The daring capture of Félicien Kabuga, the hunted Rwandan fugitive, has been in the news for three weeks now. But the untold backstory—of how an American squad of operatives nearly snared him 17 years ago—has remained a secret. Until now.
His life on the lam ended on May 16, 2020. At 6:30 a.m., as half the world slept and the rest battled a pandemic, a black-hooded SWAT team of French gendarmes raided an upscale apartment near Paris where Kabuga had been living as Antoine Tounga—the latest and last of the nearly two dozen identities he has assumed over the years. Diplomats, prosecutors, and intelligence and law enforcement officials claimed he had financed the genocide in Rwanda; helped instigate war in neighboring Congo; and was complicit in the murder of American, British, and New Zealand citizens. For a quarter century he’d managed to elude a series of international manhunts. But all that ended with the predawn arrest, and he will likely stand trial before a U.N. war crimes tribunal. (Kabuga’s attorney has claimed he should be presumed innocent, and his two recent motions to be tried in France have been rebuffed.)
Kabuga’s dramatic seizure summoned memories of another era; one in which accountability mattered, and people paid for their crimes. Operation Finale, from 1960, comes to mind—when Israel’s Mossad targeted Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution, getting him off a street near Buenos Aires, into a Jerusalem courtroom, and onto the gallows.
What makes Kabuga’s case so extraordinary, though, is not simply that it involves the gravest of charges: five counts of genocide and two crimes against humanity (persecution and extermination). It’s that it is taking place in an era when the likes of Syrian leader Bashar Assad and his patrons are able to kill hundreds of thousands and displace millions with complete impunity. Kabuga’s trial, in contrast, promises to restore a modicum of accountability; it also seems destined to shine a bright light on a network of individuals—a latter-day ODESSA—who have grown wealthy serving as his partners and protectors. They are, to put it bluntly, accessories after the fact to the horrific crimes of which he stands accused.
Which brings us back to that clandestine plot in the early 2000s. It is impossible to understand who Kabuga is, or the improbable nature of his extraordinary apprehension, without examining why a high-stakes U.S. operation to grab him was compromised. For the first time those involved in the star-crossed mission are breaking their silence to disclose how an accused mass murderer, masquerading as a benevolent businessman, slipped through their fingers. Danni (whose name Vanity Fair has altered for security reasons) was one of the American team’s Kenyan informants at the time. He is finally stepping out of the shadows now that his nemesis is behind bars: “We should have caught this man 17 years ago. He has terrorized a lot of people. I am one of them. But with his arrest, I no longer have to look over my shoulder.”
In 1994, Félicien Kabuga was among the wealthiest men in Rwanda and a close friend and ally of the country’s president Juvénal Habyarimana, whose death—in a plane brought down by a missile—ignited what was perhaps the fastest killing spree on record. According to prosecutors, Kabuga, in response, fomented a genocide. Not only did he turn his media outlet, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), into a giant megaphone, exhorting his fellow Hutus to kill their Tutsi neighbors, but he also used his fortune to purchase thousands of machetes, the very implements used to commit the slaughter of nearly 1 million Rwandans.
Kabuga’s purported crimes did not end when the genocide did. That July perpetrators fled west into Congo, rearmed and rebranded under various names, including the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALIR) and the Party for the Liberation of Rwanda (PALIR). With Kabuga’s encouragement and financial backing, these militants repeatedly tried and failed to “liberate” their homeland. They did, however, succeed in helping engulf the region in conflicts so large they are known as Africa’s First World War (1996-1997) and the Great African War (1998-2003). There was nothing great or noble about either. By the time the mayhem subsided, according to the International Rescue Committee, 3.9 million men, women and children were dead.
On March 2, 1999, Kabuga’s minions took a fateful detour, ambushing Western tourists trekking in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Over the span of several hours, the rebels kidnapped, forcibly marched, tortured, and then hacked to death four Britons, two Americans, and two New Zealanders. (Some of the victims were also said to have been raped.) The incident was so brazen and vicious that American officials labeled ALIR-PALIR a terrorist organization and placed a $5 million bounty on Kabuga’s head.
The man who spearheaded these efforts was Ambassador Pierre-Richard Prosper, responsible for the war crimes portfolio under President George W. Bush. “This wasn’t some historical exercise,” he now tells me, shortly after Kabuga’s capture. In Congo and Africa’s Great Lakes region, according to Prosper, “Kabuga continued to sow death, destruction, and terror. He continued to pose a real-time threat to peace and security.”
The son of Haitian immigrants, Prosper began his career as a prosecutor in Los Angeles, where he targeted gang-related hits. In 1996, after taking on drug cartels for President Bill Clinton’s Justice Department, the administration sent him to Africa to help jump-start the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). He was appointed lead trial attorney and successfully prosecuted a Rwandan mayor turned killer named Jean-Paul Akayesu in the first case ever brought under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Prosper also helped persuade the tribunal to recognize rape as an act of genocide and a crime against humanity.
By the time President George W. Bush appointed him ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, Prosper, based in Washington, was ready to operationalize what he had absorbed as a prosecutor, a job that had required him to go after people who exhibited little regard for human life. “Everyone was on board,” he recounts. “The NSC, the FBI, the CIA. And we had full backing from President Bush, Condi [Rice], and [Colin] Powell. We built this coordinated strategy to go after the génocidaires. And Kabuga was our number one target.” But snatching him was another thing entirely. Intelligence agencies and the ICTR’s own tracking team placed Kabuga in Belgium, Congo, the U.K., France, Burundi, Kenya, Madagascar, and the Seychelles. He was everywhere and nowhere.
To underscore the seriousness of this endeavor, the White House dispatched Jendayi Frazer, special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs at the NSC, to accompany Prosper as he barnstormed African capitals. Behind the scenes they pressed leaders to turn over Kabuga and his fellow génocidaires. In addition, they mounted a very public effort under the U.S. Rewards for Justice Program: dispersing posters and fliers, and buying television and radio spots as well as full-page newspaper ads that offered any takers up to $5 million for information leading to Kabuga’s capture.
F. Scott Gallo, a special agent with the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, arrived in Nairobi in September 2002 to serve as the regional security officer (RSO). The American embassy, to which he’d been assigned, had been blown up by al-Qaida four years earlier, killing 213. As a result, America’s diplomatic and intelligence personnel were still working out of temporary quarters, and Gallo and his wife, Karin, were still unpacking when he was summoned to the ambassador’s residence to see his new boss, Johnnie Carson.
A veteran Africa hand, Carson had served as America’s top diplomat in Kenya for Clinton and Bush. (He would later be Barack Obama’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs.) At the time, Carson recalls, “We were actively engaged as an embassy in trying to find out as much as possible about individuals who allegedly committed war crimes. One of the most prominent was Félicien Kabuga. He was thought to be circulating in east Africa; in particular, in Nairobi.”
Carson says he repeatedly and forcefully raised the issue with Kenyan officials, including then president Daniel arap Moi. “I presented him with a lot of information that gave him the impression I knew what I was talking about. Moi insisted [Kabuga] was not in Kenya, that they were not shielding or hiding him, and that they were not complicitous in his continued ability to remain at large.”
Kabuga, while he remained a thorny subject, was hardly the only topic of conversation in Kenyan-American relations. The Bush administration believed that the autocratic President Moi, then in his 24th year in office, was long past his sell-by date. Carson and other senior U.S. officials described a well-synchronized campaign to persuade him to step down and allow an orderly, democratic transition. To sweeten the pitch, they dangled the prospect of an Oval Office visit and a tour of America’s presidential libraries to help Moi concentrate on cementing his legacy after exiting the scene.
But at his residence that September afternoon, Gallo recalls, Carson was focused on a tip that the embassy had received from a person claiming to have personal knowledge of Kabuga’s whereabouts—and the Kenyan government’s involvement in providing him safe haven. Though unfamiliar with Kabuga, the responsibility fell to Gallo to administer the Rewards for Justice Program in Kenya. He quickly arranged to meet and suss out the informant.
“He was very pleasant and knowledgeable,” Gallo says of 27-year-old William Munuhe, who worked as a freelance journalist but had a more lucrative side-hustle working for Zakayo Cheruiyot, a Kenyan politician who oversaw internal security matters for President Moi. Cheruiyot, in effect, controlled the country’s sprawling police and domestic intelligence services. He was not a man to be trifled with. Yet Munuhe was enticed by the lure of a $5 million bounty. And so he sat, face-to-face, with Gallo in a cramped office in downtown Nairobi.
Munuhe revealed that Cheruiyot had entrusted him and a group of plainclothes officers with moving Kabuga between safe houses in and around Nairobi. What’s more, Munuhe stated that on several occasions Kabuga actually stayed at his home. To Gallo the scene sounded surreal: a part-time journalist and indicted war criminal sharing meals and watching television together. “I’m listening to this story,” Gallo remembers. “I don’t have a lot of background. I’m keying in on his body language, watching his eyes and his hands. He’s not blinking too much. He’s willing to answer uncomfortable questions. And he implicates Cheruiyot.”
Soon, with Ambassador Carson’s blessing, Gallo called the FBI in Washington and asked it to dispatch a polygraph examiner to Nairobi to double-check Munuhe’s veracity. In this instance, the fact that the wheels of justice turn slowly turned out to be a blessing. While embassy officials waited to finish the vetting, another informant fell into their lap.
Danni was a studious 17-year-old high school senior. One day he was passing through a cloistered neighborhood, known as Lavington, when he happened upon a motorcade idling in front of a well-appointed house. He couldn’t help but notice as a bespectacled man in a colorful shirt moved between two government vehicles. He recognized the face but could not place the name.
The chance encounter seemed innocuous enough. But suddenly the man’s security detail accosted him, seizing his school identity card and demanding to know what he was doing there. When they offered to drive him back to school, Danni politely declined. “Something told me it would be a one-way trip,” he tells me, remembering the encounter as if it were yesterday. Danni had the presence of mind, he says, to memorize and later scribble down the license plate numbers and the street address.
Focused on his studies, Danni did not think much more about the incident. After all, in President Moi’s Kenya, police work was all too often a predatory enterprise and civil liberties an abstraction. Though the armed men stole Danni’s wallet, along with his I.D.—warning him that they knew where they could find him—he considered himself lucky to have walked away unscathed.
Days later, however, Danni stumbled across one of the full-page ads that Prosper and his colleagues placed in local papers. The teenager stared at the dapper, 60-something man whose picture was sandwiched between the incongruous phrases “Wanted for Genocide” and “Financed the massacre of Rwanda’s men, women and children.” His temples began to throb. He was certain he was staring at the face of the man from Lavington. With his adrenaline racing, he made his way to a cybercafe and immediately emailed the Rewards for Justice address listed in the paper. “I was 17 years old,” he says. “I thought I was doing something good. I thought I hit the lottery. I didn’t know I was going to get myself mixed up in some international nightmare.”
Back in Washington, Ambassador Prosper was exasperated. “We were always a step behind him,” he says. “We’d get intel on houses where Kabuga was staying, and we’d stake them out only to discover he’d just departed. He was always tipped off.” Prosper, a senior diplomat, resorted to scanning the Rewards for Justice email account for promising tips. When Danni’s email arrived in September 2002, he picked up the phone and called Gallo.
With an FBI agent flying over—toting a polygraph machine—Gallo’s still-nascent Kabuga task force arranged to put Danni on the box as well. The lie detector tests took place inside the embassy’s temporary quarters, abutting Nairobi National Park. Gallo and Prosper say they were impressed by the results; the FBI concluded that both Danni and William Munuhe were credible. But that assessment carried ominous overtones. Not only did top Kenyan officials appear to be using state assets and personnel to harbor a fugitive wanted for genocide—and the gruesome murder of Western tourists—but President Moi had been lying about it to top American officials for quite some time.
“My immediate concern was that Cheruiyot controlled the police,” Gallo says. “And if he had any inkling William and Danni were cooperating with us, they’d be in danger.” He consulted Prosper by phone and caucused with Ambassador Carson, Deputy Chief of Mission William Brencick, FBI legal attaché Paul A. Hayes Jr., and their intelligence counterparts. The group settled on a security protocol: Gallo would keep the two informants in perpetual motion, moving them to different locations every three days or so. Munuhe and Danni, who were unaware of one another, received burner phones to communicate with their U.S. handlers. They expected their share of the reward money—if their tips paid off—would be forthcoming.
Efforts to capture Kabuga were heating up just as the security situation in Kenya was melting down. On November 28, 2002, al-Qaida operatives drove a car strapped with explosives into the Paradise Hotel, near Mombasa, Kenya’s second-largest city. Thirteen people were killed in the blast. At virtually the same time, a second terror squad fired a surface-to-air missile at an Israeli airliner during its takeoff from Moi International Airport. A week later Moi himself got his coveted Oval Office visit. President Bush welcomed him with a euphemistic introduction: “President Moi is a strong leader of Kenya. He is leading the country through a transition period through open elections, and, Mr. President, you have distinguished yourself by your service to your country, and I appreciate that.”
Back in Nairobi, embassy officials had their hands full, investigating the twin attacks in Mombasa while conducting a manhunt for a génocidaire. But after weeks being shuttled around to throw the Kenyans off the scent, Munuhe went dark. When he finally emerged, he called Gallo with unsettling news. He had been yanked off the street at night, he said, and thrown into the trunk of a car before being driven to a farmhouse. There he was beaten up by men who warned him, “Stop talking to the Americans, or next time it’ll be worse.” When I ask Gallo who was responsible, the decorated Diplomatic Security officer doesn’t hesitate: “These were men William knew who were working for Cheruiyot and helping move Kabuga around Kenya.”
Munuhe was not the only one in danger. “The Kenyan police found me while I was out and about,” Danni recalls. “They whisked me away and held me in the basement of a house for many days. I thought they were going to kill me. They slapped me around, obviously. They wanted to know what the U.S. embassy knew. They wanted to find out how many people were working for the Kabuga task force, who they were, where they lived.” When I press him about how things ended, I get a glimpse of the savvy and intellect that made Danni an attractive asset. “I told them the U.S. embassy had a confession tape of me talking about seeing Kabuga and that the U.S. would play it in the media if the Kenyans killed me. I had to say what I had to say to get out.”
In early January 2003, shortly after Munuhe’s assault, Gallo met up with him. The informant had a swollen face and various cuts and bruises. The RSO was surprised to find that he remained eager to catch Kabuga and to collect his share of the bounty. Munuhe explained that Cheruiyot’s men, having just learned of the cash reward, were willing to split the proceeds with him. It sounded strange to Gallo. These were the same individuals who had recently kidnapped Munuhe; now they wanted to join forces. But U.S. officials were long past accounting for the conduct of Kenyan officials when it came to Kabuga, and the promise of an easy payday sounded as plausible an explanation as any for why things appeared to be back on track. The plan was simple: Cheruiyot’s underlings would bring Kabuga to Munuhe’s house for a social visit and would then pull back, giving him time to call the embassy and let officials move in to take Kabuga into custody.
“I thought, Okay, we are getting to the point where we’re going to put our hands on this guy,” Gallo says. “Here’s a guy who’s been running around these countries with impunity. We thought, Boy, if we pull this off, what a coup for everyone.”
Gallo and several assistant security officers joined forces with Special Agent Hayes and his deputy, forming an ad hoc arrest squad. It felt like all the pieces were falling into place: Two credible informants had information that was not only corroborative, but was also consistent with a separate string of intelligence reports that suggested Kabuga had kept up a business relationship with someone very close to President Moi. “It finally made sense,” Prosper tells me, referring to the Kenyans’ strident denials and increasingly heavy-handed tactics. This was not about sovereignty or some philosophical objection to cooperating with a war crimes tribunal. “Serious money was flowing from one of the world’s most wanted men to Moi’s family and the top echelon of the Kenyan security apparatus,” Prosper maintains.
At one of the final planning sessions, however, a U.S. official purportedly said he was obliged to give his Kenyan counterparts a heads-up about the operation. Gallo was astonished and insists he pleaded with the individual not to tip off any Kenyans, much less Cheruiyot’s direct reports. Gallo says he left the meeting confident that the Kenyans would remain in the dark until after Kabuga’s capture. For his part, Prosper remembers following up with Ambassador Carson to reiterate that doing otherwise risked certain death. When asked about this chain of events, Carson recalls, “I’m not going to go into any of that.”
To avoid being spotted by Kenyan security forces, Gallo and Munuhe had a pre-operation meeting in an empty Nairobi parking lot. Gallo says he told him, “‘You have my number. Once Kabuga is in your house, call me and we’ll come pick him up.’ I gave him another chance to back out, but he said he wanted to do it.” He recalls Munuhe telling him to expect the “go” signal within 24 to 48 hours. “We can make this work,” the informant said as he departed.
The arrest team was on standby at the embassy. Prosper monitored events from his office on the State Department’s seventh floor. One day passed without word. Then another. By the following morning, on January 17, the sense of dread was palpable, and Gallo—eager to keep things low-profile—drove to Munuhe’s house alone. “I see his car out front. I go up to the door. No answer. It’s locked. I try looking in the windows. No luck. Now I’m getting suspicious.” Gallo called a Kenyan national who worked at the embassy and asked him to send the police. When they arrived, Gallo told them obliquely, “Look, there’s someone I’ve been working with closely. I’m concerned about his welfare.” One of the Kenyans then shimmied up a drainpipe, entered through a second-floor deck, and came down to open the front door. The living room looked out of sorts: framed photographs of Munuhe with family and friends were arranged in a shrine-like fashion on a coffee table.
“We go upstairs, and I see William on his bed faceup,” Gallo recounts. “Blood had soaked through the mattress, onto the floor, and all the way to the door of his bedroom.” Gallo observed a quarter-size indentation on Munuhe’s temple and rope marks on his wrists and ankles—a sign that he had been forcefully restrained. The Kenyan police accompanying Gallo, however, seized on a bucket of charcoal nearby and towels propped against the door and concluded that he died of self-inflicted carbon monoxide poisoning. Before the cops could move the body, however, Gallo says the FBI’s deputy legal attaché arrived and photographed the scene.
When he learned of Munuhe’s death, Prosper tried to console Gallo: “As a former prosecutor, I know what it’s like to lose an informant.” The men did not have time for reflection, however. Confident that Cheruiyot’s men were behind the murder, the Americans scrambled to get Danni out of the country.
As those plans were in motion, a tug-of-war ensued over Munuhe’s autopsy. Gallo wanted the FBI to conduct it in Kenya, or in the U.S. with the Kenyans present. Both suggestions were dismissed out of hand. The Kenyans told Gallo that the embassy could have representatives present, but when U.S. officials arrived at the appointed time, according to Gallo, the medical examiner had already removed Munuhe’s skullcap. As with the crime scene, empiricism was not the order of the day. “At one point,” says Gallo, “the coroner evidently reached down into the skull with tweezers and pulled out a quarter-size fragment of skull then tried to argue it was an old injury. But there was bruising of the brain, and it clearly looked to our folks like he’d been hit in the head with a blunt object. The Kenyans always maintained it was suicide. And that’s how it was left.”
Any sadness Gallo or Prosper might have felt about losing Munuhe was tempered by the knowledge of official complicity. “I was mad as hell,” Prosper recalls, “because it was clear the operation was compromised by corrupt Kenyan officials.” Worse, both men say, is that the Kenyans were tipped off about the operation by a U.S. embassy official—despite strident warnings. Carson disagrees: “I don’t think any information was shared with the Kenyans with respect to that. We were careful about what we shared, recognizing that there were some Kenyans on the inside who were ably assisting Kabuga.”
The fugitive had disappeared, and it was Danni who now had his own protective detail. Diplomatic security officers whisked him from a hotel room, where he’d been stashed after the murder, and put him in an armored car. He was told he would be flying out of the country. “We stopped at Gallo’s house so he could hug me goodbye,” Danni remembers. “He said he tried his best, but there was nothing more he could do to keep me safe in Kenya. The bastards were going to kill me.”
At the airport he was escorted through security and to a waiting plane. He arrived in the United States: a teenager with no family. Soon, however, he says he came to regard Scott and Karin Gallo as his godparents. The young Kenyan continued his studies and is now an auditor in a small town on the East Coast. In 2008, he became a U.S. citizen and has clearly mastered our idiomatic tongue: “They say justice delayed is justice denied. But Kabuga’s arrest is a big win. He tortured me psychologically, and I will never be the same again. But I am glad he is now toast.”
Three years after the ill-fated U.S. mission, Kenya’s commissioner of police ordered an undercover squad of investigators to establish whether Kabuga was (or had been) in the country and who, if anyone, was protecting him. Their conclusions, according to a sensitive internal report obtained by Vanity Fair, were unequivocal: “Credible information indicates that [Zakayo Cheruiyot] is still actively involved in the protection of the fugitive with assistance from some undisclosed senior officials in the current Government.” The report lists 10 positive sightings of Kabuga, including at one of Cheruiyot’s homes. Moreover, the report notes that the country’s National Security Intelligence Service was “following the issue cautiously because they believe there is very high profile involvement in the case.” Finally, investigators recommended: “Surveillance on Cheruiyot should be mounted, as he is likely to hold the secret behind the whereabouts of Félicien Kabuga.”
Kabuga, apparently, felt the heat. Kenya was no longer a safe haven. In subsequent years he spent long stretches in Europe, hiding out in Germany and, most recently, in France. As his case winds through the courts, one consequence might be that Kabuga’s helpers will be identified and held accountable as well. Or maybe not.
Just to circle the square, I call Cheruiyot, who still lives in Kenya. “Is this Zakayo Cheruiyot?” I ask, having been given his number by someone with ties to the highest level of the government. “Yes.” When I inquire about his connection to Félicien Kabuga and the U.S. manhunt, he is dismissive. When I ask about the files that link him to Kabuga, he bristles. “There was nothing at all of the sort,” he tells me. “I’m saying I have no information about that. I had no information before. I have none even now.” When I ask about William Munuhe, the U.S. informant, he hangs up on me.
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