Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (18 page)

It’s a baffling story that flies in the face of the evidence, and one I still don’t understand. Perhaps Sanchez is angry that our actions that day made him look ineffective, or as if he’d lost control of the situation in Iraq. The general was ultimately in charge of security and stability there, after all, and a crucial outpost would have been overrun had it not been for a handful of Blackwater’s men and our Little Birds. The first sentence of that front-page
Washington Post
article
said it quite plainly: “
An attack by hundreds of Iraqi militia
members on the U.S. government’s headquarters in Najaf on Sunday was repulsed not by the U.S. military, but by eight commandos from a private security firm, according to sources familiar with the incident.”

Not only that, but Sanchez hadn’t been able to get Army resources to the area for hours after the first shots were fired. He couldn’t evacuate wounded military. And maybe the general is resentful of the fact that Blackwater’s men on that rooftop proved that they didn’t exactly need his help. As Phil Carter, a former military policeman and civil affairs officer with the Army,
described it on his
Intel Dump
blog
: “So these [Blackwater] guys work for the U.S. government, but not for the CPA and CJTF [Combined Joint Task Force] chain of command? . . . What are these contractors doing that they have this much firepower, and a friggin’ helicopter of their own? And what kind of command system does CPA and CJTF have that they had zero visibility of this incident until presumably the
Washington Post
reported on it?” Blackwater’s vice president at the time, Patrick Toohey, drove the point home soon after in an interview with the
New York Times
. “This is
a whole new issue in military affairs
,” he said. “Think about it: You’re actually contracting civilians to do military-like duties.”

Maybe Sanchez remains bitter at contractors in general, for the events in Najaf, or the military and political fallout in Fallujah, or because the general’s three-decade military career came crashing down in June 2004 thanks to the infamous Abu Ghraib scandal, in which Iraqi detainees at the prison outside Baghdad suffered torture and sexual abuse at the hands of U.S. soldiers and contract interrogators from CACI International and Titan Corp. (A
July 2004 report by the Army’s inspector general
found, “Of the contract interrogators in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), 35% (11 of 31) had not received formal training in military interrogation techniques, policy, and doctrine,” much less background in international law.) Several military personnel were ultimately convicted of the abuses, while lawsuits against the contractors still continue to wind their way
through the court system nine years later. Sanchez was replaced as commander almost immediately after photos of the abuse shocked the American public. He has since said that Abu Ghraib was “
the key reason, the sole reason
, that I was forced to retire.”

Had I known what the general would ultimately say about Blackwater, I would have gotten to the bottom of it myself when I met him at a U.S. Army dinner in Virginia shortly before his book was published. I wasn’t impressed. Regardless, the general’s account is directly refuted not only by Blackwater’s men on the ground, but by the very military branches he once oversaw.

The Marines recognized Corporal Lonnie Young with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star with Valor, which is awarded for heroism in combat. The Army also awarded Specialist Michael Acquaviva a Bronze Star with Valor. Blackwater’s contractors in Najaf weren’t up for any medals; they simply kept their heads down and prepared for the next mission.

Meanwhile, back at LZ Washington in Baghdad, the Ass Monkeys still weren’t looking for new friends—though that part was getting harder. The morning after his makeshift medevac of Young, Hacksaw had a visitor at his hangar. It was a youthful Marine who had come to say thanks for helping out a fellow leatherneck. Knowing that Blackwater’s team would always come for a man in trouble meant a lot, he said. He just wanted to shake Chilton’s hand. As Hacksaw obliged, he could see over the Marine’s shoulder that a crowd of tan uniforms and green T-shirts was flowing toward the Blackwater staging area. Chilton shook nearly a thousand hands that day.

2004–2005

Three months after the battle in Najaf, the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded with the handover of power, and the United States established diplomatic relations with a newly sovereign Iraq. Under United Nations Resolution 1546, federal power in the powder keg of a country passed to temporary prime minister Ayad Allawi and his Interim Iraqi Government. Their main job was to ensure that a democratic national election—in which Iraqis would vote for a National Assembly, which would then select a president, prime minister, and cabinet—was held no later than January 2005.

With the transition, the key American figure in Baghdad was no longer Paul Bremer, but sixty-four-year-old John D. Negroponte, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Iraq. The veteran diplomat was responsible for overseeing a new U.S. embassy, established in Saddam Hussein’s former presidential palace in the Green Zone. The embassy was to be staffed by approximately one thousand Americans reporting to nearly a dozen government agencies, including the Departments of State, Defense, Agriculture, Commerce, and Homeland
Security, as well as USAID and others. It was the largest U.S. embassy anywhere in the world. “It has been
thirteen years since the American flag
was last lowered at the United States Embassy in Baghdad, on a day as dark as today is bright,” Negroponte said at the embassy’s opening on June 30, 2004. “This afternoon we have the honor to once again see Old Glory back where she belongs.”

The crucial question was how to keep the American personnel safe. The core of the Green Zone, including the presidential palace, was surrounded by blastproof concrete barricades, razor wire, and a raft of guarded checkpoints. But the State Department’s job can’t be conducted by “
a thousand people hunkered behind sandbags
,” as former U.S. ambassador to Iraq Edward L. Peck put it. Indeed, at the time the United States transitioned to a bilateral relationship with the Iraqi government,
Americans had overseen the creation
, training, and advisement of 18 governorate councils, 90 district councils, 194 city councils, 445 neighborhood councils, and more than a dozen national ministries across the country, according to then deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage. There was much coordination to be done outside the protection of the “Emerald City,” as some called the Green Zone—and no one at the embassy needed to be reminded how dangerous a place Iraq was at that point.

The overall size of active enemy forces in the country at the time, according to U.S. Central Command, was approximately twenty thousand men: roughly ten thousand former regime members, about three thousand members of al-Sadr’s Shia militia, some one thousand in the Sunni terrorist network overseen by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and about five thousand criminals, religious extremists, and other rogue elements. Only six weeks prior to the opening of the U.S. embassy, Izzedin Salim, the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, was killed when a suicide bomber pulled his car up next to Salim’s convoy, then detonated a bomb so powerful it melted the roadway. The attack—engineered to magnify its shock value—unfolded at a checkpoint to enter the Green Zone.

Moreover, another crucial transition was taking place inside the
Green Zone. Under DoD policy in Iraq, the military would provide security only to those contractors and government civilians deploying with the combat force or otherwise directly supporting the military’s mission. Barring any special arrangements, other U.S. government agencies—including the State Department—had to provide their own security. And as much as cobbling together a diplomatic outpost on short notice is pretty standard for the department, ensuring safety for the sheer number of diplomats and associated personnel who would soon be funneled into Baghdad was a different logistical challenge.

To accomplish that task, State has long had an official Bureau of Diplomatic Security, known as DS or DipSec. That bureau “
develops and implements effective security
programs to safeguard all personnel who work in every U.S. diplomatic mission around the world,” according to its stated mission. It’s an extraordinary responsibility, vital to our country’s development and humanitarian work abroad and for establishing the stability in war-torn regions that allows American troops to come home.

But there were
only about a thousand special agents
in DipSec in 2005, and nearly three hundred State Department missions worldwide. Those numbers just don’t line up in any sort of practical way—something State has long recognized. “Starting in 1983 after the U.S. embassy bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, the State Department resorted to using contractors to provide perimeter security to U.S. diplomatic and consular posts around the world,” read a Congressional Research Service report to Congress about private security contractors (PSCs). “The State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security
first used PSCs in 1994
when MVM, Incorporated was hired to help protect Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide as he returned to Haiti. This was followed with the use of PSCs in Bosnia, Israel, Afghanistan, and most recently, Iraq.”

I saw it firsthand while serving in both Haiti and Bosnia as a SEAL. With contractors, State didn’t need to spend some three years recruiting, vetting, and training a DipSec agent—and they didn’t
have to add those men to long-term payroll or offer them pensions. The contractors were disposable security, single-use guards hired for a particular mission, and then let go of just as quickly when the work was done. As a defense employee of the government, I had welcomed the development, and I was thrilled to contribute to State’s security now.

In 2000, the State Department had formalized an exclusive deal with contractor DynCorp to protect its diplomats in parts of the former Yugoslavia, the Palestinian territories, and Afghanistan. That contract was known as Worldwide Personal Protective Services, or the WPPS. In mid-2004, State added additional responsibilities under the WPPS to cover security for Ambassador Negroponte and other personnel at the massive new Embassy Baghdad, but DynCorp was unable to meet the expansive new task order. Suddenly, State was faced with the untenable prospect of sending waves of diplomats into Baghdad without the means to keep them safe.

Those of us at Blackwater, meanwhile, had just wrapped up the successful Bremer detail. We had the personnel, vehicles, and protection strategies necessary for a larger operation—already sitting right there in the Green Zone. We had become known for getting results, and for delivering without cost overruns or excuses. So once again the U.S. government found itself with an urgent and compelling problem that my company was uniquely positioned to solve. We were eager to help.

In June 2004 the State Department issued
Blackwater a one-year sole-source security contract under the WPPS, which provided Embassy Baghdad and its personnel with the immediate security they needed. It also allowed State a window of time to create a competitive contract for the Baghdad work, which would be bid upon by various contractors in the summer of 2005.
That “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” deal
we signed was to provide for the “protection of U.S. and/or certain foreign government high-level officials whenever the need arises.” That Baghdad task order, ultimately worth $488 million, launched Blackwater’s lucrative, tumultuous,
successful, and ultimately devastating relationship with the State Department.

Over the next five years, new iterations of the WPPS would pay my company the better part of one billion dollars and put nearly a thousand of our contractors—effectively a private regiment—on the ground in Iraq at any one time. But that hardly means things always went smoothly, and thanks to dramatic misunderstandings among the general public about the scope of that deal and the regulations governing contractor actions in Iraq, Blackwater quickly became the lightning rod for critics of the war effort. Our work fulfilling the WPPS brought my company unprecedented importance and visibility—and then, ultimately, destroyed it.

•   •   •

F
or the State Department, image was everything. The agency was a force for good in Iraq, its higher-ups said, and they wanted to be seen that way. The WPPS contract outlined a number of requirements based on how things would literally look to the Iraqi people, right down to the wardrobe demanded of Blackwater’s men. “
The Government requires a favorable image
,” the contract read, “and considers it to be a major asset of a protective force.”

State insisted that American diplomats would not be cowed into slipping under rebels’ radars in dented local cars that camouflaged their movements. They would not travel in the dead of night. When in Baghdad, I usually tried to blend in by traveling in standard dinged-up civilian cars, but State wanted its diplomats charging through Baghdad in gunned-up convoys of waxed SUVs bristling with antenna arrays. At the outset, we explained that the approach would practically taunt insurgents to strike when diplomats are most vulnerable—on the open road, getting from one meeting to the next—yet State insisted the show of authority was important.

By the terms of the contract, the department dictated the missions—where its personnel had to go, and when—as well as the vehicles to be used. It would provide Blackwater with the weapons my men would
carry. Our job, in turn, was to create for them a “
high-visibility deterrent
” to attackers and keep State’s personnel safe no matter what. It didn’t matter if it was probably the worst approach for the department actually achieving its diplomatic objectives in Iraq.

For the former military men like me at Blackwater, those discussions were the start of a culture clash that lasted until the very end of our time in Iraq. No longer were our contracts twenty pages long. State’s WPPS deal weighed in at a thousand—the contract’s iterations ultimately filled five four-inch binders at Blackwater’s headquarters—detailing everything from the Oakley wraparound sunglasses contractors would wear to the appropriate use of a nightstick to how long it should take a guard to run a mile and a half.

And unlike the Department of Defense, the State Department had a further requirement: absolutely no casualties. It might seem silly to underscore the fact that State didn’t want its personnel to get killed, but by June 2004, when Blackwater took on our WPPS duties,
more than five hundred U.S. servicemen had been killed
by “hostile action” in Iraq since major combat operations had ended the year before. It’s even crazier to expect to pump hundreds of high-value diplomats, aid workers, intelligence officers, and visiting VIPs into the middle of that kind of conflict and suffer zero loss of life—especially when your transportation demands made those workers conspicuous targets.

So how could Blackwater’s men move those personnel through lawless pockets of Baghdad, in ostentatious convoys, at the times of State’s choosing, and still safeguard their lives 100 percent of the time? My company’s critics are quick to point out the answer: We drove aggressively, sometimes offensively—just as the contract demanded under its Tactical Standard Operating Procedure, which was more than 180 pages of instructions on everything from the planning of a security mission to postmission recovery efforts.

Everyone, including State, understood from Fallujah what could happen at a single clogged intersection with a broken traffic light. In Baghdad, a group of Iraqis huddled around a vehicle at the side of the
road might be fixing a breakdown, or they might be insurgents lying in wait with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Any approaching car on the highway could be a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, or VBIED.
More than four hundred of those
blew up in 2004, more than eight hundred in 2005. Contractors, businesspeople, journalists, and missionaries were getting maimed and abducted left and right—and none of them were as princely a target as an American diplomat. Meanwhile,
some fifty-six hundred roadside bombs
detonated in Iraq in 2004 (that number grew to almost eleven thousand in 2005), and Blackwater’s holdovers from the Bremer detail had experience with the damage they caused.

So, yes, our motorcades sped through town, sometimes on the wrong side of the road. And absolutely, when hand signals or flashed lights didn’t get the attention of local drivers who pulled too close to our motorcades, Blackwater’s men threw water bottles at them. There were times we had to follow that up by putting a few bullets into the intruding car’s hood, a tactic to stop the vehicle known as “shooting to disable.” State demanded the appearance of American invincibility, but actually providing it meant getting their principals off the road as soon as possible. And almost immediately, some of my men sacrificed their lives to do it.

On June 2, 2004, Richard “Kato” Bruce, a forty-nine-year-old former SEAL and father of one from Menifee, North Carolina, became the fifth Blackwater casualty, and our first under the WPPS. He was killed when his speeding motorcade vehicle slammed into a ditch and flipped. Three days later, four more Blackwater men were killed during an ambush along Route Irish, the military name for the Highway of Death connecting Baghdad International Airport to the Green Zone, when insurgents roared up behind their convoy and sprayed the SUVs with small-arms fire and RPGs. Three of our wounded contractors in the motorcade’s heavily armored Suburban fought off the assailants and scrambled back to the Green Zone. But the four men in the “soft skin,” or unarmored, SUV perished.

I was even more infuriated at that loss of life because Blackwater’s men were stuck with some of those unarmored Suburbans while we waited months for State to deliver us Wisconsin-built SUVs with appropriate armoring. In a classic case of unhinged bureaucracy, State could have simply sent over a few of the hundred or so armored Land Rovers and Toyotas it already owned, but thanks to the Depression-era Buy American Act—a federal regulation once derided in the DoD’s
Acquisition Review Quarterly
as “
one of the most visible and egregious
remnants of U.S. protectionism”—the department could provide us with only American-made vehicles for the WPPS work.