The informant was right: Mugabe lost that first round to Morgan Tsvangirai. Two weeks after the loss, McGee spoke to the insider again. “He told us the regime was preparing for war,” he recalls. Mugabe’s men were setting up command centers for torture and killing in areas that voted for the opposition, the man told McGee, and regional party leaders like him were told to draw up lists of people to target. The ambassador learned that Mugabe’s government had landed critical funding, totaling $100 million, only days after the vote. The regime even provided hundreds of trucks and other vehicles to ferry militias to regions that favored Tsvangirai.

Reports of violence across the country soon poured into McGee’s embassy as Mugabe’s militias sought to punish opposition activists, drive their supporters from their homes, and intimidate the rest into backing Mugabe in the next round of elections. So he recruited the gardener at the ambassador’s residence in Harare as a body double and sent him out behind the tinted windows of the embassy limousine one dawn. Mugabe’s intelligence agents dutifully fell in line, on a parade to nowhere. About an hour later, McGee climbed into another limo and met diplomats from the U.K., European Union, and other allied missions waiting outside town.

McGee had witnessed just a fraction of the violence aimed at swinging the second election, scheduled for June 27, 2008. In the weeks leading up to the runoff, there were thousands of casualties reported—and tens of thousands of refugees.

McGee wouldn’t find out for years, but as the attacks were unfolding, and as he worked with Washington to financially isolate Mugabe, a Wall Street consortium provided the $100 million for the dictator’s government. These millions secured the rights to mine platinum, among the most valuable of minerals, from central Zimbabwe. Several firms were involved in the investment, including BlackRock, GLG Partners, and Credit Suisse. The most vital player was Och-Ziff Capital Management, the largest publicly traded hedge fund on Wall Street. An Och-Ziff spokesman declined to comment for this article. Now some of its African investments are at the center of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Och-Ziff, founded by Daniel Och in 1994, is a hedge fund titan, with an estimated $45.7 billion in assets under management. Large institutions such as the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, private foundations, wealthy families, and other fund management firms all put their money in its care. When Och took the fund public in November 2007, it became the foundation of a personal fortune estimated by Bloomberg to be about $3.7 billion.

The Central African Mining & Exploration Co., or Camec, was listed on the AIM exchange and wasn’t afraid of doing business in chaotic places. It attracted attention in the British press because its chairman was a retired English cricket star. But by February 2008, an Israeli diamond trader named Dan Gertler had negotiated the largest individual ownership stake in the company—almost 40 percent, to be held in family trusts. He forged a close relationship with Joseph Kabila, the former army chief and current president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC, and later amassed stakes in that country’s state-owned mining ventures, along with a fortune estimated by Bloomberg to be worth $2.5 billion.

A panel headed by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan last year said the DRC, among the world’s poorest countries, lost about $1.4 billion when its government underpriced assets sold to Gertler. The businessman has denied any wrongdoing, and a London-based spokesman declined to comment for this article.

Just weeks before the first round of elections in March 2008, Mugabe’s government took control of undeveloped platinum claims along the Great Dyke held by Anglo American Platinum, according to the company’s shareholder filings. (Anglo American is the world’s largest primary producer of the precious metal.) Then the government set out urgently to sell the rights.

Camec was ready to buy. It just needed money. It announced in March and April that it was privately raising about $200 million by selling ownership stakes, cash it said it would use to pursue “multiple investment opportunities available to the company in Africa,” besides funding its existing DRC operations. It didn’t specify what or where such opportunities may be.



Camec was ready to buy. It just needed money. It announced in March and April that it was privately raising about $200 million by selling ownership stakes, cash it said it would use to pursue “multiple investment opportunities available to the company in Africa,” besides funding its existing DRC operations. It didn’t specify what or where such opportunities may be.

Och-Ziff provided 75 percent of Camec’s total fundraising for the effort, or $150 million, corporate records show, making it the mining company’s fourth-largest shareholder. Camec raised the rest by privately selling much smaller stakes to BlackRock and 10 other companies, including GLG Partners and Credit Suisse, according to records obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek and interviews with other fund managers involved. Och-Ziff’s shares in Camec were issued on April 7, 2008.

Four days later, Camec announced it was using the money it raised to purchase a joint venture with the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corp., or ZMDC, Mugabe’s state-owned mining company. The joint venture owned the platinum stakes on the Great Dyke that had been taken back just a few weeks earlier from Anglo American. The price included $5 million in cash; Camec issued shares to partners whose identities were shielded by a shell company based in the British Virgin Islands; and $100 million to Mugabe’s government. Camec said the $100 million was a cash loan “to comply with its contractual obligations to the government of Zimbabwe” for the platinum claims. It said the money would be repaid out of ZMDC’s share of future platinum earnings. Camec’s balance sheets for the period make clear that funding for the platinum rights came from the private transactions involving Och-Ziff.

On the day Camec announced the deal with Mugabe’s government, two of McGee’s embassy employees were in the countryside gathering intelligence on Mugabe’s efforts to ensure his win. A lieutenant colonel in the president’s army told embassy staffers that soldiers, militia members, and ruling party backers loyal to Mugabe were training to conduct what he called a “reorientation campaign,” according to McGee and embassy cables. The lieutenant colonel also said 400 vehicles were being deployed to facilitate the operation.

Violence intensified throughout May. Soldiers drove opposition supporters out of their rural villages or urban neighborhoods. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 33,000 people were driven from their homes by month’s end. Hundreds turned up at the gates of the American Embassy. “These people were literally running for their lives,” McGee says.

The ambassador also began getting reports of the murder of opposition party activists: Men in Toyota pickup trucks without license plates abducted three members of the opposition’s youth group. Their bodies, two badly mutilated, were found over the next few days. An opposition leader named Shepherd Jani was abducted off a sidewalk in his town and pushed into a truck by four men. His mutilated body was found two days later. Such reports multiplied.