Charles Taylor doubled as a US spy?

Charles Taylor is cooling his 64-year old heels at The Hague awaiting a verdict on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The former Liberian president wears the dubious badge of being the first African head of state to be hauled before the International Criminal Court.

He faces a life in the coolers if found guilty this April. Taylor pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of murder, rape and deploying child soldier during the Sierra Leone civil war.

He also allegedly helped rebels in exchange for looted “blood diamonds.”

But recent reports by the Boston Globe newspaper are that the father of Chuckie Taylor doubled as a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

How did the confessions emerge after quarter century? Well, in 2006, the Boston Globe newspaper filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for information of persistent allegations that Taylor worked for the CIA.

His brief was to gather intelligence on the late Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, specifically, his role in the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, his sponsorship of guerrillas across Africa, and the broader issues of Russian activities and arms trade in the continent.

Responding to the Globe request, The Defence Intelligence Agency, the spy arm of the Pentagon confirmed that Taylor worked closely with CIA agents in the early 1980s.

That was all. Any further information would “harm national security.” But details of his involvement with the CIA emerged during his war crimes trial in 2009 when he testified how intelligence agents helped him and four others escape jail in 1985.

Taylor had fled Liberia to the US after embezzling close to $1 million in 1983 when he was the head of the General Service Agency for Liberia that handled procurement for the government of President Samuel Doe.

Taylor stashed his loot in a US bank. And fled. Doe sacked him, and requested the American government to extradite Taylor who argued he would be assassinated if he was condemned to a one-way ticket to face embezzlement charges in Liberia.

Taylor preferred to fight the extradition in the safety of an American jail.

And the Plymouth House Correctional facility in Boston it was, where he and four other escapees sawed through window grills of an unused laundry room, tied bed sheets together and slid down.

They then climbed off the wall of the maximum-security prison, and on to freedom.

Prince Yormie Johnson, who captured and executed Doe in 1990 told Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008 that Taylor was released to topple the regime of Samuel Doe.

In his 2009 testimony at The Hague, Taylor repeated as much, saying intelligence agents helped him.

After the escape-by-sheet, he recruited 168 men and women and inducted into the National Patriotic Front for Liberia (NPFL) and trained them as guerillas in Libya and on to Liberia where he became a warlord.

The one time husband of Jewel Taylor was Liberia’s President from 1997 to 2003, when he resigned and fled to Nigeria after Special Court for Sierra Leone indicted him for war crimes.

He was captured three years later and handed over to the United Nations Mission in Liberia.

But Taylor, through his Jamaican-born lawyer Courtenay Griffiths, denied he worked as a spy “in his personal capacity” and plans to sue the Boston Globe over the revelations that are mere “speculation.”

“Such unsubstantial insinuations are distasteful and insulting and amount to the character assassination of someone who is a revolutionary and Pan-Africanist” Griffiths said in a statement published by Liberia’s New Dawn newspaper.

But Taylor acknowledged that Liberian Security Agencies and National Patriot Party worked with the CIA.

Griffiths is demanding for all the correspondence between the Globe and the Pentagon over Taylor’s role as a spy and questions the timing of the revelation when his client’s verdict is nigh.

Whichever way the case goes, it is not the first time Western intelligence agencies are using spies who were common currency during the height of the Cold War, sometimes with political ramifications.

Take John Dennis Profumo. As Kenya prepared for her independence, Britain’s Secretary of State for War was girding his loins with a hooker, Christine Keeler.

The “Profumo Affair” became a national security issue when it emerged that the showgirl at a cabaret club was shuttling between Profumo, M15 spy chief Sir Roger Hollis, Sir Anthony Blunt, the curator of the queen’s artwork… and Eugene Ivanov-the naval attaché at the Soviet embassy-where it had all been planned at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis- that pitted the Soviet’s and Cubans against the US after America’s failure to overthrow Fidel Castro.

In her 2001 bio, The Truth at Last: My Story, Keeler’s brief from Ivanov was to find out when American nuclear missiles would be taken to the then West Germany.

Keeler had affairs with two other men who were killed by Soviet agents leading the press to investigate her.

The ensuing scandal that was uncovered brought down the government of Prime Minister Harold McMillan in 1963.

For the Soviets, the US and other European countries eyeing a foothold on African affairs and resources, spies came in handy.

And is now well documented, the Kenyatta administration had its own inside government in the name of Bruce Mackenzie.