The Family (3 page)

In 1979, the former Nixon aide and Watergate felon Charles W. Colson—born again through the guidance of the Family and the ministry of a CEO of arms manufacturer Raytheon—estimated the Family’s strength at 20,000, although the number of dedicated “associates” around the globe is much smaller (around 350 as of 2006). The Family maintains a closely guarded database of associates, members, and “key men,” but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.
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“The Movement,” a member of the Family’s inner circle once wrote to the group’s chief South African operative, “is simply inexplicable to people who are not intimately acquainted with it.” The Family’s “political” initiatives, he continues, “have always been misunderstood by ‘outsiders.’ As a result of very bitter experiences, therefore, we have learned never to commit to paper any discussions or negotiations that are taking place. There is no such thing as a ‘confidential’ memorandum, and leakage always seems to occur. Thus, I would urge you not to put on paper
anything
relating to any of the work that you are doing…[unless] you know the recipient well enough to put at the top of the page ‘
PLEASE DESTROY AFTER READING.
’”
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“If I told you who has participated and who participates until this day, you would not believe it,” the Family’s longtime leader, Doug Coe, said in a rare interview in 2001. “You’d say, ‘You mean that scoundrel? That despot?’”
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A friendly, plainspoken Oregonian with dark, curly hair, a lazy smile, and the broad, thrown-back shoulders of a man who recognizes few superiors, Coe has worked for the Family since 1959 and been “First Brother” since founder Abraham Vereide was “promoted” to heaven in 1969. (Recently, a successor named Dick Foth, a longtime friend to John Ashcroft, assumed some of Coe’s duties, but Coe remains the preeminent figure.) Coe denies possessing any authority, but Family members speak of him with a mixture of intimacy and awe. Doug Coe, they say—most people refer to him by his first and last name—is closer to Jesus than perhaps any other man alive, and thus privy to information the rest of us are too spiritually “immature” to understand. For instance, the necessity of secrecy. Doug Coe says it allows the scoundrels and the despots to turn their talents toward the service of Jesus—who, Doug Coe says, prefers power to piety—by shielding their work on His behalf from a hardhearted public, unwilling to believe in their good intentions. In a sermon posted online by a fundamentalist website, Coe compares this method to the mob’s. “His Body”—the Body of Christ, that is, by which he means Christendom—“functions invisibly like the mafia…. They keep their organization invisible. Everything visible is transitory. Everything invisible is permanent and lasts forever. The more you can make your organization invisible, the more influence it will have.”

For that very reason, the Family has operated under many guises, some active, some defunct: National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, National Leadership Council, the Fellowship Foundation, the International Foundation. The Fellowship Foundation alone has an annual budget of nearly $14 million. The bulk of it, $12 million, goes to “mentoring, counseling, and partnering with friends around the world,” but that represents only a fraction of the network’s finances. The Family does not pay big salaries; one man receives $121,000, while Doug Coe seems to live on almost nothing (his income fluctuates wildly according to the off-the-books support of “friends”), and none of the fourteen men on the board of directors (among them an oil executive, a defense contractor, and government officials past and present) receives a penny. But within the organization money moves in peculiar ways, “man-to-man” financial support that’s off the books, a constant proliferation of new nonprofits big and small that submit to the Family’s spiritual authority, money flowing up and down the quiet hierarchy. “I give or loan money to hundreds of people, or have my friends do so,” says Coe.
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Each group connected to the Family raises funds independently. Ivanwald, for example, was financed in part by an entity called the Wilberforce Foundation. Major evangelical organizations such as Young Life and the Navigators have undertaken the support of Family operatives, and the Family has in turn helped launch Christian conservative powerhouses such as Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, a worldwide ministry that has declared “civil war” on secularism, and projects such as Community Bible Study, through which a failing Texas oilman named George W. Bush discovered faith in 1985.

The Family’s only publicized gathering is the National Prayer Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressional sponsorship, it continues to organize every February at the Washington, D.C., Hilton. Some 3,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations and corporate interests, pay $425 each to attend. For most, the breakfast is just that, muffins and prayer, but some stay on for days of seminars organized around Christ’s messages for particular industries. In years past, the Family organized such events for executives in oil, defense, insurance, and banking. The 2007 event drew, among others, a contingent of aid-hungry defense ministers from Eastern Europe, Pakistan’s famously corrupt Benazir Bhutto, and a Sudanese general linked to genocide in Darfur.

Here’s how it can work: Dennis Bakke, former CEO of AES, the largest independent power producer in the world, and a Family insider, took the occasion of the 1997 Prayer Breakfast to invite Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, the Family’s “key man” in Africa, to a private dinner at a mansion, just up the block from the Family’s Arlington headquarters. Bakke, the author of a popular business book titled
Joy at Work
, has long preached an ethic of social responsibility inspired by his evangelical faith and his free-market convictions: “I am trying to sell a way of life,” he has said. “I am a cultural imperialist.” That’s a phrase he uses to be provocative; he believes that his Jesus is so universal that everyone wants Him. And, apparently, His business opportunities: Bakke was one of the pioneer thinkers of energy deregulation, the laissez-faire fever dream that culminated in the meltdown of Enron. But there was other, less-noticed fallout, such as the no-bid deal Bakke made with Museveni at the 1997 Prayer Breakfast for a $500-million dam close to the source of the White Nile—in waters considered sacred by Uganda’s 2.5-million–strong Busoga minority. AES announced that the Busoga had agreed to “relocate” the spirits of their dead. They weren’t the only ones opposed; first environmentalists (Museveni had one American arrested and deported) and then even other foreign investors revolted against a project that seemed like it might actually increase the price of power for the poor. Bakke didn’t worry. “We don’t go away,” he declared. He dispatched a young man named Christian Wright, the son of one of the Prayer Breakfast’s organizers, to be AES’s in-country liaison to Museveni; Wright was later accused of authorizing at least $400,000 in bribes. He claimed his signature had been forged.
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“I’m sure a lot of people use the Fellowship as a way to network, a way to gain entrée to all sorts of people,” says Michael Cromartie, an evangelical Washington think tanker who’s critical of the Family’s lack of transparency. “And entrée they do get.”
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The president usually arrives an hour early, meets perhaps ten heads of state—usually from small nations, such as Albania, or Ecuador, or Benin, that the United States uses as proxies in the United Nations—without publicity, and perhaps a dozen other useful guests chosen by the Family. “It totally circumvents the State Department and the usual vetting within the administration that such a meeting would require,” an anonymous government informant told a sympathetic sociologist. “If Doug Coe can get you some face time with the President of the United States, then you will take his call and seek his friendship. That’s power.”
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The president always speaks last, usually to do no more than spread a dull glaze of civil religion over the proceedings. For years, the main address came from Billy Graham, but now it’s often delivered by an outsider to Christian conservatism, such as Saudia Arabia’s longtime ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, or Senator Joe Lieberman, or, as in 2006, Bono. “This is
really
weird,” said the rock star.

“Anything can happen,” according to an internal planning document, “the Koran could even be read, but JESUS is there! He is infiltrating the world.”
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Too bland most years to merit much press, the breakfast is regarded by the Family as merely a tool in a larger purpose: to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more frequent prayer meetings, where they can “meet Jesus man to man.”

In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy. In 1978 it helped the Carter administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. At the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast, Family leaders persuaded their South African client, the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to stand down from the possibility of civil war with Nelson Mandela. But such benign acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s, the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most oppressive regimes in the world, arranging prayer networks in the U.S. Congress for the likes of General Costa e Silva, dictator of Brazil; General Suharto, dictator of Indonesia; and General Park Chung Hee, dictator of South Korea. “The Fellowship’s reach into governments around the world,” observes David Kuo, a former special assistant to the president in Bush’s first term, “is almost impossible to overstate or even grasp.”
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In 1983, Doug Coe and General John W. Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed the civilian ambassadors of the Central American nations that the Prayer Breakfast would be used to arrange “private sessions” for their generals with “responsible leaders” in the United States; the invitations would be sent from Republican senators Richard Lugar and Mark Hatfield, and Dixiecrat John Stennis, the Mississippi segregationist after whom an aircraft carrier is now named. The Family went on to build friendships between the Reagan administration and the Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, found liable in 2002 by a Florida jury for the torture of thousands, and the Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, who before his assassination was linked to both the CIA and death squads. El Salvador became one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the Cold War; U.S. military aid to Honduras jumped from $4 million per year to $79 million.
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In Africa, the Family greased the switch of U.S. patronage from one client state, Ethiopia, to another that they felt was more promising: Somalia. “We work with power where we can,” Doug Coe explains, “build new power where we can’t.” Former secretary of state James Baker, a longtime participant in a prayer cell facilitated by Coe, recalls that when he visited Albania after the collapse of Eastern European communism, the Balkan nation’s foreign minister met him on the tarmac with the words, “I greet you in the name of Doug Coe.”
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Coe’s status within Washington has been quantitatively calculated by D. Michael Lindsay, a Rice University sociologist who traded on his past work with evangelicals as a pollster—and his sympathetic perspective—to win interviews with 360 evangelical elites. “One in three mentioned Coe or the Fellowship as an important influence,” he reports. “Indeed, there is no other organization like the Fellowship, especially among religious groups, in terms of its access or clout among the country’s leadership.”
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At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, President George H. W. Bush praised Doug Coe for what he described as “quiet diplomacy, I wouldn’t say secret diplomacy.” Bush was apparently ignorant of one of the nation’s oldest laws, the Logan Act, which forbids private citizens to do just that lest foreign policy slip out of democratic control. Sometimes Coe’s role
is
formal; in 2000, he met with Pakistan’s top economic officials as a “special envoy” of Representative Joe Pitts, a key power broker for the region, and when he and Bush Senior hosted an off-the-record luncheon with Iraq’s ambassador to the United States in the mid-1980s, he may also have been acting in some official capacity. Mostly, however, he travels around the world as a private citizen. He has prayed with dictators, golfed with presidents, and wrestled with an island king in the Pacific. He has visited nearly every world capital, often with congressmen at his side, “making friends” and inviting them back to the Cedars, the Family’s headquarters, bought in 1978 with $1.5 million donated by (among others) Tom Phillips, then the CEO of arms manufacturer Raytheon, several oil executives, and Clement Stone, the man who financed the campaign to insert “under God,” into the Pledge of Allegiance.
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Coe, who while I was at Ivanwald lived with his wife in an elegantly appointed carriage house on the mansion’s grounds, considers the mansion a refuge for the persecuted and the afflicted: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas retreated there when Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment; Senator David Durenberger, a conservative Catholic, boarded there to escape marital problems that began with rumors of an affair and ended with Durenberger’s pleading guilty to misuse of public funds; James Watt, Reagan’s anti-environmental secretary of the interior, weathered the controversy surrounding his appointment in one of the Cedars’ bedrooms.
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A waterfall has been carved into the mansion’s broad lawn, from which a bronze bald eagle watches over a forested hillside sloping down to the Potomac River. The mansion is white and pillared and surrounded by magnolias, and by red trees that do not so much tower above it as whisper. The Cedars is named for these trees, but Family members speak of it as a person. “The Cedars has a heart for the poor,” they like to say.