Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

^{CHAPTER FIVE} GUARDING BUSH’S MAN IN BAGHDAD

L. PAUL Bremer III arrived in Baghdad on May 12, 2003, and moved into Saddam Hussein’s former Republican Palace on the banks of the Tigris River.¹ Perhaps Bremer’s greatest legacy in Iraq, where he served as the proconsul of the U.S. occupation for a little more than a year, was overseeing the transformation of the country into the epicenter of anti-U.S. resistance in the world and presiding over a system in Iraq that resulted in widespread corruption and graft within the lucrative world of private contracting. At the end of Bremer’s tenure, some $9 billion of Iraqi reconstruction funds were unaccounted for, according to a comprehensive audit done by the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq. Bremer responded that the audit held his Coalition Provisional Authority to “an unrealistic standard.”²

Like Erik Prince, Bremer is a conservative Catholic convert who cut his teeth in government working for Republican administrations and was respected by right-wing evangelicals and neoconservatives alike. In the mid- 1970s, he was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s assistant. During the Reagan administration, he served as Executive Secretary and Special Assistant to Alexander Haig, Reagan’s imposing and powerful Secretary of State. At the height of Reagan’s bloody wars in Central America, Bremer was promoted to Ambassador at Large on terrorism. In the late 1980s, Bremer left government, joining the private sector as the managing director of Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm, Kissinger and Associates. A favorite “terrorism expert” among neoconservatives, Bremer was influential in developing the concepts for what would become the “war on terror” and the Department of Homeland Security.³ A year before 9/11, he protested CIA guidelines that “discouraged hiring terrorist spies,” arguing that they should be lifted to permit the CIA to “actively recruit clandestine informants.”⁴ When the 9/11 attacks happened, Bremer was already a fixture in the “counterterrorism” community, having been appointed in 1999 by House Speaker Dennis Hastert as chair of the National Council on Terrorism. At the time of the attacks, Bremer was a senior adviser on politics and emerging risks for the massive insurance firm Marsh & McLennan. The company had a headquarters in the World Trade Center staffed by 1,700 employees, 295 of whom died in the attacks.⁵

Forty-eight hours after 9/11, Bremer wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Our retribution must move beyond the limp-wristed attacks of the past decade, actions that seemed designed to ‘signal’ our seriousness to the terrorists without inflicting real damage. Naturally, their feebleness demonstrated the opposite. This time the terrorists and their supporters must be crushed. This will mean war with one or more countries. And it will be a long war, not one of the ‘Made for TV’ variety. As in all wars, there will be civilian casualties. We will win some battles and lose some. More Americans will die. In the end America can and will prevail, as we always do.” Bremer concluded, “[W]e must avoid a mindless search for an international ‘consensus’ for our actions. Today, many nations are expressing support and understanding for America’s wounds. Tomorrow, we will know who our true friends are.”⁶ In an appearance on Fox News at the time, Bremer said, “I would hope that we would conclude that any state which was involved in any way, giving any kind of support or safe haven to that group, will pay the ultimate price.”⁷

A month after 9/11, Bremer headed up a new division at Marsh & McLennan, specializing in “terrorism risk insurance” for transnational corporations. The division was called Crisis Consulting Practice and offered companies “total counterterrorism services.” To sell this expensive insurance to U.S. corporations, wrote Naomi Klein in The Nation, “Bremer had to make the kinds of frank links between terrorism and the failing global economy that activists are called lunatics for articulating. In a November 2001 policy paper titled ‘New Risks in International Business,’ he explains that free-trade policies ‘require laying off workers. And opening markets to foreign trade puts enormous pressure on traditional retailers and trade monopolies.’ This leads to ‘growing income gaps and social tensions,’ which in turn can lead to a range of attacks on US firms, from terrorism to government attempts to reverse privatizations or roll back trade incentives.”⁸ Klein likened Bremer to a computer hacker who “cripples corporate websites then sells himself as a network security specialist,” predicting that “in a few months Bremer may well be selling terrorism insurance to the very companies he welcomed into Iraq.”⁹ Shortly after Bremer arrived in Baghdad, his former boss at Marsh & McLennan, Jeffrey Greenberg, announced that 2002 “was a great year for Marsh; operating income was up 31 percent…. Marsh’s expertise in analyzing risk and helping clients develop risk management programs has been in great demand…. Our prospects have never been better.”¹⁰

In mid-April 2003, Dick Cheney’s then Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had contacted Bremer about taking “the job of running the occupation of Iraq.”¹¹ By mid-May, Bremer was in Baghdad. His appointment as both Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance and the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq was met with immediate controversy, even among those who had worked with him. One former senior State Department official who served with Bremer labeled him a “voracious opportunist with voracious ambitions,” saying, “What he knows about Iraq could not quite fill a thimble.”¹² Klein argues that, in Bremer, the Bush administration was not looking for an Iraq specialist, but rather tapped him because he “is an expert at profiting from the war on terror and at helping US multinationals make money in far-off places where they are unpopular and unwelcome. In other words, he’s the perfect man for the job.”¹³ That certainly seemed to be the view of Henry Kissinger, who said of Bremer at the time, “I don’t know anyone who could do it better.”¹⁴

Bremer replaced Gen. Jay Garner, who seemed intent on building an Afghan-style puppet government and maintaining the public veneer of Iraqi self-governance, while ensuring a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq.¹⁵ Garner himself was heavily criticized during his three-week tenure in Iraq, but he certainly was less ambitious than his successor when it came to realizing Iraq as the free-market laboratory envisioned by many within the administration and the neocon intelligentsia. Garner was, by most accounts, a military man, not a committed ideologue. The Washington Post described Bremer as “a hard-nosed hawk who is close to the neoconservative wing of the Pentagon.”¹⁶ This was further emphasized by the fact that Dick Cheney sent his own special assistant, Brian McCormack, to Baghdad to serve as Bremer’s assistant.¹⁷ Bremer also reportedly relied heavily on the disgraced Iraqi exile, Ahmad Chalabi, for advice on internal politics in Iraq. Almost immediately upon Bremer’s arrival in Baghdad, some Iraqis viewed him as another Saddam, as he began issuing decrees like an emperor and quashing Iraqi hopes of self-governance. “Occupation is an ugly word,” Bremer said upon his arrival in the country. “But it is a fact.”¹⁸

During his year in Iraq, Bremer was a highly confrontational viceroy who traveled the country in a Brooks Brothers suit coat and Timberland boots. He described himself as “the only paramount authority figure—other than dictator Saddam Hussein—that most Iraqis had ever known.”¹⁹ Bremer’s first official initiative, reportedly the brainchild of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his neoconservative deputy, Douglas Feith, was dissolving the Iraqi military and initiating a process of “de-Baathification,”²⁰ which in Iraq meant a banishment of some of the country’s finest minds from the reconstruction and political process because party membership was a requirement for many jobs in Saddam-era Iraq. Bremer’s “Order 1” resulted in the firing of thousands of schoolteachers, doctors, nurses, and other state workers, while sparking a major increase in rage and disillusionment.²¹ Iraqis saw Bremer picking up Saddam’s governing style and political witch hunt tactics. In practical terms, Bremer’s moves sent a firm message to many Iraqis that they would have little say in their future, a future that increasingly looked bleak and familiar. Bremer’s “Order 2”—disbanding the Iraqi military—meant that four hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers were forced out of work and left without a pension. “An Iraqi soldier was getting $50 a month,” said one Arab analyst. “Keeping these men and their families in food for a year would have cost the equivalent of three days of U.S. occupation. If you starve a man, he’s ready to shoot the occupier.”²² In his book on the Iraq War, Night Draws Near, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid wrote, “The net effect of Bremer’s decision was to send more than 350,000 officers and conscripts, men with at least some military training, into the streets, instantly creating a reservoir of potential recruits for a guerrilla war. (At their disposal was about a million tons of weapons and munitions of all sorts, freely accessible in more than a hundred largely unguarded depots around the country.)”²³ One U.S. official put the number of out-of-work Iraqi soldiers higher, telling The New York Times Magazine, “That was the week we made 450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq.”²⁴ According to Bremer’s orders, some soldiers were given a month of severance pay, while Iraqi commanders were given nothing. Shortly after Bremer’s order was issued, former Iraqi soldiers began to organize massive demonstrations at occupation offices—many housed in former palaces of Saddam’s. “If we had fought, the war would still be going on,” said Iraqi Lt. Col. Ahmed Muhammad, who led a protest in Basra. “The British and the Americans would not be in our palaces. They would not be on our streets. We let them in.” Muhammad warned, “We have guns at home. If they don’t pay us, if they make our children suffer, they’ll hear from us.”²⁵ In an ominous warning of things to come, another former Iraqi military commander, Maj. Assam Hussein Il Naem, pledged: “New attacks against the occupiers will be governed by us. We know we will have the approval of the Iraqi people.”²⁶

In the meantime, Bremer exacerbated the situation as he stifled Iraqi calls for direct elections, instead creating a thirty-five-member Iraqi “advisory” council, over which he would have total control and veto power. Bremer banned many Sunni groups from the body, as well as supporters of Shiite religious leader Muqtada al-Sadr, despite the fact that both had significant constituencies in Iraq. The future prime minister of Iraq, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, said that excluding these forces “led to the situation of them becoming violent elements.”²⁷ Within a month of Bremer’s arrival, talk of a national uprising had begun. “The entire Iraqi people is a time bomb that will blow up in the Americans’ face if they don’t end their occupation,” declared tribal chief Riyadh al-Asadi after meeting with U.S. officials who laid out the Bremer plan for the country.²⁸ “The Iraqi people did not fight the Americans during the war, only Saddam’s people did,” Asadi said. “But if the people decide to fight them now, [the Americans] are in big trouble.”²⁹ Bremer staunchly ignored these Iraqi voices, and as the bloody impact of his decision to dissolve the military spread, he amped up his inflammatory rhetoric. “We are going to fight them and impose our will on them and we will capture or, if necessary, kill them until we have imposed law and order upon this country,” he declared.³⁰

By July 2003, Bremer began referring to Iraq in the first-person plural. “We are eventually going to be a rich country,” Bremer said. “We’ve got oil, we’ve got water, we’ve got fertile land, we’ve got wonderful people.”³¹ According to Time magazine, he toured the Iraq National Museum that month, in the aftermath of the massive looting of Iraq’s national treasures—including by U.S. forces and journalists. As museum officials showed Bremer a collection of ancient gold and jewelry, Bremer quipped, “Which one can I take home for my wife?” As he made the remark, according to Time, “a member of his security detail interrupted, informing him of reports of four grenade attacks near Bremer’s palace headquarters. Minutes later Bremer climbed into a waiting SUV and headed back to the office, managing a few hurried handshakes as he left. Later that day a U.S. soldier was shot and killed while guarding the museum.”³²

He also made no bones about his religious influences. Taking a page from the Christian zealot Gen. Jerry Boykin, Bremer spoke of his divine guidance. “There is no doubt in my mind that I cannot succeed in this mission without the help of God,” Bremer said a month after arriving in Baghdad. “The job is simply too big and complex for any one person, or any group of people to carry out successfully…. We need God’s help and seek it constantly.”³³ This perspective seemed to be a family affair. Bremer’s brother Duncan ran for Congress in 2006 in the home district of James Dobson’s Colorado-based Focus on the Family. “I want to be God’s man in Washington,”³⁴ he said. He ran on a far-right platform and opposed exceptions to any abortion ban that would allow abortions for victims of rape or incest, saying, “We’re killing the wrong person in that case.”³⁵ During his unsuccessful campaign, Duncan Bremer held up his brother’s role in Iraq as evidence of his own foreign policy experience, saying he had visited Iraq while Paul Bremer was heading the occupation. Duncan Bremer declared during his campaign, “While I prefer that the Islamic Jihadists convert to my world view and receive the benefits of it, my point is that they must give up their world view and their particular version of Islam in order for us to have a peaceful world. From a geopolitical point of view, it does not matter whether they convert to ‘peaceful Islam’ if that be a religion, or Buddhism or whatever, as long as they give up their religious ideology.”³⁶ Paul Bremer’s wife, Francie, whom Dobson called a “prayer warrior,”³⁷ told a Christian publication that “her husband viewed his work in Iraq as a chance to bring the light of freedom to the people of Iraq after decades of darkness there.”³⁸

But Bremer’s zealotry was not confined to his religion. Upon his arrival, he moved swiftly to begin building the neoconservative vision in Iraq, ushering in a period that Naomi Klein labeled “Baghdad Year Zero.” True to form, after just two weeks in the country, Bremer declared that Iraq was “open for business.”³⁹ The centerpiece of his plan was the rapid privatization of Iraq’s oil industry. Klein, who traveled to Iraq during Bremer’s tenure in the country and has written extensively on his rule, described the effects of his edict-based governance as such:

Shortly after Bremer took over in Baghdad, economist Jeff Madrick wrote in the New York Times: “[B]y almost any mainstream economist’s standard, the plan, already approved by L. Paul Bremer III, the American in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority, is extreme—in fact, stunning. It would immediately make Iraq’s economy one of the most open to trade and capital flows in the world, and put it among the lowest taxed in the world, rich or poor…. The Iraqi planners, apparently including the Bush administration, seem to assume they can simply wipe the slate clean.” Madrick stated boldly that Bremer’s plan “would allow a handful of foreign banks to take over the domestic banking system.”⁴¹

It seems appropriate, then, that Bremer, the senior U.S. official in Iraq, the public face of the occupation, would not be protected by U.S. government forces or Iraqi security but rather by a private mercenary company—and one founded by a right-wing Christian who had poured tens of thousands of dollars into Republican campaign coffers.

By mid-August, three months after Bremer arrived in Baghdad, resistance attacks against U.S. forces and Iraqi “collaborators” were a daily occurrence. “We believe we have a significant terrorist threat in the country, which is new,” Bremer said on August 12. “We take this very seriously.”⁴² As with other violent incidents and situations in preceding years, the chaos in Iraq would convert to financial success for Blackwater. On August 28, 2003, Blackwater was awarded the official “sole source,” no-bid $27.7 million contract to provide the personal security detail and two helicopters for Bremer⁴³ as he carried out the all-important work of building the neoconservative program in Iraq. “Nobody had really figured out exactly how they were going to get him from D.C. and stand him up in Iraq,” recalled Blackwater president Gary Jackson. “The Secret Service went over and did an assessment and said, ‘You know what? It’s much, much more dangerous than any of us believed.’ So they came back to us.”⁴⁴ Blackwater’s presence, Bremer wrote, “heightened the sense that Iraq had become even more dangerous.”⁴⁵ The man who would head Bremer’s Blackwater security team was Frank Gallagher, who served as head of Henry Kissinger’s personal security detail in the 1990s when Bremer worked for Kissinger.⁴⁶ “I knew and liked Frank,” Bremer recalled. “I trusted him totally.”⁴⁷

Employing Blackwater mercenaries as his personal guards was made possible by the very neoliberal policies Bremer had advocated for throughout his career and was now implementing in Iraq. It was a groundbreaking moment in the process that then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney launched in the early 1990s when he hired Brown and Root “to explore outsourcing logistical activities.”⁴⁸ It also represented a major shift away from the long-held doctrine that the “U.S. military does not turn over mission-critical functions to private contractors,” according to Peter Singer, author of Corporate Warriors. “And you don’t put contractors in positions where they need to carry weapons…. A private armed contractor now has the job of keeping Paul Bremer alive—it can’t get much more mission-critical than that.”⁴⁹ The privatization of the Bremer detail marked an almost immediate watershed moment for mercenary firms.

“Standard wages for PSD (personal security detail) pros [in Iraq] were previously running about $300 a day,” Fortune magazine reported. “Once Blackwater started recruiting for its first big job, guarding Paul Bremer, the rate shot up to $600 a day.”⁵⁰ Blackwater described its Bremer project as a “turnkey security package.”⁵¹ Company vice president Chris Taylor said the job “was no ordinary executive protection requirement; it really amounted to a hybrid personal security detail (PSD) solution that had yet to be used anywhere. In response, Blackwater developed an innovative combat PSD program to ensure Ambassador Bremer’s safety and that of any ambassador who followed.”⁵² The company provided him with thirty-six “personnel protection” specialists, two K-9 teams, and three MD-530 Boeing helicopters with pilots to taxi him around the country.⁵³ In October 2003, a Blackwater spokesman said the company had just seventy-eight employees in Iraq, a number that would soon explode.⁵⁴ A month after winning the Bremer contract, Blackwater registered its new security division with the North Carolina Secretary of State.⁵⁵ Blackwater Security Consulting LLC would specialize in “providing qualified and trained Protective Security Specialist[s] (PSS) to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau for Diplomatic Security for the purpose of conducting protective security operations in Iraq.”⁵⁶ The Bremer contract had officially elevated Blackwater to a status as a sort of Praetorian Guard in the war on terror—a designation that would open many doors in the world of private military contracting. It wouldn’t be long before Blackwater was awarded a massive contract with the State Department to provide security for many U.S. officials in Iraq, not just the Ambassador. Paul Bremer’s picture would soon grace the top banner on the new Blackwater Security division’s Web site, as would images of Blackwater’s mercenaries around Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.⁵⁷

Blackwater’s men brought a singularly Yankee flair to the Bremer job and, by most accounts, embodied the ugly American persona to a tee. Its guards were chiseled like bodybuilders and wore tacky, wraparound sunglasses. Many wore goatees and dressed in all-khaki uniforms with ammo vests or Blackwater T-shirts with the trademark bear claw in the cross-hairs, sleeves rolled up. Some of them looked like caricatures, real-life action figures, or professional wrestlers. Their haircuts were short, and they sported security earpieces and lightweight machine guns. They bossed around journalists and ran Iraqi cars off the road or fired rounds at cars if they got in the way of a Blackwater convoy. “You see these pictures in the media of Blackwater guys loaded to the hilt with pistols and M-4s and their hand out grabbing the camera. There’s a reason for that,” said former Blackwater contractor Kelly Capeheart, who protected John Negroponte, Bremer’s successor in Iraq. “I don’t want my face on Al-Jazeera. Sorry.” ⁵⁸

Helicopters with snipers would hover above some Blackwater transport missions, as a menacing warning to everyone below. “They made enemies everywhere,” recalled Col. Thomas X. Hammes, the U.S. military official put in charge of building a “new” Iraqi military after Bremer disbanded the old one.⁵⁹ “I would ride around with Iraqis in beat up Iraqi trucks, they were running me off the road. We were threatened and intimidated. [But] they were doing their job, exactly what they were paid to do in the way they were paid to do it, and they were making enemies on every single pass out of town.”⁶⁰ Hammes said Blackwater’s high-profile conduct in guarding Bremer broke the “first rule” of fighting an insurgency: “You don’t make any more enemies.” ⁶¹ Hammes said, “They were actually getting our contract exactly as we asked them to and at the same time hurting our counterinsurgency effort.”⁶² An intelligence officer in Iraq told Time magazine, “Those Blackwater guys… they drive around wearing Oakley sunglasses and pointing their guns out of car windows. They have pointed their guns at me, and it pissed me off. Imagine what a guy in Fallujah thinks.”⁶³ Al Clark, one of the founders of Blackwater, helped develop the company’s training procedures. In the United States, Clark said, “we get upset about a fender-bender.” But, he said, “you’ve got to get over that in Baghdad. Your car can be a 3,000-pound weapon when you need it. Hit and run. Trust me. The police aren’t coming to your house because you left the scene of an accident.”⁶⁴

An apparent deadly case of contractor impunity allegedly involving Blackwater guards took place in May 2004. The incident was thoroughly investigated and reported by Los Angeles Times correspondent T. Christian Miller. ⁶⁵ The U.S. Embassy spokesman in Baghdad, Robert J. Callahan, was finishing up his tour of duty and was making the rounds to say his good-byes to various journalists and media organizations around the Iraqi capital. “As was typical for State Department officials, Callahan relied on Blackwater for transport around Baghdad,” according to Miller. Returning from one media compound, Callahan’s “five-vehicle convoy turned onto a broad thorough-fare running through Baghdad’s Masbah neighborhood, an area of five-story office buildings and ground-level shops.” At the same time, according to Miller, a thirty-two-year-old Iraqi truck driver named Mohammed Nouri Hattab, who was moonlighting as a taxi driver, was transporting two passengers he had just picked up in his Opel. “Hattab looked up and saw Callahan’s five-car convoy speed out of a side street in front of him. He was slowing to a stop about fifty feet from the convoy when he heard a burst of gunfire ring out, he said. Bullets shot through the hood of his Opel, cut into his shoulder, and pierced the chest of nineteen-year-old Yas Ali Mohammed Yassiri, who was in the backseat, killing him,” according to Miller. “There was no warning. It was a sudden attack,” said Hattab.

Miller reported that, on background, “one US official said that embassy officials had reviewed the shooting and determined that two Blackwater employees in the convoy that day had not followed proper procedures to warn Hattab to stay back; instead they opened fire prematurely.” The official said the two had been fired and sent home. As of this writing, they have not been prosecuted. Miller obtained hundreds of pages of incident reports involving private military contractors in Iraq. He reported, “About 11 percent of the nearly two hundred reports involved contractors firing toward civilian vehicles. In most cases the contractors received no fire from the Iraqi cars.”⁶⁶

Blackwater’s style fit in perfectly with Bremer’s mission in Iraq. In fact, one could argue that Bremer didn’t just get protection from Blackwater’s highly trained mercenaries but also from the all-powerful realities of the free-market lab he was running in Iraq. Indeed, it seems that those forces were what Bremer banked on to survive the Iraq job—if he died, Blackwater’s reputation would be shot. “If Blackwater loses a principal (like Bremer), they’re out of business, aren’t they?” asked Colonel Hammes. “Can you imagine being Blackwater, trying to sell your next contract, saying, ‘Well, we did pretty well in Iraq for about four months, and then he got killed.’ And you’re the CEO who’s going to hire and protect your guys. You’ll say, ‘I think I’ll find somebody else.’… The problem for Blackwater [is] if the primary gets killed, what happens to Blackwater is they’re out of business. For the military, if the primary gets killed, that’s a very bad thing. There will be after-action reviews, etc., but nobody’s going out of business.”⁶⁷

For Blackwater, keeping Paul Bremer alive would provide the company with an incredible marketing campaign: If we can protect the most hated man in Iraq, we can protect anyone, anywhere. Indeed, in less than a year Osama bin Laden would release an audio tape offering a reward for Bremer’s killing. “You know that America promised big rewards for those who kill mujahedeen [holy warriors],” bin Laden declared in May 2004. “We in the Al Qaeda organization will guarantee, God willing, 10,000 grams of gold to whoever kills the occupier Bremer, or the American chief commander or his deputy in Iraq.”⁶⁸ The resistance, too, reportedly offered a $50,000 reward for the killing of any Blackwater guards.⁶⁹ “We had prices on our heads over there,” recalled ex-Blackwater contractor Capeheart. “We all knew it.”⁷⁰

Bremer said that soon after Blackwater took over his security, “at Rumsfeld’s request, the U.S. Secret Service had done a survey of my security and had concluded that I was the most threatened American official anywhere in the world…. One report Blackwater took seriously suggested that one of the Iraqi barbers in the palace had been hired to kill me when I got a haircut.” After that, Blackwater moved Bremer into a villa on the palace grounds that reportedly had housed Qusay Hussein’s mother-in-law.⁷¹

In December 2003, a few months after Blackwater began guarding Bremer, came the first publicly acknowledged resistance attack on the proconsul. It happened the night of December 6, right after Bremer saw Defense Secretary Rumsfeld off at the Baghdad airport. “It was after 11:00 p.m. when [Bremer’s aide] Brian McCormack and I got into my armored SUV for the run back to the Green Zone,” Bremer recalled. “Our convoy, as usual, consisted of two ‘up-armored’ Humvees sheathed in tan slabs of hardened steel, a lead-armored Suburban, our Suburban, another armored Suburban following, and two more Humvees. Overhead, we had a pair of buzzing Bell helicopters with two Blackwater snipers in each.”⁷² Inside the SUV, Bremer and McCormack were discussing whether Bremer should attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Bremer was thinking that he “could now use some of the ski resort pampering” when a “deafening” explosion happened, followed by automatic gunfire. The lead vehicle in the convoy had its tire blown out by an improvised explosive device (IED), and resistance fighters were attacking with AK-47s. According to Bremer, a bullet had hit a side window in his SUV. “We’d been ambushed, a highly organized, skillfully executed assassination attempt,” wrote Bremer. “I swung around and looked back. The Suburban’s armored-glass rear window had been blown out by the IED. And now AK rounds were whipping through the open rectangle.” As he sped toward the safety of the palace, Bremer recalled that “with the stench of explosives lingering in the car, I considered. Davos, all those good meals…. Francie could fly over and we could ski. That was about as far from Baghdad’s Airport Road and IEDs as you could get.”⁷³

Bremer’s office intentionally concealed the attack until two weeks later, when news of the ambush leaked in the U.S. press and Bremer was confronted at a press conference in the southern city of Basra.⁷⁴ “Yes, this is true,” he told reporters.⁷⁵ “As you can see, it didn’t succeed,”⁷⁶ adding, “Thankfully I am still alive, and here I am in front of you.”⁷⁷ Despite Bremer’s later description of the attack as “a highly organized” assassination attempt, at the time his spokespeople dismissed it as a “random” attack that was not likely directed at Bremer personally,⁷⁸ perhaps in an effort to downplay the sophistication of the resistance. After the attack was revealed, Bremer’s spokesperson, Dan Senor, praised Blackwater: “Ambassador Bremer has very thorough and comprehensive security forces and mechanisms in place whenever there is a movement, and we have a lot of confidence in those security personnel and those mechanisms. And in this particular case, they worked.”⁷⁹

As Bremer traveled Iraq, his policies and the conduct of his “bodyguards” and the other contractors he had immunized from accountability increasingly enraged Iraqis. Meanwhile, he continued to reinforce the Iraqi characterization of him as another Saddam, as he carried out expensive renovations to the Baghdad Palace. In December 2003, Bremer spent $27,000 to remove four larger-than-life busts of Saddam’s head from the palace compound. “I’ve been looking at these for six months,” said Bremer as the first head was being removed. “The time has come for these heads to roll.”⁸⁰ With much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure in shambles, it seemed a questionable use of funds, but Bremer’s spokespeople characterized it as compliance with the law. “According to the rules of de-Baathification, they have to come down,” said Bremer deputy Charles Heatly. “Actually, they are illegal.”⁸¹

For most of the time Blackwater guarded Bremer, the company remained under the radar. There was rarely a mention of Blackwater in media reports; instead, the men were simply referred to as Bremer’s security detail or as his bodyguards. Sometimes, they were identified as Secret Service agents. Within the industry, though, Blackwater’s men were viewed as the elite, the trendsetters among the rapidly expanding mercenary army in the country.

Around the time Blackwater won its Bremer contract, mercenaries quickly poured into Iraq. Firms like Control Risks Group, DynCorp, Erinys, Aegis, ArmorGroup, Hart, Kroll, and Steele Foundation, many of which already had some presence in the country, began deploying thousands of mercenaries in Iraq and recruiting aggressively internationally. In a throw-back to the Vietnam War era, the positions were initially referred to as “private security consultants” on the job boards. Some companies, like Blackwater, won lucrative contracts with the State Department, the U.S. occupation authority, or the British government; others guarded oil projects, foreign embassies, or government buildings; while still others worked for major war contractors like Halliburton, KBR, General Electric, and Bechtel, or as part of security details for journalists. Among the highest paid mercenaries were former Special Forces: Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Green Berets, Rangers and Marines, British SAS, Irish Rangers, and Australian SAS, followed by Nepalese Gurkhas, Serbian commandos, and Fijian troops. Meanwhile, the prospect of tremendous profits depleted official national forces, as soldiers sought more lucrative posts with private companies, which also aggressively headhunted Special Forces men for private work in Iraq. “We were bigger than life to a lot of the military guys,” said ex-Blackwater contractor Kelly Capeheart. “You could see it in their eyes when they looked at us—or whispered about us. A lot of them were very jealous. They felt like they were doing the same job but getting paid a lot less.”⁸²

In addition to these “professionals,” there were many seedier elements that got in on the action, charging less money than their corporate colleagues and acting with even greater recklessness, among them former South African apartheid forces, some from the notorious Koevoet, who apparently entered Iraq in contravention of South Africa’s antimercenary laws. By November 2003, the United States was explicitly telling companies wishing to do business in Iraq to bring their own armed security forces into the country.⁸³

When Bremer left Iraq in June 2004, there were more than twenty thousand private soldiers inside the country’s borders and Iraq had become known as a “Wild West” with no sheriff. Those mercenaries officially hired by the occupation would be contracted for more than $2 billion of security work by the end of the “Bremer year” and would account for upwards of 30 percent of the Iraq “reconstruction” budget. That, of course, does not take into account the private entities that widely hired mercenaries in Iraq. According to The Economist magazine, the Iraq occupation shot British military companies’ revenues up from $320 million before the war to more than $1.6 billion by early 2004, “making security by far Britain’s most lucrative postwar export to Iraq.”⁸⁴ One source cited by the magazine estimated that there were more ex-Special Air Service soldiers working as mercenaries in Iraq than on active duty there. Within a year, the British firm Erinys had built up a fourteen-thousand-man private army in Iraq,⁸⁵ staffed by locals—among them, members of Ahmad Chalabi’s “Free Iraq” forces—and commanded by expatriates from the company, some of whom were South African mercenaries. “[T]he massive demand for protection, and the fear of almost daily killing of foreign workers, has overstretched market supply, spawning an upsurge in cowboy contractors and drawing on a pool of international guns for hire that, according to reputable firms, are as much a liability to themselves and Iraqis as to their clients,” reported The Times of London.⁸⁶

What these forces did in Iraq, how many people they killed, how many of them died or were wounded, all remain unanswerable questions because no one was overseeing their activities in the country. As of this writing, not a single U.S. military contractor has been prosecuted for crimes committed in Iraq. Still, stories trickled out of Iraq, sometimes through the bravado of the contractors themselves. One such case involved a Blackwater contractor bragging about his use of “non-standard” ammunition to kill an Iraqi.

In mid-September 2003, a month after Blackwater won the Bremer contract, a four-man Blackwater security team was heading north from Baghdad on a dirt road in an SUV when they say they were ambushed by gunmen in a small village. That morning, one of the Blackwater contractors, Ben Thomas, had loaded his M4 machine gun with powerful experimental ammunition that had not been approved for use by U.S. forces. They were armor-piercing, limited-penetration rounds known as APLPs.⁸⁷ The product of a San Antonio company called RBCD, they are created using what is called a “blended metal” process. According to The Army Times, the bullets “will bore through steel and other hard targets but will not pass through a human torso, an eight-inch-thick block of artist’s clay or even several layers of dry-wall. Instead of passing through a body, it shatters, creating ‘untreatable wounds.’”⁸⁸ The distributor of these experimental rounds is an Arkansas company called Le Mas, which admits that it gave Thomas some of the bullets after he contacted the company. During the short gun battle that day, Thomas says he fired one of the APLP rounds at an Iraqi attacker, hitting him in the buttocks. The bullet, he said, killed the man almost instantly. “It entered his butt and completely destroyed everything in the lower left section of his stomach… everything was torn apart,” Thomas told The Army Times. “The way I explain what happened to people who weren’t there is… this stuff was like hitting somebody with a miniature explosive round…. Nobody believed that this guy died from a butt shot.”⁸⁹ Thomas, an ex-Navy SEAL, said he has shot people with various kinds of ammunition and that there is “absolutely no comparison, whatever, none,” between the damage the APLP bullet did to his Iraqi victim that day and what would be expected from standard ammo. When Thomas returned to base after the shooting, he says his fellow mercenaries “were fighting over” the bullets. “At the end of the day, each of us took five rounds. That’s all we had left.”⁹⁰

These bullets have been a source of some controversy in Congress, and the manufacturer has lobbyists trying to get them approved for use by U.S. forces, calling it “an issue of national security.”⁹¹ In fact, Thomas says he was threatened with a court-martial for using unapproved ammunition after he was mistakenly understood by a Pentagon official to be an active-duty soldier. ⁹² It was the first recorded kill using the bullets, which had been tested for several years at the Armed Forces Journal annual “Shoot-out at Blackwater” at the company compound in Moyock.⁹³ After Thomas allegedly killed the Iraqi using the APLP round, he sounded like a paid spokesman on a commercial for the bullets. “I’m taking Le Mas ammo with me when I return to Iraq, and I’ve already promised lots of this ammo to my buddies who were there that day and to their friends,” Thomas told an interviewer during a leave from Iraq. “This is purely for putting into bad guys. For general inventory, absolutely not. For special operations, I wouldn’t carry anything else.”⁹⁴ The Armed Forces Journal excitedly chronicled Thomas’s experience with the rounds, calling them “reason enough for Pentagon officials to insist that Special Operations Command immediately begin realistic testing of the blended-metal ammunition.”⁹⁵ Thomas later posted on his MySpace Web page a link to a news article about his use of the armor-piercing bullets in Iraq with a note that said:

As mercenaries roamed the country freely, there was no official explanation given to Iraqis as to who these heavily armed, often nonuniformed forces were. It would be a year before Bremer would officially get around to issuing an order that defined their status—as immune from prosecution. Iraqis killed or wounded by these mercenaries had no recourse for justice. Many Iraqis—and some journalists—erroneously believed that the mercenaries were CIA or Israeli Mossad agents, an impression that enraged citizens who encountered them. The mercenaries’ conduct and reputation also angered actual U.S. intelligence officers who felt the mercenaries could jeopardize their own security in the country.⁹⁷ As 2003 neared its end, much of Iraq lay in ruins, while the oft-promised “reconstruction” projects, ostensibly to be funded by Iraqi oil revenue, were overwhelmingly nonexistent or flat-out failing. For mercenary companies, though, business was booming. In early 2004, the situation in Iraq would begin to descend even further into chaos, bringing more business for private military companies.

In February 2004, Bremer’s office engaged in an incredible act of either vast miscalculation or wanton (and deadly) disregard for reality. According to a report at the time in the Washington Post, “U.S. officials courting companies to take part in the rebuilding insist that security is not an issue for contractors and said accounts have been overblown. ‘Western contractors are not targets,’ Tom Foley, the CPA’s director of private-sector development, told hundreds of would-be investors at a Commerce Department conference in Washington on Feb. 11. He said the media have exaggerated the issue.”⁹⁸ On the contrary, Foley asserted, “The risks are akin to sky diving or riding a motorcycle, which are, to many, very acceptable risks.”⁹⁹ By mid-March 2004, mercenary firms were basking in what had become a tremendous “sellers’ market” in Iraq. “What it cost to hire qualified security personnel in June (2003) is a fraction of what it costs today,” said Mike Battles, founder of the U.S. firm Custer Battles,¹⁰⁰ which was contracted to guard the Baghdad airport.

On March 18, word hit the streets that the United States was putting up a contract worth $100 million to hire private security to guard the four-square-mile Green Zone and its three thousand residents.¹⁰¹ “The current and projected threat and recent history of attacks directed against coalition forces, and thinly stretched military force, requires a commercial security force that is dedicated to provide Force Protection security,” read the solicitation. ¹⁰² As Blackwater’s Bremer detail succeeded in keeping its high-value “noun” alive, the company’s management seized opportunity in the chaos of Iraq. They opened several new offices, in Baghdad, Amman, and Kuwait City, as well as headquarters in the epicenter of the U.S. intelligence community in McLean, Virginia, that would house the company’s new Government Relations division. Plans were under way to expand Blackwater’s lucrative business in the war zone in a profit drive that would end with four American contractors dead in Fallujah, Iraq in flames, and Blackwater’s future looking very bright.