by Jeff Sharlet
And the Family, it turned out, was at the center of the relationship between the two men. They shared not only common ground but also common funds. According to the Justice Department, most of the money Siljander had taken from the IARA, money he’d used to develop his “Reconciliation” program, was funneled through the International Foundation, the “doing business as” name of the Fellowship Foundation. What’s more, the IARA had stolen it from a USAID grant for real relief work in the impoverished African nation of Mali.
That is what it means, at the intersection of piety and corruption now known as C Street, to “have a heart for the poor.” It’s a hungry heart, a heart that consumes. Sometimes it’s money; sometimes it’s souls.
“I’m guilty of two things,” says Sen. Jim Inhofe, Coburn’s senior colleague from Oklahoma. “I’m a Jesus guy, and I have a heart for Africa.” That heart is linked to a savvy mind with a sharp awareness of Africa’s natural resources, chief among them oil; the petroleum industry is his biggest donor, a fact about which he’s not shy. “I’m trying to get members of the House and Senate to understand how valuable Africa is,” he declares. Inhofe is the most intriguing of the Family’s apostles in that he is the most candid. He has covered most of Africa for the Family, bringing its “principles of Jesus,” backed by American power. As the second-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Inhofe has requisitioned military airplanes, at thousands of dollars an hour in operating costs, for his missionary travel. But he’s not robbing the Pentagon; as one of the Senate’s arch-conservatives, he has merged spiritual war with actual war, leading the charge for an American military buildup across the continent.
When Inhofe first ran for Senate, in 1994, he told the voters that he was running on the “3 Gs—God, gays, and guns.” Inhofe looks like the state he represents: flat-faced, wide-open, and a little raw. A former navy pilot, he still flies at age seventy-six, fearlessly, according to friends who’ve taken white-knuckle rides. He has giant, elegant hands, surprisingly gentle in the way they float around his points, which are neither elegant nor gentle—especially when it comes to “biblical” values. His office says it has a policy against hiring homosexuals, to prevent conflict of interest. He once took to the floor of the Senate with a jumbo photograph of his children and grandchildren. “I’m really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we’ve never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship.”
Inhofe is just as blunt when it comes to spreading God’s word. On December 21, 2008, the Tulsa Oklahoman placed on its front page a story that could have become a major scandal, had not the paper’s editors run it so close to Christmas. Since 1999, Inhofe had taken twenty international trips, at a cost of at least $187,000 in public money—not including the cost of military transportation—to promote what he called “a Jesus thing.” He visited Eastern Europe and the Middle East, but his real focus is Africa, especially Uganda, a country he claims to have adopted as a personal responsibility. He credits the Family, and Doug Coe in particular, with opening his eyes to that duty.
As a young representative, Inhofe attended the Family’s weekly House Prayer Breakfast meeting only out of respect for Oklahoma representative Wes Watkins, its chairman at the time. “I assumed I was a Christian,” he explained to an Oklahoma evangelical magazine. But that didn’t mean much more to him than sitting through a service every Sunday. It was a Christian Embassy missionary, Tom Barrett, who challenged Inhofe to a more zealous faith by suggesting Inhofe was lukewarm toward Jesus. Lukewarm? James Mountain Inhofe—that’s his full name—wasn’t lukewarm about anything! He was a for-or-against man. “So, right there on September 22, 1988 at 2:30 p.m. in the Members Dining Room, I had an experience I will never forget and came to know Jesus.”
He became a Prayer Breakfast loyalist, but it took another challenge to turn him into a missionary. It was Doug Coe who gave it to him. “Doug has always been kind of behind the scenes, very quiet,” Inhofe told fundamentalist activist Rev. Rob Schenck, in a video Schenck made to defend Inhofe against the Oklahoman. “He talked me into going to Africa,” Inhofe said of Coe. “And I had no interest in going to Africa.” His daughter, a schoolteacher, called him one day to tell him she was going to Africa for school break. “I said, ‘Well, guess where Daddy’s going? To Africa. And if you go with me, it’s free!” It’d also be off the books. Although Inhofe would go on to charge his missionary travel to taxpayers, that first trip was paid for by a religious organization, according to a press release. Inhofe never reported it.
What was his mission? “I call it the political philosophy of Jesus, something put together by Doug…. It’s all scripturally based. Acts 9:15”—the last of the Eight Core Aspects outlined in the document distributed at the Prayer Breakfast, which Inhofe paraphrased as “ ‘Take my name, Jesus, to the kings.’ And, of course, if you’re a member of the United States Senate in Africa, they think you’re important.” He chuckled, slapping the arm of his red leather sofa. “You’re always going to get in to see the kings!”
His first king? Gen. Sani Abacha, dictator of Nigeria, Africa’s largest and most populous nation, not long before Abacha died in bed with three prostitutes in 1998. Abacha was known for two qualities: the greed that led him to steal $3 billion from his country, and the loyalty to the foreign oil companies that made that theft possible. “You can’t help who you are,” said a Family man, defending the group’s outreach to the general. “I mean, can’t he have a friend?”
Inhofe would be that friend. “We went in there,” Inhofe continues, “not really knowing what we’re doing. He started talking about political things.” But Inhofe had a greater mission. “ ‘I came all the way across the Atlantic and down to sub-Saharan Africa,’ ” he said, “ ‘to tell you in the spirit of Jesus that we love you.’ ”
Siljander says he was there, too. “There was a moment when Abacha sent all his aides out of the room,” he recalls, “and I wondered if I was ever going to see Nancy and my four kids again.” Abacha wasn’t about to murder two American congressmen, but Siljander has to play the moment for the drama it’s worth in order to make the “reconciliation” that follows look miraculous.
Inhofe, at least, bought it. “That is probably the first time this man had ever cried, at least in front of other people,” he says. And then Inhofe, Siljander, and the dictator—a Muslim in name—prayed to Jesus. “Jesus is the common denominator,” Inhofe explained, “because Muslims love Jesus, too…. They sometimes are the first ones to say, ‘Yes, let’s meet in the spirit of Jesus.’ ”
Was it Jesus who changed the dictator’s heart? The rest of the world might be inclined to say it was oil. Forty-four percent of Nigeria’s went to America. The ninth-largest oil producer, Nigeria became a pariah nation under Abacha’s rule, officially condemned by Washington since the time of his overthrow of a democratic government, in 1993. But Abacha launched a $10 million lobbying campaign in the capital that won him Democratic as well as Republican allies. He already had four very important American friends: Mobil, Chevron, Ashland, and Texaco. Inhofe, winner of a Lifetime Service Award from a petroleum industry group, was another good friend to have. “Democracy advocates,” wrote an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus in 1997, the year of Inhofe’s mission, “worry that Abacha will interpret Washington’s willingness to dialogue as a signal that Washington will not follow through on its threats to impose oil sanctions.”
None of that mattered to the senator. All he was trying to do was help “millions and millions of poor people,” he told Rev. Schenck in the video. And for him, that began with helping General Abacha, one of the kings of Acts 9:15, through his leadership in a successful effort to block sanctions. More recently, in 2008, Inhofe pledged military aid to the government of Nigeria’s President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, who’d stolen his election the previous year.
But it didn’t end in Nigeria. Inhofe got involved with a Family initiative called Youth Corps. Endorsed by former secretary of state James Bake
r and Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, Youth Corps doesn’t lead with Jesus—in fact, its official brochure doesn’t mention his name. But a different document I’d been given while I was living with the Family in 2002, “Youth Corps Vision,” is more explicit:
A group of highly dedicated individuals who are united together having a total commitment to use their lives to daily seek to mature into people who talk like Jesus, act like Jesus, think like Jesus. This group will have the responsibility to:
see that the commitment and action is maintained to the overall vision;
see that the finest and best invisible organization is developed and maintained at all levels of the work;
even though the structure is hidden, see that the Family atmosphere is maintained, so that all people can feel a part of the Family.
After I published The Family, a member responsible for much of the group’s Uganda work—including its network of Youth Corps homes and a Leadership Academy to which the Fellowship Foundation has donated several million dollars—dismissed the document I’d quoted as outdated. He didn’t volunteer a more recent edition. But, luckily for me, someone else did: the young man who’d grown up in the Family. Inhofe and his staff were all over the documents he sent me, invited to nearly every meeting. But two documents in particular were striking. First, there was an update of the “Vision” of Youth Corps, and it was anything but the ecumenical “principles” the Family proclaims at the Prayer Breakfast:
Jesus said to his disciples to go to all the nations and tell the inhabitants about Himself (the Gospel)…. Youth Corp[s] gives us a simple way of achieving His vision; that is taking 5 men from within a country and training them on how to live like Jesus and share Him with the poor of their country.
The idea was that, as natives known to be close to American power, the five chosen for indoctrination—like Coburn’s five from Lebanon—would be more effective than all the missionaries the traditional churches could send. They’d also be cheaper: “For example if we were to send one family over to Russia to live, it might cost $70,000 per year. But 5 men and their families could be supported for $25,000 total if they are already from Russia.”
The question was how to choose these key men. “The Execution of the Vision” explains:
A. A congressman and/or Senator from the United States will befriend the leader of another country and tell him/her how Jesus and His teachings will help his country and its poor.
B. U.S. leader and foreign leader will select 5 men (mentors) from the foreign country to commit to learn about Jesus and how He will help themselves, their country and the poor.
The five would then be matched with American support teams that would cover their costs, visit them annually, and pray for them as much as possible. The men would not be asked to convert—in fact, the Family believes, it’d be better if they continued to call themselves Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, or whatever the customs of the land dictated; that way, they would be spiritual double agents fluent in two faiths, the one required by the politics of their home countries and that of the Family. To those who were ready, however, the true leader, Jesus, would be introduced. A section titled “Training” reads:
Training for the foreign mentors will be done with strict dependence of [sic] Jesus’ promise in John 15:26: “The Helper will come—the Spirit, who reveals the truth about God and who comes from the Father. I will send him to you from the Father and He will speak about me.”
Actually, it would be the Family that would explain God to the heathen:
We will teach the mentors to confess their sins (known or unknown) and to ask the Holy Spirit of Christ to live in them, and to teach them how to live, what to think and what to say. We will teach them to ask the Spirit of Jesus to teach them as they read God’s word. They will be asked to think about what did Jesus do, say, and think in relation to the situation.
Kadry reshiut vse, as Stalin liked to say; cadres decide all. Win the leadership, win the nation. The goal, according to the “Vision,” was to identify five for each of the 192 countries in the world by the end of 2008. Did they succeed? Not likely. But the “Vision” has gone far and wide with the help of men such as Inhofe, and the Work goes on. The Family apostate sent me a 2004 budget for funds to be raised by businessmen around the country for Inhofe’s missionary work. Not his travel—the government would cover that—but that of his protégés, the five men for each country he was to select with the help of a local leader. The budget covered eleven African nations (Inhofe has since said he stepped it up to twelve): Benin, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the site of the worst war on the planet at the moment, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mauritius, Rwanda, and Uganda. For each country, the local liaison is listed. In all but Ethiopia and Mauritius, it is the president. Then the U.S. leader: Inhofe, down the line. The sums that follow are small, but that’s the point: power, not cash, is the Family’s currency. Costs for 2003 were mostly covered; for 2004, the budget projected between $20,000 and $40,000 for each country, except one, Uganda, for which $70,000 was to be raised.
“We know Senator Inhofe,” David Bahati, a Ugandan member of Parliament and a rising star in the country’s ruling party, told me. “We respect him. We know him.” I repeated Inhofe’s comments about bringing to Africa the “political philosophy of Jesus, something put together by Doug.” Bahati knew Doug Coe, too. I wondered if he’d be insulted by what sounded to me like “The White Man’s Burden.” Bahati didn’t hear it like that. “I think when he says ‘political philosophy of Jesus,’ I think he’s responding to politics as the management of society, according to Jesus, how he brings Jesus to the issues of society.”
Bahati was doing just that when I spoke to him: bringing Inhofe’s Jesus to his society. So that, I decided, was where the story would take me next: Uganda.
4
THE KINGDOM
SEVERAL MONTHS after the C Street scandals, a radio producer called to talk about Uganda; was I aware of what was happening in the East African nation? I was—inspired by missionaries, Uganda had declared a war on homosexuality—but it hadn’t struck me at the time as a story that would interest Americans. Not much in Africa does. The systemic destruction of Somalia was a footnote to the deaths of a handful of Americans in a Hollywood movie, Black Hawk Down. Uganda? They’d already had their movie, The Last King of Scotland, starring Forrest Whitaker as the 1970s dictator Idi Amin. He won an Oscar. What more was there to say?
We might start with the phrase “never again”—the pledge to prevent genocide that has been reduced to an ad campaign for the business of inspirational Holocaust movies, Defiance, Triumph of the Spirit, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, its meaning in the world off the screen, meanwhile, made moot many times over in Cambodia, East Timor, Rwanda.
The radio producer was calling because, in Uganda, the idea of genocide had once again been set on a simmer. And the men responsible were those the Family calls its Ugandan brothers.
On October 14, 2009, the Ugandan MP David Bahati introduced legislation called the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Among its provisions:
three years in prison for failure to report a homosexual within twenty-four hours of learning of his or her crime;
seven years in prison for “promotion,” which would include not only advocacy but also even simple acknowledgment of the reality of homosexuality;
life imprisonment for one homosexual act;
and, for “aggravated homosexuality” (which includes sex while HIV-positive, sex with a disabled person, or simply sex, more than once, marking the criminal as a “serial offender”), death.
Bahati, the secretary of the Family’s Ugandan branch, called his bill traditional, Ugandan “family values.” Both the disease—homosexuality, that is—and its diagnosis had been exported from the West, said Dr. James Nsaba Buturo, Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity and the chair of the weekly Family meeting in Parliament. But the solution, he added proudly, was U
gandan, an idea that came from the people.
“Is the death penalty a good idea?” I asked a pretty girl named Sharon, at a weekly abstinence rally on the campus of Makerere, Uganda’s top university.
“Yeah!” She smiled, a flash of neat little teeth, and leaned in close to be heard over the music, hip-hop thumping. The rally doubles as the school’s big Saturday night party.
“Have you ever met a homosexual?” I asked.
“I have never!”
“If you met one, would you kill him?”
“It’s hard for me to kill.” That smile. Those teeth. “It is hard for me to do it alone.”
“But together?” She giggled and nodded.
Winston Churchill called Uganda “the pearl of Africa.” The Family thinks it is, too. In the last ten years, it has poured millions into “leadership development” there, more than it has invested in any other foreign country. A Family leader takes credit for turning on the tap of U.S. foreign aid through which billions have flowed into Ugandan coffers. Or private bank accounts, as the case may be. The government of Yoweri Museveni, hailed by the United States as a democracy since the general marched into Kampala twenty-four years ago, in 1986, is ranked 130th on the most reliable corruption index—better than Belarus but just behind Lebanon. “Corruption is not just an element of [the] system,” observes Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda, “it is ‘the system.’ ”
Every year, right before Uganda’s Independence Day, the government holds a National Prayer Breakfast, modeled on the Family’s event in Washington. It’s organized, with Washington’s help, by Bahati’s Parliament prayer group, called the Fellowship—also modeled on the group in Washington. Americans, among them Sen. Jim Inhofe and former attorney general John Ashcroft, both longtime Family men, and Pastor Rick Warren, are a frequent attraction at the weekly meetings of the Parliament group. Inhofe and Ashcroft are nearly defined by their vocal anti-gay beliefs, but Warren presents himself as a moderate. “I’m no homophobic guy,” he says, even as he equates homosexuality with incest. But in Africa, he doesn’t parse words. “He said that homosexuality is a sin and that we should fight it,” Bahati recalled of Warren’s visits. “He was making a strong point that we should not accept it.”