Hard Target

Shortly after dawn last Dec. 14, four Ugandan Mi-24 helicopters banked low over the thick forest canopy of Congo's Garamba National Park. A dense fog had rolled in overnight, and the weather had turned nasty. Earlier that morning at a forward staging area in Uganda, a team of American military advisers equipped with large-scale U.S. government maps and Google Earth technology had shown the helicopter pilots what to look for—four distinct "fishhook shape" camps spread out in cleared areas of the park. In one of these camps, they believed, was Joseph Kony, the professed mystic who leads Africa's longest-lived insurgent group, the Lord's Resistance Army. Find Kony, the pilots' commander had said, and kill him.

Descending through the fog bank and hovering just above the tree line, the pilots spotted what looked like a rebel council meeting in the largest cluster of shelters, code-named Camp K. The gunships immediately unleashed a barrage of rockets and chain-gun fire. Reports from the helicopter crews later stated that several dozen people, including women and children, had been caught in the open. "I saw the helicopters come—they were black, and they were bombing us," recalls George Komagun, 16, one of the hundreds of child soldiers in the Lord's Resistance Army. "I ran. We tried to fight the helicopters, but could not."

Two days after Operation Lightning Thunder began, Ugandan commandos finally reached Camp K. They found bloody trails heading into the jungle in all directions. Hastily dug graves dotted the site's periphery. Kony had been on the run for more than two decades, but this place had the look of a settled homestead. Acres had been cultivated with sorghum, cassava and maize. Stashes of sugar, rice and water in large plastic containers were buried all around.

Washington would love to get a look at the trove of evidence, which Ugandan investigators are still studying, including Thuraya satellite and cell phones, walkie-talkies and three Acer laptops. Soldiers even found a printer, a CD-ROM drive and an English-language dictionary. What they didn't find was Joseph Kony. "We have some hints where he might be now, but nothing like we had before the strike," says a senior U.S. military-intelligence official who was intimately involved with the operation's planning and execution, but is not authorized to speak on the record about it. "Kony has virtually disappeared from the face of the earth."

Kony is arguably the most-wanted man in Africa. Uganda's government has been chasing him for 23 years, ever since he donned a woman's dress, claimed to be channeling the spirit world and vowed to topple the country's president, Yoweri Museveni. Kony is a law unto himself. He claims to run the LRA according to the Ten Commandments, but he and the hundreds of forcibly conscripted children who serve as his killing squads are feared throughout the region for their horrific levels of brutality and the butchery of tens of thousands of defenseless civilians. Their swath of destruction has displaced well over 2 million people. Kony has forced new male recruits to rape their mothers and kill their parents. Former LRA members say the rebels sometimes cook and eat their victims.

Years of peace talks have consistently failed to deliver Kony. Dictators have fallen in many countries, and war criminals in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast have been brought to justice. Even Kony's longtime patron, Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, has been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court for his policy of ethnic cleansing in Darfur. But Kony remains free to raid, plunder and kidnap. The ICC issued arrest warrants for Kony and three of his top commanders in 2005, but the papers sit untouched in a dusty office in Kampala, useless until Kony is captured. "Normally these kinds of conflicts in Africa are various shades of gray," says Julia Spiegel, a California native who documents the LRA's atrocities for the Enough Project, an independent group formed to stop crimes against humanity in Africa. "But this is very clear-cut. Going after Kony is just not disputable."

george w. bush set his sights on Kony almost as soon as he was sworn in as president. Early on in his first term, Bush told his new assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Jendayi Frazer, that he wanted to "do something" about southern Sudan, a breakaway Christian and animist region of the Muslim-dominated country. Bush's interest gave Ugandan President Museveni the opening he craved. Museveni had transformed his country into a relatively peaceful and prosperous place since fighting his way to power 15 years earlier, and he believed it would be a model nation if not for Kony, whose murderous raids extended into southern Sudan. In a 2001 meeting with Bush, Museveni appealed for help. "Can you give us some helicopters?" Frazer recalls the Ugandan leader asking. "We've got this terrorist." Bush lobbied hard for the military aid and got Kony placed on a "terror exclusion list" that gave the United States much broader powers to intervene. "Museveni was happy," says Frazer. "We did it partly because we felt it was appropriate, but also to give ourselves some leverage on how to deal with [Kony]."