U.S. confirms that spy agencies worked with ex-warlord Charles Taylor [Updated]

Update: The Globe now says it ‘overreached‘ on the story and the relationship between Taylor and U.S. intelligence was never confirmed.

In response to a FOIA request from the Boston Globe, the U.S. government has confirmed that former Liberian President Charles Taylor, now on trial for war crimes at the Hague, received support from U.S. intelligence agencies during the 1980s:

After a quarter-century of silence, the US government has confirmed what has long been rumored: Taylor, who would become president of Liberia and the first African leader tried for war crimes, worked with US spy agencies during his rise as one of the world’s most notorious dictators. The disclosure on the former president comes in response to a request filed by the Globe six years ago under the Freedom of Information Act. The Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy arm, confirmed its agents and CIA agents worked with Taylor beginning in the early 1980s.[…] The Defense Intelligence Agency refused to reveal any details about the relationship, saying doing so would harm national security. Taylor, 63, pleaded innocent in 2009 to multiple counts of murder, rape, attacking civilians, and deploying child soldiers during a civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone while he was president of Liberia from 1997 to 2003.

In 2009, Taylor testified at his trial that the CIA aided him in his famous 1985 escape-by-bedsheet from a jail in Plymouth, Mass., where he was being held on embezzlement charges, so that he could take part in a coup plot against then President Samuel Doe. At the time, a CIA spokesman described Taylor’s account as “completely absurd.”

It’s possible Taylor may have aided the agency in gathering intelligence on Muammar al-Qaddafi: