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. Mass. Escapee turned Liberian dictator had US spy agency ties

He arrived in 1972 and attended Chamberlayne Junior College in Newton and studied economics at Bentley College in Waltham. While in Boston, he emerged as a political force as national chairman of the Union of Liberian Associations. In 1977 he returned to Liberia and joined Samuel Doe’s government after a coup in 1980.

Taylor served as chief of government procurement in the Doe regime but fled Liberia for Boston in 1983 after being accused of embezzling $1 million from the government. He was arrested in Somerville in 1984 and jailed in Plymouth pending extradition.

The acknowledgment now that Taylor worked with US intelligence agencies at the time raises new questions about whether elements within the government orchestrated the Plymouth prison break in 1985 - as Taylor claimed during his trial - or at least helped him flee the United States.

Four other inmates who also escaped that night were soon recaptured.

“Why would someone walk out of a prison that’s never been breached in a 100 years?’’ said David M. Crane, who was the chief prosecutor for the Sierra Leone war crimes court from 2002 to 2005 and now teaches at Syracuse University College of Law. “It begs the question: How do you walk out of a prison? It seems someone looked the other way.’’

Taylor recounted the episode during his trial testimony, insisting that a guard opened his cell for him.

“I am calling it my release because I didn’t break out,’’ Taylor testified. “I did not pay any money. I did not know the guys who picked me up. I was not hiding [afterwards].’’

He said two men - he assumed they were American agents - were waiting for him outside the prison and drove him to New York to meet his wife. Using his own passport, he said, he traveled to Mexico before returning to Africa.

With Taylor, the world saw a different kind of warfare emerge. It consisted of paramilitary combatants, armed with light, cheap weapons, whose long term goal was not only to topple a government but to attack civilians en-masse along the way. These soldiers were permitted, even encouraged, to engage in any atrocity, including rape and ethnic slaughter, to terrorize the population and gain control.

Taylor recruited combatants by giving anyone who would swear allegiance to him a cheap automatic rifle and then allow them to use that new form of violence to plunder whatever they could from whomever they killed. This was not limited to enemy soldiers, it included civilians who would be terrorized, looted, pillaged, raped, mutilated, tortured; whatever took the thugs and gang's fancy. It is one of the repugnant areas of African geopolitics that the sheer inhumanity of man as an animal is so fervently on display.

Taylor's other innovation was to put cheap arms in the hands of children, often war orphans, who he dubbed his Small Boy Units. These children often manned checkpoints or would raid villages on the assumption they would receive cars, computers, and toys in return. Kahaner writes:

In a perverted context, child soldiers fit Taylor's needs perfectly. They were easy to recruit, naive enough to stay within the fold, and armed with an AK47, they were as lethal as an adult. ... Psychologically, child soldiers held other advantages. Youth made them feel invulnerable. Coupled with natural teen bravado and an undeveloped conscience, children offered a deadly combination in a guerilla fighter.

Western soldiers initially would refuse to shoot at children even though they were armed, until a group of Irish soldiers from a UN detachment were captured and held. From that point on Western soldiers have been indoctrinated to shoot at armed children during combat situations…… Charles Taylor and Child Soldiers in Africa