Africa News Service (Durham)
Reed Kramer
1 July 1995
(Page 3 of 6)
It was during this period that Liberia began encouraging the registration of foreign ships with favorable laws on safety, employment and taxation and thus emerged as a major maritime nation. According to Liebenow, "the system of Liberian registry was actually created at the urging of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to encourage the building of ships which might be needed by the United States during wartime."
The Open Door policy attracted a greater diversity of investors to the country, but Tubman also carefully cultivated ties with the country's chief patron. As it had done in the two World Wars, Liberia steered a decidedly pro-American course as the Cold War engulfed the globe. The United States set up a permanent mission to train the Liberian military and began bringing Liberian officers to American institutions for further training. In 1959, Liberia concluded a mutual defense pact with the United States.
Over the next decade, the U.S. government built two sophisticated communications facilities (known as R-site and T-site) to handle diplomatic and intelligence traffic to and from Africa, to monitor radio and other broadcasts in the region, and to relay a powerful Voice of America signal throughout the continent. In 1976, the U.S. Coast Guard erected an Omega navigational station -- one of eight around the world -- to guide shipping traffic in the eastern Atlantic and up and down Africa's west coast.
Although Liberia was no longer the focus of U.S. interest in Africa -- new nations like Ghana and Nigeria and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa claimed the bulk of official and media attention -- U.S. aid grew steadily. From 1946 to 1961, Liberia received $41 million in assistance, the fourth largest amount in sub-Saharan Africa (after Ethiopia, Zaire, and Sudan). Between 1962 and 1980, economic and military aid totaled $278 million. In per capita terms, Liberia hosted the largest Peace Corps contingent and received the greatest level of aid of any country on the entire African continent.
Liberia voted with the United States on most key matters at the UN, although it sometimes sided with other African states, particularly on decolonization and anti-apartheid issues. Tubman gradually extended ties to the Soviet bloc, but he supported the United States on Vietnam, as did his successor, William R. Tolbert, who took office on Tubman's death in 1971. In 1978, Jimmy Carter became the first U.S. president to make an official visit to Liberia (Franklin Roosevelt's stopover had been for refueling).
The Soldiers Take Control
Americo-Liberian political hegemony ended abruptly on April 12, 1980 when 17 young army officers of indigenous descent staged a bloody coup. Tolbert was slain in the Executive Mansion, along with more than a score of others, mostly security personnel. Another 13 officials died in a nationally televised execution 10 days later on a Monrovia beach. Coming amid rising public pressure for political and economic reform and a crackdown on dissent by the Tolbert regime, the takeover was welcomed by many inside and outside Liberia as a significant shift favoring the 95 percent of the population excluded from power by Americo-Liberians.
"Liberians went wild in celebration of what seemed like our history's finest moment," according to one eyewitness, Cameroon-born journalist Bill Frank Enoanyi, who lived in Liberia for many years and wrote an account of the civil war, Behold Uncle Sam's Step-Child (Sacramento: SanMar Publications, 1991).
Doe, who turned 28 shortly after seizing power, became head of state and chairman of the ruling People's Redemption Council (PRC). The young soldiers reached out to the grass-roots opposition groups who had campaigned against Tolbert and named reform-minded politicians to senior government posts.
They faced a massive task, however. "The past rulers, bent on improving their own personal positions at the expense of the masses of the people, destroyed the economy," Minister of Planning Togba-Nah Tipoteh, one of the newly named civilians, said when interviewed in his office several weeks after the takeover. According to Sawyer, the new rulers vacillated between "a populist program of development" and "retaliatory indigenous hegemony.... The only consistency about military rule in Liberia was the repression rained upon the people and the looting of the society."
Caught off guard by the turn of events, the Carter administration reacted cautiously. But after a policy review, an aid package was approved "to exercise influence on the course of events," Assistant Secretary of State Richard Moose told Congress in August 1980. "We have maintained an active, frank and open dialogue with the new Liberian government," said Moose, who had visited Monrovia in June. He characterized the coup as a reaction to "the corruption of the Tolbert government" and "the general indifference of the ruling elite to the plight of the people at large."
After Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, support for Liberia was increased. Aid levels rose from about $20 million in 1979 to $75 million and then $95 million, for a total of $402 million between 1981 and 1985, more than the country received during the entire previous century. Ties with the Liberian army were strengthened; the military component of the aid package for this period was about $15 million, which was used for a greatly enlarged training program, barracks construction and equipment.
In 1982, Doe was invited to Washington for an Oval Office meeting with President Reagan. Although the session began on a miscue, with Reagan introducing his visitor as "Chairman Moe" during a photo taking in the Rose Garden, Doe received what he wanted -- a promise of continued American backing.
The policy was based on a belief that Doe and his colleagues could be coaxed back to the barracks and Liberia set on the road to democracy. Doe, who had been trained by U.S. Green Berets, helped matters by embracing the new administration's 'hot-button' concerns. Before coming to Washington, he had closed the Libyan mission in Monrovia, as Reagan had done in Washington. Doe also ordered reductions in the size of the Soviet embassy staff. His second-in-command, Thomas Weh Syen, who was said to favor a pro-Libyan tilt, had been tried and summarily executed along with four other Council members for plotting Doe's assassination. And politicians also considered to be "radicals," including Tipoteh, had been removed from the Cabinet.
As part of the expanding relationship, Doe agreed to a modification of the mutual defense pact granting staging rights on 24-hour notice at Liberia's sea and airports for the U.S. Rapid Deployment Force, which was trained to respond to security threats around the world. A year after the meeting with Reagan, Doe followed the precedent set by Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko in establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, thus breaking away from the isolationist stand adopted by most African countries in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
A Cog in the Anti-Qaddafi Machine
Exerting a pivotal impact on Liberia policy was the closely held fact that Doe and his small country had been drawn into an effort to oust Libya's Muammar Qaddafi from power. Within weeks after Reagan's inauguration, the CIA, under the direction of Reagan's trusted adviser William J. Casey, began encouraging and supporting anti-Qaddafi activity by Libyan opposition groups and friendly foreign governments.
Reagan officials were outspokenly critical of Qaddafi. However, the existence of a large-scale covert operation coordinated by a special CIA task force on Libya under Casey's personal direction came to light only after the 1986 bombing raid on Tripoli, when details were published in February 1987 by Bob Woodward and Don Oberdorfer in a front-page Washington Post article and by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times Magazine.
According to Hersh, the Tripoli raid was directed by the same small group of officials who carried out the arms-for-hostages operation, which later erupted into the Iran-Contra scandal, including National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter, and Oliver North, an NSC aide. Hersh also asserted that the decision-making process within the White House and the CIA used "internal manipulation and deceit to shield true policy from the professionals in the State Department and Pentagon." In addition, the administration set up an interagency committee, headed by William P. Clark, who was then deputy secretary of State, to outline economic sanctions and other options for isolating Libya.
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