Blood Diamonds, Revised Edition

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.

The story gelled quickly in Farah’s mind, like drops of mercury rolling toward one another to form one big pool. He’d heard the name Aziz Nassour in the past. Not only was the man a diamond merchant with a buying office in Bo, a diamond trading center in Sierra Leone, but he’d also heard rumors that Nassour was involved in running guns to the RUF and was close to both General Bah and Brigadier Sessay, the RUF leader. Farah knew Bah from previous meetings and an earlier Washington Post reporter had relied on Bah to make critical field contacts with commanders like General Mosquito. The outline quickly took shape: The RUF had sold diamonds to Al Qaeda through Nassour and his cousin, Samiah Osailly. September 11 may have been the impetus for the RUF to ramp up their mining efforts in Kono.

That was the theory. To turn the theory into a news story, Farah would have to have a showdown in Freetown.

OMRIE GOLLEY’ S SMALL SUITE at the Cape Sierra Hotel is guarded by a phalanx of RUF fighters and UN soldiers, most of whom lounge and sleep in the hallway outside his door, shortwave transistors providing a tinny backdrop to their continued presence. The suite is at the end of a series of narrow, unlit corridors, but because it’s at the far end of the hotel complex, it also offers a commanding view of the ocean pounding black boulders at the nation’s edge. The sound of the surf rolled across the unkempt lawns and into the room, where Farah and Golley sipped almost-cold beers and listened to it fill the long silences.

Omrie Golley is the RUF’s civilian agent, spokesperson, and UN liaison as chairman of the RUF Political and Peace Council. He is a round-faced man with thick glasses, and lives in London. He’s also one of the group’s most level-headed and world-wise, which is why Farah went to him to arrange a meeting with other top RUF leaders about his Al Qaeda story. It wouldn’t be wise to confront such unstable personalities with his charges without the presence of someone more sensible and literate like Golley.

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,⁶ 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.

The diamond industry knows this. It hasn’t been proven that Sierra Leone diamonds were specifically used to fund the hijackings, but it doesn’t need to be. Uniformly, traders’ and jewelers’ organizations stampeded to condemn the connection.

Matthew Runci, president of Jewelers of America, and Eli Izhakoff, chairman of the World Diamond Council, released a joint statement that said: “It has been known for all too long that bandits masquerading as rebels have been using the proceeds from the sale of stolen diamonds to finance their criminal behavior in some African countries. Nations involved in the diamond trade—as producers, processors and importers—must construct an effective monitoring system that protects the legitimate supply chain from the small percentage of illicit stones obtained by criminal elements.”⁷

De Beers naturally weighed in as well: “[We] utterly condemn the way in which these [terrorist] organizations are preying on otherwise legitimate industries to further their criminal and murderous activities.” The statement also reiterated that De Beers had ended purchasing on the open market and that the percentage of diamonds emanating from conflict zones was “small, but significant.”⁸

The most important thing about this slew of legislation and condemnations is that it comes too late. Trafficking in conflict diamonds is a well-established business with millions of dollars on the line. The money props up not only rebel insurgencies and the bank accounts of their leaders, but it represents a substantial amount of revenue for the president of Liberia, who doesn’t appear to be prepared to leave office any time soon; the trafficking also generates enormous profits for the gunrunning industry, as well as for thousands of middle-tier diamond brokers.

The truth is that conflict diamonds will be bought as long as they’re available. They may not be purchased by Tom Shane’s jewelry company, at least directly, but that’s because they won’t be offered to him. They’ll enter the diamond pipeline long before they become jewelry, at jungle meeting places, village backrooms, and Freetown bars when no one is looking. They’ll make their way into the legitimate exports of sellers who want to pad their parcels cheaply, safely sheltered by certificates issued by lax or bribed officials. The documents required by the Kimberley Process and the Clean Diamond Act will not stop the traffic.

They’ll just make it harder to detect.