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returned with. The one condition, Brabazon said, was that he “agree not to disclose the details of the armaments the rebels received from the American-backed government in Guinea.”
    But defense officials in Guinea did little to conceal their relationship with the anti-Taylor faction. President Lansana Conté was incensed by the continued assaults on his territory from Liberian-backed Guinean dissidents—they had briefly overtaken the town of Guékédou in December 2000. Conté repudiated the action in a statement to the United Nations, accusing the RUF and Liberian forces of direct responsibility for “625 deaths, 293 seriously wounded, 127 missing and 59,604 displaced.” 12 For Conté, Taylor was not a man with whom you could negotiate.
    “Satan has his role to play,” Conté, a Muslim, told the American ambassador to the UN, Thomas Pickering. “But Satan and the prophet don’t understand each other.” 13
    The fighting pushed Conté closer to Liberian dissidents in Conakry who sought to depose Taylor. When the group sought Guinean military assistance, Conté insisted that he have a hand in who would be named the leader of the new faction. His favored choice won out: Sekou Conneh, who was married to the president’s spiritual adviser. The dissidents formed under yet another acronym in Liberia’s seemingly endless civil war: LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy).
    Around this time, the United States dramatically increased weapons sales to Guinea. Arms sales jumped from $500,000 for 2001 to $3 million for 2002. 14 It was a drop in the bucket in terms of overall global military assistance, but in a region where small arms drove much of the conflict, it was significant. The Defense Department also loaned Guinea $3 million under a low-interest grant and loan program to purchase the weapons. All this support was overt. Taylor was well aware of the United States’ sudden interest in his neighbor and suspected the training program provided cover for a covert American support for the rebels attacking Liberia.
    In early 2001 the U.S. military’s objectives in Africa were extraordinarily vague. The official policy was “to increase the number of capable states in Africa … to build stability and peace within their borders and their sub regions,” as the Unified Command Plan for Sub-Saharan Africa stated. There was little room for Taylor’s Liberia within this vision; for Taylor, politics was about war, not governance. He had drawn power not from the people who elected him but by keeping his enemies on their heels and allowing his followers to take financial advantage of regional insecurity. This was entirely at odds with the American vision, which sought stability above all else.
    After September 2001, the U.S. military interest in Africa would shift toward combating terrorism. Taylor historically had never been linked to terror groups, although a December 2002
Washington Post
report based on Western intelligence reports alleged that the summer prior to the 9/11 attacks he had hosted two Al Qaeda operatives at the ATU’s Gbatala base. The men—identified by the
Post
as Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed—were allegedly converting Al Qaeda cash to diamonds in anticipation of an American crackdown. A former ATU commander who learned of the men’s presence said that their motives were apparent only in hindsight. “Nobody knew anything [about] the guys that we were helping them—what their intention [was], who the identity of the guys were,” he said, doubting that Taylor understood the gravity of his involvement with them. 15 “Taylor at that time worked very hard to be in America’s favor, so for him to work with Al Qaeda would not have been smart.” In fact, when he met with Ambassador Myrick on September 14, 2001, Taylor appeared “emotionally shaken by the terrorist attacks on the United States.” 16 The apparent connection to the terrorist group—as ephemeral as it