Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (22 page)
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Authors: Jeremy Scahill
BOOK: Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
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“Standard wages for PSD (personal security detail) pros [in Iraq] were previously running about $300 a day,”
Fortune
magazine reported. “Once Blackwater started recruiting for its first big job, guarding Paul Bremer, the rate shot up to $600 a day.”
50
Blackwater described its Bremer project as a “turnkey security package.”
51
Company vice president Chris Taylor said the job “was no ordinary executive protection requirement; it really amounted to a hybrid personal security detail (PSD) solution that had yet to be used anywhere. In response, Blackwater developed an innovative combat PSD program to ensure Ambassador Bremer’s safety and that of any ambassador who followed.”
52
The company provided him with thirty-six “personnel protection” specialists, two K-9 teams, and three MD-530 Boeing helicopters with pilots to taxi him around the country.
53
In October 2003, a Blackwater spokesman said the company had just seventy-eight employees in Iraq, a number that would soon explode.
54
A month after winning the Bremer contract, Blackwater registered its new security division with the North Carolina Secretary of State.
55
Blackwater Security Consulting LLC would specialize in “providing qualified and trained Protective Security Specialist[s] (PSS) to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau for Diplomatic Security for the purpose of conducting protective security operations in Iraq.”
56
The Bremer contract had officially elevated Blackwater to a status as a sort of Praetorian Guard in the war on terror—a designation that would open many doors in the world of private military contracting. It wouldn’t be long before Blackwater was awarded a massive contract with the State Department to provide security for many U.S. officials in Iraq, not just the Ambassador. Paul Bremer’s picture would soon grace the top banner on the new Blackwater Security division’s Web site, as would images of Blackwater’s mercenaries around Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
57
Fortune
magazine reported. “Once Blackwater started recruiting for its first big job, guarding Paul Bremer, the rate shot up to $600 a day.”
50
Blackwater described its Bremer project as a “turnkey security package.”
51
Company vice president Chris Taylor said the job “was no ordinary executive protection requirement; it really amounted to a hybrid personal security detail (PSD) solution that had yet to be used anywhere. In response, Blackwater developed an innovative combat PSD program to ensure Ambassador Bremer’s safety and that of any ambassador who followed.”
52
The company provided him with thirty-six “personnel protection” specialists, two K-9 teams, and three MD-530 Boeing helicopters with pilots to taxi him around the country.
53
In October 2003, a Blackwater spokesman said the company had just seventy-eight employees in Iraq, a number that would soon explode.
54
A month after winning the Bremer contract, Blackwater registered its new security division with the North Carolina Secretary of State.
55
Blackwater Security Consulting LLC would specialize in “providing qualified and trained Protective Security Specialist[s] (PSS) to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau for Diplomatic Security for the purpose of conducting protective security operations in Iraq.”
56
The Bremer contract had officially elevated Blackwater to a status as a sort of Praetorian Guard in the war on terror—a designation that would open many doors in the world of private military contracting. It wouldn’t be long before Blackwater was awarded a massive contract with the State Department to provide security for many U.S. officials in Iraq, not just the Ambassador. Paul Bremer’s picture would soon grace the top banner on the new Blackwater Security division’s Web site, as would images of Blackwater’s mercenaries around Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
57
Blackwater’s men brought a singularly Yankee flair to the Bremer job and, by most accounts, embodied the ugly American persona to a tee. Its guards were chiseled like bodybuilders and wore tacky, wraparound sunglasses. Many wore goatees and dressed in all-khaki uniforms with ammo vests or Blackwater T-shirts with the trademark bear claw in the cross-hairs, sleeves rolled up. Some of them looked like caricatures, real-life action figures, or professional wrestlers. Their haircuts were short, and they sported security earpieces and lightweight machine guns. They bossed around journalists and ran Iraqi cars off the road or fired rounds at cars if they got in the way of a Blackwater convoy. “You see these pictures in the media of Blackwater guys loaded to the hilt with pistols and M-4s and their hand out grabbing the camera. There’s a reason for that,” said former Blackwater contractor Kelly Capeheart, who protected John Negroponte, Bremer’s successor in Iraq. “I don’t want my face on Al-Jazeera. Sorry.”
58
58
Helicopters with snipers would hover above some Blackwater transport missions, as a menacing warning to everyone below. “They made enemies everywhere,” recalled Col. Thomas X. Hammes, the U.S. military official put in charge of building a “new” Iraqi military after Bremer disbanded the old one.
59
“I would ride around with Iraqis in beat up Iraqi trucks, they were running me off the road. We were threatened and intimidated. [But] they were doing their job, exactly what they were paid to do in the way they were paid to do it, and they were making enemies on every single pass out of town.”
60
Hammes said Blackwater’s high-profile conduct in guarding Bremer broke the “first rule” of fighting an insurgency: “You don’t make any more enemies.”
61
Hammes said, “They were actually getting our contract exactly as we asked them to and at the same time hurting our counterinsurgency effort.”
62
An intelligence officer in Iraq told
Time
magazine, “Those Blackwater guys . . . they drive around wearing Oakley sunglasses and pointing their guns out of car windows. They have pointed their guns at me, and it pissed me off. Imagine what a guy in Fallujah thinks.”
63
Al Clark, one of the founders of Blackwater, helped develop the company’s training procedures. In the United States, Clark said, “we get upset about a fender-bender.” But, he said, “you’ve got to get over that in Baghdad. Your car can be a 3,000-pound weapon when you need it. Hit and run. Trust me. The police aren’t coming to your house because you left the scene of an accident.”
64
59
“I would ride around with Iraqis in beat up Iraqi trucks, they were running me off the road. We were threatened and intimidated. [But] they were doing their job, exactly what they were paid to do in the way they were paid to do it, and they were making enemies on every single pass out of town.”
60
Hammes said Blackwater’s high-profile conduct in guarding Bremer broke the “first rule” of fighting an insurgency: “You don’t make any more enemies.”
61
Hammes said, “They were actually getting our contract exactly as we asked them to and at the same time hurting our counterinsurgency effort.”
62
An intelligence officer in Iraq told
Time
magazine, “Those Blackwater guys . . . they drive around wearing Oakley sunglasses and pointing their guns out of car windows. They have pointed their guns at me, and it pissed me off. Imagine what a guy in Fallujah thinks.”
63
Al Clark, one of the founders of Blackwater, helped develop the company’s training procedures. In the United States, Clark said, “we get upset about a fender-bender.” But, he said, “you’ve got to get over that in Baghdad. Your car can be a 3,000-pound weapon when you need it. Hit and run. Trust me. The police aren’t coming to your house because you left the scene of an accident.”
64
An apparent deadly case of contractor impunity allegedly involving Blackwater guards took place in May 2004. The incident was thoroughly investigated and reported by
Los Angeles Times
correspondent T. Christian Miller.
65
The U.S. Embassy spokesman in Baghdad, Robert J. Callahan, was finishing up his tour of duty and was making the rounds to say his good-byes to various journalists and media organizations around the Iraqi capital. “As was typical for State Department officials, Callahan relied on Blackwater for transport around Baghdad,” according to Miller. Returning from one media compound, Callahan’s “five-vehicle convoy turned onto a broad thorough-fare running through Baghdad’s Masbah neighborhood, an area of five-story office buildings and ground-level shops.” At the same time, according to Miller, a thirty-two-year-old Iraqi truck driver named Mohammed Nouri Hattab, who was moonlighting as a taxi driver, was transporting two passengers he had just picked up in his Opel. “Hattab looked up and saw Callahan’s five-car convoy speed out of a side street in front of him. He was slowing to a stop about fifty feet from the convoy when he heard a burst of gunfire ring out, he said. Bullets shot through the hood of his Opel, cut into his shoulder, and pierced the chest of nineteen-year-old Yas Ali Mohammed Yassiri, who was in the backseat, killing him,” according to Miller. “There was no warning. It was a sudden attack,” said Hattab.
Los Angeles Times
correspondent T. Christian Miller.
65
The U.S. Embassy spokesman in Baghdad, Robert J. Callahan, was finishing up his tour of duty and was making the rounds to say his good-byes to various journalists and media organizations around the Iraqi capital. “As was typical for State Department officials, Callahan relied on Blackwater for transport around Baghdad,” according to Miller. Returning from one media compound, Callahan’s “five-vehicle convoy turned onto a broad thorough-fare running through Baghdad’s Masbah neighborhood, an area of five-story office buildings and ground-level shops.” At the same time, according to Miller, a thirty-two-year-old Iraqi truck driver named Mohammed Nouri Hattab, who was moonlighting as a taxi driver, was transporting two passengers he had just picked up in his Opel. “Hattab looked up and saw Callahan’s five-car convoy speed out of a side street in front of him. He was slowing to a stop about fifty feet from the convoy when he heard a burst of gunfire ring out, he said. Bullets shot through the hood of his Opel, cut into his shoulder, and pierced the chest of nineteen-year-old Yas Ali Mohammed Yassiri, who was in the backseat, killing him,” according to Miller. “There was no warning. It was a sudden attack,” said Hattab.
Miller reported that, on background, “one US official said that embassy officials had reviewed the shooting and determined that two Blackwater employees in the convoy that day had not followed proper procedures to warn Hattab to stay back; instead they opened fire prematurely.” The official said the two had been fired and sent home. As of this writing, they have not been prosecuted. Miller obtained hundreds of pages of incident reports involving private military contractors in Iraq. He reported, “About 11 percent of the nearly two hundred reports involved contractors firing toward civilian vehicles. In most cases the contractors received no fire from the Iraqi cars.”
66
66
Blackwater’s style fit in perfectly with Bremer’s mission in Iraq. In fact, one could argue that Bremer didn’t just get protection from Blackwater’s highly trained mercenaries but also from the all-powerful realities of the free-market lab he was running in Iraq. Indeed, it seems that those forces were what Bremer banked on to survive the Iraq job—if he died, Blackwater’s reputation would be shot. “If Blackwater loses a principal (like Bremer), they’re out of business, aren’t they?” asked Colonel Hammes. “Can you imagine being Blackwater, trying to sell your next contract, saying, ‘Well, we did pretty well in Iraq for about four months, and then he got killed.’ And you’re the CEO who’s going to hire and protect your guys. You’ll say, ‘I think I’ll find somebody else.’ . . . The problem for Blackwater [is] if the primary gets killed, what happens to Blackwater is they’re out of business. For the military, if the primary gets killed, that’s a very bad thing. There will be after-action reviews, etc., but nobody’s going out of business.”
67
67
For Blackwater, keeping Paul Bremer alive would provide the company with an incredible marketing campaign:
If we can protect the most hated man in Iraq, we can protect anyone, anywhere.
Indeed, in less than a year Osama bin Laden would release an audio tape offering a reward for Bremer’s killing. “You know that America promised big rewards for those who kill mujahedeen [holy warriors],” bin Laden declared in May 2004. “We in the Al Qaeda organization will guarantee, God willing, 10,000 grams of gold to whoever kills the occupier Bremer, or the American chief commander or his deputy in Iraq.”
68
The resistance, too, reportedly offered a $50,000 reward for the killing of any Blackwater guards.
69
“We had prices on our heads over there,” recalled ex-Blackwater contractor Capeheart. “We all knew it.”
70
If we can protect the most hated man in Iraq, we can protect anyone, anywhere.
Indeed, in less than a year Osama bin Laden would release an audio tape offering a reward for Bremer’s killing. “You know that America promised big rewards for those who kill mujahedeen [holy warriors],” bin Laden declared in May 2004. “We in the Al Qaeda organization will guarantee, God willing, 10,000 grams of gold to whoever kills the occupier Bremer, or the American chief commander or his deputy in Iraq.”
68
The resistance, too, reportedly offered a $50,000 reward for the killing of any Blackwater guards.
69
“We had prices on our heads over there,” recalled ex-Blackwater contractor Capeheart. “We all knew it.”
70
Bremer said that soon after Blackwater took over his security, “at Rumsfeld’s request, the U.S. Secret Service had done a survey of my security and had concluded that I was the most threatened American official anywhere in the world. . . . One report Blackwater took seriously suggested that one of the Iraqi barbers in the palace had been hired to kill me when I got a haircut.” After that, Blackwater moved Bremer into a villa on the palace grounds that reportedly had housed Qusay Hussein’s mother-in-law.
71
71
In December 2003, a few months after Blackwater began guarding Bremer, came the first publicly acknowledged resistance attack on the proconsul. It happened the night of December 6, right after Bremer saw Defense Secretary Rumsfeld off at the Baghdad airport. “It was after 11:00 p.m. when [Bremer’s aide] Brian McCormack and I got into my armored SUV for the run back to the Green Zone,” Bremer recalled. “Our convoy, as usual, consisted of two ‘up-armored’ Humvees sheathed in tan slabs of hardened steel, a lead-armored Suburban, our Suburban, another armored Suburban following, and two more Humvees. Overhead, we had a pair of buzzing Bell helicopters with two Blackwater snipers in each.”
72
Inside the SUV, Bremer and McCormack were discussing whether Bremer should attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Bremer was thinking that he “could now use some of the ski resort pampering” when a “deafening” explosion happened, followed by automatic gunfire. The lead vehicle in the convoy had its tire blown out by an improvised explosive device (IED), and resistance fighters were attacking with AK-47s. According to Bremer, a bullet had hit a side window in his SUV. “We’d been ambushed, a highly organized, skillfully executed assassination attempt,” wrote Bremer. “I swung around and looked back. The Suburban’s armored-glass rear window had been blown out by the IED. And now AK rounds were whipping through the open rectangle.” As he sped toward the safety of the palace, Bremer recalled that “with the stench of explosives lingering in the car, I considered. Davos, all those good meals. . . . Francie could fly over and we could ski. That was about as far from Baghdad’s Airport Road and IEDs as you could get.”
73
72
Inside the SUV, Bremer and McCormack were discussing whether Bremer should attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Bremer was thinking that he “could now use some of the ski resort pampering” when a “deafening” explosion happened, followed by automatic gunfire. The lead vehicle in the convoy had its tire blown out by an improvised explosive device (IED), and resistance fighters were attacking with AK-47s. According to Bremer, a bullet had hit a side window in his SUV. “We’d been ambushed, a highly organized, skillfully executed assassination attempt,” wrote Bremer. “I swung around and looked back. The Suburban’s armored-glass rear window had been blown out by the IED. And now AK rounds were whipping through the open rectangle.” As he sped toward the safety of the palace, Bremer recalled that “with the stench of explosives lingering in the car, I considered. Davos, all those good meals. . . . Francie could fly over and we could ski. That was about as far from Baghdad’s Airport Road and IEDs as you could get.”
73
Bremer’s office intentionally concealed the attack until two weeks later, when news of the ambush leaked in the U.S. press and Bremer was confronted at a press conference in the southern city of Basra.
74
“Yes, this is true,” he told reporters.
75
“As you can see, it didn’t succeed,”
76
adding, “Thankfully I am still alive, and here I am in front of you.”
77
Despite Bremer’s later description of the attack as “a highly organized” assassination attempt, at the time his spokespeople dismissed it as a “random” attack that was not likely directed at Bremer personally,
78
perhaps in an effort to downplay the sophistication of the resistance. After the attack was revealed, Bremer’s spokesperson, Dan Senor, praised Blackwater: “Ambassador Bremer has very thorough and comprehensive security forces and mechanisms in place whenever there is a movement, and we have a lot of confidence in those security personnel and those mechanisms. And in this particular case, they worked.”
79
74
“Yes, this is true,” he told reporters.
75
“As you can see, it didn’t succeed,”
76
adding, “Thankfully I am still alive, and here I am in front of you.”
77
Despite Bremer’s later description of the attack as “a highly organized” assassination attempt, at the time his spokespeople dismissed it as a “random” attack that was not likely directed at Bremer personally,
78
perhaps in an effort to downplay the sophistication of the resistance. After the attack was revealed, Bremer’s spokesperson, Dan Senor, praised Blackwater: “Ambassador Bremer has very thorough and comprehensive security forces and mechanisms in place whenever there is a movement, and we have a lot of confidence in those security personnel and those mechanisms. And in this particular case, they worked.”
79
As Bremer traveled Iraq, his policies and the conduct of his “bodyguards” and the other contractors he had immunized from accountability increasingly enraged Iraqis. Meanwhile, he continued to reinforce the Iraqi characterization of him as another Saddam, as he carried out expensive renovations to the Baghdad Palace. In December 2003, Bremer spent $27,000 to remove four larger-than-life busts of Saddam’s head from the palace compound. “I’ve been looking at these for six months,” said Bremer as the first head was being removed. “The time has come for these heads to roll.”
80
With much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure in shambles, it seemed a questionable use of funds, but Bremer’s spokespeople characterized it as compliance with the law. “According to the rules of de-Baathification, they have to come down,” said Bremer deputy Charles Heatly. “Actually, they are illegal.”
81
80
With much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure in shambles, it seemed a questionable use of funds, but Bremer’s spokespeople characterized it as compliance with the law. “According to the rules of de-Baathification, they have to come down,” said Bremer deputy Charles Heatly. “Actually, they are illegal.”
81
For most of the time Blackwater guarded Bremer, the company remained under the radar. There was rarely a mention of Blackwater in media reports; instead, the men were simply referred to as Bremer’s security detail or as his bodyguards. Sometimes, they were identified as Secret Service agents. Within the industry, though, Blackwater’s men were viewed as the elite, the trendsetters among the rapidly expanding mercenary army in the country.
Around the time Blackwater won its Bremer contract, mercenaries quickly poured into Iraq. Firms like Control Risks Group, DynCorp, Erinys, Aegis, ArmorGroup, Hart, Kroll, and Steele Foundation, many of which already had some presence in the country, began deploying thousands of mercenaries in Iraq and recruiting aggressively internationally. In a throw-back to the Vietnam War era, the positions were initially referred to as “private security consultants” on the job boards. Some companies, like Blackwater, won lucrative contracts with the State Department, the U.S. occupation authority, or the British government; others guarded oil projects, foreign embassies, or government buildings; while still others worked for major war contractors like Halliburton, KBR, General Electric, and Bechtel, or as part of security details for journalists. Among the highest paid mercenaries were former Special Forces: Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Green Berets, Rangers and Marines, British SAS, Irish Rangers, and Australian SAS, followed by Nepalese Gurkhas, Serbian commandos, and Fijian troops. Meanwhile, the prospect of tremendous profits depleted official national forces, as soldiers sought more lucrative posts with private companies, which also aggressively headhunted Special Forces men for private work in Iraq. “We were bigger than life to a lot of the military guys,” said ex-Blackwater contractor Kelly Capeheart. “You could see it in their eyes when they looked at us—or whispered about us. A lot of them were very jealous. They felt like they were doing the same job but getting paid a lot less.”
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