by Johnny Dwyer
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.23 (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.24 (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.25 Taylor would build his revolutionary army from the men and boys who were displaced from Nimba County by the regime.26 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.27
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.28 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.29 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.30 (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.31 (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.32 (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.33 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.34
As the fighting stretched into the e
arly 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.”35
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.36 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.
President Bush, ultimately, made the final decision about the U.S. role in the rapidly deteriorating situation. Initially, he supported sending Cohen to enable Doe’s departure, but then he began to waver. “After learning that the President might be having second thoughts about not sending Hank Cohen to Liberia, I spoke to [National Security Adviser] Brent [Scowcroft] and outlined the reasons why you and we thought it would be useful,” Baker wrote, outlining the need for Doe to “stand down peacefully” and the eagerness to avoid any sort of American military intervention.37 “While we cannot know whether Taylor will be better or worse than Doe in the long run, we can be sure that in the short run a bloody siege of Monrovia will not play well for Liberians or Americans.”
Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., Liberian opposition leaders in the diaspora gathered to take a position on the growing rebellion.38 Taylor did not belong to the opposition establishment—insofar as one existed—and as the distinct possibility of the government’s collapse loomed, expats in the United States organized to have a separate voice. The group, calling itself the Association for Constitutional Democracy in Liberia (ACDL), included Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Then living in Alexandria, Virginia, Johnson Sirleaf had met Taylor in Paris, months earlier, in a meeting brokered by a mutual friend who was active in diaspora politics, Tom Woewiyu.
Several differing accounts of this meeting have emerged, but none of the parties denies it occurred, in a hotel restaurant near Charles de Gaulle Airport.39 Taylor and Johnson Sirleaf had not seen each other since their first encounter nearly a decade earlier, at the Ministry of Finance. While she had not had time for him then, she was willing, on the prodding of Woewiyu, to meet with the man who was now poised to launch a revolution. Taylor testified that Johnson Sirleaf was an “old revolutionary” who’d had a direct hand in Quiwonkpa’s failed 1985 coup—a fact that she denied—and their meeting served to secure funding for Taylor’s trainees from the Liberian exiles. Taylor brought with him photographs of the recruits, as proof that he wasn’t simply a hustler. Johnson Sirleaf offered to raise money, according to Taylor, and to have Woewiyu act as a courier, bringing the funds from the United States to West Africa.
Johnson Sirleaf’s recollection differs. She wrote in her memoir that while she did meet with Taylor, he did not make a positive impression. As she tells it, when she was ordering breakfast, Taylor admonished her, “The money you spend to pay for breakfast you could just give to us.” She handed Taylor the money she had with her. “It was clear to me that whatever their plans, they were not going well at the moment,” she wrote. But Woewiyu prevailed upon her to reserve judgment. “I trusted him and felt I owed his passionate belief in Taylor at least the benefit of the doubt.”
While Johnson Sirleaf made no mention of it in her memoir, she eventually acknowledged to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that her support had been more substantial. She admitted to providing $10,000 to Taylor through the ACDL, but that figure too has been called into question. The third party at the meeting, Woewiyu, would eventually break his silence about Johnson Sirleaf’s early support for the NPFL and offer a “conservative estimate” of $500,000 raised through the ACDL.
Following the Christmas 1989 invasion, Johnson Sirleaf explained that the U.S. State Department had asked for her and the ACDL to contact Taylor and urge restraint. The group decided they would provide the rebels with a small sum of money to purchase food and relief supplies. (Taylor insists that Johnson Sirleaf’s role was not as limited as she has described, saying in testimony before the Special Court, “Ellen is lying, and she knows that she is lying, okay. Ellen was in America raising money.… Do you take a government by relief supplies? Nonsense.”)
In May 1990 Johnson Sirleaf crossed rebel lines to visit Taylor’s fighters in Gborplay, a town where the NPFL had set up its headquarters.40 She was one of the first opposition leaders to return to Liberia following the invasion. By her account, she was distressed by what she saw: hundreds of male and female soldiers “all with blank, bloodshot eyes,” “huge and frightening guns,” and a “heavily guarded Taylor.”41
“Charles Taylor knew that he was going to win,” she recalled. “And implicit in his confident, boasting rhetoric was the fact that he would do whatever it took to make his belief a reality.”
Not long afterward, in early July 1990, the war arrived in Monrovia, tearing at the very fabric of Liberian society.42 Thousands of refugees streamed out of the city to avoid the fighting. The civilians who remained found themselves caught between the two factions, Prince Johnson’s INPFL approaching the city from the north, Taylor’s NPFL from the south, and Doe’s ragged and hunted government force caught in between. Effectively under siege, the city became host to a humanitarian crisis. There was little food or protection from the fighting; Doe’s control over the capital—and country—shrank to a few blocks surrounding the Executive Mansion.
That month several hundred civilians sought refuge in St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, a large chapel along Monrovia’s main thoroughfare. The church, a short drive from the Executive Mansion, is located directly across the street from a popular hotel. According to witnesses, soldiers loyal to Doe entered the church’s compound and set upon the refugees with knives and machetes, then eventually opened fire into the crowd.43 While exact numbers of the dead are unverifiable, the U.S. embassy reported immediately afterward that “the 186 persons killed in the massacre at the Lutheran Church remain where they fell. After six days, the bodies can no longer be moved, and MSF [Médecins sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders] Belgian doctors hope to find means to blanket the place with a caustic solution or to burn the bodies which would probably entail burning the church itself.”44
U.S. policy had shifted to reflect the violence on the ground: the priority of the Bush administration was to now minimize bloodshed and damage to the nation’s infrastructure. The most direct path to this objective was not to throw more support behind Samuel Doe—who had demonstrated little regard for civilians—but to work with Charles Taylor. In the background, the a
dministration negotiated a transfer of power to the rebel leader.
That summer, as rebels closed in on Doe, the United States took on the role of mediating the transfer of power. Herman Cohen had negotiated an exile agreement for Doe to receive political asylum in Togo, should he step down, but ensuring that Doe made it to Togo alive was not a priority for the Bush administration.45
One of the primary American negotiators, a political officer in the U.S. embassy to Ivory Coast, outlined in chilling terms Taylor’s seizure of power in Monrovia.46 In a transcript of the July 3, 1990, radio conversation between Taylor and an unidentified U.S. embassy official from Abidjan, which the Bush administration’s National Security Council declassified, the American made clear to Taylor that Doe’s personal safety did not have to be guaranteed should the rebels move on Monrovia: “We want to clarify a message we sent this morning. Doe’s spokesmen have asked for protection for Doe’s followers, not for Doe himself, as a condition for his resignation. Are you clear on that distinction?”47
Taylor responded, “That sounds reasonable.”
“If Doe resigns, would you be in a position to cease hostilities?” the official asked.
“Almost immediately,” Taylor replied. “If Doe resigns and names his speaker of the House of Representatives now to hold over for the next few hours, we will cease hostilities and set up an interim government. I even intend to have a surprise announcement for the world that we intend to stick to the process of free elections at the soonest possible time.”
None of this came to pass. The Bush administration scuttled it, believing that greater involvement would lead to greater responsibility. Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates saw little existing responsibility of the United States toward the Liberian people and “was adamantly against us doing anything in Liberia,” according to Cohen.