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.”