against Torture, a treaty that the United States had signed on to in 1984. The treaty had obligated the federal government, among other things, to create and enforce an antitorture law. After Congress passed the law in 1994, it became a little-known but significant component of human rights law. The statute’s obscurity changed soon after September 11, 2001.

As the FBI and CIA responded to the attacks, the Justice Department confronted the implications of this law on the War on Terror. Alberto Gonzales, then working as White House counsel, oversaw the team of lawyers laboring away toward an official opinion on the legal definition of
torture.
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In reviewing the federal antitorture statute, Justice Department lawyers found that “acts must be of an extreme nature to rise to the level of torture … certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity.” Their work would provide a foundation for the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that the CIA would employ in its secret prison program.

In the years that followed, specific allegations against CIA officers and defense department contractors—civilians who could be prosecuted under this law—would surface related to charges of abuse and wrongful deaths at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. In some cases these allegations were supported by photographic evidence, investigations by human rights groups and the U.S. Army, testimony from victims, and, in the case of Abu Ghraib, American military personnel who were also accused of abuse. None of these allegations resulted in an indictment under this law.

There was no legal distinction between Chucky Taylor and the CIA officials accused of committing torture: all were American citizens who, if charged with a crime, were entitled to a trial before a jury. The precedents that could be set by a trial were as much political and moral as legal. A line of argument rationalized the CIA’s techniques as justified in the face of an imminent terror threat directed at the United States; Chucky could similarly argue that the insurgency cohering against his father had posed an existential threat to the Liberian government and people, and, despite his methods, the moral difference was in the eye of the beholder. The most relevant distinction between Chucky and the CIA officials was political: the agency had allies in Congress, but the son of an African dictator stood alone.

Special Agent Baechtle knew that he would need support from the Justice Department—he’d be asking its attorneys to do something that they had never done before.
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Over the past two years, he’d developed a relationship with one attorney in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. A federal prosecutor would have to sign off on any case that Baechtle brought, so he needed an indication that he wasn’t chasing a charge that was—either politically or legally—impossible to pursue. He reached out to the attorney to see whether he could stop by his office a few blocks away, at Justice Department headquarters. The prosecutor had the day off but instructed Baechtle to stop by his home. Baechtle lugged the code over to the Xerox machine and copied the statute. With the law in hand, he climbed into his government-issued vehicle, which agents referred to as their “G-ride.”

Baechtle was not the only ICE employee grappling with this unique law. Mona Ragheb, ICE’s chief of the human rights law division, had come up against the issue of torture many times, covering allegations out of Latin America, the Balkans, and even Liberia.
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But when she received a call from Baechtle’s supervisor advising her that they were considering a potential charge using this law, she didn’t jump out of her seat. “Hold on—it’s not that easy,” she thought.