by Jeff Sharlet
But back then, he served a different purpose. “I said, ‘I want to be able to tell people we’re going to have a meeting for ministers and top-type-level people. It will be one meeting, and you’ve got to come with all the other guys there, too, or you don’t get to meet Andrew Young.’ That was pretty powerful.”
Powerful enough to win Hunter an audience with Milton Obote, the dictator at the time. “It didn’t necessarily get exactly anywhere yet.” Where Hunter wanted to get was unclear, even to him. He doesn’t like to think of himself as a peacemaker or a negotiator—those terms strike him as too political. His mission was spiritual—if Obote would accept the principles of Jesus, as Hunter understood him, then maybe he’d stop the killing.
Soft-sell evangelism? I asked.
“It’s so soft you don’t even notice it.”
Obote, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, really didn’t. So Hunter turned up the volume. Not on the Gospel, but on the power Hunter could marshal to promote it. His next guest was Chuck Grassley.
I was confused. On the one hand, Hunter said he went without a political agenda; on the other, he recruited the most influential politicians he could wrangle to go with him. What were they there for? I asked.
“They were bait.”
Oh.
“They wouldn’t like to hear me say that, but that’s what they were.” Big names to attract big men to Hunter’s meetings. But Grassley was strange bait for Africa, a freshly minted senator who’d campaigned just years before on a platform of preventing integrationist busing. Hunter said he didn’t know anything about that. To the Ugandans, the name didn’t matter. It was the title that got them into the room.
For good measure, Hunter also brought three members of the West German Bundestag and a German businessman named Rudolf Decker, a European counterpart to Hunter. “I purposely try to give an illusion of—I was like the Wizard of Oz, because I kept coming with guys.” The German ambassador, Gunter Held, met them at the airport. “Why are you here?” he demanded of the German delegation when they’d gathered at his residence, with the American ambassador on hand. “You shouldn’t be here. You’re giving them cover. You’re making Obote look better.”
“I don’t know why we’re here,” Decker told his ambassador. “Grassley wanted us to come.” Decker had collaborated with Grassley in the Family’s Somalia intervention—a disastrous project that devolved into a pay-to-pray scheme on behalf of the Somali ruler, Siad Barre. A Family document prepared in the early ’80s, marked “Confidential,” declares Barre ready to switch his loyalties from the Soviet Union to the United States in return for guns. “The Pentagon has the list of priorities of the most needed military equipment in Somalia.” Barre was honest, at least, about the cost of his prayers: access to the American players who could—and did—open the spigot of military aid.
The ambassador turned to Grassley. “Same question for you, Senator. Why are you here?”
“I don’t know,” said Grassley. “Hunter wanted me to come.”
“Why are you here, Hunter? Why did you bring all these people here?”
“I said, ‘Well, we’d like to build a bridge of reconciliation across some divided people.’ ” Obote and Museveni, who was marching his children’s army ever closer to Kampala.
“And who,” asked the ambassador, “are the pillars upon which you are going to build this bridge of reconciliation?” It was a fair question. Obote would tell him that Museveni was a murderer. Hunter chuckled at the memory. The funny thing about that, he’d tell Obote, is that Museveni said the same thing about him!
“I don’t know,” Hunter told the ambassador. “But God does.”
If Hunter’s stories ended like Coe’s fables, a beam of light would illuminate the ambassador at that very moment and lead him to join the happy group, off to see Obote. But Hunter was more candid. “He says, ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.’ ”
Hunter didn’t really have an answer. He still doesn’t. Obote was a killer, and so was Museveni. He knew them both, Obote in office and Museveni in the bush. “You can’t fight a war without killing people,” Hunter observed. “The reason we went to see Obote was basically to give some cover to the guys we were trying to meet with and bring together.” But Obote didn’t have much time left.
I thought of one of Coe’s maxims: “We work with power where we can, build new power where we can’t.” I thought of Hunter’s 1986 proposal to Coe to formalize the Family’s research on “the transfer of power” in African nations “so that the opportunities they present are not lost.”
When Museveni and his child soldiers took Kampala in 1986, Hunter offered his new friend the same prescription he’d given Obote: reconciliation. What did that mean to Museveni? One of the first things he did was to establish a human rights commission to investigate the recent past. Not just Obote, but Idi Amin before him. And then he let it languish. The commission soldiered on, though, and recommended prosecutions. Museveni said no. Veterans of the former regimes were filtering into his government, and Museveni calculated that peace at the price of justice was a fair trade. Reconciliation.
“Love forgets,” preached one of the Family’s leaders, in a sermon reproduced for congressional leaders. “That’s what God does with your sin and mine when it’s under the Blood. He forgets all about it.”
Today, most of Amin’s men are gone, but those of Obote’s who were willing to switch their allegiance from the old dictator’s pseudo-Marxist regime to Museveni’s pseudo-Christian one are thriving. Museveni’s ethics minister, Buturo, the chairman of Uganda’s Fellowship group, is one of them. He’d been one of the many little magicians of the Obote years, famed for his ability to make enemies of the state disappear, but he had been born again since then, he told me, though he couldn’t quite remember the details. Now, he said, he is a “spirit-filled Anglican”—Pentecostal and High Church at the same time—who worships under Archbishop Luke Orombi, the American-educated priest who always has a bed in Hunter’s home, called “the bishop’s room.” Orombi wants the gays out of Uganda, but he fears a witch hunt. “Go slow,” he tells Buturo.
Buturo listens; reconciles. If it was true that he once strong-armed for the dictator, he now hunts gays “democratically.” The kill-the-gays bill, he said, was evidence of his commitment to the rule of law. It was a kindness to its victims; better the firing squad than the fists and feet and clawing fingernails of a mob. “It is in the interest of those who are homosexuals because people will start lynching them. Take the law into their own hands.”
People already had taken the law into their hands, acting on the evidence of hints and rumors, the turn of a wrist or a baseball hat worn by a woman, “kill lists”—names, photographs, and addresses—in Red Pepper. And this was democracy, too, Buturo said. Free speech, free media, the freedom of religion.
Freedom was all Hunter had ever wanted for Uganda. What they did with it—that was democracy. The Family gave them the principles of Jesus: “Seek God, discover His laws, and obey them,” the same message they brought to all the world’s leaders, great and small. What they did with the message was their religion, not his.
“I wasn’t sent to recruit Museveni for anybody,” he said. “I’ve never asked Museveni to do anything.”
“One doesn’t need to ask, do you?”
“No. Well, that’s true.”
But Hunter had asked. “He came to Washington to go to a Prayer Breakfast, and I insisted that the embassy give me a day and a half of his time…. I said to him, ‘I want you to go and have lunch on Capitol Hill with the staffers of the two House committees, two African committees.’ ”
Museveni’s advisers wanted the president to meet with congressmen instead, but Hunter knew their staffers would actually write the legislation that set foreign aid for countries like Uganda. “I said, ‘You got to humble yourself.’ You know how it says in the scripture, ‘Humble yourself and you will be raised up.’ And he did. He said, ‘
The hell with you guys. I’m going to do what Hunter says.’ ”
While Coe cultivates top men, Hunter practices what he calls the nail-on-the-wall approach to politicians. You want to get something done? Ignore the man in the presidential portrait and look for the nail that’s holding it up. “My vision, it’s different from some of the others who like to meet with leaders. I don’t care about meeting with leaders. I care about meeting with the guys—and women—in the various groups that are working behind the scenes.”
Like the staffers who actually write the legislation that determines U.S. foreign aid. “When the budgets came he had this big jump in the budgets.” Had Museveni gone through official channels, Hunter believes, he might have gotten nothing. “So, there was one time I tried to maybe influence American policy.”
And what about Grassley, Inhofe, the Family’s long list of conservative politicians? Conservatives comprised 80 percent of its membership, estimated Hunter. What was their goal? Why had they taken such an interest in Uganda? Was it Jesus? Or proxy politics in a little-noticed region of the world?
Grassley, to his credit, had challenged Obote, an American enemy, demanding that he account for the dead of Uganda’s civil war. But he didn’t challenge Museveni, an American ally with nearly as many bodies behind him. Inhofe, flying in on military planes, mixed his missionary work with efforts on behalf of AFRICOM, the United States African Command. The United States isn’t fighting any wars in Africa, but Uganda is, its troops dispatched to combat a popular insurgency in Somalia. It’s a mission no Ugandan I spoke with saw as anything other than a favor for the Americans, Museveni’s deal with the empire.
“I think one of the points you make [that] is valid,” Hunter said, “is the tension between accessibility and accountability. There is a tension.” That is, there’s a politics, a calculation. If you hold a dictator accountable—if you speak truth to his power—you might not get back in the door. And if you’re not in the circle of power, what good are you? It’d be a catch-22 if it weren’t for the fact that, so often throughout the Family’s history, the contradiction resolved itself on the side of access to power over holding power accountable.
Hunter was more concerned with the other side of the equation. “If you do what Grassley did to Obote and confront him directly, in front of other people, you can easily not get back. Now, he did that. I’m glad he did it, but he did it. There are people who don’t build a relationship close enough—and what’s the point of building a relationship if it isn’t close?—to actually talk to people about issues. And there are some people who basically come here to social climb. And they’re never going to confront anybody, because they are here for access. Some of them are actually here to make money. But, you know, I see that.
“There is tension. I’ll give you another example. There’s a picture of me with Museveni right there. I remember that day because I had the Bible in my hand, because I was taking him through part of David.” King David, that is. Hunter led Museveni through a study of 2 Samuel 8:15–18. It’s just a list of David’s governmental appointees: Joab the general; Adoniram, “in charge of forced labor.” But to a dictator who already ruled as if by divine right, the passage meant that his anointing from God trickled down to his functionaries. It wasn’t just one man who was blessed but the entire system through which he ruled. The system was a sacred machine.
There was one more office to be filled, Hunter told Museveni. Not elective, not officially appointed. “You need a friend,” Hunter told him. “It doesn’t even have to be public.”
“Surely Museveni had some friends,” I said.
“He has lots of friends,” said Hunter. But that wasn’t what he meant. More like an adviser. Someone to help the ruler stay true to God. David, said Hunter, appointed a friend. At first I thought Hunter meant Nathan the prophet, who holds King David accountable for his seduction of Bathsheba and the murder of her husband. But it was a bad analogy, since David didn’t appoint Nathan: “And the Lord sent Nathan unto David.” David didn’t choose. That’s the distinction between the Family’s religion and the prophetic tradition. The prophets were outsiders, speaking truth to power, usually in public, often with more than a touch of fever in their words. The Family shifts the job within the ruler’s circle of power and replaces the prophet with the courtier. Instead of a Martin Luther King Jr., a Henry Kissinger. Instead of Nathan, “a friend.” Someone who keeps your secrets, even when you’re wrong.
That would be Hushai, the “king’s friend” in the story of David. “Friend” was a formal title, and it meant not a relationship of affection but an adviser and a spy. When David’s son Absalom rose up against him in rebellion, David sent Hushai the friend to pose as an adviser to Absalom and his army. “Just as I have served your father, so I will serve you,” he told the rebel. Absalom thought Hushai had pledged loyalty to him; he didn’t understand that Hushai had subtly declared himself a double agent. The friend a king, or a dictator, needs, according to scripture, is the one who serves through deception.
“There are times when you have to have secrecy,” Hunter explained. “I was trying to get an accessibility—I mean an accountability component built right in, right there.” It didn’t work. The friend would have to be Ugandan, and Ugandans were scared of Museveni. One man volunteered, but Museveni rejected his counsel. From his perspective, he had friends: the Americans. And the Americans shared their friend, Jesus.
“At least I tried,” said Hunter. No accountability, then. Both sides agreed access would have to do.
“At what point are you building relationships and at what point are you giving—”
He was good at finishing my sentences. “Cover,” he said, nodding. Then he shrugged, his palms open. He saw the implications of his actions, but he preferred to think about his intentions.
“Maybe you’re a saint,” I offered at one point.
Hunter liked that. He reminded me of it when I pressed him on the lies told by his brothers in the Family. “You’re being completely open,” I said, hoping he would be. “Maybe this is an issue of, here’s a—”
I wanted to say something about the structure of the Family, the self-assurances in which it traffics, but Hunter had a better idea for the end of my sentence.
“A saint!” He laughed.
“A saint amongst the wolves.”
That made him laugh even harder.
* * *
When I finally met Bahati, we spoke at first not about homosexuality but about Bob Hunter.
“You know, Bob was here,” said Bahati. We were eating lunch at the Serena, an international hotel in Kampala where the buffet, with bananas for dessert, costs a week’s wages. In Ugandan shillings, that is. Most of the trade was in dollars.
Bahati gestured to a table behind us. The restaurant was white, Scandinavian, windows halfway around. Outside, sculpted greenery around a pond, lily pads and spiky trees, tall grasses, like Africa on TV.
“We sat right at that table.”
The purpose of the meeting had been reconciliation: “to mend fences,” Bahati said, since a conflict around the 2010 National Prayer Breakfast in February. Bahati was expected—Hunter himself had arranged housing for him at a past Breakfast—but after gay rights groups asked Obama not to attend, Hunter had first told the American press that Bahati hadn’t been invited, then that he had been but had declined. Bahati said neither statement was true.
My relationship with Bahati began when he’d reached out to me. I would tell the Americans the real story, he’d hoped. “When Bob talked to me he was talking about the pressure the gay community is exerting on the Fellowship,” Bahati had told me by phone in February. “He communicated his fear that this might cause the destruction of the National Prayer Breakfast. He was trying to control the damage. To do damage control. He has never said, ‘David, what you are doing is a problem.’ What he has said is to discuss the pressure from the gays.”
And now?
“We talked about you!” He said Hun
ter had told him I was not to be trusted, that I was interested in the story just for money. (Hunter denies this part of the conversation took place.)
Bahati giggled, displaying a spray of teeth. A scar down the middle of his forehead gives him the appearance of having a permanently furrowed brow, but he sounded like a boy when he laughed. It was the most reassuring thing about him. Then he clamped his mouth shut, the right side of his jaw pulsing as he waited for my reaction.
Bahati had skipped our morning meeting, so I’d gone to talk with Buturo instead. “He already knows you’re here,” my Ugandan colleague, Robert, had told me. Uganda is a soft police state, the surveillance of journalists taken for granted. “I guarantee it. You might as well go and see him.” So we did. We had to bribe a soldier to get into the parking garage, where we found a spot for Robert’s beat-up little hatchback amid the vehicles of high government officials, Mercedes-Benzes and BMW SUVs. Inside the ministry flickering fluorescent bulbs, a fuzzy TV in the closet-sized waiting room. Then, the brightly lit order of Buturo’s office. He was a studiously formal man, his accent as British as it was Ugandan, his talking points a metronome of contradictions. The Bible demands death for all homosexuals, he’d said, but the bill did not; this was not a conflict, because all things would be reconciled in time. There was no need to discuss genocide, he’d said, but then he’d done so himself, because homosexuality is worse than murder, “a threat to our existence”; the gays are attempting genocide, not Buturo. The bill had begun in the Parliament Fellowship, he’d said, through the democratic process. “Was there a debate?” I’d asked. “No,” he’d said, “there is no debate, because it”—the Bahati bill—“is the best thing that ever happened.”
After we’d left Buturo, we tried Bahati again. Still no answer.
So we’d called Pastor Ssempa. “Yes, I know about you,” he’d said. His wife, an American, monitored U.S. media; Ssempa had heard the same interviews Bob Hunter had. “I think you may be a homo,” he said. “I will not talk to you.” Later, though, he’d called Robert after I’d left Kampala, thinking to find me still there. “I have a piece of land I want to sell to Jeff,” he’d told Robert. “We need to meet so I can show it to him.”