The Circuit (16 page)

I had got a preview the day before in the lobbies of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels. Walking into the complex was like lifting the curtain on a freak show. The place was crawling with security advisers looking after media and civilian contractors. One of the first details I encountered, sadly, was a British Close Protection team escorting a client off an elevator. I stared at them slack-jawed as they strutted past. There were six advisers in all: two ahead of the client and four backing him. Every member of the team was wearing body armour over their clothing and carrying a range of different weapons in full view; from AKs and submachine guns, down to back-up pistols in waist holsters. Never had I seen such an unnecessary, over-the-top display of firepower in a hotel lobby – or anywhere else for that matter.

I’m sure those lads were well intentioned. They probably thought their overt stance would intimidate would-be attackers and keep them at bay. Maybe in a Hollywood movie, but in the real world of hostile environments the worst thing you can do is draw attention to yourself and your client unnecessarily. A security team that advertises its capabilities is asking to be attacked. It’s not a matter of if they’ll get hit, but when.

As bad as those Brits were, the American security details I saw were even worse. Not only did they wear body armour on top of their clothing and flash weapons for all to see but many of them were obviously on steroids, wore sunglasses indoors (a habit which really hacks me off) and had pistols and knives strapped to their legs.

I was stunned by the sheer number of cowboys, Walter Mittys and posers I saw just in the Sheraton/Palestine complex alone. Less than a year earlier, most lads on The Circuit had the skills and knowledge to behave professionally in a hostile environment. But the aftermath of the Iraq invasion had opened the floodgates to The Circuit, changing it beyond recognition.

The Circuit’s transformation may have started with 11 September but it kicked into high gear in April 2003, with the announcement of the $18.4 billion reconstruction fund to help get Iraq up and running again after years of war and economic sanctions. Administered by the US government, the fund awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure and construct new public services such as hospitals and schools.

The main recipients of these multi-billion-dollar contracts were commercial firms staffed by civilian experts in engineering and other fields; civvies who needed looking after in ‘post-conflict’ Iraq. That’s where The Circuit came in. The coalition had always planned to use commercial security companies to look after reconstruction projects, but the role of CSCs was meant to be limited. Even the most astute industry insider couldn’t have predicted that commercial security personnel would
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eventually represent the second largest foreign armed force in Iraq
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behind the US military.

It all came down to the US-led coalition’s handling of post-invasion Iraq. You can debate endlessly about whether the US and Britain should have gone to war in the first place but few would disagree that the follow-up was a disaster. From the US military’s failure to adopt a less intimidating stance towards Iraq’s civilians, to the incredibly ill-considered decision to disband the country’s armed forces, the coalition’s post-invasion strategy in Iraq will go down as one of the most notorious screw-ups in modern military history.

In a situation like Iraq where the military is left chasing the error, the number of troops needed to secure the ground rises substantially. I estimate the US alone would have needed to commit at least 50,000 additional troops to sort out its portion of Iraq. But President George W. Bush and his administration had sold the public on a war with few casualties and a quick resolution. For political reasons, US leaders – and British for that matter – wanted to maintain the illusion that Iraq could be secured with no additional commitment of resources. The Circuit helped them achieve that.

As Iraq descended into chaos, the troops on the ground became stretched to the limit fighting a growing insurgency. Rather than deploy more soldiers, the US and UK governments responded by outsourcing more military jobs to the private sector in order to free up the troops they had in theatre. Military tasks such as guarding coalition compounds, embassies, diplomatic staff, running supply convoys and training Iraqi police all shifted to The Circuit.

Outsourced military jobs were only the half of it. As Iraq became a more dangerous place to do business the security needs of civilian contractors hired to rebuild the country became ever greater. The more the insurgency gained traction, the more reconstruction funds were diverted into the pockets of CSCs.

The biggest loser in all of this was the Iraqi people. Far from improving, their daily lives degenerated into a struggle for survival. But the coalition troops on the ground also picked up a big part of the tab by suffering enormously due to the lack of proper military reinforcements.

Meanwhile, The Circuit never had it so good; CSCs were eating up a bigger and bigger slice of the reconstruction fund while picking up more and more outsourced military jobs. Niche tasks like looking after media were also booming. In short, the debacle in Iraq had turned into a twenty-first-century gold-rush. In 2003, the collective annual revenue of British CSCs alone totalled approximately £320 million. By 2004, annual revenues had exploded to more than £1.8 billion.
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All those new security contracts funding the boom required people to staff them, and it wasn’t long before demand for advisers trained in hostile environments quickly overwhelmed supply. Standards, as I’d already seen for myself, had gone into freefall. It didn’t help matters that CSCs aren’t regulated, so there was no legal requirement for due diligence when hiring advisers. Even a military background, though the norm, was no longer a hard and fast requirement. I was meeting lads in Iraq who’d worked as bouncers before joining The Circuit!

That’s not to say everyone was playing at it. I saw plenty of advisers in Iraq maintaining a low profile and conducting themselves with the utmost professionalism. But in my heart of hearts, I knew it didn’t matter how well I or anyone else did their job; skilled or incompetent, we’d all be lumped together.

It was a distressing state of affairs, not least because it made operating in Iraq that much more hazardous. I wondered how many enemies were made when that American security detail blasted out of the Green Zone. How many Iraqi civilians turned against the coalition as a result?

As much as I was concerned for the state of British CSCs, two weeks operating in and around Baghdad confirmed in my mind at least that US firms were the worse of the two. There seemed to be little difference between the way American soldiers and American security teams operated in hostile environments. I had an idea the mistakes of the US military were being carried over into the commercial world. My first assignment north of Baghdad would confirm it.

CHAPTER 16

After a few weeks of looking after CNN in and around Baghdad, I was asked by Senior International Correspondent Nic Robertson to accompany him and his crew on a US military embed north of the capital. It may sound redundant for a journalist to bring a security adviser on an assignment where they’ll be surrounded by uniformed troops. But soldiers have enough to do without the added burden of looking after the media. Being embedded with a military unit in a hostile environment is one of the most dangerous assignments a journalist can accept. Soldiers are targeted all the time, so anyone with them is a target too. A trained security adviser using proactive skills can assess the operational environment for an embedded news team, i.e. mode of transportation, accommodation, etc., and make an early call as to whether a story can be got safely.

I said yes to Nic’s request without hesitation. I had been assigned to him previously in the West Bank and admired his work tremendously. He wasn’t afraid to tackle controversial topics and report the facts in full, even if it upset some viewers. I also found Nic very easy to work with; he doesn’t smoke, never drinks on the job and keeps himself in great shape. It is much easier looking after an alert, hard-working, disciplined correspondent than one whose physical and mental state has deteriorated through drinking, smoking and lack of exercise.

I was also very intrigued by the main focus of Nic’s embed. He was profiling Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Sassaman, at the time, a rising star in the US military. Sassaman had been written about extensively in the US media and had gained notoriety for, among other things, wrapping an entire Iraqi village in barbed wire to flush out insurgents.
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Sassaman had recently been assigned the task of crushing militant activity in Samarra, a city located in the heart of the Sunni triangle. Stretching from Ramadi in the south-west to Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit in the north to Baghdad in the south-east, the Sunni triangle had become the epicentre of armed Sunni opposition to the US-led coalition.

One of the most hazardous aspects of the embed was actually getting there. The only road connecting Baghdad to Samarra was a main supply route for coalition forces where IEDs and more elaborate roadside ambushes were commonplace. We needed a minimum of two 4x4s for the journey: one for Nic and his crew and another to serve as a lookout and backup vehicle in case the client’s broke down or became disabled in an ambush.

Samarra is only sixty-five miles from Baghdad, but I insisted on departing before nine to ensure we had plenty of daylight for our trip. There were several checkpoints along the way which would slow us down. Also, one insurgent attack could stretch our modest drive into an epic journey.

Our small convoy left the Palestine with Nic, his crew and a local driver in the lead vehicle and me and a local driver in the other. Once we cleared the traffic of central Baghdad, the road began flowing like a river after a heavy rain. I hoped it would continue that way. It wasn’t to be. About twenty miles north of the Iraqi capital, traffic started to slow. The cars ahead of us weren’t stopping, but it was obvious something was causing them to proceed cautiously. I figured either we were approaching a very slow-moving, heavily guarded convoy that wouldn’t allow anyone to pass, or someone had got hit by insurgents. It turned out to be the latter. A US military and civilian logistical convoy had been attacked. The convoy’s trucks were riddled with bullet holes and the cabs were splattered with blood. We missed the incident by approximately twenty minutes.

No one had to tell us what had happened. From the wreckage, it looked as if the insurgents had followed a classic ambush pattern. First, they paralysed the convoy by blowing one of the lead vehicles off the road with an IED. They then launched a follow-up attack with small-arms fire. I didn’t spot any Iraqi civilian vehicles in the remains. By that point, Iraqis and most foreigners in Iraq knew that driving too close to a military convoy was a double peril: they could either find themselves caught up in an insurgent attack or the convoy could mistake them for militants and open fire.

The casualities had been evacuated by the time we drove past and US soldiers along with Iraqi police were doing their utmost to secure the area as quickly as possible. They didn’t want to give the insurgents another opportunity to strike by remaining stationary for too long.

As was standard procedure, we maintained a healthy distance between ourselves and other convoys for the rest of the trip, reaching the outskirts of Samarra around noon local time. It was a crystal-clear day and I could see the city’s skyline in the distance; a series of low-level rooftops crowned by the magnificent dome of a grand mosque.

Sassaman’s camp was located in a small, flat hamlet on the edge of the city. As we pulled off the main highway, I asked Yasir, my local driver, to move ahead of Nic’s vehicle. There was a checkpoint and I wanted to get there first in case the troops manning it were trigger-happy. There had already been numerous incidents involving nervous US soldiers firing on innocent civilians at checkpoints. I was relieved to see Iraqi police were in charge of the checkpoint. I used the opportunity to have Yasir double-check our directions to the base. He rolled down the window and spoke with the police who pointed us towards an abandoned school complex up the road.

Given the volatile nature of the area, I expected the base to meet the highest possible security standards. But as soon as the perimeter came into view, my alarm bells started ringing. Though the complex was ringed with twelve-foot-high, reinforced concrete blast walls – an excellent defensive measure – all of the sentry towers we drove past were unmanned. At twenty feet high, the towers were the only way for the soldiers inside to see over the blast walls. Leaving them empty effectively blinded the entire base to what was happening on their doorstep.

After a standard vehicle search, including the once-over by dogs trained to sniff for explosives, we were cleared through the main gates of the base. Once inside, I started looking for potential security weaknesses. The base was laid out in a quadrangle centred on a helipad big enough to accommodate two Chinook helicopters. To the front of the quadrangle was the base headquarters, a rectangular one-storey building surrounded by small outbuildings and a parking area for armoured vehicles; on the far side of the quadrangle stood a sixty-foot-high rusting water tower. One look at the water tower and the words ‘reference point’ flashed though my mind; insurgents could use it as a guide to help them fire mortars at the base more accurately.

We had just started unloading our gear when Lt Colonel Sassaman and his Direct Commander (his boss) walked out of the headquarters building. As soon as the Commander laid eyes on the big TV camera, he gave Sassaman a dirty look. I got the feeling the two men didn’t get on well. Perhaps the Commander didn’t approve of Sassaman’s media exposure.