Yet Kagame, according to childhood friends, was a measured person. He didn’t react quickly. He wasn’t quick to get involved or embroiled.

The book is to be shortly published in the United States, and we bring you new, intimate and never-before-published details of President Kagame’s remarkable life, as he himself and people close to him tells it to the book’s author, Stephen Kinzer.

Kinzer, a former journalist with The New York Times and the author of several internationally acclaimed books writes: Kagame knew that powerful forces would try to prevent him from reaching the stunned army [the RPF] though he could not be certain what they would do or even who they were.

At the time of Rwigyema’s death from a stray bullet from enemy lines, Kagame was attending a military course at Fort Leavenworth in the state of Kansas in the US. But he had, as he tells it to Kinzer, made the decision to leave the United States to go to the RPF frontline even before the death of Rwigyema. Now the trip back would be far from easy.

Stephen Kinzer writes: The moment Kagame left Kansas, he became the central figure in a-cat-and-mouse game that would be played across three continents. It pitted one man, Kagame – albeit a veteran intelligence agent who was highly motivated, well-trained, richly experienced and full of native cunning – against the security agencies of Rwanda (the Habyarimana regime) and, in all probability, several other countries as well.

Kagame had much on his mind as he boarded a plane in St. Louis and headed to New York on the first leg of his fateful voyage. He spent the flight lost in thought, imagining what sort of traps his enemies might have set to prevent him from reaching Rwanda, and how he might escape them. His wife, who sat beside him, understood that he was on his way to war, but not even she realized how urgent and dangerous his mission was.

Jeannette Kagame had become pregnant during the couple’s stay in Kansas. Kagame wanted to leave her in good hands and decided to send her to Belgium where one of his sisters lived. That meant he would somehow have to obtain Belgian visas for the two of them.