Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (35 page)

I remember instances when approvals from one department would take six weeks, yet we were ordered to begin work overseas within thirty days. It left us in a precarious position with things like body armor, weapon optical sights, and other gear. And in those moments, we chose to move forward with the crucial missions in the field and provided our men and women with the weapons, protections, and other tools they needed to do their jobs and advance U.S. interests.

The majority of our violations, however, didn’t involve tangible matériel at all but rather came from our exporting intellectual property.

AECA and ITAR enforcers work hard to ensure that no bad actors receive the same valuable training as U.S. personnel and its allies. Blackwater ran afoul of those regulations by not securing timely approval for training even friendly foreign contingents, including military and law enforcement units from Canada, for example, and improperly providing background biographical information on some of the thousands of men and women abroad we had been approved to train each year. (Among the violations was training snipers from Taiwan’s National Security Bureau, which State concluded “had
potential national security implications
,” as well as training an Afghan border patrol official who happened to be a native of Iran.)

Further, we ran into intellectual property issues when we employed a pair of consultants from Volvo in Sweden for our Grizzly armored personnel carrier development program. We hadn’t secured the proper approvals first, and therefore were “providing [them]
unauthorized access to ITAR-controlled technology
,” according to the State Department.

The $42 million consent agreement we ultimately signed came after a three-year investigation into our work by agents from the Departments of Defense, Justice, State, Homeland Security, Treasury, and Commerce, as well as the FBI and the CIA’s inspector general’s office—and after a lengthy negotiation process on our end. At the time, ours was the highest ITAR settlement ever,
eclipsing the $32 million settlement
paid by Hughes Electronics Corporation and Boeing in 2003 for providing long-range rocket data and defense services to the Chinese government.

I was deeply offended by having to pay nearly 10 percent of our annual revenue in fines, particularly because, unlike selling secrets to the Chinese, State publicly acknowledged, “
These violations did not involve
sensitive technologies or cause a known harm to national security. The Department notes that many of the alleged ITAR violations occurred while Xe was providing services in support of U.S. Government programs and military operations abroad.” Two years later, in 2012, I was disgusted when United Technologies Corporation (UTC) resolved more than five hundred ITAR violations for
delivering to Chinese authorities
the extremely sensitive software allowing their military competitor to develop its first attack helicopter.
UTC agreed to pay a $55 million
settlement, or about 0.08 percent of its $64 billion annual revenue.

Blackwater had gotten hung up in the red tape, and then hung out to dry at the bargaining table. But we’d made sure to negotiate a few crucial things into that settlement, which I knew were vital to the company’s survival in the long run.

Since December 2008, the government had been denying most of our export applications, which had hobbled our ability to pursue
contracts abroad. (No one will hire a contractor to do a job if it can’t actually get the tools to the job site.) With the settlement, those denials were lifted.

The agreement also ruled out criminal charges arising from any of those violations, which could have brought a suspension of our ability to work for the government, regardless of whether there was any validity to the charges. Any convictions on hypothetical charges could have meant a complete debarment from pursuing U.S. government contracts, and likely my company’s collapse.

So we paid off State and turned our attention to landing the next contract—which was right around the corner. Because even as it scolded us, the department never dared turn its back on us entirely. With the fine out of the way, we were awarded work under its third iteration of the WPPS contract the very next month.

In September 2010, State
split up its five-year, $10 billion WPPS III
, which the department renamed simply the WPS, or Worldwide Protective Services contract, among eight separate firms: Aegis Defence Services, DynCorp International, EOD Technology, Global Strategies Group, International Development Solutions, SOC, Torres International Services, and Triple Canopy. This time, State was ensuring that no single provider would have the massive sway we did during the WPPS II.

The name Blackwater—or, rather, our affiliates—didn’t appear on State’s winners’ list. It didn’t even show up among the sixty-one firms on the “Interested Vendors List” from which the department chose the winners. But we were certainly there—and State knew it—buried in the
background of the company International Development Solutions
(IDS), a brand-new joint venture launched between our U.S. Training Center and fellow Virginia-based contractor Kaseman.

IDS won Task Order 2
of the WPS, an ongoing $84 million deal to provide security in Israel’s volatile West Bank, largely protecting motorcades from the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem. The task order called for forty-six full-time contractors to safeguard the presidential
envoys and staff who make up the U.S. contingent of the Middle East Quartet, representatives from the United States, the European Union, the Russian Federation, and the United Nations who are slowly mediating the region’s fragile peace process.

When, one month after awarding us the contract, State
confirmed Blackwater’s ties to IDS
, and the work it would be doing in Jerusalem suddenly came to light, it brought with it the criticism I’d come to expect at home. But harsh words also came from a new corner abroad: “
We emphasize that our Palestinian land is not an arena
for the criminals of that infamous company,” read an outraged statement from Hamas, the Sunni Muslim extremist group that State designated a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” back in 1997 and which in 2006 was elected the majority in the Palestinian parliament. I took a measure of pride in that one. I’m not sure whether a person can really gauge the quality of his work by the enemies he’s made, but if I somehow upset Hamas, and the Taliban, and Henry Waxman, I must have done something right.

•   •   •

E
ven as we straightened ourselves in the boardroom, the jackals continued stalking us in the courtroom. Days after the Nisour Square shooting, State had reached out directly to some of the victims with
condolence payments of as much as $12,500
for those killed—a rare instance when the department didn’t coordinate payments from the contractor, underscoring the severity of the situation. “
It’s not an admission of culpability
,” U.S. embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo said at the time, “and this is in no way a waiver of future claims [against Blackwater].” Unfortunately, thanks to Susan Burke, a Washington D.C. personal injury lawyer, and her partnership with Michael Ratner at the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), those claims would come en masse.

Burke and Ratner made a perfect match. CCR was cofounded in 1966 by William Kunstler, a self-described “radical lawyer” perhaps
best known for convincing the Supreme Court in 1989 that flag burning should be legal. “
I am a double agent
,” Kunstler once bragged to the
New York Times
, “working within the system to bring down the system.” That viewpoint led him to
defend a series of questionable-at-best characters
later in his career, including “a drug dealer who shot six policemen, a fifteen-year-old accused (and later exonerated) in the notorious gang rape and beating of a jogger in New York’s Central Park, an Islamist militant accused of assassinating Jewish leader Rabbi Meir Kahane, several of the defendants in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Mafia don John Gotti,” according to the description of a documentary his daughters later put together about his life. “
We wanted all of his clients to be innocent
and all of his cases to be battles for justice and freedom,” Emily Kunstler said. “But at some point, we thought he had stopped standing for anything worth fighting for.”

Soon after Kunstler’s death, Michael Ratner took over as president of CCR and brought the same slant to the modern battlefield, “
filing countless cases on behalf
of [those] swept up in the so-called War on Terror,” according to the center’s Web site. “On June 12, 2008, CCR helped win a historic Supreme Court victory in
Boumediene vs. Bush
, securing the right for the men at Guantánamo and other non-citizens to challenge the legality of their detention through habeas proceedings in federal courts.” Ratner was clear about his approach to national security during an interview with the weekly
Socialist Worker
newspaper in 2006: “When I started doing my work in this area after 9/11, I thought
we were moving toward a police state
,” he said. “We have arrived.”

Burke, meanwhile, had shifted directions after years spent in corporate litigation, and in 2008 began successfully suing the Pentagon and private military contractors over various alleged abuses. When a furious Iraqi government
recommended Blackwater pay out $136 million
to compensate the Nisour Square victims—$8 million for each Iraqi killed—Burke and CCR jumped at the chance to profit from the war in their own way.

Soon after my appearance on Capitol Hill, the legal team hit us with the lawsuit
Estate of Himoud Saed Abtan, et al. v. Prince, et al.
, filed on behalf of what grew to be more than sixty victims or their estates. Burke described me as a “
modern-day merchant of death
.” Her legal team wrote in the complaint that “
Blackwater created and fostered a culture of lawlessness
amongst its employees, encouraging them to act in the company’s financial interests at the expense of innocent human life.” They alleged that I, and my company, were liable under the federal Alien Tort Statute for
committing war crimes and summary execution
, among other things.

But Burke wasn’t done. Over the next few years, she would spearhead more than a half dozen additional lawsuits against me and Blackwater, accusing us of ever more salacious and ridiculous things.

It started with an allegation of fraud
for overcharging the government on contracts, brought by former Blackwater employees Brad and Melan Davis. That suit included such false assertions as
Blackwater allegedly placing a Filipina prostitute
in Afghanistan on our payroll as part of our team’s “Morale Welfare Recreation.” (
The judge threw out that allegation
before it even went to the jury.) The Davises were hardly battling troubled consciences, however; they sued us under the False Claims Act, which allows whistle-blowers to collect as much as 25 percent of recovered damages.

Then another Burke-led suit brought by four Iraqis alleged that “
Mr. Prince was well aware
that his men, including his top executives in Moyock, North Carolina, viewed shooting innocent Iraqis as sport.” It added, “Those who killed and wounded innocent Iraqis tended to rise higher in Mr. Prince’s organization than those who abided by the rule of law.” In a further bizarre addition, the lawsuit alleged that one of Blackwater’s employees had photographed company executive Ana Bundy packaging illegal weapons for shipment to Iraq, and then, the lawyers claimed, the employee mysteriously died soon after. “
Discovery is needed
to ascertain whether Mr. Prince directly or indirectly participated in the events leading to the death of the young man who photographed executive Anna [
sic
]
Bundy,” the complaint read. “One employee commented to the young man that such photographs ‘are what get people killed.’”

It was clear to me that some lofty quest for justice was hardly the point of those various suits. They all seemed to ultimately seek “
punitive damages in an amount sufficient to strip Mr. Prince
of the substantial revenue he earned from his pattern of constant misconduct and callous disregard for human life.”

I’d never imagined that being a successful entrepreneur could mean spending so much time in the courtroom. Each time, the rafts of salacious allegations quickly fell apart in front of a judge or jury, and they were dismissed. To cite one example, the trial judge
threw out all but one count
of the Davis fraud suit because there was no evidence to support their sensational claims. The one remaining count was thrown out by the jury as it found no liability by my company. In fact, we were even awarded costs for years of legal fees related to the case. Yet more than any other factor, the effort it took to defend my company against outlandish, money-grubbing lawsuits such as that one hindered our ability to serve our clients effectively. By 2010, I was shelling out $2 million per month in legal bills. And though the trial lawyers couldn’t cripple us financially, their accusations had impacts in other ways, never failing to light up a news cycle.

Burke did achieve one small judicial success: After more than two years of repeated motions filed on both sides of the Nisour Square suit, we
settled with seven of the Iraqi families
in January 2010. I’m not at liberty to discuss the terms, but the Associated Press reported that
estates of the deceased each received
$100,000; the wounded $30,000. “
We are pleased that the original settlement
has been affirmed by the plaintiffs,” one of our attorneys, Peter White, said at the time. “This enables Xe’s new management to move the company forward free of the costs and distraction of ongoing litigation, and provides some compensation to Iraqi families.”

Yet after years of getting nowhere in her pursuit of us, it appears Burke’s team resorted to questionable tactics to secure even that. Just days after the settlement, those plaintiffs asked the
Iraqi
government to step in and try to nullify the deal because, they said, they felt pressured and deceived by their lawyers. Three separate Iraqis said the American attorneys pressured them into signing the agreement with fanciful stories of an impending Xe bankruptcy, and my supposed arrest. “They told me
Blackwater was about to go into bankruptcy
, that their manager will be sent to prison and the government will confiscate all their assets,” Mahdi Abdul Khodr told the
Los Angeles Times
. Another plaintiff, Fawzia Sharif, said, “
I feel I was deceived by them
. They told me the company is going to go bankrupt and this was my last chance. But now I wonder, how could this happen to such a big company?”