by Ronan Farrow
Congress added to its appropriations a requirement that the secretary of state certify the Egyptian government was introducing democratic reforms, holding elections, defending women’s rights and safeguarding free expression. But the conditions were toothless: the new requirements had a national security exemption large enough to fit an Apache helicopter, or several. Citing extremist activity in the Sinai, the administration soon resumed deliveries of just such helicopters, even during escalating crackdowns.
Shortly after the massacre at Rabaa in 2013, the Obama administration quietly, temporarily froze the transfer of several weapons systems. Planned deliveries of helicopters, F-16 aircraft, M1A1 tanks, and Harpoon missiles were placed on hold. It was all larger-scale equipment, rather than the tear gas and small arms being deployed in the regime’s urban crackdowns. And other military support, like training operations and the delivery of many other kinds of spare parts for weapons, would continue. In March 2015, President Obama announced a full resumption of assistance. “By that time,” Anne Patterson recalled, “the Sinai stuff had flared up . . . And the judgment was, ‘yes they needed helicopters.’ ”
The posturing on Capitol Hill was just that. In fact, there was little leeway to change the relationship. “The problem we would have . . . is that the aid is already committed,” said Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch. “Everything’s pre-sold.” It was a machine that couldn’t be turned off. The Obama administration quietly attempted a more modest reform, signing off on an end to “cash flow financing”—a preferential system granted to Egypt and Israel that lets them purchase military equipment of their choice on credit, obligating corresponding appropriations of US assistance, potentially for years to come. “They lost a really important element,” with that change, said Patterson. “They’ll be forced to buy stuff that we think will be useful for them to buy.” It was a slim ration of accountability—and didn’t offer any control over what was actually done with the equipment. A scathing 2016 audit by the Government Accountability Office concluded that neither the State Department nor the Pentagon had any functional systems for monitoring how American weapons were being used in Egypt.
IN THE END, the halting reform efforts have been harsh reminders of the resistance to change in significant military alliances. Like Pakistan, Egypt was simply too big to fail, in its own eyes, and in the eyes of American policymakers.
A new array of threats, including the rise of ISIL in the country’s Sinai Peninsula, has reinforced that leverage. Competition has played a role in immobilizing the relationship, too. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates have pledged billions of dollars of economic support to Egypt, sometimes offering more than the United States, with fewer conditions. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has developed a cozy relationship with Sisi. Russia, too, has stepped into the fray, with meetings between Putin and Sisi and growing assistance packages.
“We certainly have influence,” Kerry reflected. “But our leverage is not as simple a formula as some people assume. We are far from the only actor. . . . And leverage is a two-way street—we needed Egypt’s help on a set of issues including ISIL and Israel.” As a result, said Frank Lowenstein, “their attitude about it is, ‘What the fuck are you really going to do about it? You can’t afford to have me fail.’ That’s the ultimate leverage that Sisi has: that he will fail. And that is an extraordinarily powerful form of leverage.”
Meanwhile, years of dependence on military assistance had convinced both sides that arms and equipment sales were the only currency that could purchase influence, and that diplomatic overtures were essentially cosmetic. As a result, precious little has changed in the US-Egypt relationship since the Rabaa massacre. Security wasn’t simply the first priority, it was often the only one. And Washington policymakers reverted to the traditional tools of arms and military financing to enforce it, in part because they had forged few meaningful alternatives.
Egyptians suffered the consequences as the United States gave Sisi its endorsement and support. “He’s been . . . ‘ruthless’ is a good word. Death penalties. Mass arrests of journalists. Shutting out NGOs,” said General Hayden, the former CIA director, reflecting the common thinking about Sisi among American officials. But when I asked Hayden if there was a point at which that should trigger an easing of military assistance, he darkened. “I’m not prepared to say that,” he said. He steepled his hands, peering over his rimless glasses at me. “We make our compromises,” he mused. “We may incur a debt for the future.”
Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations during the Rabaa massacre, was critical of the American response to that crisis, and since. “We should have completely revamped the relationship given who Sisi was and made it purely transactional,” she explained, exasperated. Instead, after brief pauses, US assistance inevitably resumed, and the relationship “looked largely the same as before the massacre.”
Power knew that cutting off the $1.3-billion aid package to Egypt wasn’t politically or strategically realistic, but was among the officials who felt those funds could be allocated more cautiously. “Now the Camp David rationale is over because [Israel’s] Bibi [Netanyahu] and Sisi have the relationship they need,” so much of the logic of giving the Egyptians whatever equipment they wanted was over, she said. “I argued for giving a huge share of that money to Tunisia. We should be rewarding countries who are struggling to progress in the direction we want them to.”
Moral and ethical dilemmas like this were nothing new in geopolitics. But the particular intimacy between Washington and Cairo made the compromises feel closer to home. Of all the dictators who enthralled Donald Trump once he took office, Sisi appeared to earn the most attention and flattery. Trump reversed the Obama administration’s decision to withhold invitations to the White House from Sisi and his top brass. Some of the Egyptians who witnessed the Obama-era relationship were optimistic about the shift. “With Trump,” said Nabil Fahmy, the former interim foreign minister, “you finally have the two presidents talking to each other.”
But for better or worse, even the sputtering attempts at accountability were receding in the rearview mirror. “Sisi is still getting support from the USA,” Teo Butturini, the Italian photographer, said, shaking his head. “At the same time he is the person who actually ruled to go shoot at the people in Rabaa. He’s the person who . . . made the antiprotest law. He is the person who is jailing a lot of journalists.” One of the few photographs Butturini retained from his harrowing day in the midst of the maelstrom was of a tear gas canister, one of many picked up off the bloodied concrete by numb survivors. Several appeared to be American-made. One he photographed bore the logo of CTS—Combined Tactical Systems—a Jamestown, Pennsylvania–based arms manufacturer. It even had a support contact number, with a Pennsylvania area code that, presumedly, an Egyptian would have to call during business hours to lodge a complaint. Butturini never forgot the shouts of the protesters around him, brandishing the empty canisters: “They’re shooting at us, the tear gas, and the tear gas comes from the USA.”
21
MIDNIGHT AT THE RANCH
WAKING UP IN THE BED OF A WHITE CHEVY TRUCK trundling through the moorlands of central Colombia, Freddy Torres began to suspect that his evening had gone terribly wrong. The mild fall weather had given way to a cold wind; the forested highlands replaced by a low, flat heath. Scattered homes dotted the landscape, and the early dawn was silent. Most worrying were the burlap sacks that bumped against his outstretched legs and the empty bottles of aguardiente: they were filled with rifles. Torres—a young man in his twenties, born and raised in the village of Cabrera, Cundinamarca, an afternoon’s drive south from Bogota—hadn’t meant to end up here, hungover, confused, and hours from home. The truck ride was the final stop on a liquor-fueled twelve-hour bender. Now, three strange men with strange names—Paisa, a common nickname for people from Medellin, Costeño, meaning “coast,” and another man who, improbably, was also named Freddy—had led him to what felt like the
end of the world.
It was the early hours of September 17, 2006, and Torres was about to come face-to-face with the secret costs of the United States’ most expensive military alliance in Latin America. In the coked-out frenzy of that region’s war on drugs, many of the same dynamics evident in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Egypt have plagued the United States’ alliances. Colombia, where the costliest of the region’s relationships has played out in the form of the multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia military-and-development assistance package, throws into relief some of the worst pitfalls of America’s Faustian pacts with foreign militaries. For years, the Colombian relationship served chiefly as a cautionary tale of the human rights abuses, rampant corruption, and explosion of drugs that sprang from America’s military interventions in Latin America and its insistence on prioritizing guns over negotiations. But Colombia, in recent years, has also become what US officials described as a success story, a model of how to put civilian assistance front and center in a national-security-sensitive relationship dominated by generals talking to generals.
That night in September 2006 had started quietly for Freddy Torres. Walking home from a job—he often pulled days-long trucking shifts that took him to the far reaches of the country—he bumped into his cousin Elvir at a rocola, a neighborhood joint serving as half bodega, half bar. Elvir—always gregarious and fun-loving, never short of friends—was with an acquaintance, the man also named Freddy, and the three ordered rounds of beer. They joked around, calmly whiling away the hours, half-watching children kick a soccer ball around in the park nearby.
As evening fell, the young men grew restless. Several drinks in, their new friend Freddy suggested that the cousins accompany him to a bar in Fusa, a bigger city several hours away. After their friend offered to pay for the trip, the cousins agreed to come with him, on a lark. Their friend left the store to make a phone call—of which Torres caught one phrase: “I’m bringing two people”—and returned fifteen minutes later, telling Elvir to go find a car to rent.
The three packed into an early 1980s Renault and set out for Fusa, picking up two men—Paisa and Costeño—on the way. A drive that would normally take only two or three hours stretched through the night, as the men stopped in forgettable bar after forgettable bar, in small town after small town. Just as often, they’d swap cars—a detail that an increasingly intoxicated Torres paid little attention to. Around midnight, after a delay at a checkpoint, the drunk men made it to Fusa, and after several boozy hours at the La Curva strip club and a meal of street empanadas, arepas, and shish kabobs, Freddy, Paisa, and Costeño suggested the cousins join them at a nearby ranch—owned by a friend, but long abandoned—to sleep off the drinks before returning home. Dawn was approaching and neither thought twice before accepting. Clambering into the bed of the Chevy—their fourth car of the evening—Torres and Elvir promptly fell asleep.
It was upon waking that Torres noticed the guns.
After a long, tense drive, the men parked the car and handed Torres and his cousin black sweatshirts to change into. The new friends that Torres felt increasingly convinced weren’t friends led them to an isolated two-room ranch house, seemingly empty and abandoned, and told them to wait in the bedroom while the other men looked for supplies.
Torres slipped out of the house to urinate. That’s when he noticed fresh footprints in the earth around the house—odd, for a supposedly abandoned property. He had been unnerved since their arrival, and he took the footprints as confirmation of his fears: that they were being set up, possibly by more men than the ones they’d been drinking with. Deciding not to wait to learn if he was right, Torres hurried back inside and told his cousin it was time to leave. The two had almost made it out of the house when their drinking buddies opened fire. Dodging the deadly spray, Torres leapt out the back window and ran for a nearby forest, where he hid for nearly ten hours, as his would-be killers scoured the hills for him. When the sun began to fall, he walked to the nearest town and called the police and his family.
Torres survived. Elvir was killed.
This was only the beginning of Freddy Torres’s strange saga. To his surprise, the military falsely pronounced Elvir a guerrilla combatant in the civil war, and reported his death as a combat kill. Torres launched a campaign to clear his brother’s name, which drew death threats. Eventually, an unseen shooter fired through his windshield as he sat parked near his home in Bogota in February 2007. He escaped injury, but, after the assassination attempt, Torres uprooted his family and adopted a peripatetic life, changing cell numbers and houses every few months. The authorities, he said, were unresponsive to his pleas for protection. (“They don’t help anyone,” he told me, “because they don’t want to have problems with the state.”) Torres was convinced that Elvir’s murder and the subsequent intimidation efforts could only have come from power players within the Colombian military. Eventually, his suspicions bore out, when an army colonel who had encouraged his soldiers to kill civilians was indicted for Elvir’s murder. The men who went by “Freddy,” “Paisa,” and “Costeño” were never found, let alone arrested.
Torres’s story matched thousands of others from bystanders to Colombia’s “victorious” war on terror. Elvir was a casualty of the phenomenon of “false positives”: the Colombian military’s long-unacknowledged practice of extrajudicial killings. Under pressure from their commanders to create the appearance of success in the war against the guerrillas, members of the armed forces lured in unsuspecting civilians, killed them, and dressed the bodies up as FARC rebels. The deaths were used to inflate the military’s batting average. Those who carried out the false positive killings were rewarded with vacation time, promotions, and medals. Victims included farmers, children, homeless people, drug users, the mentally disabled, and petty criminals. Rarely—if ever—were victims card-carrying FARC guerrillas.
Until 2008, most Colombian policymakers could pretend the false positives were merely a rumor, but that September, the so-called “Soacha scandal” pulled the curtain back. Prosecutors learned the fates of twenty-two impoverished young men from the slums of Bogota, who had been promised well-paying jobs, transported out of the city, and then murdered and dressed up as FARC members. General Mario Montoya, commander of the Colombian Army, resigned on November 4, 2008. Prosecutors went on to investigate more than 3,000 alleged false positives by militia personnel in the 2000s. In 2015, the UN refugee agency UNHCR reported that the total number of victims of false positives could be as high as 5,000.
Colombia was no stranger to civilian executions, but the practice soared in the final stage of its decades-long civil war, in the early 2000s. The army took on FARC rebels with renewed fury, and was eager to demonstrate progress to a frustrated public, and to its American financiers. Defense Minister Camilo Ospina de facto endorsed the practice in 2005 when he issued the so-called Directive #29, which authorized “the payment of rewards for the capture or killing of ringleaders of the illegal armed groups.” The reward was set at $1,500 per kill—a little less than half what the average Colombian took home each year. Civilian executions doubled the following year. How far up the scandal went was unclear, but the practice was common and not limited to any unit or region. UN special rapporteur Philip Alston, after carrying out an investigation into the practice, found “no evidence to suggest that these killings were carried out as a matter of official Government policy, or that they were directed by, or carried out with the knowledge of, the President or successive Defense Ministers.”
FOR WASHINGTON, DC, the false positive killings might have just been a tragic blip in another country’s history, but for one fact: many of the worst offenders were US-trained and funded. Researchers found that Colombian army brigades that received more US assistance had been associated with significantly more executions. In Washington’s race to support its Colombian partners in their mission to secure the country from so-called terrorists, US military officials and other policymakers often failed to take a close look at the fighters they were
preparing for battle. Nearly half of Colombian commanders trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning have been charged with a serious crime or commanded units whose members had committed extrajudicial killings. Commanders like General Jaime Lasprilla—a former instructor at Fort Benning who sanctioned or encouraged hundreds of killings under his command—were commonplace.
Even before the Soacha scandal broke, reports of extrajudicial killings were whispered within the United States’ intelligence, military, and diplomatic corps. A 1994 cable from the US ambassador in Bogota warned of “body count mentalities,” explaining that “field officers who cannot show track records of aggressive anti-guerrilla activity (wherein the majority of the military’s human rights abuses occur) disadvantage themselves at promotion time.” A CIA intelligence report from the same year was even more explicit, stating that the Colombian security forces “employ death squad tactics in their counterinsurgency campaign” and had “a history of assassinating leftwing civilians in guerrilla areas, cooperating with narcotics-related paramilitary groups in attacks against suspected guerrilla sympathizers, and killing captured combatants.” The Pentagon came to a similar conclusion, reporting in 1997 on a “body count syndrome” in the Army that “tends to fuel human rights abuses by well-meaning soldiers trying to get their quota to impress superiors” and a “cavalier, or at least passive, approach when it comes to allowing the paramilitaries to serve as proxies . . . for the COLAR [Colombian Army] in contributing to the guerrilla body count.” But the Colombians—and by extension, the Americans—were fighting a war. Often, the brass didn’t have the time to police their soldiers, or the interest in doing so.