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

BEFORE THE invasion of Iraq, when most people heard the term “civilian contractors,” they didn’t immediately conjure up images of men with guns and bulletproof vests riding around a hellhole in jeeps. They thought of construction workers. This was also true for the families of many private soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their loved ones were not “civilian contractors,” in their minds but were often thought of and referred to in family discussions as “Special Forces” or being “with the military.” Their actual employer or title was irrelevant because what they were doing in Iraq or Afghanistan was what they had always done—they were fighting for their country. The parents of one Blackwater contractor killed in Iraq said it was their son’s “deep sense of patriotism and his abiding Christian faith that led him to work in Iraq,”¹ a common sentiment in the private military community. So on March 31, 2004, when news began to reach the United States that four “civilian contractors” had been ambushed in Fallujah, several of the men’s families didn’t draw any kind of connection. After all, their loved ones were not civilians—they were military. In Ohio, Danica Zovko, Jerry’s mother, heard the news on the radio that “American contractors” had been killed.² After she saw the images coming out of Fallujah, she actually wrote her son an e-mail, telling him to be careful: “They’re killing people in Iraq just like Somalia.”³

Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, Scott’s mother, was working at her home office in Leesburg, Florida, with the television on behind her.⁴ “I was sitting here at my desk, doing research, and I had CNN on in the background,” she recalled. “And the noon news just all of a sudden caught my attention, and I looked over there and I saw this burning vehicle and I thought, ‘Oh, my God.’” It didn’t cross her mind at the time that the footage she was watching was her own son’s gruesome death. “When they said contractors, I was thinking construction workers working on pipelines or something. I changed the channel because I thought, This is just getting insane, I can’t watch this anymore.” Helvenston-Wettengel went on with her work, but then she heard the men described on the news as “security contractors,” which made her nervous. “I said, ‘My God, Scotty is a security contractor, but he’s not in Fallujah. He’s protecting Paul Bremer in Baghdad,’” she recalled. “I called my other son, Jason, and he told me, ‘Mom, you worry too much.’” Anyway, she reasoned, her son had just arrived in Iraq a few days earlier. “He wasn’t even supposed to be on any missions,” she said. Helvenston-Wettengel went out that afternoon to a meeting, and when she returned home at seven o’clock that night, her answering machine was blinking like crazy: eighteen new messages. “The first four were from Jason, saying, ‘Mom, it was Blackwater. They were Blackwater guys that got ambushed.’” Helvenston-Wettengel called Blackwater headquarters and got a woman on the other line. “This is Katy Helvenston, Scotty’s mom,” she said. “Is Scotty all right?” The Blackwater representative said she didn’t know. “It’s been twelve hours!” Helvenston-Wettengel exclaimed. “What do you mean you don’t know?” She said the Blackwater representative told her that the company was in the process of doing a sort of “reverse 911” with its contractors in the field in Iraq. “She said there were about 400 of them and that 250 had checked in. I asked if Scotty was one of those and the woman said, ‘No.’” Helvenston-Wettengel said she called Blackwater back every hour, desperate for any information. In the meantime, she found Fallujah on a map and realized that it wasn’t that far from Baghdad. By midnight, she knew in her heart that her son was dead. “Scotty had been so good about calling me and e-mailing me, and I kept thinking, He would have called me and let me know he was OK, because he knew how worried I was,” she recalled. “I just knew it.”

While the families began to absorb the shock and horror of what had happened to their loved ones in Fallujah, the world—including many elected officials in Washington—was getting a window into just how privatized the war had become and how entrenched private contractors, like the dead Blackwater men, now were in the occupation. In the 1991 Gulf War, one in sixty people deployed by the coalition were contractors. With the 2003 occupation, the ratio had swelled to one in three.⁵ For Erik Prince, the Fallujah killings and the Najaf firefight provided an almost unthinkable opportunity—under the guise of doing damage control and briefings, Prince and his entourage would be able to meet with Washington’s power brokers and sell them on Blackwater’s vision of military privatization at the exact moment that those very senators and Congressmen were beginning to recognize the necessity of mercenaries in preserving the occupation of (and corporate profits in) Iraq. With timing that would have been impossible to create, Blackwater was thrust into the fortunate position of a drug rep offering a new painkiller to an ailing patient at the moment the worst pain was just kicking in.

Blackwater’s Lobbyists

The day after the Fallujah ambush, Erik Prince turned to his longtime friend Paul Behrends, a partner at the powerful Republican lobbying firm Alexander Strategy Group, founded by senior staffers of then-majority leader Tom DeLay.⁶ Behrends, a U.S. Marine Corps Reserve lieutenant colonel, had been a senior national security adviser to California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a onetime aide to President Reagan. Prince and Behrends had a long history—in 1990-1991, young Prince worked for Rohrabacher alongside Behrends.⁷ That marked the beginning of a close political, business, and religious partnership between the two men that would only strengthen as Blackwater grew.

Behrends first officially registered as a lobbyist for Blackwater in May 1998 and began advocating for the company in areas ranging from disaster planning to foreign relations.⁸ That month, Behrends’s firm Boland & Madigan “delivered” Representative Rohrabacher and another “staunch defender” of the Second Amendment, Representative John Doolittle, to Prince’s Moyock compound for Blackwater’s grand opening—at the company’s expense.⁹

While Prince—with Behrends’s lobbying assistance—built up his Blackwater empire, Behrends was simultaneously becoming deeply involved in areas of U.S. foreign policy that would become front lines in the war on terror and areas of revenue for Blackwater. Among these was a high-stakes Big Oil scheme, led by petrol giant Unocal, to run a pipeline through Taliban-governed Afghanistan. Behrends worked as a lobbyist for Delta Oil, Unocal’s partner in the scheme, pushing for the United States to officially recognize the Afghan government.¹⁰ Prince and Behrends’s former boss, Rohrabacher, had long been interested in Afghanistan, since his days working as a senior speechwriter in the Reagan White House, when the United States was aggressively backing the mujahedeen against the Soviet occupation of the country. Rohrabacher, known as a fan of various U.S.-backed “freedom fighters,” traveled to Afghanistan in 1988, personally joining the mujahedeen in the fighting against the Soviet forces before being officially sworn into Congress.¹¹ It was not surprising when Blackwater became one of the first private military firms contracted to conduct operations inside Afghanistan after 9/11.

Prince and Behrends had long served together on the board of directors of Christian Freedom International, the evangelical missionary organization founded and run by veterans of the Reagan administration—several of them major players in the Iran-Contra scandal. Its founder and president, Jim Jacobson, cut his political teeth working under Erik Prince’s friend and beneficiary Gary Bauer, when Bauer served as the head of President Reagan’s Office of Policy Development. Jacobson also served in the George H. W. Bush administration. CFI passionately supported the Bush administration’s war on terror, faulting the White House’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan only for not doing enough to defend Christians.

At the time of the Fallujah ambush, there were few lobbying firms with more influence on Capitol Hill than Alexander Strategy, a centerpiece of the GOP’s “K Street Project,” under which lobbyists raised “enormous sums of money from their clients to ensure that Republicans remain the majority in Congress. For this fealty, the leadership grants the lobbyists access to the decision-makers and provides legislative favors for their clients,” according to the Congressional watchdog group Public Citizen.¹² Behrends and his associates wasted no time in going to work for Prince and Blackwater. “[Blackwater] did not go out looking for the publicity and did not ask for everything that happened to them,” said Chris Bertelli, a spokesman for Alexander Strategy assigned to Blackwater after the Fallujah killings. “We want to do everything we can to educate [the media and Congress] about what Blackwater does.”¹³

A week to the day after the ambush, Erik Prince was sitting down with at least four senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including chairman John Warner.¹⁴ Former Navy SEAL turned Blackwater executive Patrick Toohey accompanied Prince to his Congressional meetings,¹⁵ as did Behrends. Senator Rick Santorum arranged the meeting, which included Warner and two other key Republican senators—Appropriations Committee chairman Ted Stevens of Alaska and Senator George Allen of Virginia.¹⁶ This meeting followed an earlier series of face-to-faces Prince had with powerful House Republicans who oversaw military contracts. Among them: Tom DeLay, the House majority leader and Alexander Strategy’s patron; Porter Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (and future CIA director); Duncan Hunter, chair of the House Armed Services Committee; and Representative Bill Young, chair of the House Appropriations Committee.¹⁷ What was discussed at these meetings remains a secret, as neither Blackwater nor the Congressmen have discussed them publicly. But there was no question: the company’s moment had arrived.

With well-connected ASG operatives steering the publicity-shy Erik Prince and other company executives around, Blackwater was positioning itself to cash in on its newfound fame, while staking out a key role in crafting the rules that would govern mercenaries on U.S. government contracts. ¹⁸ “Because of the public events of March 31, [Blackwater’s] visibility and need to communicate a consistent message has elevated here in Washington,” said ASG’s Bertelli. “There are now several federal regulations that apply to their activities, but they are generally broad in nature. One thing that’s lacking is an industry standard. That’s something we definitely want to be engaged in.”¹⁹ By May, Blackwater was reportedly “leading a lobbying effort by private security firms and other contractors to try to block congressional or Pentagon efforts to bring their companies and employees under the same justice code” as active-duty soldiers.²⁰ “The Uniform Code of Military Justice should not apply to civilians because you actually give up constitutional rights when you join the armed forces,” Bertelli said. “You’re subject to a different legal system than you are if you are a civilian.”²¹ (Two years later, despite Blackwater’s efforts, language would be slipped into the 2007 defense-spending authorization that sought to place contractors under the UCMJ.) In June, Blackwater would be handed one of the U.S. government’s most valuable international security contracts to protect diplomats and U.S. facilities. ²² At the same time, Blackwater was given its own protection, as Bremer granted a sweeping immunity for its operations in Iraq.²³

But while Blackwater executives worked the GOP elite on the Hill, others in Congress began to question what the Blackwater men were even doing in Iraq, not to mention Fallujah that day. A week after the ambush, thirteen Democratic senators, led by Jack Reed of Rhode Island, wrote to Donald Rumsfeld, calling on the Pentagon to release an “accurate tally” of the number of “privately armed” non-Iraqi personnel operating in Iraq. “These security contractors are armed and operate in a fashion that is hard to distinguish from military forces, especially special operations forces. However, these private security companies are not under military control and are not subject to the rules that guide the conduct of American military personnel,” the senators wrote.²⁴ “It would be a dangerous precedent if the United States allowed the presence of private armies operating outside the control of governmental authority and beholden only to those who pay them.” The senators asserted that security in a “hostile fire area is a classic military mission” and “delegating [it] to private contractors raises serious questions.” Rumsfeld did not respond to the letter.²⁵ Instead, the Iraq reconstruction floodgates opened wide and mercenary contracts poured out. As the New York Times bluntly put it, “The combination of a deadly insurgency and billions of dollars in aid money has unleashed powerful market forces in the war zone. New security companies aggressively compete for lucrative contracts in a frenzy of deal making.”²⁶

Two weeks after the Fallujah killings, Blackwater announced plans to build a massive new facility—a twenty-eight-thousand-square-foot administrative building—on its Moyock property for its operations.²⁷ The finished product would be sixty-four-thousand square feet, more than twice the originally projected size.²⁸ It was a major development for Blackwater, which had been denied permission for the project for six years because of objections by the local government. In the days after the ambush, county officials worked to amend local ordinances for Blackwater’s expansion. With the new permissions, Blackwater was given the green light to build and operate firearms ranges and parachute landing zones, and to conduct explosives training as well as training in hand-to-hand combat, incendiary-type weapons, and automatic assault weapons.²⁹ “It will be our international headquarters,” said company president Gary Jackson.³⁰

Meanwhile, just two weeks after the Fallujah killings, Blackwater issued a press release announcing that it would be hosting the first-ever “World SWAT Conference and Challenge.” The release declared, “Never before in the history of the world has there been such a need for men and women who can respond effectively to our most critical incidents. Blackwater USA, the world’s largest firearms and tactical training facility, has put together a conference to meet that need that is unlike any other before it.”³¹ It boasted of workshops on a number of subjects, including “resolving hostage situations, suicide bomber profiling, and the psychology of operating and surviving critical incidents.”³² After the conference portion, there would be a SWAT Olympics, where teams from across the United States and Canada would compete in a series of events televised by ESPN. At the event’s press conference, Gary Jackson refused to answer any questions about the Fallujah ambush, steering all discussion back to the SWAT challenge.³³ The only mention of Fallujah came during the chaplain’s blessing of the event. “This is almost a vacation compared to what a regular week looks like,” Jackson told reporters at the opening of the games.³⁴

At the conference, retired Army Lt. Col. David Grossman, author of the book On Killing and founder of the Killology Research Group, addressed participants in a hotel ballroom, pacing around with a microphone.³⁵ He spoke of a “new Dark Age” full of Al Qaeda terrorism and school shootings. “The bad guys are coming with rifles and body armor!” he declared. “They will destroy our way of life in one day!” The world, Grossman said, is full of sheep, and it was the duty of warriors—the kind of men assembled at the Blackwater conference—to protect them from the wolves. “Embrace the warrior spirit!” he shouted. “We need warriors who embrace that dirty, nasty four-letter word kill!” Meanwhile, Gary Jackson sent out an e-mail to the Blackwater listserv encouraging people not to miss the “fantastic” dinner speaker at the challenge, one of the most experienced spies in recent U.S. history, J. Cofer Black, at the time the State Department’s head of counter-terrorism. ³⁶ In the aftermath of 9/11, as head of the CIA’s counterterrorism division, Black had led the administration’s hunt for bin Laden. A year after the Fallujah ambush, he would join Blackwater as the company’s vice chairman—one of several former senior officials the company would hire in building up its empire and influence.

As Blackwater plotted its tremendous expansion at home, it emerged as the mercenary industry trendsetter. “Increased violence this month has thrown a spotlight on the small army of private US security firms operating as paramilitaries in Iraq under Pentagon contracts,” reported PR Week, a public relations trade journal.³⁷ “As calls for greater regulation over these companies increase, [they] are ramping up their presence in Washington to make their voices heard…. At the forefront is Blackwater USA, the North Carolina firm that lost four employees after an attack in Fallujah on March 31.” After Blackwater started using well-connected ASG lobbyists to promote its services, other mercenary firms followed suit. All seemed to realize that the mercenary gold rush was on. The California-based Steele Foundation, one of the earliest private security companies to deploy in Iraq, hired former Ambassador Robert Frowick, a major player in the Balkans conflicts, on April 13, 2004, to help manage “strategic government relationships” in Washington.³⁸ Meanwhile, the London-based mercenary provider Global Risk Strategies rented office space in D.C. that month to base its own lobbying operations. “We are fully aware that D.C. operates in a totally different manner,” said Global executive Charlie Andrews. “What we need to assist our company is a hand-holding organization basically who will guide us through procedures and D.C. protocols.”³⁹ In the midst of the flurry of lobbying activity by private military companies, Senator Warner told the New York Times his view of the mercenaries. “I refer to them as our silent partner in this struggle,” he said.⁴⁰

The day after Erik Prince met with Warner and the other Republican senators, his new ASG spokesman, Chris Bertelli, boasted about a considerable spike in applications from ex-soldiers to work for Blackwater. “They’re angry,” Bertelli said, “and they’re saying, ‘Let me go over.’”⁴¹ Bertelli said that with the graphic images of the Fallujah ambush, “it’s natural to assume that the visibility of the dangers could drive up salaries for the folks who have to stand in the path of the bullets.”⁴² By late April, the New York Times was reporting, “[S]ome military leaders are openly grumbling that the lure of $500 to $1,500 a day is siphoning away some of their most experienced Special Operations people at the very time their services are most in demand.”⁴³

In Iraq the situation was fast deteriorating. On April 13, in a dispatch from Baghdad, British war correspondents Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn reported, “At least 80 foreign mercenaries—security guards recruited from the United States, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies—have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq.”⁴⁴ The violence rocking the country had brought “much of the reconstruction work” to a halt and contractors were being killed or abducted in record numbers.⁴⁵ Nearly fifty were kidnapped in the month after the March 31 Blackwater ambush.⁴⁶ The targeting of foreign contractors (brought in to support Washington’s occupation and reconstruction operations), aid workers, and journalists would provide a major source of funding for the very forces fighting the United States in Iraq. Though the United States has an official policy of not paying ransoms, a classified U.S. government report estimated that resistance groups were taking in as much as $36 million annually from ransom payments.⁴⁷ In April 2004, Russia withdrew some eight hundred civilian workers from Iraq⁴⁸ and Germany followed suit,⁴⁹ while a senior Iraqi official said that month more than fifteen hundred foreign contractors had left the country.⁵⁰ As Fortune magazine reported, “[T]he upsurge in violence comes just as the government is awarding $10 billion in new contracts, and companies like Halliburton and Bechtel are trying to increase their presence there.”⁵¹ The United States was struggling to interest more business partners and organized a series of international conferences to entice new businesses. “In Rome there were over 300 companies and there was so much interest we had to use a spillover room,” said Joseph Vincent Schwan, vice chair of the Iraq and Afghanistan Investment and Reconstruction Task Force.⁵² He boasted that 550 businesses showed up at a similar conference in Dubai, and another 250 in Philadelphia. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also distributed its “Doing Business in Iraq” PowerPoint presentation across the world, from Sydney to Seoul to London.⁵³

At the conference in Dubai three weeks after the Fallujah ambush, described by the local press as an “opportunity to win billions of dollars in subcontracted work in Iraq,” Schwan told potential contractors, “Iraq presents an opportunity of a lifetime.”⁵⁴ But to cash in on this opportunity, security was a necessity, and the contractors were being encouraged to add on new costs in their billing to hire mercenaries. As a public service the “Doing Business in Iraq” presentation included a list of mercenary companies for hire.⁵⁵

Meanwhile, the newly appointed U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq, Stuart Bowen Jr., explained the extent of the new demand for mercenary services in Iraq. “I believe that it was expected that coalition forces would provide adequate internal security and thus obviate the need for contractors to hire their own security,” Bowen said. “But the current threat situation now requires that an unexpected, substantial percentage of contractor dollars be allocated to private security.”⁵⁶ As a result of the ever-increasing demand for private security services from companies like Blackwater, corporations servicing the occupation began billing the CPA substantially more for their protection costs. “The numbers I’ve heard range up to 25 percent,” Bowen said, versus the initially estimated 10 percent of the “reconstruction” budget that would go to pay for security for private companies like Halliburton. ⁵⁷ The Pentagon official in charge of Army procurement contracts backed up Bowen’s estimate.⁵⁸

“The US military has created much of the demand for security guards,” reported The Times of London. “It has outsourced many formerly military functions to private contractors, who, in turn, need protection.”⁵⁹ Because the U.S. privatized so many of these essential services—like providing food, fuel, water, and housing for the troops—and made private corporations necessary components of the occupation, the Bush administration didn’t even consider not using contractors when the situation became ultralethal. As one occupation official, Bruce Cole, put it, “We’re not going to stop just because security costs go up.”⁶⁰ Instead, the administration dug deeper into the privatization hole, paying out more money to more companies and encouraging an already impressive growth in the mercenary industry. “When Halliburton teams working to rebuild oil pipelines first arrived in the country, they had military protection,” according to Fortune magazine. “But now they’ve had to hire private security. With armored SUVs running more than $100,000 apiece and armed guards earning $1,000 a day, big contractors like Bechtel and Halliburton are spending hundreds of millions to protect their employees. Since the government picks up the tab, ultimately that means fewer dollars for actual reconstruction work.”⁶¹ And many more dollars for private military companies.

What became clear after the Fallujah ambush and firefight at Najaf was that mercenaries had become a necessary part of the occupation. “With every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and private commandos,” reported the New York Times. “[M]ore and more, they give the appearance of private, for-profit militias.”⁶² A year after the invasion began, the number of mercenaries in the country had exploded. Global Risk Strategies, one of the first mercenary companies to deploy in Iraq, went from ninety men to fifteen hundred, Steele Foundation from fifty to five hundred, while previously unknown firms like Erinys thrived—hiring fourteen thousand Iraqis to work as private soldiers.⁶³ The global engineering firm Fluor—the largest U.S. publicly traded engineering and construction company—hired some seven hundred private guards to protect its 350 workers, servicing its nearly $2 billion in contracts.⁶⁴ “Let’s just say there are more people carrying guns and protecting than turning wrenches,” said Garry Flowers, Fluor’s vice president.⁶⁵ “Established” mercenary firms—or those with connections to the occupying powers—began complaining about ramshackle operations offering security services in Iraq for cheaper and with far less “qualified” contractors. There was also controversy about former apartheid-era security forces from South Africa, whose presence came to light only after some were killed. “The mercenaries we’re talking about worked for security forces that were synonymous with murder and torture,” said Richard Goldstone, a retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa who also served as chief prosecutor of the UN war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. “My reaction was one of horror that that sort of person is employed in a situation where what should be encouraged is the introduction of democracy. These are not the people who should be employed in this sort of endeavor.”⁶⁶ A Pentagon official told Time magazine, “These firms are hiring anyone they can get. Sure, some of them are special forces, but some of them are good, and some are not.”⁶⁷

On April 28, 2004, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was blown into the open when CBS’s 60 Minutes II broadcast graphic images depicting U.S. soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners.⁶⁸ It soon emerged that private contractors from two U.S. corporations—the San Diego-based Titan Corporation and the Virginia-based CACI—were allegedly involved in the torture, having provided interrogators for use at the prison during the period of alleged abuse. An Army investigative report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba found that an interrogator at CACI and a translator for Titan “were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.”⁶⁹ Both companies denied the allegations. CACI counted as one of its former directors Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage,⁷⁰ a key administration official in the war on terror. A subsequent class action lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights charged that Titan and CACI conspired with U.S. officials to “humiliate, torture and abuse persons” to win more contracts for their “interrogation services.”⁷¹ Though a greater spotlight was being shone on private contractors, it was hardly having an adverse effect on business.

In Iraq, Blackwater, with its former Special Forces operators and political connections, billed some clients $1,500 to $2,000 per man per day, according to Time magazine.⁷² The private military industry, meanwhile, used the Fallujah ambush to argue for overt approval from the United States for private soldiers to use heavier weapons in Iraq.⁷³ Even with the growing controversy and image problems, it was an incredible moment in mercenary history, blowing open a door to legitimacy that would have been difficult to fully imagine before the launch of the war on terror. A year after the Iraq invasion, shares in one of the largest private security firms, Kroll Inc.—which provided security for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Iraq—had soared 38 percent, while its profits had “skyrocketed” 231 percent with sales doubling to $485.5 million.⁷⁴ “Listen, it is the Gold Rush,” said Michael Cherkasky, Kroll’s president, warning, “This is what happens: People who don’t know what they’re doing can really get hurt.”⁷⁵ The full magnitude of the industry-wide profits is difficult to gauge because many of the firms, like Blackwater, are ultrasecretive and not publicly traded. But some experts began estimating the value of the industry at $100 billion a year.⁷⁶ “We have grown 300 percent over each of the past three years,” Blackwater’s Gary Jackson bragged shortly before the Fallujah killings. “We have a very small niche market, we work towards putting out the cream of the crop, the best.”⁷⁷

In the aftermath of Fallujah and Najaf, some of the private military firms began to coordinate informally with one another, sharing information and intelligence. “Each private firm amounts to an individual battalion,” a U.S. government official told the Washington Post. “Now they are all coming together to build the largest security organization in the world.”⁷⁸ It became like a Frankenstein experiment in military and intelligence outsourcing, with Iraq as the laboratory. “[T]he power of the mercenaries has been growing,” Robert Fisk wrote from Baghdad in the summer of 2004. “Blackwater’s thugs with guns now push and punch Iraqis who get in their way: Kurdish journalists twice walked out of a Bremer press conference because of their mistreatment by these men. Baghdad is alive with mysterious Westerners draped with hardware, shouting and abusing Iraqis in the street, drinking heavily in the city’s poorly defended hotels. They have become, for ordinary Iraqis, the image of everything that is wrong with the West. We like to call them ‘contractors’, but there is a disturbing increase in reports that mercenaries are shooting down innocent Iraqis with total impunity.”⁷⁹

Doing Kafka Proud

That summer, the United States began funding a large intelligence and operations center for the mercenaries, intended as a sort of privatized Green Zone within the Green Zone. It started in May 2004 with a massive $293 million, three-year contract awarded to the newly formed UK firm Aegis Defense Services, founded and run by the world’s most infamous mercenary, Tim Spicer, a former British Special Forces officer.⁸⁰ Spicer’s previous firm, Sandline, was hired by warring factions in Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, sparking a major controversy in Britain about the use of mercenaries.⁸¹ He started the new firm in September 2002 to shake the mercenary image of Sandline. “I wanted to make sure that Aegis was a completely different animal,” he said.⁸² Spicer became the godfather of sorts of the campaign to recast mercenary firms as “private military companies.” That Spicer was awarded the largest security contract to date in the Iraq occupation was an ominous symbol of the dawning of a new era. What’s more, the scale of the contract and its timing made a bold statement about real U.S. intentions with the “handover of sovereignty” a month away: We—and our mercenaries—are here to stay. It was also a devastating commentary on the flimsiness of a key part of the “handover” rhetoric—that Iraqis would be assuming responsibility for the country’s security. Like the system that Halliburton used to guarantee itself large-scale profits through its government contracts, Spicer’s contract was a “cost plus” arrangement. “In effect, this deal rewards companies with higher profits the more they spend, and thus is ripe for abuse and inefficiency,” wrote Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution expert on private military contracting. “It has no parallel in the best practices of the business world, for the very reason that it runs counter to everything Adam Smith wrote about free markets.”⁸³

The official intent of the contract was twofold: Aegis was to coordinate and oversee the activities and movements of the scores of private military firms in the country servicing the occupation, including facilitating intelligence and security briefings. Aegis would soon establish six control centers across Iraq.⁸⁴ Under the contract, Aegis was also to provide up to seventy-five “close protection teams” to protect employees of the occupation authority’s Program Management Office from “assassination, kidnapping, injury and embarrassment.”⁸⁵ The deal pushed Aegis from an unprofitable company to one of the most successful ones operating in the war on terror. “The contract has taken us from a very small organization to a big one,” said Spicer, the largest single shareholder in Aegis. “Now we want to consolidate. We will go wherever the threat takes us.”⁸⁶ The awarding of the contract to Spicer sparked outrage from various sectors—including from other private military companies. Texas-based DynCorp, one of six original bidders for the contract, filed a protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office.⁸⁷ Aegis was not even on the list of State Department-recommended private military firms in Iraq.⁸⁸ Even Republican lawmakers were up in arms over the deal. Texas Congressman Pete Sessions, in supporting DynCorp, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, saying, “It is inconceivable that the firm charged with the responsibility for coordinating all security of firms and individuals performing reconstruction is one which has never even been in the country.”⁸⁹

Then there was the issue of Spicer’s past. In a letter to Rumsfeld shortly after the Aegis contract was announced, Senators John Kerry, Edward Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd, and Charles Schumer called on the Defense Secretary to order an Inspector General’s review of the contract, labeling Spicer “an individual with a history of supporting excessive use of force against a civilian population” and a man “who vigorously defends [human rights abuses].”⁹⁰ As evidence, the senators cited a Boston Globe article charging that Spicer has “a reputation for illicit arms deals in Africa and for commanding a murderous military unit in Northern Ireland.” ⁹¹ The senators’ protests apparently fell on deaf ears, as Spicer’s contract was renewed by the United States each of the following two years.⁹² “The contract is a case study in what not to do,” Peter Singer, the Brookings scholar, wrote in the New York Times.⁹³ Citing the already evident lack of coordination, oversight, and management of the mercenaries in Iraq, Singer asserted, “[O]utsourcing that very problem to another private company has a logic that would do only Kafka proud. In addition, it moves these companies further outside the bounds of public oversight.”⁹⁴

In late 2005 more controversy hit Aegis when a video was posted on a Web site run by a former Aegis employee that appeared to show private security contractors shooting at civilian vehicles driving on highways in Iraq.⁹⁵ The video looked as though it was filmed from a camera mounted in the rear window of an SUV. According to the Washington Post, “It contained several brief clips of cars being strafed by machine-gun fire, set to the music of the Elvis Presley song ‘Mystery Train.’ A version posted months later contained laughter and the voices of men joking with one another during the shootings. The scenes were aired widely on Arabic-language satellite television and prompted denunciations from several members of Congress.”⁹⁶ A subsequent investigation by the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division determined there was a “lack of probable cause to believe that a crime was committed.”⁹⁷ It also determined the incidents recorded were “within the rules for the use of force.”⁹⁸

The U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq audited Aegis in 2005 and found “There is no assurance that Aegis is providing the best safety and security for the government and reconstruction contractor personnel and facilities.”⁹⁹ Despite the controversy, what mattered to the industry was that “private military companies” were being brought closer to the fold and winning their legitimacy. “There have been a lot of changes in the way this industry works in the past ten years,” Tim Spicer said in late 2006. “What I was doing ten years ago was way ahead of its time. The catalyst has been the war on terror. The whole period since 9/11 has highlighted the need for a private security sector.”¹⁰⁰ By October 2006, there were an estimated twenty-one thousand mercenaries working for British firms in Iraq, compared to seventy-two hundred active duty British troops.¹⁰¹

Ambushed Again

In the summer of 2004, more private soldiers poured into Iraq, as the situation on the ground continued to deteriorate. In June, Blackwater commandos once again fell victim to an ambush that had echoes of the Fallujah killings. On the morning of Saturday, June 5, at about 10:30 a.m., two Blackwater sports utility vehicles were en route to the Baghdad airport.¹⁰² Blackwater /Alexander Strategy spokesperson Chris Bertelli said the men were on a mission relating to Blackwater’s ESS contract¹⁰³—like the one the four men killed at Fallujah were working under when they died. Bertelli identified it as a subcontract with Halliburton subsidiary KBR.¹⁰⁴ Working the Blackwater detail that morning was a mixture of U.S. and Polish contractors. One of the Americans, Chris Neidrich, had previously worked the Bremer motorcade detail.¹⁰⁵ In one of his last e-mails sent before the mission, Neidrich had joked with his friends about needing to drive ninety miles per hour in Iraq to avoid roadside bombs. “You know when I get home I’ll have to not drive for like two months,” Neidrich wrote. “Can’t remember the last time I drove slow, stopped for a light or stop sign or even a person.”¹⁰⁶ The Poles on the Blackwater team that day were former members of their country’s elite GROM (“Thunder”) forces who had left Poland’s official Iraq contingent and gone to work for Blackwater.¹⁰⁷ Gen. Slawomir Petelicki, former commander of the GROM, said Blackwater offered the Polish commandos $15,000 a month plus insurance.¹⁰⁸

As the Blackwater convoy sped along the four-lane highway to the airport, resistance fighters began tailing them in their own vehicles. “They were set up by four to five vehicles, full of armed men, all with automatic weapons,” said Bertelli. “It was a high-speed ambush.”¹⁰⁹ The resistance fighters reportedly fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the trailing Blackwater vehicle, hitting the gas tank and engulfing the vehicle in flames.¹¹⁰ The second Blackwater vehicle doubled back to assist, and a gun battle ensued. “It was a hell of a firefight,” said K.C. Poulin, owner of Critical Intervention Services, a private security company that had employed Neidrich for years in the United States. “They engaged hostiles in multiple vehicles. They expended all their ammunition in the fight. The attack was well orchestrated. These weren’t your run-of-the-mill terrorists.”¹¹¹ Blackwater said its men were outnumbered about twenty to seven.¹¹² In the end, Neidrich and another American were killed, along with two of the Polish contractors.¹¹³ The remaining three Blackwater guards reportedly managed to fight their way to the other side of the road, flag down a passing vehicle, and escape.¹¹⁴

The ambush took place on the main route from the Green Zone to the Baghdad airport and once again put Blackwater in the headlines. “Remember a year ago when Saddam’s spokesman, the wacky ‘Baghdad Bob,’ claimed that U.S. forces didn’t control the airport?” wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman about the ambush. “We shouldn’t have laughed. A year later, we still do not fully control the main road from Baghdad airport to Baghdad. You can’t build anything under those conditions.” Ironically, Blackwater would soon become one of the main high-paid taxi providers along this dangerous route—transporting clients in armored vehicles. The day after the ambush, with the chaos escalating in Iraq, the U.S.-installed Prime Minister-designate, Iyad Allawi, a former CIA asset, appeared to blame the violence on U.S. policy. He told Al Jazeera that “big mistakes” had been made by the United States in “dissolving the army, police services and internal security forces.”¹¹⁵ Allawi called for the Iraqi military to be reconstituted. The damage, though, had been done, and there were very few parties that benefited more from the violence than private military companies.

Paul Bremer snuck out of Iraq on June 28, 2004, two days ahead of the scheduled “handover of sovereignty.” As Bremer made his final rounds in Baghdad, saying good-bye to his Iraqi allies, the head of Bremer’s security detail, Frank Gallagher, insisted on increased security for the proconsul. “So this time he laid on seventeen extra Humvees to cover our convoy’s route, ordered all three Blackwater helicopters—each with two ‘shooters’—to fly just above our motorcade, and arranged with the military for a couple of Apache choppers to fly on our flanks and F-16 fighter bombers to fly top cover,” Bremer recalled.¹¹⁶ One of Bremer’s last official acts was to issue a decree immunizing Blackwater and other contractors from prosecution for any potential crimes committed in Iraq. On June 27, Bremer signed Order 17, which declared, “Contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal process with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Contract or any sub-contract thereto.”¹¹⁷ That same month, Senator Patrick Leahy attempted to attach an “Anti-War Profiteering” amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill that, among other provisions, would have created “extraterritorial jurisdiction over offenses committed overseas” by contractors.¹¹⁸ It was voted down.

Paul Bremer’s policies had left Blackwater firmly attached to the contract gravy train, not the least of which was the company’s prized contract to guard senior U.S. officials in Iraq. Blackwater would soon be responsible for the security of Bremer’s successor, Ambassador John Negroponte, a man notorious for his central role in the U.S. “dirty wars” in Central America in the 1980s.¹¹⁹ Known as the “proconsul” when he was U.S. Ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte helped oversee U.S. aid to the Contra death squads fighting to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua—a program Negroponte referred to as “our special project.”¹²⁰ Negroponte was also accused of covering up widespread human rights abuses by the U.S.-backed Honduran junta.¹²¹ Like several other officials from the Iran-Contra era, Negroponte was placed in a key position by the Bush administration. In Iraq, he would oversee the world’s largest Embassy and the biggest CIA station anywhere.¹²²

As Bremer left Iraq, there was a much bigger picture unfolding that Blackwater understood better, perhaps, than any other private military firm on the planet: a kairos moment was upon the new soldiers of fortune. Out of the carnage of Fallujah, Blackwater was leading the mercenary industry toward a level of legitimacy that years earlier would have seemed unimaginable. One of the broader goals of the neo-mercenary rebranding campaign has been acceptance as legitimate forces in the country’s national defense and security apparatuses. For Blackwater, the Bremer contract in Iraq was undoubtedly far more valuable than its incredibly lucrative price tag. It was prestigious and an invaluable marketing tool to win more clients and high-value government contracts. The company could boast that the U.S. government had entrusted it with the protection of its most senior officials on Washington’s hottest front line in the “war on terror.” It also gave the unmistakable impression that Blackwater operations had a U.S. government seal of approval.

While private military firms on the ground in Iraq battled each other for contracts, Blackwater was quietly rewarded with the attachment of a U.S.-taxpayer funded I.V. to the company’s headquarters in Moyock. In June 2004, at the end of Bremer’s tenure, Blackwater was handed one of the most valuable and prestigious U.S. government contracts on the market, through the State Department’s little-known Worldwide Personal Protective Service (WPPS) program.¹²³ State Department documents describe the WPPS program as a government “diplomatic security” initiative to protect U.S. officials and “certain foreign government high level officials whenever the need arises.” In the government documents, the work is described as “providing armed, qualified, protective services details” and, if ordered, “Counter Assault Teams and Long Range Marksman teams.” The companies might also provide translators and perform intelligence work. The State Department warned the companies to “Ensure that contractor-assigned protective detail personnel are prepared to, and in fact shall operate and live in austere, at times unsettled conditions, anywhere in the world.” The contract also said that if necessary, “personnel, who are American citizens, will be issued an appropriate, official or diplomatic passport.” Private contractors were also authorized to recruit and train foreign nationals and to “conduct protective security operations overseas with them.”

In soliciting bids for the 2004 global contract, the State Department cited a need born of “the continual turmoil in the Mid East, and the post-war stabilization efforts by the United States Government in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq.” It said the government “is unable to provide protective services on a long-term basis from its pool of special agents, thus, outside contractual support is required.”

The WPPS contract was divided among a handful of well-connected mercenary companies, among them DynCorp and Triple Canopy. Blackwater was originally slated to be paid $229.5 million for five years, according to a State Department contract list. Yet as of June 30, 2006, just two years into the program, it had been paid a total of $321,715,794. A government spokesperson later said the estimated value of the contract through September 2006 was $337 million.¹²⁴ By late 2007, Blackwater had been paid more than $750 million under the contract. A heavily redacted 2005 government-commissioned audit of Blackwater’s WPPS contract proposal charged that Blackwater included profit in its overhead and its total costs, which would result “not only in a duplication of profit but a pyramiding of profit since in effect Blackwater is applying profit to profit.”¹²⁵ The audit also alleged that the company tried to inflate its profits by representing different Blackwater divisions as wholly separate companies.¹²⁶

For Blackwater, the WPPS contract was a milestone that solidified the company’s role as the preferred mercenary firm of the U.S. government, the elite private guard for the administration’s global war. In late November 2004, Blackwater president Gary Jackson sent out a mass e-mail celebrating President Bush’s reelection and Blackwater’s new contract: “Well, the Presidential elections are over, the masses spoke, the liberals are lined up at health clinics receiving treatment for Post Election Selection Trauma, and President Bush’s war on terror will continue to move forward for the next four years. Our military is doing a fabulous job in fighting the war on terrorism as is apparent by the results of the most recent victory in the Battle of Fallujah. As Iraq continues to become more stable the Department of State will be sending in more U.S. Government Officials to assist Iraq in becoming a democracy. Even though the majority of Iraqis want democracy there will still be those terrorist[s] who do not, and they are a high-threat to the safety of our Officials. These Officials need professional protection and the Department of State, Bureau of Diplomatic Security has chosen and contracted Blackwater Security Consulting to assist their organization in providing that protection.”¹²⁷ Jackson excitedly announced that for qualified candidates wishing to “get involved in stabilizing Iraq and supporting the President’s war on terrorism… now is the time to join Blackwater.”¹²⁸