American Warlord (9 page)

Taylor could do little to prevent his extradition, other than claim that he would be harmed upon returning to Liberia. When he asked Clark to represent him, he warned that Doe wanted to throw him “into a crocodile stream.” At a succession of hearings, Taylor and the U.S. government made their respective cases. The government had received assurances from the Liberians that Taylor would receive a fair trial following his extradition, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stearns recalled, though he acknowledged that “there was concern at the time [that] the Doe regime didn’t have the most savory of reputations.” Taylor had real reason to fear for his life should he lose the extradition battle. Doe had ordered the execution of colleagues who had been much closer to him than Taylor ever was—though those men had been accused of plotting to overthrow him. Clark put documents into evidence and presented witnesses to build the case against extradition, but Stearns said only that some of the testimony was “pretty weird.”

The gravity of the decision before the court can easily be perceived in hindsight, but there was little indication of what was on the line during the proceedings. “For a very young guy,” Stearns recalled, “Taylor was in a position of prominence. And he obviously embezzled huge amounts of money, which he wasn’t spending freely, so he was obviously banking something. He was reasonably educated and polished in his own way. But I did not honestly see him at that time as what he became, which was bloodthirsty.”

Even in his growing paranoia, Doe may have had a lucid sense of the potential threat Taylor posed. His push to extradite Taylor came at a moment when the specter of a coup was becoming more real. The ranks of disaffected government officials were growing, and with them came rumors of hostile governments that were willing to provide sanctuary to members of the Liberian opposition, including Libya, Cuba, Ethiopia, and the USSR.
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The most tangible threat was in the United States, where Thomas Quiwonkpa had found haven before launching the first significant raid into Liberian territory during Doe’s regime in November 1983. Doe may have known well that Taylor and Quiwonkpa were in contact in the United States and that both were plotting a return to Liberia with the shared goal of achieving a Liberia without Samuel Doe.

To return to Liberia a free man, Taylor needed first to break jail in Massachusetts and avoid extradition. Throughout his later political career, he would offer differing accounts of his escape, varying in detail and attribution but always serving the same purpose: to cultivate his own mystery and lend himself an intangible legitimacy.

In 1992 he explained vaguely to the American novelist Denis Johnson, who had been sent by
The New Yorker
to profile the young warlord: “I wouldn’t even be in this country today if not for the CIA. My escape from the American jail in Boston—I think they must have arranged that. One night I was told that the gate to my cell wouldn’t be locked. That I could walk anywhere. I walked out of jail, down the steps, out into America. Nobody stopped me.”
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In another version, Taylor recounted that a guard simply escorted him to the room where two other inmates had already completed sawing through the bars. “I don’t know who cut it,” he said, “but I think the guards had made these arrangements.”

But according to one of the men who broke Taylor from jail, the truth was less fantastic. There was no official involvement, either from the government or prison officials. Instead, Taylor had arranged with another inmate, twenty-two-year-old Thomas Devoll, to engineer the escape.

The jail, which was overcrowded and nearly a century old, had suffered multiple escapes in the decade prior.
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Devoll worked as the “runner,” the inmate responsible for doling out ice-cream sandwiches and microwaveable cheeseburgers from the prison canteen; as such, he had access to the span of the prison.
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The job gave him the opportunity to learn “every inch” of the place, as he recalled. Most important, he could map the daily rituals that made the jail function.

Nearly fifteen years Devoll’s senior, Taylor was fatherly to him rather than patronizing, unlike a lot of Plymouth’s old-timers. The two men spent hours together boxing and playing gin. Devoll developed something personal for his friend. “I also felt sympathy for Charlie,” he later said. “The man had children.”

“Getting out of here is no different than planning a score,” he told Taylor.

The escape was planned for September 15. Devoll had arranged for several high-tempered hacksaw blades to be smuggled in through inmates working on the jail’s farm. Early on the day of the escape, Taylor’s wife Tupee visited, delivering cash and mail to him.
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(Tupee, who knew that her family connections to both Taylor and Quiwonkpa could make her a target in Doe’s Liberia, had moved to Rhode Island, not far from the jail.) The two men, with a teenage prisoner Anthony Rodrigues, planned to break out from a second-floor laundry room, which had been converted to a cell.

After dinner the three drifted back to the third tier, detouring to the laundry room. Devoll removed the bars, and the men clambered out the window, dropping onto a roof below. From there they hopped down into the courtyard. Devoll had timed the patrol of the guard on his walk around the prison’s perimeter and had figured out how much time they had to get to the fence. As they were about to climb it, Taylor stopped. He’d had second thoughts.

That moment of hesitation had huge implications for his future. Taylor would later argue he was breaking jail for a greater good: to return to Liberia to oust Doe and help the nation return to an electoral democracy. He would slip out of the United States, he later claimed, via Mexico and eventually land back in West Africa.
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(Others maintain he flew from New York on a false passport.) In a few short weeks, on November 12, 1985, Quiwonkpa would attempt to overthrow the regime, only to be slaughtered, his body paraded through Monrovia. Taylor would assume the life of a peripatetic revolutionary, doing prison stints in both Ghana and Sierra Leone before coming under the wing of Qaddafi.
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Taylor would build his revolutionary army from the men and boys who were displaced from Nimba County by the regime.
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He would transit them secretly from Ivory Coast, through Burkina Faso to their training base in the Libyan desert, preparing them for the moment to take up his cause and return to Liberia to overthrow Doe.

But on that night in September, an uncertain future lay in front of him. “The guy showed fear,” Devoll remembered.

It was too late, he told Taylor. “I ain’t pushing your fat ass through those bars again.”

Nearly a decade later, when Chucky first met his father at the villa in Gbarnga, the civil war was in its third year. The jailbreak at Plymouth had long been enshrined as part of his father’s legend, just one of many struggles his father had endured en route to power. Gbarnga teemed with activity in the summer of 1992, but Taylor’s revolution was in purgatory, having ground to halt a year and a half earlier, when a West African peacekeeping force, comprised largely of Nigerians, moved in around Monrovia to provide a buffer between the rebels and government troops.
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The war had started with a lone assault two years earlier. In the darkness before dawn on December 24, 1989, several dozen rebels threaded their way through the bush deep in the rain forests of Nimba County. Their destination was Gbutuo, along the Ivorian border. The town held little strategic significance but was an important symbol in the tribal struggle taking place. Soldiers belonging to the president’s tribe, the Krahn, were garrisoned among the villagers, who were mostly of the Gio tribe—a group that had been persecuted and dispossessed by a U.S.-backed junta government.
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The insurgents anticipated assaulting a battalion of trained soldiers loyal to the Monrovia-based regime; instead they found a small detachment of sleeping men unprepared to defend the village. Armed with little more than a few hunting rifles, the rebels moved quickly, killing the commander, seizing a large weapons cache, and hunting down the remaining soldiers. When the assault ended, the rebels announced themselves to the encampment over a loudspeaker. The villagers sang and rejoiced, as if they had been liberated.

Liberia had long simmered with tensions. Doe’s repressive government had split the society even more starkly between those it sheltered and those it viewed as threats. With the assault on Gbutuo, the regime’s fears came to life. It wasn’t simply an isolated attack on a lonely outpost; it marked the opening of the longest-running and most brutal conflict in West Africa’s modern history. What started with a few dozen men armed with hunting rifles would end with an entire generation robbed of their youth, opportunities, and future in a region awash in AK-47s and RPGs. Behind this violence—which over the course of the next decade would subsume Sierra Leone and parts of Ivory Coast and Guinea—was a single man: Charles McArthur Taylor.

The U.S. government gave Taylor a platform to pursue power at any cost. This was not by design but rather through indifference, negligence, and a failure to grasp who Taylor was. In the early 1990s—as genocide in the Balkans and Rwanda were confounding the international community—Taylor introduced the world to a new type of violence. Indelible images began appearing in the media: fetish-clad fighters and child soldiers fighting African peacekeepers on the outskirts of Monrovia; survivors of rebel attacks in the diamond fields of Sierra Leone, appearing in Freetown with their hands severed, lips cut off, and the initials RUF—for Taylor’s proxy army, the Revolutionary United Front—carved into their chests. The violence was unspeakable and unstoppable.

After the assault on Gbutuo on Christmas Day 1989, Taylor’s revolution spread from Liberia’s interior toward the capital on the coast. His army, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), found a forceful accelerant in the tribal hatred stirred by Doe’s campaign against rival ethnic groups.
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This hatred was particularly potent in Nimba County, which served as the launching point for Taylor’s revolution. The NPFL’s ranks swelled with men, women, and children largely from tribes aggrieved by government purges following Thomas Quiwonkpa’s coup attempts—the Gio, the Mano, and the Kpelle. Even Armed Forces of Liberia troops sent to quash the revolt joined the ranks willingly. Taylor portrayed it as a popular rebellion, but many of the fighters, particularly the women and children, had little choice but to join.

The notion of giving consent, in the context of the newly divided Liberia, was often reduced to choosing the most survivable option. Civilians often found themselves caught between government and rebel forces but also, equally significant, within an upended economy. While some commanders turned to brutalities—such as killing off family members—to force conscripts to join, Taylor found that protecting civilians in major towns, as well as their commerce, incentivized their support.
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(This system often broke down outside major population centers.)

From the earliest days of the conflict, the United States refused to take clear sides. In 1988 the Liberian government had defaulted on a $7 million military loan from the United States, with the result that Doe effectively destroyed the relationship with his largest financial supporter.
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(In a last-bid effort to avoid default, Doe exhorted the Liberian people to contribute their pocket change in “Operation Pay the United States,” even as he stashed cash in footlockers at the Executive Mansion.) The distrust became mutual.

When Doe heard the news of Taylor’s opening attack on Gbutuo, he came to suspect American involvement with the rebels, especially after several U.S. embassy vehicles were seen proximate to the assault.
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(The ambassador and other American personnel were traveling along the roadway over the Christmas holiday.) As Doe’s army rushed to the bush to confront Taylor’s rebels, U.S. Army Rangers followed with them—not to offer military guidance but to ensure, with little success, that the Liberian soldiers’ discipline didn’t break down.
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After a few months, Doe realized that Taylor’s insurgency posed an existential threat to his government. He pleaded for tangible U.S. support, providing
The Washington Post
with a letter written to President George H. W. Bush imploring him to “help your stepchildren,” but it was too late.
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As the fighting stretched into the early summer of 1990, the NPFL revealed itself as only marginally less brutal than Doe’s forces. Nearly as soon as the invasion started, NPFL commanders began terrorizing civilians and forcibly conscripting children. An NPFL general named Noriega was accused of executing dozens of men, women, and children from the Sapo tribe in Sinoe County; one elder later recounted to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (the investigative body formed by the postwar government to document crimes committed during the 1990s civil war) that this commander had ordered civilians marched to a creek, where they were “beaten, butchered or shot to death. The bodies were then pushed into the water. Over 500 persons were killed and 100 children abducted and taken to Nimba County.”
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For foreign observers, the situation in Liberia had gone from fluid to confounding. A new faction, the Independent National Patriotic Front for Liberia (INPFL), had split from Taylor, led by one of Taylor’s best—and most unpredictable—fighters, Prince Yormie Johnson, an effective military commander. Johnson’s smaller yet better-trained faction quickly advanced to the edge of the capital.

The State Department searched for a viable path to peace. Separately, the Bush administration’s National Security Council (NSC) debated what role—if any—the United States should play in mediating the conflict. The State Department saw Doe as a lost cause, and while Taylor left much to be desired, it recognized his power, both militarily and politically. Lawrence Eagleburger, then deputy secretary of state, wrote a cable to James Baker on June 8, 1990, about whether Herman Cohen, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, should visit the region to press for a resolution.
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State’s key objective was to prevent the war from moving into the capital. But officials within the NSC, including Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates, began to reassess American involvement. Beyond the several million dollars’ worth of surveillance and communications equipment housed in the country, Gates argued, the United States had no compelling interest in Liberia.