Kai looked out at the boys playing, and told me about his childhood during the war. He was, he said, younger than his pupils when he saw someone burned alive in front of him. The man was a rebel, and a few weeks previously, he’d shot another person, an act which Kai witnessed too. Now, the murderer was at the mercy of a mob, seeking revenge.

They shoved a tire around his neck, doused him with gasoline, and set him alight. This was 1997, Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Kai and his family had been driven from their home in Kenema, a city in the east of the country, by the rebel advance. They arrived in Freetown among thousands of other refugees. “We were accused of being rebels, spat at, called ‘monkeys’, people said we had tails,” he says. Kai’s older brother didn’t make it – he was captured by the rebels and taken to Liberia.

Kai’s family were educated, but in Freetown there was no work. So Kai and his siblings sold charcoal to support themselves. They sheltered in a hotel commandeered by “Kamajors”, a civil defense militia, who wore voodoo-infused “body-armor”: string vests, hung with woolen charms and trinkets. When there was a general amnesty for weapons in 1999, Kai’s mother persuaded him to take in one of their guns to receive payment. It was a believable story – child soldiers were common. The money kept them going for a while. But “it was very, very hard,” Kai says. Throughout the war, he barely went to school.

***

It’s been 25 years since the end of Sierra Leone’s war. What began as an army uprising against the corrupt administration of the then-President Joseph Momah on 23 March, 1991, swiftly spilled into a bloody regional conflict. In a small country of five million people, more than 50,000 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands more wounded, disabled and displaced. At one point, the army rebels held almost all the country, including parts of Freetown. Speak to anyone in Sierra Leone over the age of 30, and they will have stories of trauma and loss.

It’s too easy to dismiss Sierra Leone’s conflict as a historic tragedy – simply the kind of thing that happens in Africa, as inevitable as the rains. But the British military intervention, which brought the war to an end in an extraordinary fashion in 2001 – through concentrated force, in-depth understanding of regional politics and clear, boundaried objectives – showed how Western powers can use military force humanely and effectively to create change, including in current conflicts, such as Iran.

Yet after a bright period of stabilization and peace, the country seems to be backsliding into the conditions which led to the war in the first place. Indeed, UnHerd can today report that Britain has ended its permanent military presence in Sierra Leone, citing security concerns. And as the Western powers have pulled out of West Africa, other countries – principally China and Russia – have hungrily stepped in to fill the breach. Sierra Leone today provides a front-row seat to the new Great Game, as Western and non-Western powers scramble to control their “spheres of influence” through diplomatic, military and economic might.

***

Even by the standards of Africa’s civil conflicts, Sierra Leone’s war was breathtaking in its brutality. It began when a breakaway commander in the Sierra Leone army, Foday Sankoh, led an incursion from neighboring Liberia. His nominal goal was to overthrow Momoh’s government. But sponsored by Charles Taylor, the dictator of Liberia, who wanted a piece of Sierra Leone’s diamond industry, Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) ran riot. Allied with elements of the Sierra Leone Army — a faction which came to be called the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) — the rebels terrorized ordinary Sierra Leoneans. In response, many formed militias, the Kamajors, to fight back. They were a rag-tag bunch: alongside their faith in voodoo-infused protection from bullets, they also believed that a mirror could deflect an RPG.

The rebels lacked a central command structure, and individual commanders effectively acted as private warlords, rampaging across the country, looting, raping and kidnapping children to fight for them. Among the various factions were foreign mercenaries from Britain and South Africa, the Kamajors and the West Side Boys, a gang of drugged-up thugs. Adding to the chaos were the Sierra Leone Army’s “sobels” — soldiers by day, rebels by night. Child soldiers were used by all sides — but were a signature of the RUF, as were mass mutilations. Fighters would cut off people’s arms to spread terror among the population, especially after the 1996 election returned a democratically-elected President. (“Vote for the government, lose your hand.”)

By late 1999, it looked like Sankoh and the rebels were poised to seize full control of the country. The previous decade had seen coups, counter-coups and democratic elections; there had been half-hearted attempts at peace deals and disarmament. Though the government was nominally run by Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, a former UN development worker who had been elected by a landslide in 1996, the power lay with Sankoh. He paid lip-service to the 1997 Lome Peace Agreement, which was supposed to defuse the fighting, but refused to disarm the RUF and had himself installed as Minister for Mines. The UN peacekeeping forces were underpowered and ineffective; the rebels were becoming increasingly assertive, attacking positions on the way to the airport and threatening Freetown.

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At this point, the Foreign Office ordered a Non-Combatant Evacuation (NEO) — Operation Palliser — of British citizens, headed by the then-Brigadier, David Richards, who had already visited the country on several occasions. With a small team of British officers, paratroopers and special forces soldiers, he set about taking the fight to the RUF. This went explicitly against orders from London, who wanted Richards to remain solely focused on the evacuation mission. He ignored them, rallying beleaguered UN troops and forging an “unholy alliance” between the Sierra Leone Army (SLA), the Kamajors and warlord Johnny Paul Koroma’s West Side Boys — all of whom had been at each other’s throats in previous months. Using British troops as a spearhead, they pushed back against the RUF with maximum force. They were aided in this blitzkrieg campaign by Neall Ellis, an eccentric South African mercenary who piloted a Russian-made Hind Mi-24 attack helicopter.

Within weeks, the RUF were on the back foot, and driven to the negotiating table. Whitehall — despite sneers about Richards’ buccaneering tactics, earning him the nickname “Richards of Africa” — was forced to concede that Operation Palliser had been a success. The lightning campaign was the making of Richards’s career; afterwards, he went on to command NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and served as Chief of Defense Staff. By the end of 2000, Sankoh was in prison awaiting trial, and the democratically-elected government could begin to rebuild. Thirteen of the ringleaders of the conflict were put on trial in the high court in Freetown. Sankoh died before he could begin his sentence, but Charles Taylor, the Liberian dictator, was sentenced to 50 years for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is currently serving his term at HMP Frankland in County Durham.

Yet Richards says now that he wasn’t concerned about the storm the Sierra Leone intervention caused back home. “I never expected to be a Field Marshal or anything like that. I had a rather romantic idea of what the military could do — that the Armed Forces could make people’s lives better, rather than the conventional view of armies as brutal killing machines. This was the last British-only foreign intervention. We had sufficient military muscle to do it then. I’m not sure we could do it now.”

***

Unlike the sprawling, messy interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan – and now in Iran – Richards’s campaign was short, sharp and goal-limited. There were no lofty aspirations about “regime change” or “sowing the seeds of democracy”; instead, the campaign was about supporting Kabbah’s military until they could stand on their own against the RUF, and then lending a hand as Kabbah sought to shore up his country again. To this end, for ten years afterwards, the British ran a training center for future officers in Freetown and provided foreign aid to support the government. “We helped get it back on its feet,” says Richards. “Most coups and dictatorships in Africa are born of the armed forces, so we were very keen in Sierra Leone that we had a democratically-elected president, with an accountable armed forces.”

After that first decade, British support began to dwindle. Since 2019, the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) has been cut from 0.7% to 0.5% of Gross National Income; and, as of this year, it will hit its lowest since 2008 — down to 0.3%. This drop in foreign aid has blindsided countries like Sierra Leone. In the country, things seem more precarious; politics appears to be polarizing along the lines of old tribal animosities. So far, presidential elections have peacefully rotated every five years between the two main parties, the SLPP and the APC, and no president has tried to push their two-term limit. But the current President Julius Maada Bio is seen in some quarters as autocratic and nepotistic — and some Sierra Leoneans I spoke to felt it was only a matter of time before the peaceful transition of power broke down. In addition, many of the factors that led to the war — illiteracy, uneven development, drugs and corruption — are still present; by themselves, each is a manageable issue. But taken together, their effect is corrosive, especially given the context of Sierra Leone’s endemic poverty. The minimum monthly wage is 1,200 Leones (less than £40), and outside of Freetown, mains electricity and running water are scarce. People make do with solar power units, but they also look across to the nearby Ivory Coast, which has almost comprehensive mains electricity coverage, and wonder what is going wrong.

One compelling answer to that question is corruption. It operates at all levels — I was frisked for money several times by policemen at the ubiquitous roadblocks — but, more damagingly, it pervades the apparatus of the state. Only 6% of businesses which can pay tax do so, and the main industries — mining, ports and defense — are run by the President’s inner circle. “My time to eat,” runs a local saying. This lack of altruism leads to widespread culture of short-termism: few ordinary Sierra Leoneans have many savings, and the economy still operates on a wartime GDP. After all, why bother to save, to build businesses, to invest, if an iffy contract or an insufficiently-stuffed brown envelope could undermine all your efforts?

Drugs are a caustic problem, too. “Kush” — a synthetic, psychoactive drug which sends the user into a brief, catatonic high — is endemic. Addicts are easily identified, stumbling in a zombie-like daze through the streets; in 2024, the President declared its abuse a national health emergency. It mostly leads to petty crime as addicts steal to afford a hit — but its long-term use is lethal. Last year, a corpse lay outside on the smart streets of the embassy quarter for days, as the unlucky soul had no one to bury them.

West Africa, and Sierra Leone in particular, also appears to be becoming a hub for global cocaine trafficking — and, most concerningly, the Sierra Leonean government seems to be involved. Jos Leijdekkers, a Dutch cocaine kingpin, sentenced to 25 years in absentia in the Netherlands, appears to be operating with impunity in Freetown, enjoying Sierra Leone’s lack of an extradition treaty with the Netherlands. He is even rumoured to be married to the President’s step-daughter and the father of her child.

Still, Sierra Leone is far from a failed state: some of the robust civil society so carefully built after the war remains. No-one, aside from the police and the armed forces, carries guns. And despite the occasional flutterings of unrest — there was a squib of a coup in November 2023, in which 17 soldiers died — the upper echelons of the armed forces are seen as competent and loyal. “Coup-proof”, in the words of one insider. (Though whether they would stand up to a determined incursion from neighboring Liberia or Guinea, a distant but plausible scenario, is another matter.) In addition, Freetown has a small but feisty independent media. And Sierra Leonean social media — while occasionally unhelpfully hysterical — is rambunctious and critical: a vital outlet via which to safely complain against the government and the state of the country.

***

Traveling through Sierra Leone 25 years after its war, you can’t help but call to mind other, more recent conflicts, such as Afghanistan and Iran. So what went right in the 2000 Sierra Leone intervention — and what is going wrong with more recent Western interventions?

For a start, militarily, there was sufficient use of concentrated force to deal a “shock and awe” blow to the RUF, vaporizing desire to fight. In one memorable episode, the RUF were goaded into attacking a small, isolated force of British soldiers near the airport. This was, in fact, a ruse and they were met with overwhelming firepower, killing dozens of rebels. “Clout, don’t dribble” was the maxim which lay behind any engagement with the RUF.

Richards also worked with a small, agile command structure, with responsibility for everyday tactical decisions delegated to trusted commanders. And he could also operate autonomously — free from both oversight and backseat battle-fielding from London, but also without having to manage other allies in the field. Lastly, he and his team understood the country. Their multiple previous visits meant that they knew its top people, knew where power lay and could navigate its complex tribal structures adroitly.

All of these factors were absent or lacking when it came to Iraq and Afghanistan — and it seems Trump is in danger of making the same mistakes with Iran too. From the first in Iran, there has been a lack of clear, obtainable objective — is it regime change? Neutralizing Iran’s nuclear capability? Reopening the Straits of Hormuz? It’s been all of these and more throughout the months-long conflict. Another key difference was that Sierra Leone was already at war: Britain could back one side against the other. In Iran, America initially appeared to be attempting to topple a regime, and keep a lid on any resulting instability indefinitely: “Pandora’s Box” doesn’t begin to do it justice.

And while the initial US strikes accorded with the idea of maximum, overwhelming force, they failed to deal with a knockout blow. The escalating nature of the fighting — and the way that Iran is able to wreak havoc through asymmetric drone strikes and small boat attacks — wasn’t factored in beforehand. Nor was the unpredictable way it might draw in regional allies. As Richards puts it, “I think it will be looked on as an example of how not to run operations, because of the chaos it’s caused to the global economy. And if it causes a recession, I don’t think Trump will ever be forgiven.”

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And once the Iran intervention is over, what then? Again, Sierra Leone’s recovery, though imperfect, is instructive. After a promising start, which brought much-needed prosperity and stability, Britain and other Western countries took their eye off the region. In Britain’s case, this absentmindedness is especially unforgivable. The UK’s ties to Sierra Leone run deep — the state was established in 1787 by abolitionists as a refuge for escaped slaves, and it was a British colony and protectorate until independence in 1961. It sits in a key position geographically, with the largest natural harbor on the west coast of Africa. Yet even before the recent military withdrawal, Whitehall appeared to have no grand strategy for the country — or the region more broadly. There is not only, therefore, a lingering moral obligation to Sierra Leone, but also, most pressingly, an opportunity. English is widely spoken and Britain, unlike the region’s other former colonial masters, is largely looked on fondly. I remember whizzing on the back of a motorbike over stone bridges deep in the northern bush, while my guide proudly pointed out that they were built during the period of the British Protectorate, and still standing many decades on.

Into the breach, Sierra Leone has welcomed other partners. The Lebanese community, traditionally involved in the country’s mineral industry, provides 30% of the country’s GDP. China is heavily involved in mining as well. In fact, the Chinese have rebuilt the old British railway to neighboring Liberia, which last ran a passenger service in 1975; its massive, 90-carriage long trains now ferry gold, bauxite and coltan. Turkey is a key player as well. Its Karpowership, a floating power station anchored in Freetown harbor, provides 80% of the city’s electricity. Disputes over unpaid debts have frequently led to blackouts: powerboat diplomacy in action. Lastly, Russia is heavily invested in Sierra Leone’s shipping industry. Its boats provide a “shadow fleet” of Sierra Leonean-flagged vessels, running oil and avoiding international sanctions. Quite whether this is an explicit arrangement with the Sierra Leonean government is unclear; nonetheless, to date around 85 tankers registered to Sierra Leone have been sanctioned by the US, UK and EU for connections to Russian oil trade.

The danger here is twofold. First, that Sierra Leone might slip back toward the corruption, inequality and disillusionment which were among the factors that led to its 11-year war. Such a result would be a disaster for the ordinary people of Sierra Leone, and would have profound consequences for Western security. As it stands, Sierra Leone has been relatively untouched by the Islamic terrorism which has ravaged nearby Mali and the Sahel; a breakdown in law and order would create fertile conditions for terror. Any conflict would also create a massive refugee crisis which, as recent years has taught us, will inevitably end up on European doorsteps.

But even if that doesn’t come to pass, Sierra Leone deserves better than to become a vassal state, carved up between China, Russia. Or to become a safe haven for international organized crime. On my travels through the country, I found a deep optimism, a desire to reckon with its past and hope that, through education and a robust civil society, life might be different.

And by reaching out into the world again in this way, Britain may begin to strengthen its position – at home, and abroad. It’s perhaps naive to think it can recapture the swashbuckling success of the 2001 intervention. But to pull back entirely, and pull up the drawbridges, is also a mistake.

And so the biological-industry complex was also born, swept into being as the US started to reckon with the inevitability of biological warfare and bioterrorism — an inevitability that arrived just one week after 9/11, when envelopes of inhalation anthrax were mailed around the country. But, as with the military-industrial complex, the emergence of America’s biodefense infrastructure was about much more than defending against potential threats. It was about anticipating them, understanding them, spying on them, and creating them. In many ways, the sense of urgency echoed the Manhattan Project, which showed just how quickly a “scientific-technological elite” could coalesce around a military project of strategic value. Consequently, American biodefence today spans the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Agriculture, the FBI, the State Department, and the Intelligence Community (not to mention state-level agencies).

Curiously, however, it also appears to have spread into American foreign aid. In April, Samantha Power, the former human rights activist and Obama hand now serving as administrator of United States Agency for International Development (USAID), testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Rand Paul asked: “Did USAID fund coronavirus research in Wuhan?” In response, Power was evasive, referring repeatedly to USAID funding of the Wuhan lab having taken place “before my time”. But Power’s testimony raises a much bigger question: Why was USAID funding risky research in a Chinese lab that the US Department of Energy and the FBI now assess to be the source of Covid at all?

Since the heady days of the pandemic, when top scientists resorted to burner phones and clandestine meetings, journalists have uncovered thousands of pages of redacted emails, deleted virus sequences, and concealed events related to the outbreak of Covid. Among the key revelations of this years-long investigation was the enormous sums of US government funding spent on risky virus research around the world, but with a particular emphasis on China. The vast majority of this money was funnelled through a New York-based NGO called EcoHealth Alliance, led by  British zoologist Peter Daszak. And by far the largest portion of US money channelled through EcoHealth — no less than $65 million — came from USAID. Not even the pandemic could put a stop to investment. As recently as late 2021, well after EcoHealth Alliance had been rebuked by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for improper practices regarding its funding of the Wuhan lab, USAID gave EcoHealth Alliance a further $4.67 million.

This was merely the latest in a long series of funding rounds. EcoHealth received its first installment from USAID in 2009. The money would come from a then-novel USAID programme called Predict, whose mission was to hunt out viruses that jump from animals to humans and could potentially cause a pandemic. Predict was the brainchild of Dennis Carroll, an infectious diseases expert who had run USAID’s Pandemic Influenza and Other Emerging Threats (PIOET) Unit.

Carroll had permanently joined USAID in 2005 — a critical year for the agency, but also for the country. Two years prior, an outbreak of avian flu, or H5N1, had decimated poultry stocks and infected around 1,000 people around the world. The outbreak heightened a sense of terror of biological agents that had gripped the Bush Administration since the anthrax attack. In response, the Bush administration increased non-military biodefence funding from a paltry $60 million 2001 to a staggering $2 billion in 2003 — in addition to $6 billion dedicated solely to the development and stockpiling of vaccines. Just as importantly, with the 2004 presidential directive called Biodefense for the 21st Century, based on the assumption that “a bioweapons attack could devastate America”, Bush would lay the foundations for America’s first biodefence infrastructure.

At USAID, a similarly seismic change was underway. Under the leadership of Andrew Natsios, a longtime Republican political operative who started his career in politics running the 1990 primary campaign of George H.W. Bush, USAID would take a dramatic shift towards America’s defence establishment, becoming “a quasi-security agency”, as British professor of conflict studies Alice Hills wrote in a 2006 paper. This began in 2005 when USAID created its Office of Military Affairs (now the Office of Civilian Military Cooperation). “Uniforms [of US military personnel] in the corridors of the Ronald Reagan Building that houses USAID are now so commonplace they are not even noticed,” Henrietta Fore, the USAID administrator from 2007 to 2009, wrote in Parameters journal in 2008. “This is not the way things used to be.”

In 2009, USAID was forced to ramp up its efforts when another seismic event in the world of biological-threat preparedness took place: a novel influenza virus called H1N1, swine flu, which infected around one billion people and killed tens of thousands. In May 2009, Carroll testified before Congress that USAID had announced the launch of a new Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) Program, which would create “a global early warning system for the threat posed by diseases of animal origin that infect humans”. The programme, which in various forms ran until 2019 was slated to consist of four projects: Predict, Respond, Identify and Prevent — with the first, Predict, granted around $200 million in funding over two five-year funding cycles. (A follow-up USAID virus program called STOP Spillover was announced in May 2020 with a $100 million budget before getting quietly shelved.)

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With Predict, USAID sought to “identify the emergence of new infectious diseases in high-risk wildlife, such as bats, rodents, and non-human primates, that could pose a major threat to human health”. Under Carroll’s leadership, however, Predict went much further than identifying the “emergence” of dangerous new viruses. Instead, it started actively hunting them out. It sampled more than 164,000 animals and people and sourced more than 1,100 unique viruses, including strains of Ebola, Marburg, MERS- and SARS-like coronaviruses, 949 of which were not previously known. In doing so, Predict introduced a completely new kind of pandemic risk: giving these deadly, unknown viruses a direct pathway to become introduced to large human populations living nearby.

Given the risk, the benefits would presumably need to be at least as great. But a highly influential 2017 paper by Emma L. Geoghegan and Edward Holmes demonstrated that the predictive value of the programme wasn’t merely of dubious value but of no value at all. “[E]fforts to predict disease emergence commonly conflate fundamentally different evolutionary and epidemiological time scales, and are likely to fail because of the enormous number of unsampled viruses that could conceivably emerge in humans,” the paper stated.

Nevertheless, the programme’s leaders were certain that Predict worked. A 2012 article published by the journal PLOS concluded that, as a result of Predict and EPT: “China has made a series of changes to public health policy and infrastructure specifically targeting SARS-like illnesses… It is likely that any future spillover from SARS… would be less likely to result in international spread.” One of the main authors of the paper was Dennis Carroll. Another was Peter Daszak.

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It would be less than seven years from the publication of that paper before a pandemic would be caused precisely by a SARS-like pathogen originating in China. This raises the very serious question of how the world’s leading experts on pandemics, who commanded nine-figure budgets to monitor populations for exactly this kind of emerging virus, failed to even detect its emergence.

The reality is that Predict was doing more than detecting dangerous pathogens: it was helping labs make them. In May 2021, the office of US House Representative Guy Reschenthaler released a report showing that USAID had funnelled $1.1 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) through the EcoHealth Alliance. Among the work funded by USAID was a 2015 study jointly conducted by Shi Zhengli, the infamous “bat lady” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the University of North Carolina researcher Ralph Baric, which used reverse genetics to insert a spike protein from a wild coronavirus capable of binding to a human receptor into the SARS-1 virus. The new lab-made virus was shown to bind to the human receptors and replicate “efficiently”, according to a House Foreign Affairs committee report.

The 2015 study — which the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists characterised as a “prototype” for making SARS-CoV-2 in a lab — was considered so dangerous that its authors did not upload the resulting sequence to GenBank, the NIH’s genetic research repository, for fear it might “fall into the wrong hands”, as Baric, its lead author, would later attest. But the study also omitted one other critical piece of information: USAID had provided funding for the study. Nature Medicine, the journal that published the paper, was forced to add a “Corrigendum” clarifying that the aid agency had in fact funded it.

Funding this kind of research in China added a whole other dimension of risk. According to the State Department, the Wuhan Institute began collaborating with the People’s Liberation Army no later than 2017. NBC News reported that in spring 2018, the Wuhan Institute’s Shi collaborated with military scientists specifically on coronavirus research. And in April 2020, it was revealed that the Wuhan Institute worked with Chinese military researchers to conduct research on Covid in humanised mice cells for the purposes of investigating the new disease. (US government investigators later found that the mice cells used specifically for Covid testing would have been created in the summer of 2019 — months before the pandemic began.)

There is little doubt that the US had, and still has, a global premium on the equipment, expertise, and ambition to do this type of research. So why would the NIH, let alone the USAID, fund such research in, of all places, a lab in China?

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Among the four pillars of “Biodefense in the 21st Century”, Bush’s strategy that gave rise to programmes like Predict, was one called “Threat Awareness”. It indicated that the US was “improving the Intelligence Community’s ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence [on bioweapons]”. Of all places, China would almost certainly be at the top of any list of bioweapons intelligence targets. Though the nation is a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the State Department found in 1993 that its bioweapons activities continued long after its accession in 1984. A 2002 report by The Nonproliferation Review found that one of a number of PRC-connected factories producing bioweapons was located in Wuhan. It was there that Shi Zhengli was conducting her own cutting-edge virus research, though under the banner of scientific research.

While failing to anticipate, or even identify, the Covid pandemic, Predict could have given American intelligence access to the findings of virus researchers such as Shi Zhengli, not just in China but around the world. In which case, given the sums associated with America’s defence and intelligence budgets, the project’s hefty $200 million lifetime budget would have paid for itself.

It wouldn’t have been the first time that international aid programmes have been used to gather intelligence. In 2014, it was reported that USAID had been caught trying to create a version of Twitter in Cuba that would help the CIA influence the political situation, with an eye to overthrowing the government. “USAID, perhaps, is the new CIA here,” Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive’s Cuba said at the time. The programme backfired, eventually allowing the Castro government to spy on the 40,000 Cubans who signed up.

Have USAID’s intelligence efforts failed again? In September 2019, the Wuhan Institute, with no explanation, took its database of viruses offline — a database populated by efforts funded, in part, by Predict. It was only months later, in March 2020, that Predict was brought to a close. But far from being the end of the programme, Predict’s demise was only the beginning of a much bigger and bolder incarnation of it.

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The Global Virome Project (GVP), a $3-billion private venture to “identify and characterize, within a decade, 99% of all zoonotic viruses with epidemic/pandemic potential”, was envisioned as Predict on steroids. Not coincidentally, it was created and led by the same people at the centre of Predict, including Dennis Carroll, Peter Daszak and Predict’s principal investigator Jonna Mazet. Like Predict, the GVP would be rooted in tight cooperation not just with the Chinese government (one of the co-authors of the Science paper announcing its launch was George Gao, then head of the Chinese CDC), but specifically the lab in Wuhan. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology… is the forerunner to the Global Virome Project,” a 2018 State Department cable from the US consulate in Wuhan reported. “China has expressed interest in building the GVP database… Other countries…are skeptical on whether China could remain transparent as a ‘gatekeeper’ for this information.”

In addition to the Chinese government, a core partner in the GVP was health-tech company Metabiota. Led by a PR-savvy “virus hunter” named Nathan Wolfe, Metabiota played a key role in USAID’s Predict, despite having been accused of running a “bungled” response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. The company received around $24 million in funding from the Department of Defense, funding that is alleged to have been facilitated by Hunter Biden, whose investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, led a $25 million investment round in Metabiota, investing $10 million for a 13% stake in the company. Emails revealed by US Right to Know show that, while building the GVP, Carroll (using his USAID email address) earmarked hundreds of thousands of dollars in USAID funding to Metabiota, possibly in violation of federal law.

Since then, even in the wake of a pandemic that it might have caused, the power of the biological-industrial complex has continued to grow. Funding to EcoHealth Alliance has been fully restored. Everyone from Anthony Fauci to Samantha Power to Anthony Blinken is able to calmly sit in front of a powerful senator and explain that documents regarding the research done at Wuhan, subsidised by USAID, NIH and the State Department, will not, after all, be forthcoming. When I asked USAID about Predict, a spokesperson said: it “focused on understanding viral risk” and lowered “the pandemic risk in several ways”. They also stated: “USAID has never funded gain of function or dual use research of concern activities.” But it still remains unclear what exactly it did fund. With 20 million people dead and the world no closer to answers regarding what actually caused the pandemic — not the scientific method, but the policies, people, and institutional corruption — we can only continue to pose questions that have, for three years, gone glaringly unasked.

Second, the state of the Labour Party, riddled with anti-Semitism and personal vindictiveness, with people cancelled for the slightest ideological slip, with its gender wars obsessions, with its hatred of the very idea that one might love one’s country. It was a huge personal relief to leave all that behind. Good riddance.

At first, my switch of allegiance to the hated Tories came as something of a relief. And in the early stages of our relationship, it was easy to keep on making excuses for the things that did not sit quite right with me. I found myself, less than a month after the vote, inwardly cringing at the refusal of Tory MP’s to support the bid to reunite unaccompanied child refugees with families in the UK. It seemed heartless and unnecessarily petty — a kind of unvirtue signalling designed to send a strong message to the faithful that this government wouldn’t be manipulated by any of that sentimentalism so beloved of the Left. Perhaps you just have to take the rough with the smooth, no party is ever going to be perfect. And with this sort of unconvincing blah, I soldiered on, morally embarrassed.

I’ve had other wobbles. But now, with the reduction of the aid budget to 0.5% of GDP, the romance is well and truly over. The idea that we export our Covid-related economic pain to the most vulnerable is just too much for me to swallow, especially as the Conservatives made a clear electoral commitment on this one. Not only was their previously stubborn defence of the 0.7% figure a bunch of garlic that could ward off the “nasty party” tag, it was also a promise to some of the poorest people on the planet. Theresa May was right when she spoke against this £4 billion drop in funding, warning that: “Fewer girls will be educated, more girls and boys will become slaves, more children will go hungry and more of the poorest people in the world will die.”

An instinctive distrust of grand, over-arching theories of morality is one of the principle features of the Conservative mindset. Practice trumps theory. Utopianism is dangerous. Human beings are messy, complicated, conflicted creatures, and strict moral prescriptions are often inhospitable to the lived reality of human life. I get all of that. I agree with it. But one of the inherent weaknesses of this position is that morality can become so bendy and pragmatic as to be practically non-existent. And there is nothing Conservative about the abandonment of guiding moral ideals, however qualified they might have to become when they bump into reality.

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By Giles Fraser

What distinguishes this government from so many Conservative governments of the past is that this one doesn’t seem to do morality at all. One suspects they think that morality is for lefties. Which is just rubbish. Because Conservatism has always had a moral core, albeit a different one from that of the Left. It honours the implicit moral tone of communities, customs and institutions – monarchy, law, military, the family. Traditionally, it has had a close relationship with the Church of England and its establishment.

It has a ready affinity with environmental concerns, with its instinctive preference for the countryside over concrete. And while it does not typically appreciate the way modernity has formatted the moral instinct, it nonetheless holds important things like honourable conduct, something that used to be called character, keeping your word, being fair, even that much derided idea of noblesse oblige, which, when sympathetically understood, is a sense of social responsibility by those who have much, towards those who do not. All of these add up to a powerful conjunction of obligations — something we used to be comfortable describing as implicit in what it was to be British. And they are deeply conservative instincts.

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The EU's most shameful betrayal

By Giles Fraser

But what do we have with this government? No one can say that Boris has ever made any great play of being constrained by morality, certainly not anything like a Judeo-Christian one. Perhaps he thinks that the air has gone out of this particular balloon. But if that’s the case, another one of the bulwarks of moral Conservativism has been dislodged. I wonder if he thinks that the sense of honour implicit in keeping one’s word is equally old fashioned. Green MP Caroline Lucas is right to be concerned that with Boris Johnson there has been a gradual “normalisation of lying to the house”. And this normalisation is highly corrosive of one of key institutions that Conservatives have traditionally respected: Parliament itself.

I don’t care so much about the money spent on soft furnishings, but it’s that creepy conjunction of greed, entitlement and sexual licence that eats away at the integrity of our public life. I am not terribly judgmental about a bit of old-fashioned hypocrisy; the gap between what we want to be and who we are is there in most of us. What I find so deeply dispiriting is its, yes again, normalisation — as if, for instance, there was nothing about Matt Hancock’s bit on the side that should concern proper grown-ups. And such was the normalisation of this corrosive and amoral me-first philosophy that it seems Boris genuinely thought he could get away with there being one Covid isolation rule for him, and another for the rest of us, the little people. Pilot project? More Pontius Pilate, if you ask me.

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The dictator who fooled us

By Ian Birrell

I have discovered and nurtured my inner conservative since 2019. People like Roger Scruton have become central to how I look at the world. But the more conservative I become, the less I like the Government. It is true that the very different values of market-led liberal individualism have been hollowing out more traditional Toryism since at least the Thatcher revolution. But there were hopes of a fightback. The Brexit vote was a refusal to put the values of economic growth over those of democracy and sovereignty. It was a repatriation of distant unaccountable power and the first great break with the Thatcherite economic consensus. And there is still a long way to go to undo the damage it did.

I won’t return to the Left. But I won’t be voting Conservative next time either. They have forgotten the values of being conservative. And without those values, the Conservative Party is little more than a vessel for the personal ambitions of the depressingly self-entitled.

His actions brought fame and a United States presidential medal of freedom. But he was dismayed to see his nation become snared in fresh horrors under the one-time rebel turned president Paul Kagame; there was the invasion and looting of next-door Democratic Republic of Congo that left millions dead, as well as the routine killings, detentions and disappearances of Rwandans who questioned their leader’s rule.

Why, he asked me ten years ago, was Britain propping up this despot with big dollops of aid when his democracy was such an obvious sham? “We know what happened in the past. But that does not mean we close our eyes to what is happening now,” he said. “I did not keep silent in 1994 and I cannot keep silent now. We need justice, not aid.”

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Today, Rusesabagina stands in a Kigali court clad in prison pink, the latest victim of Kagame’s paranoid misrule. He was seemingly set up by an agent posing as a Burundian priest, lured six months ago from his Texan home to Dubai and then flown on a privately-hired jet to the Rwandan capital. Three days later he was paraded in handcuffs, facing charges on nine offences including murder, armed robbery and membership of a terror group. The president crowed about a “flawless” operation.

Rusesabagina had told me several times about the smears, the death threats and the assassination attempts he endured, which eventually forced him to move from Belgium to a gated community in the US. He is 66 years old with some health issues, so he knows there may be little hope of seeing freedom again.

Kagame is sending out a clear message to his critics with this kidnapping and show trial: no-one is safe from his reach, whoever they are and wherever they live. Only on Sunday, another leading opposition member was killed in Cape Town in a shooting that bears all the hallmarks of a targeted assassination, according to one man who survived such a hit.

There should be little doubt now about the true nature of Kagame’s regime. Slowly but surely, the sheen has come off the self-styled saviour of his nation, exposing the reality of his Tutsi dictatorship along with more complex and often-murkier insights into the genocide and its aftermath. More and more former loyalists have spoken out in dismay at their nation’s descent into darkness. Even with such a skilled Rwandan diplomatic and public relations machine, there are only so many times another Kagame critic can be accused of being a sympathiser of génocidaires. 

Yet there is disturbing irony underlying this latest show trial as Rusesabagina’s presence in that Kigali court reminds us again of the validity of his words when we spoke a decade ago: why is Britain backing this barbarous figure? Even now, even today.

Britain pumps huge sums into this tiny central African nation — £111m over the past two years alone — while its president spends a reported £30m sponsoring Arsenal FC, his favourite football club. Our officials churn out pathetic reports talking about “building effective government institutions” and “development of an open and inclusive society” while Kagame kills his critics, overturns term limits, jails political foes, squashes free expression and shuts down the slightest space for civil society.

Only last week he told CNN that “democracy is not defined by the West”, and spoke about the “imperfections” in those countries which “elect their leaders” only for voters to “turn around and start complaining about the same leaders they elected”. Perish the thought that there might be any complaints from people under his style of “democracy”.

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It gets worse, however. Rwanda was a German, then a Belgian, colony. But Kagame preferred the adulation from British and US leaders over rising criticism in the Francophone world of his rule and the RPF’s role in the 1994 bloodshed. So he imposed English as an official language, encouraged cricket and was permitted to join the Commonwealth. Now he is preparing to host royals, presidents and prime ministers from around the world, having been handed the bi-annual Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, due to be held in Kigali in June.

Yet why has this monstrous dictator been handed such a prestigious event when, for example, it has never gone to Ghana, despite its far closer ties to Britain, its genuine democracy and its symbolic significance as the first African nation to gain independence?

The answer lies in the legacy of guilt over the world’s failure to prevent the sickening genocide, fused with the desperate desire of Western leaders to find an aid success story. So they hail Kagame and hold Rwanda up as the lonely poster child for their tarnished policy of throwing cash at problems of conflict and poverty. They praise its economic growth, ignoring that it was built on the back of rampant pillaging in the Congo. They point to its enterprise and openness to business, yet front companies for a one-party state that dominate vast chunks of the economy. Yes, visitors admire Kigali’s order and clean streets, though those with longer memories say the smooth roads and sober officials existed before the genocide.

Even if Rwanda was a runaway success, there would be no excuse for Kagame’s persistent meddling in neighbouring states and savage repression. Yet politicians across the political spectrum have fallen at the strongman’s feet. Tony Blair called Kagame a “visionary”, congratulated him for a sham election victory, borrowed his private jet, defended his intervention in DRC — and used his bond with the president to help build an advisory empire.

Bill Clinton called Kagame one of the “greatest leaders of our time”. David Cameron claimed Rwanda was “a success story” and “a role model for development”. His former development minister Andrew Mitchell remains a constant cheerleader — and, coincidentally, collects £39,600 for nine days work a year advising a bank in Kigali run by the former finance minister. Meanwhile, big development charities appease this brutal regime with their silence to keep their hefty revenues flowing.

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The flow of funds from British taxpayers did not even stop when Scotland Yard warned two human rights activists in this country that a Rwandan hit squad had been sent to kill them, or when MI6 gave the government tape recordings of senior regime officials plotting to kill opposition leaders. The author Anjan Sundaram has also written that anti-terror experts provided him with armed protection in the UK when he promoted his superb exposé of Kagame’s dictatorship, based on several years trying to teach journalism in Rwanda on an aid-funded project. Rwandans living here have told me of regular events organised by intelligence operatives based in the London embassy, at which they must pledge loyalty to the RPF on pain of death for them or their families

In Do Not Disturb, a forthcoming book by journalist Michela Wrong investigating the brazen murder of former intelligence chief and Kagame’s political rival Patrick Karegeya in Johannesburg, there is a Kagame quote that rings all too true to explain his unperturbed approach to eliminating foes: “Those wazungus [white people] make noise but over time they forget it.” His regime has become so arrogant that it barely hides its actions now. “When you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog — and the cleaners will wipe away the trash so that it does not stink,” said Kagame’s defence minister after that killing. His president, in that CNN interview, absurdly claims Rusesabagina “more or less brought himself” into Kigali.

Kagame’s defenders argue that he brought stability to a troubled country. Gerard Prunier, the French historian, rightly responds that such attitudes display lingering racism, since they suggest a tough ruler is needed to control the inherent violence of Africans. Meanwhile, some prominent defectors claim the president sneers in private at his Western backers. “He calls those British politicians who sing his praises all the time his stooges,” said David Himbara, who spent six years working with Kagame as his policy chief and principal private secretary. He added that “behind Blair’s back, Kagame laughs at how he deploys a former prime minister of Great Britain as his praise-singer on the cheap.”

Yet could this current show trial, following the trapping of a simple man who stood firm in the face of unimaginable hell, finally spark a change in attitudes towards this regime and its mendacious president? The European Union has condemned the rendition, while 37 members of the US Congress have called for Rusesabagina’s release. Even Britain has tentatively showed concern over “continued restrictions to civil and political rights and media freedom”.

But as Kagame says, this is just noise. We need to cut off all his flows of aid, then ensure Prince Charles does not have to shake his bloodstained hand at a Commonwealth summit in Kigali. This ruthless president will only see that the West does not fall for his phoney talk of democracy and facade of “development” when he becomes a toxic pariah. We should be in awe of human rights heroes like Rusesabagina, not murderous dictators who crush dissent.