Africa's Most Wanted
Charles Taylor is an accused war criminal. A U.N.-backed court wants him. Washington is dithering
Taylor's alleged links to al Qaeda were first documented in 2001 by the Washington Post's Douglas Farah, who later expanded his reporting into a book, Blood From Stones . Farah briefed both White and the court's chief prosecutor, David Crane, a former senior Pentagon intelligence official. Crane and White were initially uninterested in the al Qaeda connection, but eventually, they concluded, they couldn't ignore the links. "We ran smack-dab into al Qaeda's presence," Crane says, "almost within a month that we were operating in this area." The court now says it has found nearly two dozen witnesses who have identified about half the men on the FBI's list of most-wanted terrorists as having been in contact with Taylor. "I'm absolutely positive of this, " says Crane. "I am not a sensationalist. I am just a prosecutor who is trying to put some bad people in jail, and I just found an association of these bad people with these international terrorists."
Questions. The FBI isn't buying it. "During the course of our yearlong investigation, we worked closely with the CIA and the entire international intelligence community, and nobody could support White's position," says Dennis Lormel, former chief of the FBI's terrorist financing operations section. His agents submitted financial questions to al Qaeda detainees at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but Lormel says "we never got any inkling that al Qaeda was related to the diamonds."
In its report last year, the 9/11 commission concurred, saying it found "no persuasive evidence that al Qaeda funded itself by trading in African conflict diamonds." The CIA declined to comment. Juan Zarate, an assistant secretary at the Treasury Department who helped investigate the 1998 embassy bombings, says the government has carefully investigated White's findings but found little to support them. "It's not that we're afraid of the connections," he says. "There's no one hungrier than the U.S. to attack the issue."
Back and forth. The disagreements between the FBI and the court's investigators are sharp and specific. White says his sources identified Aafia Siddiqui, an alleged high-level al Qaeda female operative. Other sources, he said, told of Taylor's hosting al Qaeda members at his home in Congo Town, Liberia, and at the Hotel Boulevard in Monrovia, where they said satchels of diamonds were exchanged for cash and guns. The U.N.-backed court also obtained what it says is evidence that al Qaeda was buying Taylor's diamonds through a Belgian gemstone-smuggling operation called Asa Diam, which allegedly had ties to Hezbollah, and selling them at the diamond exchange in Antwerp, Belgium. The FBI's Lormel says the bureau identified the men who were purportedly al Qaeda diamond buyers as Senegalese smugglers. "They were basically bad guys," he says. "But they weren't al Qaeda operatives that we could identify." Lormel says Belgian police told him they have ruled out the possibility that Asa Diam had ties to al Qaeda's diamond-selling operation. FBI Director Robert Mueller insisted that agents run down every lead, Lormel says, and the FBI sent two separate teams of agents to Sierra Leone. "We did interview a few people who say they saw al Qaeda operatives over there," Lormel says. "But they were not involved in diamond trafficking for al Qaeda on a major, wholesale level. They may have tried to dabble in it a little bit. Maybe that's where the confusion is."
advertisement
