Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (20 page)

Not only were Blackwater’s men not immune from Iraqi law—much less U.S. federal regulations—Order 17 simply followed the general international framework in place for contractors for more than a half century.

Additionally, in January 2007 contractor accountability became even stricter. That year, the
National Defense Authorization Act added a new provision
to the long-standing Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), which had previously governed all military personnel and—“in time of war”—the government’s contractors. That “time of war,” however, meant that contractors acting in what
were not officially war zones were not subject to the UCMJ. And while there have been innumerable instances in which the U.S. military was sent abroad for various reasons, the United States has fought only five officially declared wars: the War of 1812 against Great Britain, the Mexican-American War in 1846–1848, the Spanish-American War in 1898, World War I, and World War II. A case in 1970 exposed the limitations of the UCMJ, when the Court of Military Appeals reversed the conviction of a contractor in Saigon because Vietnam didn’t officially constitute a war zone.

So in 2006, Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a reserve Judge Advocate General officer, added the
key words “or a contingency operation
” to the code. “The provision clarifies the [UCMJ] to place civilian contractors accompanying the Armed Forces in the field under the court-martial jurisdiction during contingency operations as well as in times of declared war,” he said. That, too, covered Blackwater’s men in Iraq.

The faulty reporting and mistaken assumptions about our motorcade policies and our accountability are things all of us in Moyock dearly wanted to correct. But there was another wrinkle: The WPPS strictly forbade contractors from talking to the media without express permission from the State Department. Section H.7 H-020 of the
contract concerns the “Safeguarding of Information
” (emphasis mine):

The Contractor and its employees shall exercise the utmost discretion in regard to all matters relating to their duties and functions. They shall not communicate to any person any information known to them by reason of their performance of services under this contract which has not been made public, except in the necessary performance of their duties or upon written authorization of the Contracting Officer. All documents and records (including photographs) generated during the performance of work under this contract shall be for the sole use of and become the exclusive property of the U.S. Government.
Furthermore, no article, book, pamphlet, recording, broadcast,
speech, television appearance, film or photograph concerning any aspect of work performed under this contract shall be published or disseminated through any media without the prior written authorization of the Contracting Officer.

As it happened, the public affairs officer in Washington involved in managing Blackwater’s contractual nondisclosure policy was a career bureaucrat named Grace Moe. She had a fear of bad press that was extraordinary. Rather than allowing us to defend ourselves under proper official parameters, as we requested numerous times, State threatened to terminate the contract if we did anything to halt the repeated slams by ill-informed talking heads. Not only would we have to take the bullets for their men in Baghdad, we were effectively told, we had to take the heat at home, too. And when we deviated from that role, the response was unequivocal.

One email from Moe to Blackwater
higher-ups—regarding that 2007 interview Taylor gave to the
National Review
, which she hadn’t preapproved—highlighted the tensions. “I’ve had it with the egos, the macho attitude and the total disregard of just how much trouble [interviews like] this will cause,” she wrote. Soon, to strike back at us, State canceled Blackwater’s contracts for WPPS work we’d also won in Haiti and Israel.

That message was delivered loud and clear. And suddenly, “
A Blackwater spokesman declined
to comment” soon became an incessant refrain in news stories. Each time it appeared, my team back in Moyock wanted to whip a computer against the wall.

•   •   •

R
egardless of what was said in the press at home, our effectiveness on the ground in Baghdad spoke for itself. Amid a seemingly overnight postinvasion boom in the contracting industry, which led to all sorts of fly-by-night “two-guys-and-a-laptop competitors,” as I often described them, the Blackwater brand of professionalism stood out. “
They were there to assist
, to do the right thing,” Hammes,
the retired Marine colonel, said of my men. “I never had the feeling that Blackwater was about money. Obviously it is about money, because they’ve got to stay in business. But these guys were people who dedicated their life to America. They’ve served in our best special forces. They’re very, very concerned and dedicated Americans. And they’ll do anything, including put their life on the line, to do right.”

While U.S. military personnel saw our commitment in Iraq, the State Department respected the results. So much so that in June 2005, once our yearlong contract had expired and State put the WPPS work up for bid, Blackwater came out of the open competition with the lion’s share of the work.

Under the five-year contract generally referred to as the “WPPS II,” personal security in Iraq was split among three firms: DynCorp would be responsible for State personnel in the relatively placid northern region, including the major cities of Erbil and Kirkuk; Triple Canopy was assigned the south, including the port city of Basra; and Blackwater undertook protection for Embassy Baghdad personnel and provincial reconstruction teams across volatile central Iraq, accounting for the bulk of the people in Iraq being protected under the WPPS II. “
The contract was awarded
on a best value basis, meaning its award was based on what was most advantageous to the federal government,” a 2008 Congressional Research Service concluded. “The WPPS II considered technical merit more important than cost.”

That cost was significant
: a ceiling of $1.2 billion per contractor over the five years, which included a guaranteed first year plus four more optional years. The total price of each contract wasn’t fixed, but the daily rate for each labor category was. It was expected that as requirements for various task orders evolved and increased over the years—and with it, the man-hours required—so, too, would the State Department payout. And soon, as Blackwater’s role grew to safeguard the ever rising number of State personnel in Iraq,
my company brought in some $340 million
a year in revenue through the WPPS II. We oversaw the main centers of reconstruction while the other contracting companies safeguarded something akin to satellite offices.
It’s not surprising that
Blackwater’s take dwarfed the payouts
to DynCorp ($47 million) and Triple Canopy ($15.5 million). Of the more than $400 million annually State spent for that total contract’s Iraq components, Blackwater came away with almost 85 percent of it.
And our manpower
—which soon rose to nearly one thousand men—made up more than 70 percent of the trained personnel filling the contract.

It was another dramatic success for our company. It also offered a watershed reflection upon nation building in the twenty-first century.

The Defense Department had blown apart Iraq under the promise of a brighter, more democratic future for its people. Amid the chaos of insurgency, the DoD handed over the restoration job to an undermanned State Department—and without contractors like us, U.S. embassy personnel simply couldn’t accomplish that mission. “
Security is key to establishing
diplomatic relations,” according to a 2005 Congressional Research Service report. “If the effort to achieve security [for State Department personnel] is unsuccessful, U.S. diplomacy will likely be ineffective.” Then, with the WPPS II, State hired nearly three-quarters of its contractors, for its most crucial work, from one single company. From the
only
company that could get the job done in Baghdad.

The moment we signed that contract, any discussion of Blackwater in Iraq was actually about something far larger than security contracting: If our motorcades didn’t run, the State Department didn’t run. Without my company,
U.S. diplomacy in Iraq didn’t run
. It was a terrifying realization for many on Capitol Hill—but one that also provided them with a perfect whipping boy.

By June 2005, comparisons between the conflict in Iraq and the morass of Vietnam were everywhere. A
Washington Post
/ABC poll found that nearly 60 percent of Americans believed that the war in Iraq should never have been fought in the first place, and 52 percent believed military action there wasn’t contributing to the long-term safety of the United States. “
It was the first time a majority
of Americans disagreed with the central notion [President] Bush has offered
to build support for war: that the fight there will make Americans safer from terrorists at home,” the
Post
reported. Democrats looked to appease constituents by distancing themselves from the war effort—yet it proved more difficult than they anticipated.

Even as President Bush headed toward historical lows in approval ratings that summer, Democratic minorities in both the House and the Senate meant that members of Congress could marshal little more than impotent theatrical broadsides against the administration’s policies. “
With the presidency and control of Congress
, we have an easier time setting the agenda,” House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, a Republican from Illinois, said in late 2005. “We can act when the other side can only talk and complain.” Soon, columnists referred to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Howard Dean—the House minority leader, Senate minority leader, and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, respectively—as
the “Three Stooges
,” and their party’s floundering led to newspaper headlines such as “
For Democrats, Many Verses, but No Chorus
” and “
Democrats Struggle to Seize Opportunity
.” (The
Onion
was even more on point with its satirical current events roundup, “
Democrats Vow Not to Give Up Hopelessness
.”)

Publicly sniping at our servicemen and -women was also risky. Four decades ago, veterans returning from Vietnam were smeared as “baby killers” and worse in what seemed to be an accepted tactic of the antiwar movement. In the Internet era, however, those boundaries have shifted.
Los Angeles Times
columnist Joel Stein, for instance, was nationally excoriated in 2006 for a piece that began, “
I don’t support our troops
.” He wrote, “I’m not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken—and they’re wussy by definition. . . . [W]hen you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you’re not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you’re willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times it’s
Vietnam.” The backlash Stein suffered was predictable—and no politician wanted that sort of heat.

Dead-set against any conflict—yet without the strength to rattle the administration that had launched it, and knowing the people who actually fought it were off limits—Democrats were in need of a new villain. They needed
somebody
to publicly push around. So they took aim at the “mercenaries.”

What sort of person would want to work for Blackwater? It’s a question I’ve heard often—and the standard smear goes something like this: “
Once I did a little reading
, I was horrified at the secret, virtually unregulated army [President] Bush has at his beck and call. This mercenary army is arguably composed of conscienceless assassins who are among the best of the best, or worst of the worst, depending on your point of view, about being highly skilled at ‘stability solutions’ utilizing assault rifles.”

That tired bit of rhetoric came from the blog
Capitol Hill Blue
, but the practice of equating Blackwater’s men with “mercenaries” happens to this day everywhere from blog posts to book titles to the halls of Congress. It’s an intentionally inflammatory term—evoking “
vigorous condemnation of immoral killers
and profiteers of misery and war,” as the
International Review of the Red Cross
describes it—which affects not only the lawmakers who authorize funding for PSC operations abroad, but also—possibly fatally—the contractors whose potential treatment if captured by the enemy is legally tied to it. Yet no
matter how many times the “mercenary” refrain is repeated, it doesn’t make the description of Blackwater’s contractors more accurate. And it’s a distinction I take seriously.

At its essence, mercenarism is outlined by a pair of international conventions set in place to specifically criminalize and eliminate the practice: 1977’s Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, and the UN’s 1989 International Convention Against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries. Under Additional Protocol I, there are
six conditions to be satisfied
for one to qualify as a mercenary. The term applies if that person:

(a)
is specially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict;

(b)
does, in fact, take a direct part in the hostilities;

(c)
is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a Party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party;

(d)
is neither a national of a Party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict;

(e)
is not a member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict; and

(f)
has not been sent by a State which is not a Party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces.

The result under the Geneva Conventions is that a mercenary, if captured, does not benefit from prisoner of war status, which otherwise guarantees detainees cannot be prosecuted for taking part in hostilities, demands their release and repatriation after the end of hostilities, protects them against violence and intimidation at the hands of their captors, and defines minimum conditions of detention regarding accommodation, food, clothing, hygiene, and medical
care. The
UN convention defines the term
similarly, but adds as punishment that signatories of the document can also try mercenaries for the fundamental crime of mercenarism. Either way, if captured by the enemy, “mercenaries” are simply on their own—and probably gone for good. It’s not a designation to be taken lightly.

Yet considered in the terms of the Geneva Convention qualifications, Blackwater’s men were hired to protect civilians and buildings from insurgent attack, not overtly fight in an armed conflict; their engagements with enemies were purely defensive, as opposed to offensive action as a direct part of the hostilities; their motivations for being in Iraq were generally as patriotic as they were material; and perhaps most important, the men on our WPPS details were American citizens, working for U.S. agencies that were a lawful party to the conflict. (We periodically hired a small percentage of foreign nationals to fill nonsecurity roles with Blackwater, but they never worked protective details.)

Legal scholars can go on—and have—at further length about the myriad ways the term has been misapplied, but suffice it to say, it simply doesn’t fit for Blackwater’s men. “In truth, whenever I hear someone call a PSC a mercenary
I just roll my eyes
,” David Isenberg, author of
Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq
and an evenhanded critic of the industry, wrote at the
Huffington Post
. “It is a sign of mental laziness.”

Moreover, as those standard smears go, it is a certainty that nothing in Blackwater’s contracts with the government gave me the resources or constitutional authority to create a standing army. The security wing of Blackwater was basically a robust temp agency. We hired people from across the country for short-term contracts—and far from a militia, we simply had a database full of tens of thousands of subscribers to our
Blackwater Tactical Weekly
newsletter.

Gary Jackson launched that newsletter in the company’s early days to keep the special operations and law enforcement communities apprised of the latest developments in Moyock. What began as a pre-Facebook attempt at social media, however, became an invaluable
recruiting tool. By the time we took over the WPPS duties, filling our rapidly growing list of contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan meant we had to find guards, medics, intelligence analysts, armored vehicle mechanics, helicopter pilots, door gunners, and more. So we put job postings in the newsletter—and three days later, we’d have a few hundred applicants.

They were specialized skill sets we were looking for, to be sure. But we were able to find not only elite-level military and law enforcement professionals for the armed security work, but also our own collection of linguists, agricultural and sanitation experts, electrical power grid engineers, civil engineers, accountants, attorneys, psychologists, architects, managers, logisticians, machinists, and PhDs in everything from aerodynamics to communication. Even a chaplain—D. R. Staton, a retired officer and instructor from the Virginia Beach Police Department. Far from being suitable for reckless cowboys, those positions required sophistication and maturity, morality and discernment.

For people who wanted to work for Blackwater, character counted—I can’t stress that enough. We needed thinking men behind the trigger, who had passion for the job in front of them. Because one never knew when those characteristics might be tested.

•   •   •

M
untazer al-Zaidi surely didn’t realize that his life rested in the hands of a security contractor. To this day, few people do. But in December 2008, the thirty-year-old journalist with the Al Baghdadiya TV channel made global headlines when he interrupted a Baghdad press conference by yelling that
President Bush was “a dog
”—then chucking his shoes at him, one after the other. In video footage that immediately spread around the world, one fellow journalist, at the prime minister’s palace to cover the joint appearance by Bush and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, can be seen trying to halt the shoe thrower from the front, while another claws at him from behind.
Then al-Zaidi is tackled—and, eventually, swarmed by U.S. Secret Service agents in their telltale suits and ties and earpieces.

Almost entirely unseen by the phalanx of cameras at the rear of the room was a bearded young man in khakis and wearing a short-sleeve black shirt over a long-sleeve gray one—the man who actually tackled and apprehended al-Zaidi. The reason he didn’t look like Secret Service is that he wasn’t. He was one of Blackwater’s men, there in the room because high-ranking State Department personnel also attended the press conference. And within an instant of the commotion, he had his department-approved pistol drawn, with a front sight picture of the assailant’s head, before the second shoe was thrown. Yet, grasping the lack of a more significant threat—and the magnitude of shooting a man in a crowded room in front of two heads of state and an international press corps—Blackwater’s man reholstered his weapon, darted around the reporters, and brought the assailant to the ground.

The Secret Service closed in on the pile of bodies after the fact, and was left to endure public scrutiny over how a reporter had been able to hurl two objects—effectively committing assault and battery against the president of the United States—before they could stop him. “
In a perfect world
, [the Secret Service] would have been on the guy before he threw the first shoe,” Joseph J. Funk, a former service agent told the
Los Angeles Times.
“But after looking at the tapes, [the throws] were pretty quick and they were one right after the other. I doubt any security force or any law enforcement could have reacted in time to stop the second shoe.” Blackwater’s man did. And then he held off. That’s no accident.

The contractors who formed the ground teams we sent to Afghanistan and Iraq were mainly former noncommissioned military officers and former members of the special operations services and elite light infantry. They averaged thirty-seven years old, with ten years of experience in the armed forces and three years of professional security experience afterward. Roughly two-thirds were former
U. S. Army, about one-quarter were Marines, and the rest former Navy SEALs, police SWAT team officers, and former federal agents from the FBI, Secret Service, and other agencies. More than half were combat veterans. All knew how to make calm decisions in even the most stressful of situations. “
You have to be disciplined
to do this job,” one of our WPPS contractors in Baghdad told the
Washington Post
in 2005. “If any one of them is a cowboy, he will . . . get everyone killed.” On the aviation side, the average age of our contractors was forty-eight, and many of the pilots came to us with more than seven thousand hours of flight time.

Some men and women came to Blackwater after injuries had curtailed their military careers and yet they still had the training, talent, and perspective to be tremendous assets in a war zone. “
I like being someplace
where stupidity can be fatal, because here you work with people who think about their actions,” the
Washington Post
quoted another of our men saying. Route Irish, the contractor said, was a far cry from a pampered American society back home that “puts warnings on coffee cups.”

The people who worked for my company were proudly patriotic. I could relate to the many contractors we hired for whom a military lifestyle no longer meshed with family obligations. Still others were retired from their previous DoD positions, but after the attacks of 9/11 felt compelled to rejoin the fight. Those contractors had all built successful first careers, during which the Defense Department received its return on investment for their training—and then, much like the aviation mechanics or submarine reactor technicians they served with in the military, the special ops guys found the chance to translate their skills to the private sector. The government should have been publicly thankful to have them back out there assisting its mission abroad, regardless of the company name on the ID card.

Our employees may have been retired from the military, but Blackwater didn’t hire your typical “retiree.” After the eight-week Moyock training programs that turned those veterans into diplomatic security professionals, our final physical fitness test
standards required men to run one and a half miles in less than ten minutes, forty-five seconds; execute twelve pull-ups in a row, seventy-five push-ups done in two one-minute sets, and seventy-five sit-ups in two one-minute sets; and drag a 175-pound dummy eighty feet in under one minute. Those aren’t far off Navy SEAL fitness standards—and they’re ones that State Department personnel often supervised at the Blackwater facility to ensure quality and compliance with their needs.

Our trainers subjected those elite, dedicated applicants to the exacting screening procedures outlined in the WPPS—more than five hundred pages of which were devoted to specifications for each training element, going so far as to itemize how many pieces of furniture were required to be in the rooms of a building used in live-fire simulation exercises.

Then we scrutinized applicants’ professional backgrounds and their psychological profiles. They all had to pass medical examinations and criminal background checks. Each recruit’s biographical data was submitted to DipSec’s High Threat Protection office, where State Department staff independently verified the recruits’ qualifications. Once cleared by DipSec, each Blackwater WPPS contractor then underwent an additional State Department investigation in order to qualify for a national security clearance at least at the “secret” level.

Only U.S. citizens can be granted those security clearances, so all Blackwater personnel who accompanied American officials were Americans. We did, however, sometimes hire locals from the countries in which we worked, and also third-country nationals where the laws permitted, for periodic static security functions such as manning checkpoints and gates, or acting as housekeepers and cooks. In fact, during our time executing the WPPS II contract, nearly a quarter of the Blackwater contractors in Baghdad were Iraqis or third-country nationals.

Some have suggested this must have been a cost-cutting measure to lowball foreign workers, but that overlooks the obvious: Locals,
with native fluency and an innate understanding of the culture, are invaluable to any security operation. They’re able to detect inconsistencies and threats the way foreigners might not—and build personal networks with police and community leaders that no outsider can. Critics also miss the fact that, under our contract with State, we hired non-Americans only when so instructed: “
In certain circumstances,
and when directed
,” the WPPS reads (emphasis mine), “contractors may be required to recruit, evaluate, and train, local foreign government or third-country foreign nationals in established personal protective security procedures, to conduct protective security operations overseas with them, and to provide trained protective security personnel for short or long-term special domestic security situations.”