Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (19 page)

That didn’t mean I couldn’t buy better armored cars myself, however. And regardless of the fixed-price contract, I wasn’t about to watch more of my men get blown up because the government dragged its feet. If the agency wanted a show of force, I would give it one.

Within days of that attack, I was standing in an Army surplus yard outside London, buying retired armored personnel carriers (APCs) for roughly $10,000 apiece. I purchased two ten-ton Saxons—giant, boxy vehicles used by the British army—and four Mambas—distinctive South African APCs whose oblique-angled hulls help deflect bullets, rockets, and bomb blasts. Some of the fortified transporters had seen action in Northern Ireland, others in Kosovo, but all needed overhauls for a 130-degree desert environment. I had them shipped to Kuwait, where Blackwater’s engineers installed air conditioners and modified them to carry civilians and their luggage for runs to the airport. From there, we drove them north across the border into Iraq. Mere days after I’d purchased the vehicles, Blackwater had an armored motorcade in Baghdad that trailed only the U. S. Army and Marines.

Those APCs arrived not a moment too soon. By late summer, Route Irish had deteriorated into a shooting gallery. There were numerous suicide VBIED attacks on the highway each week, all of which seemed to claim a handful of lives, and the Army’s 1st Cavalry
Division, which guarded the highway with about a thousand soldiers, could do little to stanch the bloodshed. Yet thanks to the armored vehicles and our aggressive driving strategies, Blackwater’s teams transported roughly a dozen people from the Green Zone to the Baghdad airport every day for months in those high-visibility motorcades, and returned with twice as many new arrivals. The APCs became such a key to our protection details, I eventually bought twenty of them, and State leased about half after incorporating them into its motor pool of contracted options for safe travel.

By early December 2004, enough carnage had befallen other motorcades that the U.S. embassy declared State’s personnel were permitted to travel between the airport and the Green Zone only in helicopters. The rest of Baghdad was faring little better; the entire stretch of city surrounding the Green Zone had morphed into a barbarous hellscape that came to be known as the “Red Zone.” Whereas State’s motorcade policy initially relied upon ten-man protective details using as few vehicles as possible, convoys heading most anyplace outside the Green Zone soon required a number of additional guards plowing through town in a parade of massive vehicles. When we took the job, State had insisted they wanted their motorcades to be seen. There was no way any of us would be missed now.

•   •   •

W
hen we signed the WPPS, Blackwater had roughly a hundred people working in Baghdad. By the end of 2004, that number had swelled to about 375. We had twenty teams in the Iraqi capital operating seven days a week. Approximately fifteen had permanently assigned VIPs to protect; the others were used in rotation for State’s various transportation requirements each day. And much as my men had done with Bremer’s detail, we had to rethink the fundamentals of a protective detail.

Three months after signing on for the WPPS, for instance, we developed a quick reaction force (QRF) of Humvees and armored SUVs that could race to an engagement and ferry back the wounded. The
QRF conducted mission planning and rehearsals, and coordinated with the State Department—and was always waiting in the wings should any of our motorcades find themselves in a tight spot. Similarly, we got those Little Birds—previously dedicated only to Bremer’s security detail—redesignated as common-use support assets, to provide cover for all our State Department convoys. And we created an advance team to evaluate security at State’s meeting locations and perform route reconnaissance ahead of the missions. That crew used those K9 explosives detection dogs we’d been raising on my farm in Virginia to sweep meeting areas prior to a visit.

Then we worked with State to create a TOC, or tactical operations center, inside one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces. There, we coordinated the security requirements dictated to us by the State Department’s regional security officer, or RSO. By the explicit terms of our contract, Blackwater’s personnel answered only to the RSO and to the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad—we were not to be under the military’s chain of command. We worked for State.

On any given evening, a department officer would give us a list of their officials’ itineraries for the next day. By the next morning, our protective details presented them with the equivalent of a preflight plan, including satellite imagery with the primary and backup routes; safe areas and other protective physical features where officials could seek shelter in case of an ambush; the locations of military forward operating bases adjacent to the security teams’ paths of movement; and preidentified landing zones for medevac extractions. Each leg of the security teams’ travel to and from was segmented in the plan, and the completion of those legs would be monitored as an individual event in real time.

Each Blackwater vehicle and aircraft had a specific designation number, every team was attached in our database to that particular piece of equipment, and every individual was assigned to a specific team. That enabled us to track the exact locations of every on-duty Blackwater security professional anywhere in the world, virtually in real time, using GPS signals from the vehicles superimposed over
Google Earth. As each milestone, or “event,” was achieved throughout the mission, the team’s progress appeared on status boards and banks of flat-screen monitors that allowed Blackwater supervisors, the RSO, and Ambassador Negroponte to monitor our teams. (It was also the way we could definitively refute assertions from the military or the media that insurgents had taken Blackwater personnel hostage. “All of our men are accounted for,” we’d say. “But the hostage is wearing a Blackwater hat!” they’d say.)

On one eventful run in early 2005, insurgents along Route Irish attacked one of our twenty-five-year-old Mambas with a powerful roadside bomb known as an explosively formed penetrator, or EFP. The weapon is a simple device about the size of a coffee can, often built from a short section of well-casing pipe packed with high explosives. A copper liner is attached to the pipe’s open end. When the bomb explodes, that liner deforms into a shaped charge of molten metal that screams toward its target at 4,500 miles per hour, or something approaching Mach 6. On that run to the airport, the Iranian-made hypersonic projectile punctured the Mamba’s armor, costing one of our men his right arm at the elbow and spraying another Blackwater contractor with metal fragments that destroyed one of his eyes. They were awful injuries—but that EFP could have cut an armored Suburban in half, killing everyone inside.

The attack was significant for another reason. The shock wave from the blast ruptured an eardrum of one of the principals in the Mamba. Thanks to our equipment, preparation, strategies, and driving techniques, it was the only real injury ever suffered by someone under Blackwater’s protection.

The State Department got its 100 percent survival rate. And yet somehow by doing exactly what the department demanded—regardless of how miscalculated its strategy was—Blackwater got the PR nightmare. Anonymous “U.S. military officials” told reporters things like: “[Blackwater’s men]
tend to overreact to a lot of things
. They maneuver around town very aggressively, they’ve got weapons pointed at people, they cut people off, of course their speeds—I mean
a whole bunch of things they do fairly consistently.” As recently as the start 0f 2013, nearly a decade after my company was awarded that WPPS contract, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois, naively listed this screed on her Web site, among her positions “on the issues”: “
I am one of the few members of Congress
who has focused particularly on the over 27,000 armed private security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan who work for companies like the infamous Blackwater. Time and again, the cowboy-like behavior of these private contractors—or mercenaries—has endangered the men and women of our armed forces, damaged our relationships with foreign governments, and threatened our mission.”

Critics contend we should have somehow toned down our vigilance on those convoys. I contend most of them have never been in a truck hit by a roadside bomb. Even more important, no other contractor filling the WPPS would have been able to act any differently. Retired Marine colonel Thomas X. Hammes, who served in Iraq in early 2004 and ultimately spoke out against PMC use in general, at least described the situation accurately. “Blackwater’s an
extraordinarily professional organization
, and they were doing exactly what they were tasked to do: protect the principal,” he told PBS’s
Frontline
. “The problem is in protecting the principal they had to be very aggressive, and each time they went out they had to offend locals, forcing them to the side of the road, being overpowering and intimidating, at times running vehicles off the road. . . . [I]t puts Blackwater in an impossible position. They will be as aggressive and as muscular as they need to be to fulfill what we contracted them to do. They did a superb job doing exactly what we told them to do. The problem is what we told them to do hurt the counterinsurgency effort.”

•   •   •

E
ven beyond our tactical approach, there is a grander fundamental misunderstanding about Blackwater’s work for the State Department—one tied directly to the perception of “cowboy-like behavior” that my company’s critics have feverishly latched onto:
the complete fallacy that contractors were somehow above the law while in Iraq.

As the public learned more about our contractually mandated aggressiveness in Baghdad, relentless headlines blared that Blackwater was getting “
A Free Pass in Iraq
,” or suggested we operated in an area “
Where Military Rules Don’t Apply
.” Those stories inevitably got spun by bloggers to declare, “
There is no law that restricts
[Blackwater] from committing crimes.”

Much of the focus fell on one of Paul Bremer’s final acts as head of the CPA: issuing Order 17 to clarify legal guidelines for contractors in Iraq. Critics such as Tom Engelhardt at the
Nation
further fanned the flames of misinformation: “
Order 17 gave new meaning
to the term ‘Free World,’” he claimed. “It was, in essence, a get-out-of-jail-free card in perpetuity. . . . These private soldiers, largely in the employ of the Pentagon or the U.S. State Department—and so operating on American taxpayer dollars—were granted the right to act as they pleased with utter impunity anywhere in the country.” The implications of those assessments would be staggering—if they were true. But that sort of dogma is profoundly, dangerously wrong, showing at best a hasty mishandling of the facts and more likely, I suspect, a willful misrepresentation of reality.

In June 2003, Bremer’s CPA issued a public notice establishing the initial legal framework for coalition forces and contractors operating in Iraq.
The relevant part of that notice
read: “In accordance with international law, the CPA, coalition forces and the military and civilian personnel accompanying them, are not subject to local law or the jurisdiction of local courts. With regard to criminal, civil, administrative or other legal process, they will remain subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the State contributing them to the Coalition.” That meant Blackwater (and the military, and CPA officials) faced no legal oversight from
Iraqi
authorities—who could hardly have provided a fair or thorough judicial system at a time when much of the country didn’t even have running water—but were still subject
to oversight from U.S. authorities.
The CPA’s public notice concluded
(with emphasis in the original):

The immunities provided will
not
prevent legal proceedings against Coalition personnel for unlawful acts they may commit. It simply ensures that such proceedings will be undertaken in accordance with the laws of the State that contributed the personnel to the Coalition. Furthermore, the immunity will only apply to acts or omissions during the authority of the CPA within Iraq.

So from virtually the moment Blackwater’s men arrived in Iraq, they were subject to the American rule of law.

The question of contractors’ legal oversight in the post-CPA landscape was even more clearly spelled out one year later, when Bremer signed Order 17 immediately prior to the handover of power.
The order states in relevant part
(emphasis mine):

Contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal process with respect to acts performed by them
pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Contract or any sub-contract thereto
. Nothing in this provision shall prohibit (Multi-National Force) Personnel from preventing acts of serious misconduct by Contractors, or otherwise temporarily detaining any Contractors who pose a risk of injury to themselves or others, pending expeditious turnover to the appropriate authorities of the Sending State.

That order laid out the crucial fact that contractors were immune from Iraqi civil or criminal liability only when their actions were a necessary part of fulfilling their U.S. government contracts. Order 17 “said any action that is required to fulfill an authorized and legal contract cannot be considered a crime under Iraqi law,” former Blackwater vice president for strategic initiatives Chris Taylor told the
National Review
in 2007. “
Rape, murder, smuggling, sex abuse,
child molestation—those are never actions that are required to fulfill a contract. Therefore they could be tried under Iraqi law, under a Military Territorial Jurisdiction Act, under the War Crimes Act, under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act—I can go on.” He concluded: “Everybody says that Ambassador Bremer signed a piece of paper that makes contractors immune: ‘They can’t be charged with crimes in Iraq!’ Horse doo-doo. That’s not what Order 17 said.”

Understand, as well: Unlike the State Department’s thousand-page contracts detailing the behavior expected of Blackwater’s men, CPA Order 17 was a total of sixteen pages long. Section 4—the component specifically relating to contractors—is one single page. It would almost seem difficult for my company’s critics to so blisteringly misunderstand the information outlined in seven numbered paragraphs, especially when the legal accountability for American contractors in Iraq was so similar to their traditional accountability in other countries. For instance,
NATO’s official parties’ agreement
regarding the Status of Forces, signed in 1949, establishes: “The military authorities of the sending State shall have the primary right to exercise jurisdiction over a member of a force or of a civilian component in relation to . . . offences arising out of any act or omission done in the performance of official duty.” It continues: “In the case of any other offence the authorities of the receiving State shall have the primary right to exercise jurisdiction.”