Edward Siedle chased ghosts in Uganda to unravel the decades-old mystery of his father’s murder — and came face to face with the “demon” he believes was responsible.
The forensics expert was 17 years old when his father, a 46-year-old sociologist and CIA operative from Rye, N.Y., vanished in the East African nation during the murderous regime of President Idi Amin, a bloodthirsty tyrant who became infamous as the “Butcher of Africa.”
While lecturing and researching Uganda’s elderly at Makerere University in Kampala, Robert Siedle befriended a freelance journalist, Nicholas Stroh, 32, who was investigating rumors of atrocities in the bloody aftermath of Amin’s January 1971 coup.
In July that year, Stroh asked the professor to guide him to an Army barracks where the reporter, a contributor to the Washington Star, heard rumors of a massacre ordered by Amin and piles of rotting corpses.
The two men never returned.
Their disappearance made worldwide headlines.
Edward Siedle went on to become a successful lawyer and financial-fraud guru, but his father’s murder in Uganda continued to haunt him.
So 26 years later, he traveled back to the country in search of closure.
“When a father is murdered, a son has an obligation to learn whether he suffered, to care enough to find out how he met his death, and try to bring him home,” he said.
Siedle chronicled his mission in a new book, “Buried Beneath A Tree in Africa: The Journey to Investigate the Murder of My Father in Uganda by Idi Amin,” out on Feb. 3.
The personal and deeply researched story prompted Uganda’s current president, Yoweri Museveni, to vow to re-open an inquiry into the “criminal killings” of the two Americans.
“I commend Mr. Edward Siedle’s courageous attempt to retrace the last steps of his beloved father,” Museveni writes in an 11th-hour forward submitted for the book last month.
Growing up in hot spots around the world — Panama, Trinidad, Venezuela, Peru, Egypt – Siedle traveled with his dad who occasionally “fed information to the CIA,” US officials have told him.
He was 14 when they moved to Uganda.
Just days before his dad vanished, Edward left with his girlfriend to vacation in Norway, a departure he still regrets.
“What’s worse than having your loved one brutally murdered?” he asked in the book. “Believing you caused, contributed to, or could have prevented the killing.”
A week after the disappearance, a Norwegian mailman on a bicycle delivered a cryptic telegram telling him “Bob Siedle delayed — stay in Norway.”
Then the American embassy in Oslo summoned the teen to pick up a letter from the American embassy in Uganda, saying, “In view of the long passage of time… we hold out only slight hope the men are still alive.”
“Those were the very words I did not want to hear,” he recalled, saying the harsh language robbed him of “a last thread of hope.”
He wrote in his diary, “If he’s dead, I wonder how he died. Was it a horrible death? If he’s alive, where the hell is he? I hate not knowing for sure what happened.”
Siedle faced the mystery alone.
His Trinidadian mother, Zenobia Khan, had given up custody of him at age 3, and he didn’t see her again for 30 years.
Lacking proof of death, his father’s modest estate was untouchable, leaving him “orphaned and penniless.”
“Since he was single, my dad and I were especially close,” Siedle told The Post. “My scholarly father worried that I wasn’t a serious student, but he inspired me to live boldly, like him, seeking adventure and knowledge rather than wealth.”
Siedle graduated from Boston College Law School, worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission, and exposed corruption that led him to win a record-breaking $78 million whistleblower award in 2018 for uncovering misconduct at JPMorgan Chase.
With all he had achieved, it was finally time to honor his father — and face his own trauma — by returning to the scene of his dad’s agonizing last days.
“At age 42, still crippled by the fear that struck me upon his death – and unshakable since – I chose to travel back to the last home we would ever know together.”
He boarded a plane to Kampala in 1997, armed with declassified documents and the blessing of US and Ugandan government and intelligence agencies.
On his travels in Uganda, the military provided escorts and translators.
“‘They wouldn’t even let me jog by myself. They followed me as I ran through the killing fields to ensure my safety.”
What he learned was chilling.
On the date of their disappearance, Siedle’s dad and Stroh arrived in Mbarara, where the Simba Battalion garrison was located.
Siedle’s dad remained in his room at the nearby Rest House, a government-run hostel.
Stroh went to the barracks to question the commanding officer about rumored mass killings.
Arrested at gunpoint and manhandled, he protested, “I am not alone.”
“Stroh must have told the soldiers who were beating and pushing him that my father was waiting for him at the Rest House and would tell American officials if he came to harm,” an eyewitness told the author.
Stroh gave the warning “in hopes of saving himself,” Siedle writes, but told The Post he doesn’t consider it a betrayal. “My father certainly would have done the same thing.”
The threat backfired.
Three soldiers in Special Force uniforms went to the hostel and seized Siedle’s dad.
Newspapers and magazines reported “every sensational possibility” of what happened next, the son writes.
Various witnesses said the men were “tortured, starved, their throats slashed, hacked to death with machetes, fed to crocodiles, or tied over oil drums, shot and burned.”
Under international pressure, Amin launched a “Commission of Inquiry” to investigate the case in September 1971, and appointed judge David Jeffreys Jones, to lead it.
It wasn’t an outright sham, but a crippled undertaking. “Amin and his cronies did everything possible to thwart the investigation, including intimidating, hiding and killing witnesses; lying under oath; withholding and destroying evidence, and threatening to kill the judge and the lawyers involved.”
Amin regularly bashed the judge in the media — and even “defiantly drafted a decree exonerating his government for any killings in connection with the takeover of the country” through the end of July 1971 — when the Americans disappeared.
In his March 1972 report, Jones concluded the Americans were murdered by the Ugandan Armed Forces, but was “unable or unwilling (due to presidential intimidation)” to name the actual killers, Siedle wrote.
The “God of retribution” would mete out justice, Jones declared.
His report never mentioned the massacre that the two Americans came to investigate — the killing of 500 soldiers loyal to Amin’s predecessor and the piles of bodies tossed onto farmers’ fields near the barracks.
Under Amin, other judges were kidnapped and hammered to death. Jones did not submit his final report until he had fled Uganda for refuge in Kenya.
Amin agreed to pay the Siedle family about $80,000 in compensation, which put him through college.
When Siedle returned to Uganda, he interviewed Silver Tibihika, an ex-Ugandan Army intelligence officer turned deserter.
Tibihika, who testified in the inquiry, claimed the Americans were locked in a jail cell, denied food and beaten with clubs and iron bars — but not cut “for fear their blood would be found.”
When Siedle asked what their bodies revealed about how they had perished, Tibihika replied, “Nothing really — they were decomposed.
When you picked up a limb, the meat and flesh just fell off.”
Ordered to “destroy everything,” Tibihika said, he poured gasoline over the bodies and Stroh’s car to incinerate them.
The burnt-out blue VW was pushed into a snake-infested ravine where lions and leopards roamed.
The car was later found, but not the bodies.
Tibihika drove Siedle’s son about 10 miles from the barracks, turned off the road and pointed to a lone tree on the grassy savanna.
“If you dig here, you will find remains – body parts,” the ex-soldier assured.
Tibihika then arranged for Siedle to return to that “very spot” the next day with two laborers and shovels.
After first digging a trench, the group had to flee a swarm of killer bees.
Then, to Siedle’s surprise, the men eagerly kept digging, apparently believing it a search for buried treasure.
After excavating for two hours, a dejected Siedle told them to stop: “We found nothing, and it was unlikely we would.”
In a final gut-wrenching stop on his journey, Siedle was permitted by the Ugandan military to visit the Luzira maximum-security prison to confront the man, after Amin, he held responsible for his dad’s death.
Ali Fadhul, the former commanding officer at the Mbarara barracks — and a distant relative of Amin — had a “reputation for brutality and a hair-trigger temper.”
Although suspected of overseeing the mass killings, Fadhul was on death row for the1987 murder of one local government official who was “forced into the trunk of his own car and later coolly shot in the head.”
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Facing the author in the warden’s office, Fadhul feigned ignorance, Siedle said, claiming he was not in the barracks when the capture and killing of the Americans took place — only arriving after the two bodies were hauled away.
“I too am a father,” Fadhul said. “I would help you if I could, but I really don’t know anything more. Believe me.”
Siedle said Fadhul deserved to die and he, as the son of his murder victim, had the right to kill him.
“I could have had his pitiful life snuffed out in prison that day by offering a carton of cigarettes in exchange,” he told The Post, but resisted the impulse. “My journey to Uganda was not about vengeance, or forgiveness.”
Ultimately, he failed to bring his father home.
“Success is not whether you solve the crime, but knowing you’ve done all you could,” said Siedle, now 69 and living in Boca Raton, Fla.,with his wife and two kids.
“I am hopeful that Ugandan president Museveni’s promised new investigation, along with still-secret national archives on atrocities committed during the Amin years, will solve the mystery once and all.”