Blood Diamonds (27 page)

But still, this was a frightening moment for Farah. He was simultaneously showing his hand and bluffing about an explosive connection between the world's most degenerate fighting force and the world's most evil enemy; he had to play his hand just right.

The plan was a simple and time-honored journalistic trick: Farah would tell them what he thought he knew and make them believe that he knew far more than he really did. Farah also wanted to
scare the holy hell out of the RUF about how bad it would be for them—with elections less than six months away and the RUFP struggling for legitimacy—to be tied to Osama bin Laden.

So Golley arranged for a meeting between Farah and several RUF leaders, who Farah declined to name to preserve their confidentiality. The men sat around the room and listened to his allegations.

Then there was silence.

Farah sipped his beer nervously, amazed at how loud the surf sounded. He could see their wheels spinning, each person trying to decide what to lie about, what to admit, and what to say. Everyone was jittery.

At first, there was denial of everything. Eventually, one man spoke up. He may have heard of Aziz Nassour if he was the one called Alpha Zulu. Another chimed in with another piece of the story. Bit by bit, Farah's theory was confirmed. Finally, one of the RUF told Farah the whole plot, that he'd met with Nassour in Monrovia in July 2001 and they agreed that the RUF would increase its diamond production in exchange for a higher price. He confirmed that the men identified as Al Qaeda operatives were in Kono overseeing the operation, but were replaced when Bah complained to Nassour that the two were attracting attention by obviously not being of Sierra Leonean heritage. After hours of back and forth, the RUF had admitted what Farah had discovered: The rebels helped Osama bin Laden's group launder millions of dollars in cash. The RUF insisted that it didn't know that Nassour was a middleman for bin Laden; nevertheless, the terrorists now had an untold number of highly liquid diamonds they could use to fund further attacks against the United States and its interests abroad.

 

AFTER THE MEETING, Farah confirmed more details with American and European intelligence sources and returned to his room at the Mammy Yoko to write the article. He knew he'd landed on a big one, an “oh-shit” story in his words, and he was nervous about it. From his time in Colombia reporting on drug producers, he knew that warlords would ignore almost anything he wrote about them as long as it didn't affect their bottom line. There was little question that this article would have a huge impact on the diamond world, bigger by leaps than the Global Witness report in 1999.

He wrote and filed the story on November 1, 2001. It detailed the relationships between Bah, Nassour, and Osailly with the Al Qaeda operatives, a Tanzanian and a Kenyan who were implicated in the U.S. embassy bombings in those countries in 1998. The story focused on Liberia's role in the scheme, how Nassour skirted customs with official protection, how the Senegalese Hezbollah members were sheltered in their safehouse by the government, and how Bah flew to meetings with Al Qaeda intermediaries on a Liberian government helicopter. It ran on the front page of the
Washington Post
the next day.

Then the shit hit the fan.

 

AS THE
POST
'S West Africa bureau chief, Farah is used to drawing Liberian President Charles Taylor's ire. But he struck a particularly raw nerve with the Al Qaeda story. The Liberian government went out of its way to post Farah's picture, along with a scathing denial of the allegations and personal insults about him, on the home page of the country's official Web site. On a radio interview with the BBC, Liberian officials denied the story and threatened legal action against the newspaper. Bah—who refused Farah's request for an interview through mutual contacts—even weighed in with a
rare interview with the Associated Press. He too denied Farah's story that RUF diamonds were being sold to Al Qaeda.

To Farah, the Web site was the most troubling; it seemed to insinuate that he was a target and he and his wife—who's normally unshakeable about such things—began to fear for their safety. Their home in Abidjan didn't provide a lot of psychic comfort; not only was it right next door to Liberia, it was also home to various and sundry Liberian dissidents, refugees, and rebels.
⁵

The situation grew more dire when Farah returned home on a Saturday from a trip to Ghana to find an urgent message awaiting him from the regional security officer of the U.S. Embassy. He was asked to report to the embassy the following day, a Sunday, so Farah knew it was important. When he arrived, the man had him sit and then read a two-line cable from the U.S. Department of State: There was information of a threat on Farah's life.

Shaken and alarmed, he returned home and called his editors. He told them that he was going to lay low around the house for a few days and then see about going on a trip and making himself scarce around Abidjan for awhile. But before he could go anywhere, his editors called back two days later and told him that they'd received word that Bah was looking for “retribution” against him. He was ordered to evacuate his family back to Washington immediately, no questions asked. In between bouts of frantic packing, Farah managed to contact some of Bah's associates in an attempt to find out what Bah had in store for him.

Bah wasn't interested in killing him, Farah was told, just having him beaten to a bloody pulp and maybe arrested with planted drugs. That was hardly reassuring, so Farah called the embassy and requested diplomatic escort through the airport so that he could clear customs without having anything planted on him or being
detained by a bribed official. Then he just had to sit and wait for the plane to leave. He and his family secured themselves in their home, a former embassy with steel covers that roll down over the windows at the end of a dead-end street. Farah employed three unarmed security guards and installed an alarm, complete with a panic button that would call armed guards from the security company to his house within five minutes if he needed them. Friends on the street kept an eye out for anyone suspicious. At night, the family locked themselves upstairs, behind a “mau-mau” door, a reinforced steel-plated vaultlike thing secured with heavy bolts.

On Thursday, November 13, Farah and his family fled Ivory Coast. U.S. embassy officials sat with them at the gate until they were safely on the plane and on their way to Amsterdam.

Two weeks after he broke the story that suddenly made the civil war in Sierra Leone front-page international news once and for all, Farah was back at a desk in D.C.

 

THE EFFECTS OF FARAH'S STORY rippled far and wide.

While the story about Al Qaeda purchasing RUF blood diamonds was breaking, the Kimberley Process was meeting again in Luanda, Angola. Most of the thirty-five nongovernmental organization, government, and industry representatives had finally agreed, after almost a year, to endorse a scheme of uniform cross-border documentation for imported and exported diamonds. A lynchpin of the plan was that participating countries could refuse to import diamonds that didn't adhere to the standards. This would encourage all exporting countries to take the process seriously. If their parcels couldn't be exported, they would lose out on valuable export taxes, giving diamond-producing countries an incentive to comply.

But the United States didn't like the idea. Approximately 80 percent of the world's diamonds are sold to U.S. consumers, but U.S. representatives with the Kimberley Process were worried that the scheme proposed could violate World Trade Organization policies. The WTO mediates trade disputes between countries that agree to allow the WTO to set trade rules that may be counter to laws within those countries. For example, an exporting country may argue to the WTO that an importing country's laws banning genetically modified corn constitute unfair trade. If the WTO sides with the exporting country, the importing country's law against the corn would be rendered null and void.

The United States was worried about the same problem with diamonds. The fear was that if a country was denied an import license on the grounds that it couldn't prove its diamonds were from clean sources, the exporting country could appeal to the WTO and have the Kimberley Process rules overturned. The U.S. therefore objected to the Kimberley Process's insistence that diamond-importing countries refuse entry to any goods that didn't come with a certified document trail.

But when Farah's story broke, the U.S. representatives suddenly saw the light. As the largest consumer of diamonds—some of which may have been used to launder money by terrorists who'd just leveled the worst attack on its soil in history—it took little coaxing. The Luanda meeting concluded with consensus on the details and participants set about drafting a resolution to be presented to the UN Security Council early in 2002.

The U.S. Congress wasn't far behind. The House of Representatives was stalled on a decision about Tony Hall's Clean Diamonds Act. The bill sought to write into U.S. law whatever system of rough and polished diamond controls was eventually adopted by
the Kimberley Process, or institute its own based on the Kimberley recommendations; install a set of instant triggers that would impose sanctions on a country that didn't adhere to the controls on its diamond exports; and release $5 million in 2002 for countries that needed financial assistance to comply with export controls.

But like the Kimberley Process, the bill was stalled by legislators fidgety about instantly slapping sanctions on a country violating the rules. Those opposed wanted wiggle room to allow discretion on a case-by-case basis.

The day Farah's story was published, Hall released a statement that read, “Al Qaeda's workings may be news to most Americans, and the link between the money we spend on [diamonds] and terror certainly will shock consumers and the jewelers who employ many thousands of people in communities across our country. Conflict diamonds' exploitation by terrorists appears to have been well known to our intelligence agencies, and yet Congress still has not acted on any of the bills introduced over the course of two years.” Twenty-six days after Farah's story hit the newsstands, the House overwhelmingly passed a compromise bill, 408 to 6.

The new bill doesn't feature automatic sanctions against violating countries, but gives the president the authority to level sanctions if he feels it's in the interest of national security. Also, the compromise bill addressed only rough goods, not polished, but again gave the president authority to confiscate rough and polished goods if there was convincing evidence that they were produced from conflict areas. Also, the bill allowed exemptions to seizure and sanctions in order to satisfy the WTO. But, still sensitive to the tragedy of September 11, the House kicked in an additional appropriation of $5 million for fiscal year 2003 and eliminated the original bill's six-month phase-in period. The new bill will take effect
immediately once adopted by the U.S. Senate and signed by President George W. Bush. As of March 18, 2002, the bill was read twice in the Senate and referred to the Committee on Finance, where it has remained as of this writing.

There were other effects from Farah's story. The diamond industry had a collective panic attack over the allegations, as expected. It was bad enough that its diamonds and policies of buying and selling had resulted in the death of some 3.7 million people in various African war zones and displaced another 6 million,
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but now they were being tied directly to horrible scenes of destruction that had been burned into everyone's mind in the days following September 11. The attacks changed the political and social landscape in countries around the world. Overnight, it seemed that a new Cold War infrastructure had been created with terrorists and the countries that harbor and support them on one side and those pressed into a “war on terrorism” on the other. The collapse of the Twin Towers was only the first glimpse of this unbelievable new reality.

I watched United Airlines Flight 175 vaporize into the South Tower of the World Trade Center while at the Diamond Trading Company, standing next to Andy Bone, whose corporate cool evaporated as quickly as the U.S. sense of security. It was about a fifteen-minute walk back to my East London hotel, but I had no television in my room. I headed to a pub that I knew had several televisions. Out on the chilly streets of London, traffic flowed along as usual and pedestrians streamed by wearing headphones, oblivious to the attacks. Diamonds were the last things on my mind or anyone else's for a long time thereafter. I numbly watched the footage over and over: People falling a long way to their deaths from some of the tallest buildings on earth, the towers collapsing one after another like sand castles, the streets of a familiar city—
home to dozens of friends and family members—filling with ash and debris. Getting onto an airplane to Africa a few days later, I felt I was escaping into the farthest corner of the planet, leaving the chill and cucumber sandwiches for heat and crushing starvation, unaware that I was heading to one of the scenes of a global crime. I would learn later that many Lebanese in Kenema and Bo, the diamond trading centers, celebrated in joy at the news of the attacks.

In the following months, the United States began its counterattack on Afghanistan, bin Laden's base of operations where he found sympathetic shelter with the country's ruling Taliban regime. The U.S. methodically destroyed the Taliban and dealt a serious blow to Al Qaeda, which trained its terrorists there in windblown high mountain deserts, though bin Laden has so far evaded capture. But the one thing that's clear is that he and the people who lead his organization aren't as financially wounded as the United States would hope. Somewhere out there is a multimillion-dollar cache of goods from Kono. Whether the diamonds are in a Hamburg safe-deposit box or a cave in the Tora Bora mountains, they are now the terrorists' ace in the hole. As long as some cells of leadership can survive the American military assault, they will have the means to continue their war well into the future.