THE PERSUADER.(Dr. K. A. Paul)

Charles Taylor, having laid waste to Liberia, has been trying to set the record straight about who persuaded him to surrender his Presidency and go into exile in Nigeria. "I will say that 99% of [the credit] goes to Dr. K. A. Paul alone," he wrote on August 16th, in a letter to the Times. Since Taylor was on the verge of losing a civil war, and three African heads of state went to Liberia to usher him out of the country--and since President Bush made his exit a precondition of American peacekeeping help--this is no small nod to Dr. K. A. Paul.

But the Times has declined to publish Taylor's letter. (Taylor fled Liberia on August 11th, declaring, before he boarded the plane, "I want to be the sacrificial lamb" and "I may have stepped on a few toes, but I don't care" and, finally, "Dr. Paul, I'm out of here.")

Who is Dr. K. A. Paul, and what can he do about this erasure of his place in history? He is a hyperactive Christian evangelist from southern India, now living in Houston, and he can (indeed, he did) hire Rubenstein Associates, the publicity firm, to get out the word about his good works and, while they're at it, circulate Taylor's letter.

And so Dr. Paul was in town the other day, installed in a midtown conference room, under rows of framed magazine covers featuring other Rubenstein clients: Rupert Murdoch, David Letterman, Fergie. He is a small, dark, bright-eyed fellow, thirty-nine, with thinning hair and a thick but neatly trimmed mustache. He wore an immaculate cream-colored Nehru suit, brocaded at the collar, and, though he smiled a great deal, he seemed pretty furious with the Times. He told Juda Engelmayer, his handler at Rubenstein, that he had left a message for a Times reporter whom he had previously helped get an interview with Taylor, saying, "I will never do interview with New York Times again as long as I live!"

"Oh, don't say that," Mr. Engelmayer murmured.

"The man is risking his very life," Dr. Paul cried. He meant that Taylor's letter could perturb his host, Nigeria's President, Olusegun Obasanjo, who believes that he deserves much of the credit for getting Taylor out of Liberia, and who is under some international pressure to hand Taylor over to Sierra Leone, where he has been indicted for war crimes. What's more, President Obasanjo apparently dislikes Dr. Paul because, according to Dr. Paul, he is jealous of the great crowds and the great press that Dr. Paul gets in Nigeria for his evangelical crusades.

O.K. How did Dr. Paul gain such influence over Taylor? They only met, after all, in mid-July. "Oh, he watched me on some television program," Dr. Paul said. "The leadership in Africa, it's hard not to hear about me. We are in forty or fifty countries." By "we" he meant Gospel to the Unreached Millions, a missionary organization that he founded. Or perhaps Global Peace Initiative, a more recent effort. Or both. "We have huge rallies. We had seven million people in Lagos, Nigeria, in November, 2001."