The Bremer Detail (7 page)

I was still short two guys. Shrek, a former FAST Company (Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security) Marine, showed up and filled one of the holes. It was apparent that he had some experience, and he went to work almost immediately. We still had guys with gastrointestinal issues or upper respiratory infections from the never-ending dust. And the heat was a killer. And now another 10 percenter revealed himself. A former cop asked to speak to me. He told me that he had not signed up for this type of work, that he was used to eight-hour days, three meals per day, coffee breaks, and eight hours of sleep. I very sarcastically told him to organize a union and see what he could get arranged. I was faced now with sending another guy home, but in a stroke of clarity I decided to send him to the villa and replace him with a villa guy. The villa guy was ecstatic to be on the detail, and the weak sister could relax as he would no longer have to go into the Red Zone. The villa quickly became a place where I could hide the sick, lame, and lazy.

Baghdad was a city that was one of the most extreme examples that I have ever seen of “haves” and “have-nots.” Saddam’s palaces were a garish testament to excess. Huge chandeliers, gold-plated fixtures in the bathrooms, fifty-foot cathedral ceilings, pictures of Hussein in every room. He spared no expense in making sure he had the best of everything. The citizens of Baghdad, on the other hand, lived in cement houses that had no sewage systems and no organized garbage pickup. Raw sewage ran from the houses into the streets; garbage was tossed in vacant lots. The smell, intensified by the heat, was oppressive. Electricity was a hit-or-miss proposition for the people. Forget about air-conditioning. Saddam had kept his foot firmly on the throats of his people while he enjoyed all the luxuries that he or anyone else could ever imagine. No wonder they hated him.

October 2003—THE LITTLE BIRDS ARRIVE

About this time I got a call from Blackwater that my helicopters would be arriving in a few days. Once again I was faced with a logistical nightmare. I now needed housing for ten more people, and a place to park and be able to work on the “Little Birds.” I went to Ken H and asked him to get the process rolling. There was a helo landing zone (LZ Washington) in the Green Zone that would be perfect, but there was neither housing nor a hangar there. Ken went to Colonel Sabol and somehow between the two of them, they miraculously got trailers installed at the LZ, and construction on a hangar began.

Six pilots, four mechanics, and the three MD-530 helicopters arrived. I met with the lead pilot. We talked about potential problems that might arise, and he assured me that due to his connections with the army air guys he could handle the issues. All the pilots in the first group were former TF-160 guys—The Night Stalkers. Most had considerable time working with Delta and the SEALs in support of spec-ops missions. Several were veteran pilots of the famous Somalia incident immortalized in the film
Black Hawk Down
. Most had retired from active duty after twenty years.

It took a couple of days for the Little Birds to be assembled, op checked, and declared operational. The decision was made to use only two at any time, thus making sure we would always have a spare ready to go if one of them got hit or had a mechanical issue. Each bird had two pilots and room in the back for two shooters who might provide firepower and cover in the event the motorcade was hit.

And then, as I anticipated and feared, some issues began to develop. Apparently a couple of the pilots never got the memo they were there to support the PSD team that was providing the security to the most-threatened man in the world. Several seemed to think our PSD team was there to support the new air wing of Blackwater. This was the first time that Blackwater had an aviation division, and, by extension, the first time that air power would be used to provide support to a PSD team on the ground. Just like when building the PSD team, we would have to develop the protocols for this new air resource. First these pilots wanted me to give them dedicated door gunners who would report only to them. When I told them I didn’t have sufficient manpower to do that, they suggested I cut back on either the detail or the advance team. Really? How would that make sense? Where did they think we were working, Myrtle Beach? I told them when the guys from the villa were off duty, they could use them. It was the best I could do until we got more people.

Then they informed me that, per FAA regulations, they could only be on duty for eight hours each day. WTF? We were in Iraq, not Nebraska! Again, I told them we worked whenever the ambassador worked. They wanted precise takeoff times and wanted to know exactly when they should be back on station before the ambassador left a meeting. I’ll never know what fairy tales they had been told, but they had obviously not been given a clear picture of what we were really doing. Meetings lasted until the ambassador was done. Sometimes they ended twenty minutes early; sometimes they ran two hours over. Ambassador Bremer was trying to rebuild a country, and a few of the pilots were worried about crew rest? I was beside myself. One pilot actually told me to tell the ambassador that he had to follow his schedule exactly or it would affect the pilots’ performance. It was an amazing conversation. He’s looking at me like I’m crazy, and I’m looking at him like he has three heads. I looked around for a
Candid Camera
crew. There was no way he could be serious. But he was.

At this point I wasn’t even sure how to best utilize them in their support role. A few days later one of the pilots came over to talk to me. Steve “Hacksaw” Chilton knew I was reaching a breaking point, and he asked me to let him massage his boss. I knew from word of mouth Hacksaw was a straight shooter and a damn good pilot, and I knew if he told me something could be done and that he could do it, it would get done. He was also, far and away, the best pilot in the group.

Somehow he fixed the issues. How he did it will always remain a mystery. I did hear a few stories of rather heated arguments and offers to “step outside” to handle the differences of opinion. Fortunately they kept that strictly to themselves.

The first Thursday the pilots were in-country I invited them over to my trailer for some adult beverages; I was told curtly by the lead pilot that his guys would not be attending. I responded in kind. I said they now worked for me; I was the AIC, and he and his guys fell under my command, not vice versa. He did not come over, but a few of the others did. It was the start of a very contentious relationship between him and me. I was never happier than when he rotated out. Eventually I learned that his biggest issue stemmed from taking directions from me, a former Marine Corps NCO, an enlisted man. He was a retired army colonel, and he truly believed that officers were superior to enlisted men in everything and in every way. The fact that I had been doing protection operations for years for a former cabinet-level government official meant nothing to him. As an officer he automatically knew more about protection than I ever would.

The other pilots were great guys—absolutely fearless. Men of character who would do anything asked of them whenever it was asked. And ask we did, and answer the call they did.

At this time Blackwater had another team in country—The Dirty 30. They worked under a different contract and provided support for a different agency. Most were former spec-op guys (Recon, SEALs, and Special Forces) and when they heard about our Little Birds they could not get to me fast enough to see how they might use them to support their mission. Once again, I had to remind people that the birds were here to support the PSD team guarding Ambassador Bremer. I got the patented Blackwater “one team, one fight” speech, and I realized that they actually thought they had access to the helos. It was a nightmare. We were on different contracts, being paid by different government agencies. If something happened while we were out with the ambassador, how was I supposed to explain why my birds were providing air support for someone else?

My new toys were a novelty item to most of the folks in the palace. Everyone wanted a ride or to “borrow” them. It was a pain in the ass dealing with all the requests for special favors from folks who “absolutely needed” them for some special project. I tried to stay focused on the missions, but between the attitude of the lead pilot and the hours my men were keeping, it was a brutal struggle. The lead pilot never met a request he thought he shouldn’t fulfill. In his mind those “recreational” flights would count against his eight-hour day and had the potential to generate future business and income for Blackwater Air. Needless to say they were rarely granted. The guy was a skilled pilot, but why he was there as the lead guy baffled me. We made up the rules as the situations dictated, and he played everything by the book—a book that was totally inapplicable in Iraq. He would call Blackwater HQ daily to complain about something, and then my phone would ring and I would be asked to explain some nonexistent problem. On more than one occasion I was with the ambassador when Blackwater called about some slight, real or imagined, that hurt this guy’s feelings. I only called HQ if and when I had an emergency.

At this time IEDs (improvised explosive devices) were becoming quite a problem for the folks (military and civilian) in Baghdad. The Iraqis were masters of taking different explosives—artillery shells, mortar shells, hand grenades, plastic explosives, etc.—and turning them into explosive devices they could bury under the road, stuff into animal carcasses, or hide in trash cans and then detonate remotely. IEDs were extremely effective and were responsible for thousands of American, coalition, and Iraqi citizens’ injuries and deaths. Not to mention the car bombs that were driven by suicide bombers or the suicide bombers that would strap explosives to themselves and walk up to the target and blow themselves up while killing their intended victims.

Consequently, we were always on guard for lone individuals. One day, we took Bremer to the other side of The 14th of July Bridge. This bridge crossed the Euphrates River and was named by the Iraqis to honor a special date in their history. A homeless man approached the motorcade while we were stopped for traffic. He fixated on the limo and began to approach with a broom in one hand. The other hand extended palm up. He was obviously begging for a handout. The limo driver, instead of keeping the car moving, reached and fumbled for his pistol as though he was going to draw it and fire it through the armored window. I casually reached over and stopped him from drawing the weapon. Firing a weapon inside an armored vehicle may be just about dumbest thing a person could do. The bullet can’t get out. It would just bounce around inside until it hit one of us or the ambassador. At the same time I heard yelling behind me and turned around to see the shift leader out of his vehicle pointing his weapon at the homeless guy and screaming at him to stop and get back. Funny thing about the English language; no matter how loud you yell it, if they can’t understand it, they can’t understand it. The ambassador calmly asked me if it was necessary to point a loaded weapon at an obviously homeless beggar. I told him I would talk to the team. Fuck.

In October the Al Rasheed Hotel came under a rocket attack that killed an army Special Forces soldier and badly wounded several others. The rocket launcher used in the attack was a large, hollowed-out diesel generator with drop sides that had been towed into place by a pickup truck. The truck had pulled up, stopped, and the driver had gotten out to initiate the launch. The generator held a bunch of rockets in improvised launch tubes set to fire when a countdown timer hit zero. The timer clicked, the sides dropped, and some rockets launched. Lucky for most of the folks in the hotel, only about eight of the array (I don’t recall the exact total number, around twenty to twenty-five, I think) went off. That was the trouble with the improvised munitions that the Iraqis started slapping together. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t. Who knows how many attacks didn’t happen because of shoddy and poor quality of work.

Thank God this had not happened the evening of our first party a few weeks earlier. Prior to this the Al Rasheed had been viewed as a safe place for us to go. Another fantasy destroyed.

As a result of the attack, the decision was made to close the hotel to all Americans, and to move all U.S. personnel onto the palace grounds. This created another housing shortage as the trailer parks were still under construction. Steve Jones and Bill Miller approached me and asked if we had any beds available that they could use. Both were Diplomatic Security (DS) agents for the U.S. State Department. I liked both of them—great guys on assignment to help transition the palace grounds to the new U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Bill would actually become the first regional security officer (RSO) in the new Iraq.

Thanks to Ken H’s efforts liaising with a navy officer, LCDR Tucker, (whom he had met and formed a great working relationship with in the palace), we had secured a large multiroom office and a separate cipher-locked room with cots that we used as a “ready” room where the guys could relax between missions. There was a refrigerator and long-distance phone line for the team to call family back home. Inside the locked room we stored our weapons and operational gear. It wasn’t much, but it beat the hell out of living in tents. Bill and Steve and another DS agent moved in that day and lived there for a few weeks. Bill, even before becoming the RSO, had become a valuable ally to Blackwater. He helped me get a lot of things accomplished through both back channels and official channels that otherwise may have never gotten done.

In late 2003 Bill stopped an international incident that would have been a disaster. Secretary of State Colin Powell came to town for a visit, and made several trips with Ambassador Bremer during the days he was there. One of the visits was to the Baghdad City Council in downtown Baghdad, a Red Zone destination we truly hated each and every time we went there. The DS team accompanying the secretary worked very closely with both our detail team and our advance team. The AIC for the secretary was John Murphy. John is and was a great guy, and he’s still a good friend. Post-Iraq I worked with John for about seven years in the Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program run by the U.S. State Department.

Knowing that eventually the palace grounds would become the U.S. embassy, and speculating that if Blackwater was still doing security there, a decent working relationship with the State Department would be important, I offered John any support we could provide. On this particular day my advance team had gone to the Baghdad City Council and had begun setting up the concentric rings of security that we needed to protect both the ambassador and the secretary. One of the DS advance agents panicked when he saw Iraqis in the street carrying AK-47s. To us it meant almost nothing; every family in Iraq had at least one AK-47. It only became an issue when and if they pointed them at us … which they frequently did. They were extremely careless about their weapons handling. The DS agent ordered my snipers to shoot each and every Iraqi carrying a rifle. Fortunately, Scotty, my advance team leader, called me and told me what was happening. I told the guys they were not to shoot at anybody unless they were fired upon first. I then called Bill Miller, and he called the agent and told him to follow Blackwater’s lead when it came to this sort of thing. Nisoor Square would have been nothing compared to this disaster had Bill not intervened and ordered his agents to comply with our tactics and protocols.

The intel reports continued to get darker and darker. The Iraqis were becoming more openly hostile to all American forces, and the threats against Bremer continued to pour in. One day I got a report that the insurgents had decided that Bremer did not have enough security guys close to him and he would be susceptible to a knife or suicide bomber attack. At this time I was still wearing a sport coat and trying to blend in. I made the decision to begin dressing like the rest of the Blackwater guys with weapons revealed, making no attempt to hide who or why I was there and letting folks know that we were right in the ambassador’s back pocket. Two days later another report was passed along stating that the insurgents had decided to attack the British ambassador instead because Bremer now had security close to him and the British ambassador did not. Needless to say my British counterparts were not happy with me.