Blood Diamonds

by Greg Campbell

  “I’m getting on that fucking helicopter,” I announced. The look on Hondros’s face said good luck trying. Although we were registered correspondents with respected U.S. media outlets, accredited through the United Nations and generally well-organized people, not a single excursion on a UN chopper, pickup truck, or troop carrier was without its share of mind-numbing complications that soon made us seriously contemplate buying our own vehicle and taking our chances in the bush, something we would have done in Kailahun if there had been any operable vehicles. Traveling on a helicopter was impossible without an MOP, a “movement of personnel” form that’s meant to keep track of who’s going where so that if one of the helicopters crashes or is shot out of the sky, the responsible UN person back at headquarters would know whose parents to call to claim the bodies, assuming they weren’t eaten by hungry Kamajors. Needless to say, we didn’t have MOPs.

  But I was willing to risk a fistfight with the Ukrainian pilots to avoid being stranded with the Ghanaians a moment longer. So far, it had taken four days to accomplish a portion of the mission that had been estimated back in the comfort of the base at Daru to take 12 to 14 hours.

  The desperate and determined look on my face when I approached the pilot was apparently an acceptable alternative to having an MOP. He let us both on the plane.

  Rotor wash is hypnotizing, invisible waves of superspeed air that flattens long grass and makes palm trees move like disco dancers. It seemed that all of the refugees and RUF defenders were in the trees around the soccer field to watch some of their young colleagues fly off to a deprogramming center. Some waved, some stood still as statues until the blast of air became too powerful to face, and as we lifted off, quickly and into a turn before we were even fifteen feet off the ground, everyone had their heads buried in their elbows. The deafening roar of the chopper was welcome indeed and we craned our heads out the portholes to look down on Kailahun, the little roofless buildings fading rapidly into the jungle, challenging you to believe that some of the best gems sold throughout the world in the last seven or eight years had passed through this shelled and hopeless bush village.

  I wondered what Sween and Lahia were thinking as they listened to us fly overhead.

  8

  “THE BASE”: Osama’s War Chest

  West Africa, Afghanistan, New York

  IN JULY 2001—more than a year into the Kimberley Process—a Lebanese diamond broker named Aziz Nassour arrived in Monrovia, Liberia, for a crucial meeting. Although his name appeared on a watch list issued by the United Nations Security Council merely two months before, Nassour was received at Robertsfield Airport as if he were a government official, greeted by Liberian law enforcement and escorted past the obligatory customs and immigration checkpoints to ensure that he was quickly on his way through the streets of the crumbling, humid West African city.

  Within an hour of his arrival from Antwerp, he was inside a drab four-bedroom safehouse, a place that, if it looked normal from the outside, revealed quite a bit about its residents on the inside. Plastered on the walls were posters celebrating the suicide bombings of Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group, and videotapes of Hezbollah attackers killing Israeli troops were scattered around the VCR.

  The safehouse was run by Senegalese men and the meeting had been arranged by their boss and countryman, Ibrahim Bah, a diamond trafficker who lived in Burkina Faso, two countries to the northeast of Liberia. Bah was also a general in the RUF, the rebellion’s senior logistics expert in the movement of weapons and diamonds between Burkina Faso, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Several other high-ranking RUF officers were also in attendance.

  The meeting occurred at a critical time. The two-year-old UNAMSIL had managed, after countless failures and broken deals, to kick-start a disarmament agreement between the RUF and the government of Sierra Leone that even the cynics agreed looked promising. By the time Nassour and the others sat down under the fanatical eyes of Hezbollah guerillas staring from the walls, the UN was claiming that half the country had been disarmed: More than 3,000 fighters had turned in their AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers and begun the process of reintegrating into daily life in Sierra Leone. If the schedule held fast, disarmament would be complete by the end of the year and, in theory, the war that had torn apart the small West African country over the course of the previous decade would be over.

  This was good news for everyone but those who profited from Sierra Leone’s diamond wealth, especially the men in the Liberian safehouse that day. In 1999, an estimated $75 million worth of gemstones had flowed from the RUF to the world market, a vast amount of capital for a bush army, moving completely undetected, untaxed, and unrecorded. In return, an army’s worth of munitions, fuel, food, and medicine flowed back.

  The United Nations banned Nassour and 130 others from traveling to or from Liberia in an effort to stem the tide of diamonds moving so easily from the RUF into the world market, and adopted Security Council Resolution 1343 on May 7, 2001, in an attempt to shut down one of the many branches of the illicit pipeline. Among other provisions, it banned countries from importing any diamonds from Liberia, regardless of whether they originated in Liberia or not; imposed military sanctions and travel sanctions on people like Nassour believed to be involved in the arms-for-gems scheme; and required the Liberian government to expel any RUF fighters seeking refuge in the country.

  The list of those affected by the travel ban read like a “Who’s Who” of the whole Sierra Leone melodrama. Besides Nassour, the list included Sam Bokarie, better known as Major General Mosquito, an RUF battle-group commander who fell out of favor with the RUF leadership in early 2001 and fled to Liberia. Mosquito was an instrumental middleman in moving diamonds out of Sierra Leone. Also named was Victor Bout, the former KGB agent who owns and operates the complicated network of private planes that ships munitions and weapons to the RUF from Eastern Europe. Wealthy Lebanese businessman Talal El-Ndine was named as well; he was the inner circle’s paymaster. Ibrahim Bah was on the list, as was Nassour’s cousin, Samiah Osailly, another Antwerp diamond broker.

  But for smugglers and criminals, UN resolutions mean little. Nassour had business to conduct with the RUF. He told the rebels that he had buyers who needed to convert large sums of cash into easily convertible commodities, and diamonds fit the bill perfectly.

  It’s not known if Nassour told the RUF who the buyers were, but they probably could have guessed. On previous occasions, Nassour had done business with two Muslim men who referred to him as “Alpha Zulu” whenever they spoke to him on a satellite phone. The two 24-year-old men—Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, from Tanzania, and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed of Kenya—were members of Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network. According to the FBI, they’d been buying diamonds from the RUF since 1998, the same year U.S. embassies were destroyed by Al Qaeda operatives in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi. Ghailani is accused by the FBI of helping buy the truck that destroyed the building in Dar-es-Salaam.

  According to the FBI, it seems the first Al Qaeda contact was established between Mosquito and Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, a top bin Laden aid. The two met through RUF General Bah in September 1998, and Abdullah discussed the possibility of buying RUF diamonds on a regular basis. As recently as January 2000—right under the nose of UNAMSIL—Ghailani and Mohammed had been in Sierra Leone’s mother-lode district, Kono, with the RUF, overseeing diamond production on behalf of Al Qaeda.

  Whether he mentioned his clients or not at the July meeting in the safehouse in Monrovia, Nassour’s request of the RUF stood to benefit everyone involved: He asked the RUF to double their production at the diamond mines in exchange for a higher price for the rough. That way the RUF could pad their profits before having to hand over the diamond districts to the government as outlined in the disarmament agreement, Nassour would make out handsomely, and his clients could easily launder millions of dollars of cash. They could also turn a considerable profit: RUF diamonds usually sold to their first customers for
about 10 percent of their uncut worth.

  The timing of this agreement was critical. From the RUF’s point of view, there was a finite amount of time, measured in months if not weeks, for the rebels to continue plundering the diamond fields before the government regained their control, with UN oversight. For Nassour’s Al Qaeda clients, they had less than two months—until September 11, to be precise—to turn their cash into diamonds, which would then represent one of their few liquid assets.

  Shortly after the meeting, news reports noted a frenzied pace of mining in Kono and other RUF-controlled diamond areas. “Sierra Leone’s rebels are using the forced labor of children and young men to greatly expand their diamond mining here, despite an agreement as part of a fragile peace process to stop harvesting gems from one of the world’s richest diamond fields,” wrote Washington Post reporter Douglas Farah from Kono in August. “The rebels of the Revolutionary United Front are digging, in defiance of an accord with the government earlier this month, and the presence nearby of 800 UN peacekeepers. UN officials said their mandate was to enforce a cease-fire signed by the rebels and the government in November (2000) and did not include enforcing the mining ban.”

  It’s impossible to say how much Al Qaeda money was converted to gems during this last-ditch megabuy, but it’s likely that it served its overarching purpose very well.

  On September 11, 2001, a group of Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked three commercial airplanes and crashed them into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., in a catastrophic and well-organized attack on the United States. A fourth hijacked airliner presumed to be aimed for the Capitol building or the White House crashed in a forest in Pennsylvania after passengers fought with hijackers for control of the airplane. The Twin Towers collapsed, killing nearly 3,000 people, and 190 were killed at the Pentagon. The plume of smoke from the New York attacks could be seen by satellites in outer space. Intelligence experts put the blame squarely on Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden.

  As a first step in its retaliation, the United States launched a diplomatic mission to Europe and the Middle East in an effort to freeze the financial accounts of Osama bin Laden’s terror network, tying up over $100 million in assets in the first three weeks. The aim was to cripple the Saudi exile’s ability to fund future attacks and resupply its military assets in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda’s base of operations.

  But if bin Laden’s currency-to-diamonds conversion scheme worked—and the indication is that it did, for Al Qaeda operatives seem to have begun three years before the attacks—the network kept up to several million dollars worth of assets in the form of milky white stones, the most compact form of wealth known to man.

  “I now believe that to cut off Al Qaeda funds and laundering activities you have to cut off the diamond pipeline,” said a European investigator quoted in the Washington Post. “We are talking about millions and maybe tens of millions of dollars in profits and laundering.”1

  “WHAT IS ‘HEZBOLLAH?’”

  It was an unexpected question for 44-year-old Washington Post reporter Doug Farah, especially under the circumstances. Although Sierra Leone was the proud home to thousands of Lebanese diamond merchants and their families—and the country’s reputation as a fund-raising source for the infamous Iranian-backed terrorist group was practically common knowledge—the fact that he was being asked about Hezbollah by one of his RUF contacts seemed out of place. And that it was happening in the weeks following the September 11 terror attacks made it all the more intriguing.

  He answered the question with one of his own: Why do you want to know?

  That simple inquiry would lead, although he couldn’t have known it at the time, to his eventual hasty departure from West Africa under threats to his life and those of his family by a powerful network of people. It was the tiny crack in a dam of information that would bring the Sierra Leone diamond story full circle and add a major piece of the puzzle to the world’s biggest story that was breaking in places far removed from Sierra Leone: the U.S. war on terrorism that was, at that moment, building like a thunderhead over Afghanistan.

  But the tale began undramatically, as many do, with a shrug and a plausible explanation. The RUF fighter told Farah that there was a safehouse in Monrovia used by General Bah that was occupied by Hezbollah members, but he wasn’t sure what Hezbollah was. He told Farah that he’d been there and seen movies of men blowing up Israeli tanks and large posters of Osama bin Laden on the walls. The men who occupied the house claimed their membership with the Lebanese terrorist group.

  Although he had no idea about the eventual significance of that piece of information at the time, Farah filed it away as a possible lead. A longtime correspondent in some of the world’s most dangerous locations, Farah was a veteran reporter of the drug war in Latin America and was no stranger to conflicts that were run purely as economic endeavors. In the weeks and months following the September 11 attacks, he was pursuing the connections between foreign fund-raising in West Africa and its wars.2

  Although he’d been to dangerous places in the past, Farah had never experienced a fighting force as unhinged as the RUF, a telling statement from a man who’d spent fifteen years prior to coming to Africa covering wars in Central America, drug wars in the Andes, and the American occupation of Haiti.3

  Since March 2000, Farah had been the Washington Post’s West African bureau chief, based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, with his wife and infant child. He spent his time traveling throughout West Africa, but focused on Nigeria, the big brother of all West African countries. The continent’s most populous country, Nigeria holds the most interest for Americans—one in six Africans is Nigerian—and it’s the one that Western nations hope to be a stabilizing force in the war-torn region. Other countries of interest to Farah were those that don’t have a map-location in the minds of most American news consumers: Equatorial Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Niger, Chad . . . and Sierra Leone. When Farah took on the job, Sierra Leone was reaching a watershed moment in its history—the breakdown of all authority with the deployment of UNAMSIL and the subsequent capture of over 500 of its soldiers.

  Sierra Leone proved to be familiar soil for Farah. He felt he intuitively understood the conflict thanks to his background in Colombia, the big difference being that the end product of one war was illegal and that in the other was one of the world’s most prized luxuries, a fact that made the Sierra Leone story all the more lurid. Diamonds and drugs can sometimes have a lot in common in regards to where they’re harvested, what they fund, and how they’re sold.

  But the RUF defied most stereotypes about organized crime rebellions. The RUF’s standards of conduct—and those of almost everyone else fighting in Sierra Leone—were nearly nonexistent, controlled mainly by drugs, booze, and savagery, making them wholly unpredictable and terrifying.

  “Even the crazed death squad goons in El Salvador and the hit men in Colombia were not that far gone,” he wrote in an e-mail message to me in late 2001. “And no group I was familiar with ever targeted children like the RUF and others did.”

  Farah filed a story about diamond mining in Kono, and how it had inexplicably reached a fever pitch in the summer of 2001 even though the RUF were to have stopped mining under the current peace agreement. One of the key points in his story was the obligatory washing-of-hands statement from UNAMSIL officials: The peacekeeping force was there to enforce the disarmament, not the mining ban. In other words, although it was a violation of the agreement, UNAMSIL was going to do nothing about it.

  Farah returned home to Abidjan, where he turned the Hezbollah nugget over in his mind. There are an estimated 120,000 Lebanese living in West Africa, most of them in the import-export business. Although the number of extremist Shiite Muslims who would be inclined to actively fund Hezbollah is thought to be low, it’s also thought that more moderate Lebanese contribute to the organization to keep from being shaken down. The fact that Bah may have ties to the group wasn’t necessarily surprising
. Intelligence agencies have long suspected Bah of coordinating diamond sales with them for as long as twenty years, during a time in which terrorists attacked American interests in Beirut with car bombs, hijacked airplanes, and kidnapped Americans. Bah has spent most of his life as a rebel, first in Senegal, then in Afghanistan, then in Lebanon. He is thought to have personally trained Charles Taylor and Foday Sankoh when they were in Libya in the early 1990s.4

  Farah soon learned that a top Hezbollah member may have visited Abidjan recently. The man was named as one of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists, a list that was released in the wake of the September 11 attacks and also published, with photos, in Newsweek magazine. Farah took the magazine with him when he again met with his RUF contacts a few weeks later.

  The Al Qaeda story may have died there. None of the people he showed the picture to recognized the Hezbollah operative. But one of the RUF men picked up Farah’s Newsweek and began idly flipping through the pages, looking at the pictures. At one point, Farah said the man gasped in surprise. He knew three of the others wanted by the FBI; two of them, he said, had been in Kono as recently as January 2001, working with a man known to them as Alpha Zulu, the code name of Aziz Nassour. All three of the wanted men were identified in the magazine as Al Qaeda members.

  Farah was stunned. He’d gone to Sierra Leone with the hopes of connecting RUF diamond sales and Hezbollah, but it seemed that he had hit the jackpot, so long as the RUF man knew what he was talking about. Several other RUF soldiers came over and also recognized the three Al Qaeda operatives. He asked them to look at the pictures again. They said that they were sure; Bah also knew the wanted men, they said, because Bah had “fought in Afghanistan” and with Hezbollah. The Al Qaeda operatives were sent to Kono by “Alpha Zulu.” He was the main man, they confirmed, and he’s the one who rented the Hezbollah house in Monrovia.