To Stop a Warlord

by Shannon Sedgwick Davis

  —

  Back in January, with defection efforts already seeing positive results, a US Army psychological operations (PSYOPS) team had deployed to Central Africa as part of the US counter-LRA intervention to bolster defections further. PSYOPS is a unique division of the Department of Defense that uses nonviolent means—usually print and broadcast media—to further American objectives in conflict zones. They helped on a number of fronts, including radio messaging and flyer drops.

  We brought access to defectors, strong relations with the Ugandan military, as well as unparalleled flexibility and rapid response; they brought technology, intelligence, and knowledge of how psychological defection operations had worked in other contexts.

  We were grateful for the progress and success of the paper defection campaign, but we wondered if there was an even better strategy to invite the LRA soldiers home. During the Vietnam War and in other global conflicts, the US military had mounted massive loudspeakers on tactical helicopters to broadcast messages over remote areas. What if the mission could acquire tactical mounted speakers and fly a chopper around areas of known LRA activity, blaring loudspeaker messages in Acholi, telling the LRA soldiers where to surrender, and assuring them that they would not be harmed or prosecuted? The US military had access to speakers, but they didn’t have the right choppers on which to mount them. The current—now the third—Special Forces commander in Entebbe helped us get the loudspeaker platform up and running on our Bell 412.

  The speakers were massive and had huge batteries—each one was like a rock concert sound system squeezed into a space the size of a dorm fridge. We asked recent LRA defectors and Acholi speakers in the SOG to record short come-home messages—saying, this is so-and-so, I’m free, if you surrender you won’t be harmed or prosecuted—and we played them through the speakers using the A/V jack on our iPhones. Through trial and error we discovered how long the message had to be and at what speed the helo had to fly for the entire message to be audible to someone on the ground. The messages could be heard from as far as four miles away; we could cover more than two hundred square miles in an hour of flying.

  Despite our steep learning curve, the day after the first official loudspeaker mission a fifteen-year-old girl surrendered. Shortly after, the current Special Forces commander emailed me: The other day we had an LRA member defect after he heard the speakers broadcast. As he was walking out, he found a leaflet we had dropped with Acellam’s picture on it and came out of the bush waving it at a farmer to show he meant no harm. Pretty great indicator of effectiveness, no?

  And then one day in mid-October, our pilot flew the Bell 412 for forty-five minutes over the area just south of the confluence of the Vovodo and Chinko rivers, playing loudspeaker messages, and just three days later two LRA sergeants—Sergeant Kidega and Sergeant Shantel—surrendered late in the evening at Dembia. They had been in Ongwen’s group but had been separated from the rest of the LRA unit during the August firefight with Lieutenant Charles’s squad. They had heard the loudspeaker messages and come out of the bush. In their debriefing, they alerted us to a rendezvous of Ongwen’s group set to occur in a matter of days at the west side of the Vovodo.

  Kidega’s and Shantel’s surrenders gave us immediate proof of concept of the loudspeaker messaging, and also confirmed the success of our air assets in allowing the Ugandan military to act on intelligence within hours instead of days. The aircraft played loudspeaker come-home messages on October 15; flew Sergeants Kidega and Shantel to Djemah for debriefing the same night they defected; inserted Kidega with a SOG squad on October 19 to lead the way to the planned meeting point on October 29; and moved three SOG teams near the rendezvous site to ambush the meeting. A year ago, the mission had lacked this agile capability.

  * * *

  —

  The defections just kept coming. A week before the suspected October rendezvous, another LRA soldier, Lieutenant Francis Chogme, reported to the base in Obo late in the evening and said he was ready to go home. Like Sergeants Kidega and Shantel, he had been part of Ongwen’s group, had become separated during the firefight, and had heard the loudspeaker messaging. When he was flown to Djemah for debriefing he said that a meeting between Ongwen, Odhiambo, and Kony had been scheduled for late December or early January. We kept his surrender a secret to prevent the LRA from altering its intended meeting location, and Colonel Kabango began preparing the equipment, tactics, and personnel needed for the ambush. He wanted to be ready to move by the end of November in case the meeting was pushed earlier.

  In the meantime, the assault teams moved in on the different LRA groups traveling to the October 29 rendezvous. In multiple contacts over the course of six days, the SOG teams recovered more weapons and ammunition and captured several LRA combatants. One early morning a call came into the base in Djemah—a tracking team had picked up an LRA trail crossing a river in the Central African Republic. They estimated that the LRA was about seven hours ahead. If the base could airlift troops into position, they might be able to make contact sooner. The helo lifted off into the day’s first light, the air fresh, green and mist swirling below.

  “Pack light,” Captain Kommando, who was leading the ground team, radioed in. “You’re going straight in on the target, you’ll get on it and have to keep running.”

  He was there to greet the troops when the helo door slid open to let the soldiers out, and he flashed a peace sign as the bird lifted off.

  By afternoon he radioed in again: “Contact, contact!” The helo headed back out into the bush and John found a place to land just west of the SOG troops’ position. He was in the helo on the makeshift landing zone when a SOG lieutenant came out of the trees, carrying a small child in each arm. Three mothers followed him out of the bush, more little ones in their arms. The families had been trying to flee the LRA and were stuck near a river looking for a safe crossing. The SOG soldiers had helped them cross and led them out of the jungle into the grassy clearing where the helo waited to fly them home.

  The youngest child, still a baby, sucked his thumb and gazed out at the big world from the safety of his mother’s arms. The next oldest child, a toddler, was dressed in fatigues, an outfit his mother had fashioned out of a man’s full-size camouflage uniform. He rode in the arms of a soldier who, rifle slung over his shoulder, ammo vest bulging from his chest, proudly cradled him. At the head of the group, two soldiers held the hands of a young boy who walked cautiously between them—a boy who only the day before was on a steady track to becoming a soldier within Kony’s ranks. He held tightly to the soldiers’ hands and eyed the helo with a mix of apprehension and wonder as he made his final steps to freedom.

  42

  OKELLO’S TEETH

  EACH NEW DEFECTOR strengthened our understanding of the LRA’s movements and operations. We learned that in late September, Kony had sent Okello*—one of his bodyguards and an aide-de-camp—and a group of eight fighters down to Congo to collect Lieutenant Colonel Binany, the LRA leader who had led the Makombo massacres, from Garamba National Park, a protected wildlife preserve in Congo, and bring him back to Kony’s camp in Kafia Kingi (K2). Binany was in charge of the entire Congo sector and was one of the most fearsome and respected of Kony’s commanders because of his battlefield prowess. In addition to supplying ivory and other goods that could be traded for medicine and GPS equipment, Binany’s Congo operation—so close to the border with Uganda—was important to Kony because it validated his propaganda that the LRA’s purpose was still to overthrow Museveni and return home. From our perspective, Binany was important because he led the assaults in by far the deadliest region of LRA operation.

  On the way down to Garamba to get Binany, Okello’s group had attacked Pasi, a village in Congo, where they had looted medical supplies, food, and an HF radio from the Early Warning Network, attacked a Congolese military base, and abducted civilians. At the beginning of November, a SOG squad laid an ambush for the LRA group on
the Ouora River, trying to catch them as they headed back through the Central African Republic toward the K2 base. During contact, the SOG soldiers rescued a young boy from Congo who said that many other women and children, all recent abductees, were being marched up to Joseph Kony, forced to carry the food and ivory Binany had poached in Garamba. In the next few weeks, the SOG troops made four more contacts with Binany’s group as they pushed their way on toward K2, and at least five more LRA combatants and captives defected.

  Meanwhile, several Darfuri traders on their way from K2 to Obo and Mboki, moving near the South Sudan/Central African Republic border, agreed to come to Djemah for questioning. They didn’t know where Kony’s camp was situated, but they shared the locations of trade routes into K2 and said any of the traders traveling these routes might have information that would help finally find the central LRA camp.

  * * *

  —

  Then, near Christmas, we got the luckiest break we’d had to date. In Mboki, a small town on the border between the Central African Republic and Congo, a short, quiet man in dirty fatigues stepped out of the forest and approached several residents walking on the main road to town. He was missing most of his top two front teeth—they were half shot off, nothing left but jagged stumps. He told them he had escaped from the LRA and asked if they could show him the way to a nearby Ugandan military base where he could surrender.

  When he was received by the Acholi unit captain stationed near Mboki, they discovered that the defector was Okello, Kony’s personal bodyguard and confidant. One of Kony’s most trusted colleagues, Okello had been routinely assigned some of the LRA’s most sensitive missions, including the recent one down to Garamba National Park to bring poached ivory back to Kony’s K2 camp. As a tactic to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, Kony demanded the continual capture of virgin women to become his sex slaves, and Okello was tasked with escorting a group of captured women all the way up to K2 in addition to transporting the numerous tusks. Okello was one of the people Kony counted on to oversee the safe transit of the women and ivory.

  But, under attack from Ugandan troops, one of the LRA commanders assisting with the convoy had been shot, and Okello and some of Kony’s other bodyguards had split off from the group, taking the women. During the journey back to K2, Okello and the others raped some of the captive women. When they returned to the K2 camp, Kony discovered that the women delivered to him weren’t all virgins, and he executed at least one of the other bodyguards. Okello learned that Kony planned to execute him, as well. He decided to escape, and fled the K2 camp late one night.

  Perhaps to better hide from anyone who might pursue him, Okello opted to follow the natural topography of rivers until he found a safe place to defect. Trails used by local cattle herders also followed the water, and a few days into his flight south, he came upon a group of herders on the trail. Although some herders cooperated with the LRA, engaging in trade or helping transport supplies, many held a grudge against the LRA for stealing their cattle. Okello didn’t know where the loyalties of these herders lay, and whether his status as an escapee would make him a friend or a foe. At first, they offered to protect him, and allowed him to travel in their company. But one day, they turned on him, threatening to kill him because he was LRA. He managed to flee, and kept running south. He passed Djemah, where Laren was stationed, but didn’t surrender until he had traveled all the way down to Mboki. When he surrendered, he had been on the run for three weeks.

  The Ugandan army transported him back up to the forward base in Djemah for debriefing. A defector of his status could have been a useful tool in encouraging other defections, but because of Okello’s intimate knowledge of Kony’s camp in K2, and because it was better for Kony to believe that Okello had died during his flight, they decided to keep his defection a secret.

  Upon arriving at Djemah, he was warmly received by fellow Acholis in the Ugandan army, including ex-LRA, who gave him updates on other defectors. It amazed me that although mere weeks ago Okello had been in the upper echelon of the LRA, abducting and raping captives, protecting Kony, the Ugandan soldiers welcomed Okello now as though they were greeting an old friend. He wasn’t an enemy. He was a brother. They didn’t express any suspicion or judgment, they didn’t condemn Okello for the atrocities he’d committed, or berate him for having waited so long to defect, only choosing to leave Kony’s army when his life was on the line. Their conversation was warm and jovial. A common bond united them, and the fact that they could sit together and share stories and updates was a triumph.

  It didn’t hurt their rapport that Okello was so eager to help them stop Kony. Although he had no GPS to give us the exact coordinates of Kony’s camp, he was able to draw a map—a generic-looking aerial view of a tree with some clumps around it to represent huts—and to tell us how many people were living there. It wasn’t a lot to go on, but it did give us a visual footprint to look for in satellite images.

  Okello also gave us the only recent stories we’d heard of Kony’s actual state of mind. We knew well how tough life was in the bush. Everything out there was dangerous, and it had been a mystery how Kony had managed to live for years, and with apparent ease, in such an inhospitable environment. In the absence of real information about Kony, the mythological stories held sway, the stories that Kony used to indoctrinate impressionable children: that he could read people’s minds, that he could run so fast that his feet didn’t touch the ground, that he was a conduit for spirits that would possess him, offering prophecies and guidance. From Okello we learned the truth: Kony wasn’t doing well. He was highly intelligent and charismatic—but he was not invulnerable. Recently, he had gotten lost in the jungle for a week, and when his soldiers finally rescued him, he was dirty, hungry, and sobbing. According to Okello, Kony was so terrified when he heard gunshots that he defecated in his pants. If the person closest to Kony could see his flaws and weaknesses, it meant others in Kony’s fold might become aware of the cracks in Kony’s armor and see the truth that lay under his façade of lies.

  In addition to the generic map and the insight into the real Joseph Kony, Okello immediately became a tactical asset to the SOG soldiers, joining them as one of the most capable trackers. Perhaps he was motivated by a sense of guilt over the atrocities he had witnessed or committed. Maybe he was motivated by ten years of accumulated resentments toward Kony. Or maybe he was just ready to do right. Whatever his motivations, Okello’s defection was a turning point, shifting the war in the SOG’s favor.

  One piece of intelligence is like a puzzle piece—useless all by itself. It’s only in putting the pieces together that the whole picture is clear. Okello’s defection yielded the first of three puzzle pieces that would soon line up to present the mission’s next big opportunity. His intelligence propelled Colonel Kabango to put SOG troops on the border with K2, anticipating that Binany’s group would come back that way to poach more ivory. If he hadn’t, we would have missed our next lucky break.

  * * *

  —

  In the months that followed, the SOG soldiers, 10 percent of whom were also ex-rebels of some kind, accepted Okello into the fold. In a gesture of goodwill and unity, they would later help him get to Entebbe for eight hundred dollars’ worth of dental work to replace the two front teeth that had been shattered when he’d taken a bullet to the face fighting in Kony’s rebel group.

  Laren would send me a picture of the two of them after Okello’s teeth had been replaced. Okello wears his Ugandan army fatigues, tipping the brim of his camouflage cap and flashing the widest possible smile, showing off his brand-new pearly whites. He and Laren stand side-by-side, arms looped across each other’s shoulders, both smiling hugely. Except for the ammo vest on Okello’s chest, the clothesline behind them where military uniforms have been hung to dry, the wall of jungle that rises behind them, they looked as though they might be college friends on a camping trip, happy and brotherly and carefree.

  *
* *

  —

  Okello challenged me, as Acellam had, to reconsider the borders between us. Before this mission, my notion of good and evil had been cut and dry. I couldn’t forget what LRA members like Acellam and Okello had wreaked on innocents. The terrible past felt irredeemable. But the Ugandan soldiers were teaching me to see the world in shades other than right and wrong, to notice the fiber of humanity that bound all of us, on every side of the war.

  For Christmas that year, Laren sent me the toddler’s camouflage uniform that the child had been wearing when the SOG soldier had helped carry him out of the bush that fall. The uniform had been carefully cleaned and pressed, and Laren enclosed a short note: This boy’s life is different from what it was going to be.

  43

  BINANY’S GPS

  IN THE SEMIARID desert and grassland on the border between the Central African Republic and South Sudan, where, based on Okello’s information, Colonel Kabango had put troops to wait for Binany, the SOG troops began questioning the large groups of nomadic cattle herders that crossed the border, within which LRA members would sometimes travel in disguise. As they moved around the outside edges of the huge herd, the SOG soldiers encountered some enraged nomads, upset because a few of their cows had just been stolen—by a Ugandan rebel, they said, who was still nearby, feasting on the meat.

  When the SOG troops found Lieutenant Colonel Binany with his bodyguards, he was barefoot, roasting a hunk of stolen beef on a campfire. During the ensuing gunfight, Binany used flames from his cooking fire to start a blaze as diversion and protection. But then he became pinned, ultimately consumed by the brushfire he’d started, and burned alive. The man who had orchestrated the Makombo massacres, the second Christmas massacres that no one had known about for months, the ones that in part had led us to this riskier intervention, was now dead. And in his backpack, found at a distance from his body, the SOG soldiers retrieved a journal full of useful intelligence: ledgers of looted goods and ivory poached from Garamba National Park and gold and diamonds mined in the Central African Republic; charts of LRA units, including their locations and force strength; and a list of Binany’s own command groups and operations. Most important of all, they found the second puzzle piece: a GPS device that provided a pivotal missing link that could lead to Kony’s capture.