Armed Humanitarians (32 page)

Part of the problem, military officers realized, was that bodyguards' primary mission was to protect diplomats, civilian reconstruction experts, and other VIPs. They could be very good at their jobs, but at the expense of the larger nation-building mission. “Their limited role to protect the client may conflict with the overall mission, which is counterinsurgency,” Mansoor said. “And if they push traffic off the roads or if they shoot up a car that looks suspicious—whatever it may be, they may be operating within their contract—[it's] to the detriment of the mission, which is to bring the people over to your side. I would much rather see basically all armed entities in a counterinsurgency operation fall under a military chain of command.”

Members of the uniformed military could be held accountable for their actions: They were subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If they used excessive or indiscriminate force, killed or injured civilians in violation of the rules of engagement, or engaged in any other serious crime, they could be court-martialed. The U.S. military also had a system of condolence payments to compensate people for damage to property or accidental deaths and injuries caused during combat operations. If a contractor ran a car off the road, or shot an innocent person—deliberately, or by accident—Iraqis had no real legal recourse.

Who could hold contractors accountable for their actions? In late 2005, they were not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In theory they could be prosecuted under the MEJA, which gave the Department of Justice the power to prosecute crimes committed overseas by contractors accompanying U.S. forces. In practice, however, MEJA was a poor enforcement tool. Federal prosecutors were unlikely to commit resources to investigate contractor misconduct in a distant war zone, and the Department of Justice did not have offices in Iraq set up to investigate contractor misdeeds. MEJA at the time was applied in only a few, exceptionally rare cases, and never against private security contractors. And then there was Coalition Provisional Authority Order 17, the get-out-of-jail-free card for contractors. Two days before the dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer signed CPA Order 17, which gave contractors blanket exemption from Iraqi law. It was in effect a form of diplomatic immunity for the foreign hired guns who were working in Iraq.

The management of Erinys liked to stress accountability: to their contract, to coalition forces, and to their internal corporate codes of conduct. They even had a system set up for paying compensation to Iraqis when their contractors were at fault in traffic incidents. Andy Melville, the country manager for Erinys, told a PBS
Frontline
documentary crew, “We have a contract with the United States [Army] Corps of Engineers, which is through the American Department of Defense. Most of the contractual stipulations are based on Army regulations, and they actually quote Army regulations, and we have to follow our contract very, very closely.”
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But in the end, accountability was a fiction. The ROC system was essentially self-policing. Contractors reported their movements and escalation-of-force incidents to the ROC, and incident reports relied in part on the honor system. No one was even sure how many private security operators were working on behalf of the U.S. government in Iraq.

To Iraqis, the contractors seemed entirely above the law. And one private security company seemed more above the law than others. It had emerged as the main provider of security for the U.S. diplomatic mission in Iraq. Blackwater was founded by Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and heir to a Michigan auto parts fortune (his father's company invented the lighted vanity mirror for car window visors, among other things). Blackwater began in 1997 as a rather modest business: manufacturing steel targets and teaching combat shooting in a remote corner of northeastern North Carolina. Turnover was unremarkable—until September 12, 2001. After the 9/11 attacks the phone started ringing off the hook. Prince and several of his top executives tapped a network of former SEALs and other special operations veterans to bid for government bodyguard contracts.

The company's first big security client was the CIA. The agency needed high-end guard details for its widening operations in Afghanistan. In
Licensed to Kill
, his inside account of the post-9/11 boom in Blackwater's business, Robert Young Pelton writes, “The Global Response Staff, the CIA's security division, was overstretched, and they needed protection for their newly established Kabul station. The CIA had hired corporations for collection and other covert needs before, but they had rarely contracted out their field officers' security to private industry.”
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Enter Blackwater. The company provided men to start protecting the remote outposts on the Afghan frontier, where operatives were pursuing the remnants of the al-Qaeda network. Prince even went over personally to Afghanistan as a security contractor for a few weeks in spring 2002. That stint of working for the CIA “energized him,” Pelton wrote. “He loved the intrigue and excitement so much that the thirty-something head of the Prince family empire decided he wanted to join the CIA's Special Activities Division and enter the world of covert operations as a paramilitary.”
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Things didn't work out as Prince hoped, however. He failed to pass the polygraph examination, so he focused instead on growing his business. Blackwater morphed from a small-time security contractor to a major provider of security services to the U.S. government. In 2001, it had federal contracts worth $736,906; by 2006 that figure had grown to $593.6 million. Between 2001 and 2006 Blackwater won contracts for U.S. government business worth over $1.1 billion.
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Prince was notoriously press-shy, but in early 2005 I watched him deliver his company's sales pitch at a conference on special operations and low-intensity conflict in Washington. It was a unique insight into the scale of Blackwater's operations in Iraq. In addition to its security details on the ground, the company had its own private air fleet. It operated MD-500 “Little Bird” small reconnaissance helicopters, complete with helicopter door gunners armed with M249 light machine guns, to give air cover to motorcades on the ground. In Afghanistan the company provided contract airlift for the U.S. military with CASA 212s, twin-engine turboprops that could take off and land from remote airstrips. They ferried essential personnel and equipment around the country, a mission similar to the one undertaken by Air America, the CIA front company, in Vietnam. At Blackwater's giant training facility in Moyock, North Carolina, they were burning through around a million rounds a month.

“Why private military firms?” Prince said. “Why do we exist? There have been a lot of defense contractors for a long time making gear. But not as much doing the kind of services that we provide.”

Prince was advancing an argument that was commonly made by military contractors. The private sector had accompanied the military since the founding of the republic, from the camp sutlers who sold provisions at Valley Forge to European military professionals such as the Marquis de Lafayette, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, and Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who were hired to help train and organize the Continental Army. But contractors were not just in the business of logistics support and equipment maintenance, Prince argued: He pointed to the American Volunteer Group, better known as the Flying Tigers, a wing of the Chinese nationalist air force that fought the Japanese prior to the entry of the United States into World War II. The Flying Tigers were technically employees of the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, an American company that was an antecedent of sorts of modern private military contractors. (After Pearl Harbor the group was disbanded and was succeeded by a regular military outfit.) Companies like KBR had capitalized on a push to outsource “nonmilitary” tasks such as laundry, logistics, and recreational facilities to private firms in the 1990s. Prince was making a more ambitious argument, that private companies like Blackwater could perform many of the core functions of the military, and they could do it more cheaply. He described one of the early assignments the company received, to provide security at a remote U.S. base in southwest Asia. A Blackwater team of 25 men replaced 166 active-duty soldiers: a 28-strong rifle platoon plus 138 other troops to provide headquarters, logistics support, and other administrative functions. “Everyone carries guns, just like Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel—with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other,” Prince said. “They are the guys that keep the generators, water, food, communications, air conditioning, you name it. They run a whole base: 25 guys instead of 166. You can imagine the logistics, the simplicity of doing that.”

It was about more than running bases on the cheap. Prince said that the private sector could take on many of the essential tasks of nation building and stability operations. The military, he suggested, could outsource things like traffic control, presence patrols, and convoys to a private army. “There's consternation in the DoD about increasing the permanent size of the Army; they wanted to add thirty thousand people—they talked about it costing anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. By my math, that comes down to about $135,000 a soldier. And our ability to raise a contractor brigade, using vetted, trained and equipped, reliable third-country national soldiers led by one of our type guys, a nine-to-one ratio. We can do it, certainly cheaper.”

It was a hardcore, free-market argument. Prince sounded like a disciple of Milton Friedman making an argument for private armies—something quite different than the limited defensive role of private security contractors. He cued up a slide showing an S-type Mercedes and a Trabant, the East German car that sounded as though it was powered by a lawnmower engine.

Central planning, [a] noncompetitive, socialist market provided [a Trabant], versus the Mercedes, which is what a competitive, innovative, risk-rewarding culture built. And … you know, same culture, same language, same background. Different command structure. I don't believe the people we have in a private military firm are better—in fact, they are the same people that are on active duty. It's just a different set of bureaucracy, or lack of, that we deal with.

Prince did acknowledge one of the main arguments made against armed contractors: that they operated without any oversight or any jurisdiction. “As of 31 December [2004] that ended,” he said. “The president signed a law, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which previously applied to anyone on a defense contract, now it's any U.S. dollars that fund a contract overseas, that contractor can be brought to justice by the U.S. Justice Department.”

In theory Prince was right. In the fiscal year 2005 Department of Defense Authorization Act, Congress amended MEJA to extend its jurisdictional coverage. The revisions tightened a loophole to extend jurisdiction to all contractors, not just those employed directly by the U.S. Defense Department. The legislation that created MEJA acknowledged that there had been a longstanding “jurisdictional gap” that had allowed crimes by battlefield contractors to go unpunished.

But there was still the problem of enforcement. The language of the report that accompanied the original bill when it was passed in 2000 was prescient:

Often, the only remedy available to the United States Government with respect to military dependents and civilian employees and contractors who commit crimes in foreign countries is to limit their use of facilities on the installation where they live, or bar their entry onto the installation altogether, which often causes them to return to the United States. In any event, however, the fact that the person who committed the act may return to the United States does not give rise to any jurisdiction in the United States to try the crime he or she committed abroad.
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That is what happened when a Blackwater contractor shot and killed the local bodyguard of Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi in Baghdad's Green Zone on Christmas Eve, 2006. The contractor, later identified in the press as Andrew Moonen, was off duty and had been drinking heavily when he wandered near the Iraqi prime minister's compound, got into an altercation with the bodyguard, and shot him three times.
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The contractor fled the scene and was later apprehended by the International Zone police, who determined that he was too drunk for questioning. The following day, Blackwater fired him for cause—possession of a firearm while intoxicated—and on December 26, they whisked him out of the country on a flight to Jordan. The contractor then returned to the United States, a free man.

Stunningly, the State Department was informed of the incident and of Blackwater's arrangements to spirit Moonen out of the country. According to a Diplomatic Security incident report, the contractor was returned to the United States “under the authority of a DOS [Department of State] Regional Security Officer.” In internal correspondence that followed, embassy officials discussed ways to paper over the incident. In an e-mail the day after the incident, the chargé d'affaires (the acting ambassador) urged the regional security officer to follow up and make sure the company did “all possible to assure that a sizeable compensation is forthcoming.” A prompt apology and compensation, the chargé d'affaires reasoned, would be the “best way” to ensure that the Iraqis did not take measures to sanction Blackwater or bar them from operating in Iraq. He proposed a payment of $250,000, then $100,000. This prompted a diplomatic security officer to complain that such “crazy sums” would tempt Iraqis “to try to get killed so as to set up their families financially.” The State Department and Blackwater agreed on a payment of $15,000 to the slain bodyguard's family. Summarizing the concerns of the Diplomatic Security Service, an official wrote: “This was an unfortunate event but we feel that it doesn't reflect on the overall Blackwater performance. They do an exceptional job under very challenging circumstances. We would like to help them resolve this so we can continue with our protective mission.”
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