Free The Family by Jeff Sharlet Page A

brought a guest with him, an Albanian politician whose pale face and ill-fitting gray suit made Doug Coe seem all the more radiant. In his early seventies, Coe could have passed for fifty: His hair was dark, his cheeks taut. His smile was like a lantern.
    “He hates the limelight,” Gannon had warned me. “It’s not about him, it’s about Jesus, so he doesn’t like people to know who he is.” But he knows who you are. When I reintroduced myself that night, he cut me short. “I remember you,” he said, and moved on to the next man.
    “Where,” Coe asked Rogelio, “are you from, in Paraguay?”
    “Asunción,” he said.
    Doug Coe smiled. “I’ve visited there many times.” He chewed for a while. “Asunción. A Latin leader was assassinated there twenty years ago. A Nicaraguan. Does anybody know who it was?”
    I waited for someone to speak, but no one did. “Somoza,” I said. The dictator overthrown by the Sandinistas.
    “Somoza,” Coe said, his eyes sweeping back to me. “An interesting man. I liked to visit him. A very bad man, behind his machine guns.” He smiled like he was going to laugh, but instead he moved his fork to his mouth. “And yet,” he said, a bite poised at the tip of his tongue, “he had a heart for the poor.” There was another long silence.
    “Do you ever think about prayer?” he asked, but it wasn’t a question. Coe was preparing a parable.
    There was a man he knew, he said, who didn’t really believe in prayer. So Doug Coe made him a bet. If this man would choose something and pray for it every day for forty-five days, he wagered God would make it so. It didn’t matter whether the man believed or whether he was a Christian. All that mattered was the fact of prayer. Every day. Forty-five days. He couldn’t lose, Coe told the man. If Jesus didn’t answer his prayers, Coe would pay him $500.
    “What should I pray for?” the man asked.
    “What do you think God would like you to pray for?” Doug Coe asked him.
    “I don’t know,” said the man. “How about Africa?”
    “Good,” said Coe. “Pick a country.”
    “Uganda,” the man said, because it was the only one he could remember.
    “Fine,” Coe told him. “Every day, for forty-five days, pray for Uganda. ‘God, please help Uganda. God, please help Uganda.’”
    On the thirty-second day, Coe told us, this man met a woman from Uganda. She worked with orphans. Come visit, she told the man, and so he did, that very weekend. And when he came home, he raised $1 million in donated medicine for the orphans. “So you see,” Doug Coe told him, “God answered your prayers. You owe me five hundred dollars.”
    There was more. After the man had returned to the United States, the president of Uganda called the man at his home and said, “I am making a new government. Will you help me make some decisions?”
    “So,” Doug Coe told us, “my friend said to the president, ‘Why don’t you come and pray with me in America? I have a good group of friends—senators, congressmen—who I like to pray with, and they’d like to pray with you.’ And that president came to the Cedars, and he met Jesus. And his name is Yoweri Museveni, and he is now the president of all the presidents in Africa. And he is a good friend of the Family.”
    “That’s awesome,” Beau said.
    Coe had told this story many times before, I’d learn; it now appears recycled in evangelical sermons around the world, a bit of fundamentalist folklore. It’s false. Doug’s friend was not just an ordinary businessman but a well-connected former Ford administration official named Bob Hunter. He may have made a bet with Coe, but his trip was hardly as casual as Coe suggested; I later found two memos totaling eighteen pages that Hunter had submitted to Coe, “A Trip to East Africa—Fall 1986,” and “Re: Organizing the Invisible,” detailing his meetings with Ugandan and Kenyan government officials (many of whom he already knew) and the possibility