Bitter Chocolate

by Carol Off

  Guy-André Kieffer had moved to Canada in 1971 to study at McGill University in Montreal, a time of his life that few people know much about. He married a Canadian woman, presumably to get citizenship, and they divorced soon after. He left Canada after obtaining his degree—and his first divorce—to go on to Cuba and possibly China during the 1970s, always travelling on his Canadian passport, which carried less political baggage than that of his home country. He eventually resumed his studies in France, where he met Marie-André Lecompte at journalism school. Marie-André was a Québécoise-Mohawk woman from Valleyfield. It was a tumultuous relationship between two “very strong people” as their son Sébastien characterizes them.

  They fell in love during heady times: France in the mid-1970s buzzed with political and social debate. The pair were both actively involved with the French Communist Party, both idealists and social crusaders. Wedding photos show a small, not terribly happy little gathering of family and friends in front of the courthouse in Strasbourg. Guy-André is a handsome but serious young fellow with shaggy black hair, an insouciant pouting mouth and an air of impatience. His bride is a fragile beauty with Renoir eyes; the slight bulge of her white wedding dress betrays her advancing pregnancy.

  Sébastien remembers little of his early childhood, except that his parents yelled at each other a lot. In 1978, his mother left France, returning to Montreal with three-year-old Sébastien. Soon after, Guy-André followed them, moving to Ottawa, where he used his Canadian citizenship and a McGill law degree to get a job as an assistant to a Liberal Member of Parliament, Marcel Prud’homme (now a senator). Sébastien thinks his father made some effort to keep the family together, but Sébastien’s mother became deeply embittered towards her husband.

  Sébastien says desolately, “She definitely poisoned me against him.” The years with his mother, after his father left, were difficult and erratic. To compensate for the instability in his home life, Sébastien became obsessed with swimming. The discipline of high-intensity training was a creative distraction, and he was soon winning every meet he entered. Those years of endless laps paid off with an opportunity to train in France, where he became part of a competitive swimming club. But his hidden agenda in going to Paris was to find his father.

  Sébastien remembers the day he called Guy-André. “It was very emotional but also full of joy.” Guy-André was about to leave on a business trip to Africa—on assignment for the Paris-based daily newspaper La Tribune—and he would not be in France to see Sébastien. He told his son that he had married again, this time to a woman from Guadeloupe named Osange, and together they had a child, a girl named Canelle. He told Sébastien how much he had wanted to see him and be with him over the years. Sébastien was nineteen. Instead of seeing his father on that trip Sébastien was able to connect with his estranged family and he met an intoxicating crowd of fascinating relatives, including his grandparents. The next summer, Guy-André arranged for his son to come and stay with him. It became the most treasured time of Sébastien’s life, helping him unlock the mysteries of his missing parent and overcome a life of anger.

  Father and son met again the following summer, this time for two weeks, “but there was a lot of tension at that time.” Sébastien brought with him his new girlfriend, a young woman whom Guy-André considered a bad match for his boy.

  The two continued to stay in touch by telephone and email as Sébastien embarked on a troubled marriage and had a daughter of his own. But Guy-André became less communicative after he moved to Africa in 2002. As other friends and family members also noted, GAK quickly became obsessed with Côte d’Ivoire. His movements were mysterious, and he often went “underground,” as he told them, for his own safety.

  On Monday, April 19, 2004, the phone call came from Osange. GAK had gone missing without a trace. The family would hold on to the hope that he was alive for as long as possible, but it didn’t look good.

  Sébastien’s life fell apart.

  Tudor Hera had not known a moment’s peace since he arrived in Côte d’Ivoire in September 2002. When the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade appointed him to the post of First Secretary of Public and Political Affairs in the Canadian Embassy in Abidjan, no one thought the job would be a sinecure. He knew more about how the world worked than about how diplomacy functioned. He had travelled extensively in the field, working for the International Committee for the Red Cross before arriving in Ottawa. He was young, single, without children: an ideal candidate for a mission in which the Canadian government suspected there was going to be trouble.

  But no one thought it would come so soon. Hera had hardly unpacked his bags and found his desk when, three weeks after his arrival, he learned that he was in the middle of a war zone. Rebels had seized half the country and had come close to taking control of Abidjan itself. All of his plans to slowly get to know people and the country evaporated as he scrambled to find the file of contacts left by his predecessor and to figure out what was going on. Diplomatic niceties were subverted in the interests of survival, and Hera called up people out of the blue to ask for help. One of the best contacts in his Rolodex was the Canadian journalist Guy-André Kieffer.

  “He was very useful and also refreshing,” Hera remembers. “Kieffer was blunt and direct, not like most people in the country.” Hera had a lot of contact with Kieffer over the next two years, though he never got to know him personally. “He was a deeply private man, a mystery.” Also, the way GAK worked perplexed the Canadian diplomat. He knew that Kieffer met with disreputable people. He went to the hangouts of underworld types, where he would get his information. There was about him the dark, rank musk of the underworld he travelled in. “A lot of people hesitated to call him a journalist,” says Tudor. “He didn’t play by any rules. He didn’t work for any known media group; he was a freelancer but he never signed his articles. You just knew it was he who had written something because the other newspapers would name him when they reacted to his exposés. In the government-run press he was often referred to as a spy.”

  It was the policy of La Lettre du Continent not to publish bylines, and presumably no one knew which articles were Kieffer’s. But identical scoops would often turn up in opposition newspapers under a variety of names. In the close-knit world of Ivorian politics and journalism—which are often one and the same—it was presumed that Kieffer was the hand behind most of the more damning reports, even if that wasn’t true. Kieffer never seemed to mind being blamed.

  None of this dissuaded Hera from making use of Kieffer. He may not have acted like a journalist, but he certainly didn’t appear to be profiting from his work, and he was very well informed. Many journalists in the country admitted that their primary source was Kieffer, who gave away information for nothing. “You did not get the impression that he was on the take. He had an old car, he wore simple clothes, no suits, no flashy anything. Not a person with Swiss bank accounts somewhere. It’s just a gut feeling, and I certainly don’t speak for the Canadian government when I tell you this,” says Hera. “But my sense was that the guy was truly genuine. He wanted to expose corruption. There was no malice in what he was doing.”

  Other diplomats who used Kieffer’s information had the same impression. “A lot of shady characters stayed behind when everyone else was leaving Côte d’Ivoire,” says one man who used Kieffer’s information. “They called themselves ‘consultants,’ but you didn’t really know what profession they were in. There was a lot of money to be made, and they were after it. No one really knew what Kieffer was up to, but it wasn’t in the interest of getting wealthy.”

  What made Hera curious was how Kieffer had managed to survive so long given how provocative his reporting was. When the Canadian diplomat arrived in Côte d’Ivoire, there were still the remnants of the kind of civility that the country had enjoyed for decades, a European patina of culture that made Ivorians snobbish. Journalists enjoyed the freedom of what appeared to be a democracy. But that genteel atmosphere was fading fa
st. This was not a place where you knocked over furniture and called people liars without risking consequences. This was a place to mind your p’s and q’s. How did Kieffer do it?

  Many people in Côte d’Ivoire told me they believed that the Canadian Embassy was protecting Kieffer. Hera found that astonishing when I told him. For his part, Hera was convinced that sympathetic elements inside the Ivorian regime were watching out for the difficult reporter. Kieffer himself liked to create the impression, among both those who loved and those who hated him, that he had patrons, guardian angels of some kind. He dropped names and created around himself something of an aura of exceptional influence. A lot of people presumed he was being protected because no sane person would be as belligerent as he was in such a volatile place without some assurance of immunity. But in the days and weeks before he disappeared, Kieffer finally seemed afraid; he had lost some of the confidence that made powerful people reticent to take him on.

  One diplomat suspects that the magic spell Kieffer created began to dissipate as his inside sources dried up, rendering him less useful to people. “Kieffer’s intelligence became less and less reliable before he disappeared,” he says. “He was obsessed with cocoa. He was trying to get at something that was quite obscure, and he ceased to have the general-interest inside knowledge he once had, especially about security issues.” At the same time, Kieffer had become a major annoyance to people with power. “He was bothering the regime,” says another diplomat. “It sucks to say it, but he brought disaster upon himself. There is a limit to how far you can go in a country like Côte d’Ivoire.”

  A foreign cocoa executive in Abidjan is not surprised that GAK disappeared. “It was inevitable. He knew too much,” he says, as though kidnapping and death were as inevitable for a nosy journalist as an auto accident might be for a careless driver. Another foreigner who knew GAK went even further, suggesting he had it coming. Kieffer had a kind of post-colonial sense of superiority, not unlike other Frenchmen in Africa, the man says. “GAK thought he was a white knight. He was telling Ivorians what was wrong without being asked for his opinion. Questioning their ways. In other places he would have been asked to leave, but in Côte d’Ivoire he just disappeared.”

  Whatever the reason for GAK’s change of circumstances, Tudor Hera was still deeply disturbed when he heard that Kieffer had vanished. One of Kieffer’s friends called Hera on his mobile phone on Saturday to ask if he had seen GAK. No one knew where he was. On Sunday, the same person called to say that he thought something bad had happened to Kieffer. Hera contacted the French embassy and the Ivorian police.

  From the first days of the inquiry, says Hera, the French took control of the case. They had better resources in the country than the Canadians, and also had close contact with the authorities. “French police worked with Ivorian police,” says Hera. “They were training the Africans in police work.” So the Canadian Embassy took a back seat. Kieffer’s friends criticize the Canadian Embassy for not doing very much to find out what happened to him, but Tudor Hera said they did all that was possible. “We made a task force with the French and Canadian embassies, and we met with leading people in the Ivorian gendarmerie from the first day of the investigation,” he says. “We put a lot of pressure on the police, and they genuinely seemed to be helpful.”

  Despite the suspicions of Kieffer’s friends that the French authorities really didn’t want to know the truth, Hera says that was never his impression. “There was a lot of diplomatic nudging going on at very high levels. But there is only so much you can do in someone else’s country.”

  With no answers coming through official channels, the well-oiled machine that had been supplying Kieffer with information, his Network, now set out to investigate for themselves. Kieffer’s friends, family and supporters, plus his associates, informers and spies, pulled out all the stops. If Kieffer had investigated his own disappearance, he probably could not have done a better job than either the police or his circle of friends.

  Kieffer’s Network began to assemble a picture that was as accurate as is possible in an African country where truth must be, at best, approximated from a shifting assemblage of fact, innuendo, rumour, theory and wild speculation. The first version of the story had it that agents, possibly working for the ministry of the Economy and Finance, had abducted Kieffer. The assignment was apparently to take him out of town to a military installation and rough him up: apply a bit of physical coercion try to get from him any documents he might have had in his possession concerning the files he was investigating. But the operation went wrong. Kieffer had a bad heart and needed steady doses of his medication. “He popped a raspberry” in the blunt words of one European cocoa executive who has heard some of the inside story, meaning he had a heart attack.

  As local and international media dug deeper, they discovered more alarming details. The torture was probably much more aggressive. As part of the physical coercion the kidnappers beat Kieffer with clubs and iron bars for perhaps even days before he died. When the secret police realized they had killed their subject and not just terrorized him, they had to cover up the crime. The body quickly disappeared.

  While using intimidation on journalists who worked for foreign agencies had become commonplace in Abidjan, killing them was still taboo. Six months earlier, police had murdered Jean Hélène—a reporter for Radio France Internationale—shooting him dead on a street in Abidjan. The sergeant who had killed the reporter was now serving a sentence of seventeen years without parole. President Gbagbo condemned the assassination, but he publicly stated that he could understand why one of his people might be driven to such a desperate act, given the Ivorian frustration with France. The message was clear: It’s wrong to kill foreign reporters, but you’ll get official sympathy if you are compelled to do so.

  What Kieffer’s Network couldn’t fathom was why a white man’s corpse ended up on the side of the road two days later and how it subsequently disappeared from an Abidjan hospital. Was it Kieffer’s body? What happened to it? It’s not easy to get rid of a white cadaver in Abidjan without someone noticing. But that seems to be what happened. One foreign diplomat says he was told that the corpse was actually an albino African man and not a white European. But Baudelaire Mieu says that the police radio chatter they intercepted distinctly said it was a white man.

  What did seem clear to Kieffer’s Network was that the French government wanted the GAK affair to go away even more than the Ivorian government did. The embassy withheld information that the Network knew it had regarding Kieffer’s arrest, his detention and his treatment. A French foreign office representative suggested to journalists that Kieffer had been involved with nefarious activities, and that such involvement might explain his abduction. Another French official was reported to have said, “Kieffer’s disappearance was best for everyone.”

  Another story was circulating, and it turned up in French newspapers: Kieffer had been implicated in the kidnapping of a German restaurant owner some time earlier—a business deal that went bad—and he had been killed out of revenge. Kieffer’s friends concluded that this theory was not just malicious but also highly improbable, given Kieffer’s nature.

  Baudelaire Mieu found all of this deeply hurtful, but he didn’t have time to dwell on it: A week after Kieffer disappeared, Mieu himself was the target of a death threat for his alleged role in GAK’s reporting. He felt compelled to go into hiding. The authorities derided Mieu’s claims of intimidation, insisting that he was just grandstanding. But the Network knew better.

  Aline Richard, an old friend of GAK’s from his days at La Tribune, was also distressed by what she believed was the French government’s attempts to demonize her friend. The two had worked together in Paris when Kieffer covered commodities and she was on the oil beat, but she lost contact with Kieffer when he moved to Africa. All of the official and unofficial stories put out about her friend alleged that Kieffer was a part of disreputable activities and not really a journalist. “The embassy started to say that
Guy-André was a strange guy, that he was dubious and shady. Was he a journalist? Or what? That was the tone.” Aline Richard thinks if there were any questionable activities going on in Abidjan, they involved the French government, not her former colleague: “Just what is it that France is trying to accomplish in Côte d’Ivoire?”

  A twist on the Kieffer story, and one that gave ammunition to his critics, is that he didn’t initially go to Côte d’Ivoire as a journalist but rather as a consultant. In fact, he had moved to Africa at the behest of an associate, Stéphane de Vaucelles, a young idealist and a director with the HSBC Investment Bank, Africa branch, who was living in Abidjan.

  In October 2001, the HSBC was asked by Côte d’Ivoire’s prime minister, Seydou Diarra, to perform an audit on the cocoa filière, and de Vaucelles was chosen by the bank to head up the investigation. The marketing board that had kept the cocoa price stable and profitable for decades—CAISTAB—had been disbanded at the insistence of the World Bank, and some new system would have to be installed. Farmers were distrustful of attempts to launch new control systems and were attempting boycotts. World Bank leaders, who had substantial leverage in Côte d’Ivoire through their control of the state’s debt, wanted some independent organization to investigate how the filière really functioned and to determine how it might be replaced. HSBC got the contract.

  Laurent Gbagbo had come to power a year earlier, bringing with him a breath of hope that the years of instability since the death of Le Vieux had finally come to an end. Gbagbo claimed to be a socialist and professed an interest in cleaning up corruption in the cocoa industry and ensuring that the farmers got better funding. The World Bank and the IMF had made a mess of the cocoa filière with all of their SAPs, and Gbagbo claimed he wanted to restore its effectiveness. Indeed, the World Bank, the farmers and the government all agreed it was time for some fresh air to blow through the cocoa trade of Côte d’Ivoire. But there was one holdout. According to sources, the multinational food trader Cargill pressured the HSBC, of which it was an important client, to abandon the audit and shut down the cocoa review. It isn’t clear why Cargill would want to halt the investigation, but the HSBC agreed to do so.