“Joseph Kony Est Mort,” reads a leaflet bearing the murderous Central African warlord’s visage and the message, in French, that he has died. Over the last six years, the United States invested the better part of $1 billion to make that statement a reality. America sent military advisers, set up bases, gathered intelligence, and funded and equipped local proxies across the region in an effort to kill or capture Kony and destroy his Lord’s Resistance Army, a militia that has committed atrocities since the 1980s. The U.S. military even created that flier to tout Kony’s death and sent reams of them to a shadowy outpost in the Central African Republic where they sat, waiting for the day they could rain down from the sky. Now that leaflet — and that dream — have gone up in smoke. Late last year, via a Freedom of Information Act request, I asked the U.S. military for a copy of the “Joseph Kony Is Dead” flier and other similar leaflets dropped by the millions in Central Africa. I was told, after a search, that the fliers could not be located — not one single leaflet. They had apparently vanished, never to be seen again. That is, until they were. When they were found, the military could, of course, have contacted me. They could have sent them to me. But the military had other plans for the documents. And those plans didn’t involve me. What they instead involved – perhaps in a breach of U.S. law — was incineration. Yet even before the burning, the military found a novel way to comply with my FOIA request without really complying with it; a means of achieving victory in a FOIA fight – what they were never able to do in their battle against Joseph Kony.

Photo: Adam Pletts/Getty Images

In 2008, the United States began pouring resources into military efforts to capture or kill Kony and wipe out the LRA. Three years later, former President Barack Obama launched Operation Observant Compass, a ramped-up campaign that saw around 100 U.S. military personnel deployed to the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Uganda to aid local proxies in the war. “It is time to end Kony’s reign of terror,” wrote Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., at a time when the warlord’s force reportedly numbered about 150 to 300 armed fighters. In 2012, the charity Invisible Children, created a frenzy with “Kony 2012,” a 30-minute film that was plugged by celebrities from Justin Bieber to Kim Kardashian, and viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube. Criticized as ahistorical, oversimplified, inaccurate, reductive, manipulative, and the worst sort of slacktivism, the tugs-at-the-heartstrings viral video about Kony’s victims was nonetheless praised by the Obama administration and helped drive the U.S. military campaign. In the years that followed, America would send more troops, equipment, and resources to the fight. “In eastern Africa, we are working with partners to bring the Lord’s Resistance Army to an end,” Obama announced in 2013. It never happened. The Pentagon says that, since 2011, about $780 million has been spent to battle the LRA. Yet Kony was never captured or killed, and the LRA is still in the field with an estimated 150 to 250 fighters under arms — perhaps the same number of soldiers as when Observant Compass began. The U.S. has nonetheless packed up shop and ended the effort. When asked this spring about the failure to find Kony, Maj. Gen. Joseph Harrington, the commander of United States Army Africa, replied: “Everyone will meet their maker at some point.”

Close-up of a Pentagon-supplied image of its Joseph Kony leaflets. Image: U.S. Military

The “Joseph Kony Est Mort” leaflet was one of the many fliers created by U.S. soldiers specializing in Military Information Support Operations – formerly known as Psychological Operations – and was, according to Defense Department spokesperson Maj. Audricia Harris, set “for rapid release to remote parts of the Central African jungle” in the event Kony was ever killed. While I had asked Special Operations Command to provide copies of those leaflets, what they instead sent to me were three pages with 94 tiny images — some partially redacted, all barely readable due to their size. When I asked again for the actual leaflets, or at least larger images, SOCOM’s FOIA office told me that despite a “comprehensive search of records, this is the only copy of the documents that could be located responsive to your request. We tried enlarging the document, but unfortunately it degrades even further.” For years, various components of the U.S. military have thrown up a variety of roadblocks to my reporting. They have, at times, led me on with promises of information only to renege months later, ignored my calls and emails, feigned failing phone lines, hung up on me, lost my FOIA requests, kept me waiting for years to provide documents, and released documents so heavily redacted as to be utterly useless. The leaflet response could be still another technique. You might call it the “FOIA microdot method” — shrink materials to the point they’re almost unreadable.

Image: U.S. Military