Read Armed Humanitarians Online
Authors: Nathan Hodge
These new embassy buildings, Loeffler writes,
became symbols of the United States and its desire to be perceived as an energetic and future-oriented nation. Thus the buildings themselves served as cultural advertisements, propaganda perhaps, but nothing less than reflection of architectural theory married to political necessity. Not surprisingly, the symbols themselves were ambiguousâat once elegant and refined, decorative and flamboyant. Though often concealed behind wood, metal, or masonry screens, the buildings called attention to themselves with the openness of their glass walls, their overall accessibility, and their conspicuous newness.
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The violent, tumultuous 1960s and 1970s forced something of a rethink in U.S. embassy design. The Viet Cong assault on the fortresslike U.S. embassy compound in Saigon during the 1968 Tet Offensive was a tactical failure, but it had a profound symbolic effect. Images of the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975 and the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 further underscored the vulnerability of U.S. diplomatic missions overseas. The decisive shift away from open embassy design occurred in the aftermath of the suicide bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983, an incident that claimed the lives of seventeen Americans and thirty-four Lebanese employees and decimated the CIA's Middle East operation, which was based out of the compound.
In the wake of the bombing, Secretary of State George Shultz appointed a retired admiral, Bobby Inman, to head an advisory panel on diplomatic security. His report, which came out in 1985, identified vulnerable facilities overseas, and it recommended stringent new building standards for U.S. embassies.
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No more sleek, smoked-glass facades: Buildings would have blast-proof walls and windows and would be surrounded by high walls, security cameras, and monitors. The panel recommended that the State Department embark on a long-term plan to renovate or replace office buildings at 126 overseas posts in order to reduce their vulnerability to attack. Instead of the open plan, embassies would have to be designed around a new principle: “setback.” New embassy compounds would have layered defenses. They would be built at least one hundred feet from the street, have a more forbidding outer perimeter, and be far less accessible.
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And they would no longer be situated in busy downtown areas and open to visitors, which would make the job of public diplomacy much harder. The embassy and its inhabitants would become more isolated from the world outside.
Equally important, the Inman report called for creation of a Bureau of Diplomatic Security. The bureau was given a wide remit: issue security clearances for diplomatic personnel; conduct background checks; investigate passport and visa fraud; and supervise the security of diplomatic and consular offices. It was also to provide bodyguard details for the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and foreign VIPs visiting the United States. Diplomatic Security special agents are federal law enforcement officers. In the United States, they help guard foreign embassies and consulates. Overseas, they serve as regional security officers responsible for embassy security and the safety of diplomatic personnel.
The bureau, however, was not equipped to handle a massive nation-building enterprise. The Inman panel originally recommended a force of 1,156 special agents, hardly enough to take on the full range of missions at the time. (Two decades later, the bureau had grown to about 1,450 special agents.) In the mid-1990s, the bureau began quietly augmenting its force with contracted personal security specialists, first hiring contractors to provide security in Haiti, then deploying them to the Balkans, Gaza, and the West Bank. The State Department also contracted DynCorp to provide personal security details to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan in 2002.
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The invasion of Iraq and the deployment of diplomats and civilians to work in reconstruction projects created an explosion in demand for contracted security. The Coalition Provisional Authority was a major customer for private guards. It hired a previously obscure company called Blackwater to provide a high-end protective detail for Ambassador Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Gulf Region District, which oversaw massive infrastructure projects in Iraq, also hired its own army of private security operators to ferry its engineers and specialists around the country. Through the Corps, the military even hired a contractor to oversee the other contractors. With so many private security convoys operating on the roads, competing firms needed to find a way to share intelligence about threat conditions: routes that were safest to travel, places where roadside bomb attacks and ambushes were taking place, no-go areas where coalition forces were conducting combat operations. They also needed to reduce the risk of shooting at each other or being shot at by coalition forces. Well-armed private security details often traveled in unmarked vehicles. They were easy to mistake for insurgents, and on more than a few occasions, private security details and military forces mistakenly shot at each other (something euphemistically referred to as “blue-on-white” incidents, a reference to friendly, or “blue” forces, and contractors, referred to in military shorthand as “white” forces).
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In May 2004, the British security firm Aegis Defence Services Ltd. won the first Reconstruction Security Support Services contract to build the Reconstruction Operations Center as a hub to oversee a network of reconstruction projects. The ROC was supposed to serve as an interface between uniformed troops and private security. It tracked contractor vehicles with transponders and distributed sanitized military intelligence such as the grid coordinates of recent roadside bomb attacks and information on threat levels. It was also supposed to introduce some kind of accountability and oversight. Security operators were supposed to file route plans and report weapons discharges. The system evolved into a network of six regional ROCs as well as a national intelligence center in Baghdad. The company subsequently won two extensions to a contract initially worth $293 million, and the ROC contract effectively put Aegis on the map.
Iraq in 2003 and 2004 was a Klondike for security firms. Previously unknown firms such as Custer Battles, a start-up founded by two former Army Rangers, scored multi-million-dollar awards to provide security in the chaotic postwar environment. As the
Wall Street Journal
reported, no banks would lend new firms money, so the Coalition Provisional Authority had to lend Custer Battles $2 million. It arrived in the form of $100 bills that one of the company founders had to stow in a duffel bag and deposit in a Lebanese bank.
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What private security providers called the “Baghdad bubble” created enormous new opportunities in a relative niche market for high-end security services. In early 2003, before the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime, ArmorGroup had conducted a survey of the total global market for “high-end” protective security (bodyguard services for government clients in war zones and other high-threat areas). They estimated a total global market of $900 million per year. In 2007 the company repeated the survey. The estimated value of the security market had risen to $2.5 billion.
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Before Iraq, low-key British firms such as Control Risks and Global, companies often staffed by former commandos from British and Commonwealth armies, dominated the private security field, providing bodyguard services, security consulting for high-risk regions, and occasionally kidnap-and-ransom negotiation services. But with the American government now the biggest customer in Iraq, there were glowing prospects for U.S. firmsâespecially when they could recruit U.S. citizens with security clearances.
The biggest players in this new market were three U.S. firms: Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and DynCorp. In early 2004, as the Coalition Provisional Authority prepared to hand over power to a provisional Iraqi government, the State Department issued additional task orders to its Worldwide Personal Protective Services contract to hire additional contracted security for the planned opening of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on July 1, 2004. DynCorp was unable to meet the rush requirements for additional guards and personnel, so the State Department signed a second contract, with Blackwater.
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Meanwhile, Triple Canopy won a key contract to provide protective services for the Regional Embassy Office in Basra.
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In July 2005, the State Department formalized the arrangement, selecting the three U.S. security firms to compete for task orders under the new Worldwide Personal Protective Services (WPPS) II contract, a program worth a potential $1.2 billion to each contractor over five years to provide protective services to U.S. diplomatic personnel in war zones. WPPS II task orders included missions in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, and Israel. The private guard force would help protect a gargantuan new embassy rising on the Tigris River, a billion-dollar complex the size of Vatican City that would house a thousand diplomats.
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The new U.S. Embassy Baghdad was the logical culmination of the Inman standards. Many details of the design remained classified, but a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report in 2006 offered some hints of the scale of the project, and the degree to which this giant fortress would isolate U.S. diplomats from the Red Zone of Baghdad. The building would be “hardened” (reinforced to withstand rocket and mortar attacks); self-sufficient (it would have its own generating station, wells, and wastewater treatment facilities); and it would have extraordinary “setback” (the walled perimeter would be ringed with multiple layers of defense, plus an emergency entrance-exit). Loeffler, the historian of U.S. diplomatic architecture, describes it as a modern-day fortress. “Encircled by blast walls and cut off from the rest of Baghdad, it stands out like the crusader castles that once dotted the landscape of the Middle East.”
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The presence of contractors presented a major headache for military commanders, who were wary of hired guns moving around in “their” battlespace. The U.S. military likes to maintain a monopoly on lethal force wherever it operates, and the heavily armed contractor convoys were not under their direct control. Revisions to defense contracting regulations were supposed to tighten oversight of the army of contractors to make sure they complied with both local and U.S. laws, including the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, or MEJA, which theoretically allowed for prosecution under local laws of private contractors employed by the military in foreign countries. But they did not resolve the question of who, ultimately, had legal jurisdiction and control over contractors in Iraq.
I accompanied an Erinys team on a trip to Camp Taji, a sprawling U.S. military installation north of Baghdad that had once been a base for a Republican Guard tank division. The U.S. government had invested a serious amount of money in base infrastructure, and the day's mission was to pick up a “client,” an engineer working on a construction project at Taji, and deliver him safely to the Green Zone. The trip to Taji from downtown Baghdad should have been a half-hour trip, but driving on Iraqi roads was a risky affair. Insurgents were designing increasingly lethal roadside bombs, and the contractors were particularly worried about a new threat, the “explosively formed projectile,” or EFP.
Unlike typical roadside bombs, made of an artillery shell buried beneath a road or concealed in some trash, an EFP was what some militaries called an “off-route mine,” because it was placed beside a road. An EEP was fabricated out of metal pipe and packed with a high-explosive charge; the business end was sealed with a concave plate, or liner. When the charge went off, the force of the blast turned the liner into a slug of molten metal that could slice through the door of an armored vehicle at supersonic speed. The EFPs were often tripped by passive infrared sensors. When the beam was broken, the bomb went off.
The trip to Taji took an anxious two hours because of an emergency detour. “That road is incredibly dangerousâit's perfect for setting up an ambush,” said one of the Russians. “The Americans and the Iraqis patrol Route Irish [the Baghdad Airport road] all the time, but on that road, you hardly see any patrols. By the end of the day, you're totally wound up.”
Driving through downtown Baghdad was a nightmare for ordinary Iraqis as well. Contractor SUV motorcades drove aggressively, turning on sirens to force other drivers to the side of the road. Get too close, and you might get a warning shot. But there was a reason for the “tactical driving”: If you didn't keep moving, you became a target. So when one of the armored SUVs in the Erinys convoy got stuck traversing a low concrete barrier, the shooters jumped out of the trucks to form a hasty roadblock, their rifles at the ready. One of the bodyguards, a lanky Ukrainian, stepped out to halt oncoming traffic. At least 6 feet 5, wearing full body armor and wraparound shades, he didn't need to point his weapon. He stood with his left hand raised, and the Iraqi drivers quickly stopped.
Fortunately, an Iraqi National Guard patrol was nearby. They quickly blocked all the civilian traffic merging from an access road and pulled around their truck, attached a chain, and towed the SUV free. The team members exchanged parting handshakes, boarded their vehicles, and turned back down the access road. We had to make a U-turn and reverse course through central Baghdad. As we sped away, I looked at the faces of the drivers in the opposite lane, where traffic was now backed up all the way to the next intersection; it was easy to see why Iraqis resented the contractors.
The military didn't like the contractors, either, at least not the armed ones. Colonel Peter Mansoor, an Iraq veteran and a member of the Petraeus brain trust, explained the dilemma to me at Fort Leavenworth in the fall of 2006: Logistics contractors like KBR fit neatly in the military chain of command. But the security firms “could not be controlled. They work for whoever hires them, they work under different rules of engagement than the military, they don't always have the same communications capabilities. They don't always have robust access to quick reaction forcesâreinforcementsâif they get into trouble.”