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

WHEN PAUL Bremer skulked out of Iraq on June 28, 2004, he left behind a violent, chaotic mess that the White House called “a free and sovereign” Iraq.¹ Just how unstable the country was when Bremer departed was evident in the fact that he actually had to stage an exit in one plane for the press and then fly out of Baghdad in another to “get me out of here… preferably in one piece.”² In real terms, this “sovereignty,” which President Bush described as “the Iraqi people hav[ing] their country back,”³ was a way to set the stage for U.S. officials to blame the puppet government in Baghdad for the worsening American-made disaster. When Bremer’s secret flight fled Iraq, anti-U.S. attacks were increasing by the day as more mercenaries poured into the country—now officially operating with immunity. In the meantime, more Iraqi factions began arming militias, and talk of civil war began drowning out that of a united resistance to the U.S. occupation. It was in the midst of these developments that Bremer’s successor arrived on the ground in Baghdad.

Ambassador John Negroponte was certainly no stranger to wanton bloodletting and death-squad-style operations, having cut his teeth working under Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War.⁴ Beginning in 1981, Negroponte was the Reagan administration’s point man in fueling death squads in Central America.⁵ As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte had presided over the second largest embassy in Latin America at the time and the largest CIA station in the world.⁶ From that post, Negroponte had coordinated Washington’s covert support for the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and for the Honduran junta, covering up the crimes of its murderous Battalion 316.⁷ During Negroponte’s tenure in Honduras, U.S. officials who worked under him said the State Department human rights reports on the country were drafted to read more like Norway’s than anything reflecting the actual reality in Honduras.⁸ Negroponte’s predecessor in Honduras, Ambassador Jack R. Binns, told the New York Times that Negroponte had discouraged reporting to Washington of abductions, torture, and killings by notorious Honduran military units. “I think [Negroponte] was complicit in abuses, I think he tried to put a lid on reporting abuses and I think he was untruthful to Congress about those activities,” Binns said.⁹ The Wall Street Journal reported that in Honduras, “Negroponte’s influence, backed by huge amounts of U.S. aid, was so great that it was said he far outweighed the country’s president and that his only real rival was Honduras’s military chief.”¹⁰ He was “such a powerful ambassador in Honduras in the early 1980s that he was known as ‘the proconsul,’ a title given to powerful administrators in colonial times,” the Journal noted in a story published shortly after Negroponte’s nomination to the Iraq post. “Now President Bush has chosen him to reprise that role in Iraq.”¹¹

Perhaps there was little irony, then, that shortly after Negroponte’s appointment as ambassador to Iraq, in April 2004, the Honduran government announced it was pulling its 370 troops out of the “coalition of the willing.”¹² Despite Negroponte’s well-documented record of involvement with a policy of horrible human rights abuses and killings, his confirmation as ambassador to Iraq went smoothly—he was approved by the Senate in a 95-3 vote on May 6, 2004. Senator Tom Harkin, who as a Congressman in the 1980s had investigated Negroponte’s activities in Central America, said he wished he had done more to stop Negroponte’s appointment. “I’ve been amazed at how this individual—from what he did in Central America, where under his watch hundreds of people disappeared—has moved up. He falsified reports and ignored what was happening,” Harkin said. “This is going to be our ambassador to Iraq at this time?”¹³

Negroponte was guarded by Blackwater’s forces upon his arrival in Baghdad in June and as he stepped up the development of the largest U.S. Embassy in the world—overseeing an estimated staff of thirty-seven hundred, including twenty-five hundred security personnel, “a unit only slightly smaller than a full Marine Corps regiment.”¹⁴ In an echo of his time in Honduras, the Baghdad Embassy would house some five hundred CIA operatives.¹⁵ At the same time, Blackwater had just been awarded a vaunted diplomatic security contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars.¹⁶ But it wasn’t just American private armies that were making their mark in Iraq. In addition to the mercenary companies increasingly being employed by the occupation forces and reconstruction industry, there was also a sharp rise in death-squad-style activities in the country in the months directly following the brief joint uprising of Shiites and Sunnis in March/April 2004.

Six months after Negroponte arrived, on January 8, 2005, Newsweek reported that the United States was employing a new approach to defeating the insurgency in Iraq, one that harkened back to Negroponte’s previous dirty work two decades earlier.¹⁷ It was called “the Salvador option,” which “dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported ‘nationalist’ forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers.” ¹⁸ The idea seemed to be that the United States would seek to use Iraqi death squads to hunt anti-occupation insurgents, while at the same time siphoning resources from the resistance and encouraging sectarian fighting. While Rumsfeld called the Newsweek report (which he admitted to not having read) “nonsense,”¹⁹ the situation on the ground painted a different picture.

By February 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported from Baghdad that about fifty-seven thousand Iraqi soldiers were operating in “planned units” that were “the result of careful preparation this summer between the U.S. and Iraqi commanders.”²⁰ At the same time, the country saw the emergence of militias “commanded by friends and relatives of [Iraqi] cabinet officers and tribal sheiks—[they] go by names like the Defenders of Baghdad, the Special Police Commandos, the Defenders of Khadamiya and the Amarah Brigade. The new units generally have the backing of the Iraqi government and receive government funding…. Some Americans consider them a welcome addition to the fight against the insurgency—though others worry about the risks.”²¹ U.S. commanders referred to them as “pop-up” units and estimated they numbered fifteen thousand fighters. “I’ve begun calling them ‘Irregular Iraqi ministry-directed brigades,’” said Maj. Chris Wales, who was tasked in January 2005 with identifying the units.²² The Wall Street Journal identified at least six of these militias, one with “several thousand soldiers” lavishly armed with “rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, mortar tubes and lots of ammunition.” One militia, the “Special Police Commandos,” was founded by Gen. Adnan Thabit, who took part in the failed 1996 coup plot against Saddam Hussein. Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who in 2005 was “overseeing the massive U.S. effort to help train and equip Iraqi military units,” told the Journal he gave Thabit’s unit funding to fix up its base and buy vehicles, ammunition, radios, and more weapons. “I decided this was a horse to back,” Petraeus said.²³

Upon his arrival in Baghdad, Negroponte joined up with other U.S. officials who were veterans of the U.S. “dirty wars” in Central America—among them Bremer’s ex-deputy, James Steele, who had been one of the key U.S. military officials managing Washington’s brutal “counterinsurgency” campaign in El Salvador in the 1980s.²⁴ “The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, to which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980,” wrote journalist Peter Maass at the time in The New York Times Magazine²⁵:

Newsweek described the “Salvador option” in Iraq as the United States using “Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers.”²⁷ The magazine also reported that then-interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi “is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option.”²⁸ This was interesting, given that the New York Times reported, “Negroponte had taken a low-key approach, choosing to remain in the shadows in deference to Ayad Allawi.”²⁹

Though allegations that the United States was engaged in Salvador-type operations in Iraq predate Negroponte’s tenure in Baghdad, they did seem to intensify significantly once he arrived. As early as January 2004, journalist Robert Dreyfuss reported on the existence of a covert U.S. program in Iraq that resembled “the CIA’s Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, Latin America’s death squads or Israel’s official policy of targeted murders of Palestinian activists.”³⁰ The United States, Dreyfuss reported, had established a $3 billion “black” fund hidden within the $87 billion Iraq appropriation approved by Congress in November 2003. The money would be used to create “a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups. Experts say it could lead to a wave of extrajudicial killings, not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists.”³¹ The former CIA chief of counterterrorism, Vincent Cannistraro, said U.S. forces in Iraq were working with key members of Saddam Hussein’s defunct intelligence apparatus. “They’re setting up little teams of Seals and Special Forces with teams of Iraqis, working with people who were former senior Iraqi intelligence people, to do these things,” Cannistraro said.³² “The big money would be for standing up an Iraqi secret police to liquidate the resistance,” said John Pike, an expert on covert military budgets. “And it has to be politically loyal to the United States.”³³

Veteran journalist Allan Nairn, who exposed U.S.-backed death squads in Central America in the 1980s, said whether Negroponte was involved with the “Salvador option” in Iraq or not, “These programs, which backed the killing of foreign civilians, it’s a regular part of U.S. policy. It’s ingrained in U.S. policy in dozens upon dozens of countries.”³⁴ Duane Clarridge, who ran the CIA’s “covert war against communism in Central America from Honduras,” visited his old colleague Negroponte in Baghdad in the summer of 2004. In Iraq, “[Negroponte] was told to play a low-key role and let the Iraqis be out front,” Clarridge told the New York Times. “And that’s what he likes to do, anyway.”³⁵ According to the Times, “Negroponte shifted more than $1 billion to build up the Iraqi Army from reconstruction projects, a move prompted by his experience with the frailty of the South Vietnamese Army.”³⁶

Negroponte called the connection of his name to the “Salvador option” in Iraq “utterly gratuitous.”³⁷ But human rights advocates who closely monitored his career said the rise in death-squad-type activity in Iraq during Negroponte’s tenure in Baghdad was impossible to overlook. “What we’re seeing is that the U.S. military is losing the war [in Iraq], and so the Salvador option was really a policy of death squads,” said Andres Contreris, Latin American program director of the human rights group Non-violence International. “It’s no coincidence that Negroponte, having been the Ambassador in Honduras, where he was very much engaged in this kind of support for death squads, was the Ambassador in Iraq, and this is the kind of policy that was starting to be implemented there, which is not just going after the resistance itself but targeting for repression and torture and assassination the underlying support base, the family members, and those in the communities where the resistance is. These kinds of policies are war crimes.”³⁸

Negroponte’s time in Iraq was short-lived—on February 17, 2005, President Bush nominated him as the first Director of National Intelligence. Some would say Negroponte had a job to do in Iraq, he did it, and then left. By May of that year, he was back in the United States, while reports increasingly appeared describing an increase in death-squad-style activity in Iraq. “Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country’s divide along ethnic and sectarian lines,” the Washington Post reported a few months after Negroponte left Iraq.³⁹ “In 2005, we saw numerous instances where the behavior of death squads was very similar, uncannily similar to that we had observed in other countries, including El Salvador,” said John Pace, a forty-year United Nations diplomat who served as the Human Rights Chief for the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq during Negroponte’s time in the country. “They first started as a kind of militia, sort of organized armed groups, which were the military wing of various factions.”⁴⁰ Eventually, he said, “Many of them [were] actually acting as official police agents as a part of the Ministry of Interior…. You have these militias now with police gear and under police insignia basically carrying out an agenda which really is not in the interest of the country as a whole. They have roadblocks in Baghdad and other areas, they would kidnap other people. They have been very closely linked with numerous mass executions.”⁴¹

Shortly before Negroponte left Iraq, former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter predicted that “the Salvador Option will serve as the impetus for all-out civil war. In the same manner that the CPA-backed assassination of Baathists prompted the restructuring and strengthening of the Sunni-led resistance, any effort by US-backed Kurdish and Shia assassination teams to target Sunni resistance leaders will remove all impediments for a general outbreak of ethnic and religious warfare in Iraq. It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members, and many more Iraqis.”⁴² Ritter’s vision would appear prophetic in the ensuing months, as Iraq was hit with an unprecedented and sustained level of violence many began describing as an all-out civil war.

In October 2005, correspondent Tom Lasseter from the Knight Ridder news agency spent a week on patrol with “a crack unit of the Iraqi army—the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Division.”⁴³ He reported, “Instead of rising above the ethnic tension that’s tearing their nation apart, the mostly Shiite troops are preparing for, if not already fighting, a civil war against the minority Sunni population.” The unit was responsible for security in Sunni areas of Baghdad, and Lasseter reported that “they’re seeking revenge against the Sunnis who oppressed them during Saddam Hussein’s rule.” He quoted Shiite Army Maj. Swadi Ghilan saying he wanted to kill most Sunnis in Iraq. “There are two Iraqs; it’s something that we can no longer deny,” Ghilan said. “The army should execute the Sunnis in their neighborhoods so that all of them can see what happens, so that all of them learn their lesson.”

Lasseter reported that many of the Shiite officers and soldiers said they “want a permanent, Shiite-dominated government that will finally allow them to steamroll much of the Sunni minority, some 20 percent of the nation and the backbone of the insurgency.” Lasseter described the First Brigade, which was held up by U.S. commanders as a template for the future of Iraq’s military, like this: “They look and operate less like an Iraqi national army unit and more like a Shiite militia.” Another officer, Sgt. Ahmed Sabri, said, “Just let us have our constitution and elections… and then we will do what Saddam did—start with five people from each neighborhood and kill them in the streets and then go from there.” By November 2006 an estimated one thousand Iraqis were being killed every week,⁴⁴ and the Iraqi death toll had passed an estimated six hundred thousand people since the March 2003 invasion.⁴⁵

In retrospect, if one stepped back from the various substories playing out on the ground in Iraq in 2005, the big-picture reality was that the country was quickly becoming the global epicenter of privatized warfare with scores of heavily armed groups of various loyalties and agendas roaming Iraq. In addition to the U.S.-backed death squads, operating with some claim to legitimacy within the U.S.-installed system in Baghdad, there were the private antioccupation militias of various Shiite leaders, such as Muqtada al-Sadr, and the resistance movements of Sunni factions, largely comprised of ex-military officials and soldiers, as well as Al Qaeda-backed militias. The Bush administration made it a policy to denounce certain militias. “In a free Iraq, former militia members must shift their loyalty to the national government, and learn to operate under the rule of law,” Bush declared.⁴⁶ Yet at the top of this militia pyramid were the official mercenaries Washington had imported to Iraq—the private military companies, of which Blackwater was the industry leader. While calling for the dismantling of some Iraqi militias, the United States openly permitted its own pro-occupation mercenaries to operate above the law in Iraq.

“There Continues to Be the Need for This Kind of Security”

At the end of Negroponte’s time in Baghdad, with militia violence on the rise, Blackwater’s forces once again grabbed headlines in what would be—at the time—the deadliest incident the company acknowledged publicly in Iraq. On April 21, 2005, the day Negroponte was confirmed to his new position as Director of National Intelligence in Washington, some of his former bodyguards were dying in Iraq.⁴⁷ That day, a Bulgarian-operated Mi-8 helicopter on contract with Blackwater was flying from the Green Zone to Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.⁴⁸ On board were six American Blackwater troops on contract with the U.S. government’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.⁴⁹ With them were three Bulgarian crew members and two Fijian mercenaries.⁵⁰ A day before they left, one of the Blackwater men, twenty-nine-year-old Jason Obert of Colorado, had called his wife, Jessica. He “told me that he was going to be sent on a mission. He had a bad feeling about it,” she recalled. “I begged him not to go. I just told him just to come home. But he would never quit; that’s not him.”⁵¹ Jessica Obert said her husband did not tell her the nature of the mission. Like many who signed up for work with Blackwater in Iraq, Jason Obert viewed it as a chance to build a nest egg for his wife and their two young sons.⁵² In February 2005, he quit his job as a police officer and signed up with Blackwater. “The financial gain was incredible,” said Lt. Robert King, Obert’s former boss at the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department. “He had communicated to me and several other people that he would do one year, and his children and his wife would be taken care of. Their college education would be funded, houses paid off.”⁵³ The day after he told his wife about his “bad feelings,” he boarded the Mi-8 helicopter with his Blackwater colleagues, the Fijians, and the Bulgarian crew.

At about 1:45 in the afternoon, as the helicopter buzzed toward Tikrit, it passed near the Tigris River town of Tarmiya, a small community of Sunni Muslims twelve miles north of Baghdad.⁵⁴ The pilots were flying the craft low to the ground, a common military tactic to thwart potential attackers. On an elevated plain nearby stood an Iraqi who reportedly had been waiting three days for an occupation aircraft to come close enough so that he could carry out his mission.⁵⁵ When the chopper whizzed within range, the Iraqi fired off a Soviet-made Strela heat-seeking missile and directly hit the helicopter, setting it ablaze as it crashed into the flat desert.⁵⁶ The attacker and his comrades filmed the attack and kept the cameras rolling as they jogged toward the crash site. On their video, they can be heard out of breath repeating the chant “Allah-u-Akbar! Allah-u-Akbar!” When they arrive at the site, helicopter parts are spread across the open field and several small fires continue to burn. A badly charred body of one of the dead men lies on the ground with one arm raised in an L shape as though cowering from some form of attack.⁵⁷ “Look at this filth,” says one of the attackers. “See if there are any Americans left.”⁵⁸

The attackers continue to explore the remains of the helicopter when they come across the Bulgarian pilot, Lyubomir Kostov, in a dark blue flight suit lying in a patch of tall grass. One of the men, realizing Kostov is still alive, shouts in Arabic and English, “Any weapons?” The camera pans to the pilot as he winces in pain. “Stand up! Stand up!” one of the attackers shouts in accented English. “I can’t,” replies the pilot. Motioning to his right leg, Kostov tells them, “I can’t, it’s broken. Give me a hand.” One of the attackers replies, “Come here, come here,” as he helps Kostov to his feet. “Go! Go!” someone shouts at the pilot. Kostov turns around and begins to limp away with his back to the camera. As he hobbles forward, Kostov turns his head around and puts his hand up as though to say, “Stop!” when someone suddenly yells, “Carry out God’s judgment.” The attackers, shouting “Allah-u-Akbar,” open fire on Kostov, filming the execution as they pump eighteen bullets into his body, continuing to shoot the pilot even after he has fallen.

Within two hours, a group identifying itself as the Islamic Army in Iraq provided the video to Al Jazeera, which broadcast it. “Heroes of the Islamic Army downed a transport aircraft belonging to the army of the infidels and killed its crew and those on board,” the group said in a written statement that accompanied the video. “One of the crew members was captured and killed.”⁵⁹ The group said it had executed the surviving pilot “in revenge for the Muslims who have been killed in cold blood in the mosques of tireless Fallujah before the eyes of the world and on television screens, without anyone condemning them.”⁶⁰ The statement was interpreted as a reference to the apparent execution by a U.S. soldier of a wounded Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque in November 2004 (which was caught on tape) during the second U.S. assault on the city.⁶¹

In a statement released shortly after the helicopter was shot down, Blackwater said the “Six were passengers in a commercial helicopter operated by Sky Link under contract to Blackwater in support of a Department of Defense contract.”⁶² Despite its obvious military use, media reports overwhelmingly referred to the helicopter as a “civilian” or “commercial” aircraft. Reporters at the Pentagon, meanwhile, began reporting that “these commercial aircraft fly without the type of air protective measures that military aircraft fly with.”⁶³ Shortly after the helicopter was downed, retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd, who once headed the Air National Guard, told CNN, “All of the airplanes over there, if possible, should have infrared countermeasures and flares to protect themselves against shoulder-fired missiles, which are the biggest threat to low-flying helicopters…. Once an infrared shoulder-fired missile is fired at you, you can confuse it and divert either with flares or with sophisticated maneuvers.”⁶⁴ Shepperd added, “All those protect you.”⁶⁵ At the Pentagon press briefing after the shoot-down, a reporter asked spokesman Larry Di Rita about the apparent lack of these “countermeasures” on the Blackwater-contracted helicopter:

Unlike the Pentagon—which was limited by budget constraints—Blackwater was limited in its ability to defend its personnel only by its own spending decisions and by how much it was willing to shell out for defensive countermeasures. “I have concerns for many of the contractors who are still over there,” said Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, who already was suing Blackwater for her son’s death in Fallujah. “Our government seems to be subcontracting out this war, and these companies have no accountability.”⁶⁷

The same day the helicopter was shot down, forty-two-year-old Curtis Hundley was working a Blackwater security detail outside the city of Ramadi, not far from the site of the helicopter shoot-down. He was just a few days away from a return trip home to his wife in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. ⁶⁸ “When the war in Iraq started, he wanted to fight for our country,” according to his father, Steve Hundley, a former helicopter pilot who fought in Vietnam. “Too old to rejoin the Army, he joined Blackwater Security. That put him on the roads in Iraq almost daily, the most dangerous place to be. I’ve never seen him more proud. He enjoyed throwing candy to kids along the road. Like me in Vietnam, at first, he thought progress was pretty good. But civilian miscalculations—such as not sending over enough troops to secure ammo dumps and borders, and then deactivating the entire Iraq army, which instantly created thousands of potential terrorists—began to take effect. I saw my happy-go-lucky son start to harden. His eyes, which always had had a twinkle, were different in the pictures he sent. When I could get him to talk about his job, he began to sound disgusted at the worsening situation. The last several weeks of his life, disgust had turned to anger.”⁶⁹ Curtis Hundley died in Ramadi on April 21, when a bomb exploded near a company armored personnel carrier.⁷⁰ Hundley’s death meant that with the helicopter crash, Blackwater had lost seven men in Iraq that day, its deadliest to date in the war. “Blackwater’s Black Day,” proclaimed one news headline.⁷¹

Back in Moyock, company executives quickly mobilized their response. “This is a very sad day for the Blackwater family,” said president Gary Jackson. “We lost seven of our friends to attacks by terrorists in Iraq and our thoughts and prayers go out to their family members.”⁷² A company press release said, “Blackwater has a 15-member team of crisis counselors working with those family members to assist them in coping with the loss of their loved ones.”⁷³ At the State Department, meanwhile, the seven men were eulogized as heroes. “These Blackwater contractors were supporting the State Department mission in Iraq, and were critical to our efforts to protect American diplomats there,” said Assistant Secretary of State Joe Morton. “These brave men gave their lives so that Iraqis may someday enjoy the freedom and democracy we enjoy here in America.”⁷⁴

Once again, the killing of Blackwater forces in Iraq had cast the spotlight back on the secretive world of mercenary companies. “The fact of the matter is that private security firms have been involved in Iraq from the very beginning, so this is nothing new,” said State Department spokesperson Adam Ereli, responding to questions from the press. “There’s a need for security that goes beyond what employees of the U.S. Government can provide, and we go to private companies to offer that. That’s a common practice. It’s not unique to Iraq. We do it around the world.”⁷⁵ In Iraq, Ereli said, “I think it’s a statement of the obvious to say that the conditions… are such that it’s not completely safe to go throughout the country at all parts, at all times, so there continues to be the need for security—for this kind of security protection.”⁷⁶

Those words must have been music to Blackwater’s ears: There continues to be the need for this kind of security. Once again, the death of Blackwater contractors translated into more support for the mercenary cause. The day after the seven Blackwater mercenaries died in Iraq, the U.S. Senate approved a controversial $81 billion spending bill for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, pushing the total cost of the wars to more than $300 billion.⁷⁷ More money was being allocated for “security” in Iraq. Some 1,564 U.S. soldiers had died since the invasion,⁷⁸ along with an uncounted number of mercenaries. It was a year after the Blackwater ambush in Fallujah, and business had never been better for Erik Prince and his colleagues, despite the confirmed deaths of eighteen Blackwater contractors in Iraq.⁷⁹ Back in the U.S., the Blackwater Empire was about to add another powerful former Bush administration official to its roster.