Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (10 page)

She knew about everything with Joanna. I had devastated her,
yet in her final months Joan had found the strength to forgive me. There are no excuses for what happened—there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t regret the way I hurt her.

After years of pain and treatments, on June 14, 2003, my beautiful wife surrendered her body to her Creator and passed from this life. She was thirty-six years old. I cut a small lock of her hair to keep, and I asked the doctor for the chemotherapy port that had been implanted in her upper chest.

“Really?” the doctor said. “That thing was the bane of her existence.”

“That was the closest thing to her heart,” I said. I’ve got it to this day.

Soon after, surrounded by family and friends, we laid Joan to rest in that same ruffled navy blue taffeta dress she wore the night I met her. Our children were eight, seven, five, and three years old.

With her passing, and my shame, the screaming jet noise of life overwhelmed me. I dug ever deeper into my work. Days at a time morphed into a single blur, and I know that for a while I lost focus on those around me, and even those at home—our four beautiful kids, who’d just lost their mother. Not knowing what else to do, I turned my all-consuming sense of loss into an all-consuming drive to forge Blackwater into everything Joan and I had dreamed it could be.
Whatever it takes
, I told myself,
I’m going to make that happen
.

2004

One afternoon in early 2004, Richard Pere sat in Blackwater’s staging area on the ramp at Bagram Airfield in Kabul, Afghanistan. He was there with a pair of pilots from Presidential Airways, a loadmaster, and a crew chief. Behind them sat one of the company’s boxy, Spanish-built EADS CASA C212 airplanes. A Blackwater plane.

Presidential Airways was the operating subsidiary of Aviation Worldwide Services, the company I’d bought the year before. The purchase had been part of my deep focus on expanding Blackwater’s capabilities while I was facing struggles at home. But regardless of the impetus, few business decisions I’ve made have had a bigger impact on the company.

Partly I bought Presidential for those two twin-engine Spanish workhorses it owned. But also I bought it for the airmen. Pere, Presidential’s cofounder and president, was a veteran of the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the “Night Stalkers” because of their pilots’ strike capabilities in complete darkness.
His experience stretched all the way back to flying a nighttime helicopter mission to start the liberation of Grenada in 1983.

Then there was John Hight, vice president of Presidential and the man who became director of our aviation operations in Afghanistan. He was a fellow veteran of Army’s 160th who had served this country with distinction since Vietnam. He was also there with Pere at Bagram that day. They were there for standard Blackwater cargo and passenger movements.

Suddenly, a frantic phone call came in from a junior Army officer.
The 82nd Airborne had been on long patrol
when they encountered insurgents in the mountains near Pakistan, Pere was told. The firefight had now gone on for days. The soldiers were almost out of ammunition. The Air Force wouldn’t resupply them because the drop zone hadn’t been “surveyed,” or officially approved. Could we help?

Everyone at Blackwater knew it was only a matter of time before something like this unfolded. As the military mission in Afghanistan shifted from toppling the Taliban to rousting insurgents in the mountains along the Pakistan border, the Army’s Special Forces had to venture deep into some of the most isolated and inhospitable areas on earth. Rebel camps thrived in the snowcapped Hindu Kush range, with peaks twice as high as many of those in the Rockies or the Alps. In the barren Safed Koh mountains south of Kabul, the thirty-three-mile-long Khyber Pass winding between Peshawar, Pakistan, and the Afghan border was
littered with the roadside remnants
of NATO supply vehicles blown apart by militants hiding in the hillsides. And
thirty miles west of the pass was Tora Bora
—or “Black Dust” in the native Pashto—Osama bin Laden’s notorious cave and tunnel stronghold, which at the time was manned by a few hundred of his loyal followers. “
The tyranny of distance and terrain
, a long history of conflict and occupation, an extraordinarily complex tribal mosaic, an adaptive and committed enemy, and primitive and often corrupt governance all posed extraordinary challenges for soldiers and diplomats alike,” read a National Defense University assessment of the region.

Without any significant civil infrastructure in the region, America’s elite counterinsurgency troops were stuck creating forward operating bases (FOBs) that were little more than heavily armed campsites in the wilderness, often no larger than a city block. And to do their jobs, they constantly needed supplies: food, water, fuel, ammunition.

Delivering cargo by road just invited an ambush—and that’s when there were any roads at all. (With only about thirty
miles of paved road in the entire country
, it was hardly a given.) Helicopters could get to the FOBs, but the noise would only advertise troop locations and leave the choppers vulnerable to antiaircraft fire. The Air Force has a rock-and-roll collection of strategic bombers and high-speed ground attack planes—classic vestiges of big wars no longer being fought—but few landing zones in the Afghan highlands can handle a 150,000-pound supply plane. By the time Pere got that call, the Pentagon had been making do by airdropping six-hundred-pound pallets of gear. But it’s hard to hit a postage stamp–sized base from the altitudes the Air Force drops from in order to protect those multimillion-dollar warplanes. Too many loads were drifting away, then forcing our troops into dangerous recovery missions to prevent the matériel from falling into enemy hands.

Presidential’s boxy little turboprops, meanwhile, were decidedly blue collar, but also cheap to fly and easy to maintain. They could haul just over two tons of personnel and cargo. A rear cargo ramp made them perfect for parachute drops. In the right hands, a C212 could pull off exactly the harrowing sort of low-cost, low-altitude (LCLA) resupply missions the soldiers on the ground desperately needed. The “low cost” refers to the less expensive parachute system employed for smaller package sizes. And the “low altitude”? That’s ripping through the mountainside at 160 knots less than fifty feet above ground level—close enough to study a stunned goatherd’s face as we soared above him. Close enough to be sure not to miss the drop zone. Close enough that mistakes become fatalities.

Pere’s crew agreed on the spot to help out—no haggling, or
contracts, or attorneys. Just a simple yes to a request from an officer in need, and then Blackwater’s plane, packed with shrink-wrapped ammunition, headed into the mountains to find the troops. A soldier there placed the drop zone’s big orange RAM, or raised angle marker, on the hood of his Hummer; less than an hour later, our men flew in low and tight enough to knock the RAM off the Hummer with a pallet. I gladly paid the costs of that mission myself; soon, after a few more of those emergency runs, the Pentagon asked us to make it official.
Air Force solicitation of competitively bid contract
FA4428-04-D-0036 began in July 2004; in September of that year we completed negotiations with Air Mobility Command out of Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, which oversaw the contract. The deal was to provide fixed-wing short takeoff and landing aircraft to move the troops and supplies of Combined Joint Task Force 76 in and around Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan. In no time at all, Presidential was dropping 5.5 million pounds of cargo a year in a deal worth $34.8 million—
more than the combined total
of our federal contracts to that point.

Which meant, of course, that we suddenly needed to put a fleet of C212s on the ground in Afghanistan. Our team found secondhand CASAs in Texas, Latin America, and Australia, but the little planes had an average range just shy of nine hundred miles. They were designed for coastal patrols, not oceanic crossings. John Hight sat down and calculated how much fuel each C212 would need to make the flight, then filled the planes with fifty-five-gallon fuel drums and a pump system he engineered himself. Every thirty-seven minutes on those transatlantic flights, a crewman shifted the pump from one barrel to the next as the engines wolfed down the gas. For forty hours straight.

There’s no autopilot on these clattering little planes, mind you, no cabin pressure—and there certainly aren’t bathrooms. But over and over, Presidential found dedicated pilots and other crew members who wanted to be part of a mission again and contribute to a team doing something larger than themselves. We had no problem recruiting crews to pump their way across the Atlantic.

Soon I, too, was joining on those LCLA flights in Afghanistan, harnessed at the rear of the plane, standing alongside six supply bundles and a jumpmaster team. With the cargo ramp raised, the khaki countryside disappeared behind us in a furious blur. The countdowns came from the loadmaster and pilots at one minute, thirty seconds, ten seconds—then “
Go, go, go!
” When that tinny “go” bell rang, one team member slashed the tether and the rest of us shoved pallets through the tail chute. The payloads smacked down on the ground in mere seconds, just as the CASA pilots pulled spine-bending banks away from the drop zones that left even the most battle-tested veterans airsick. It was some of the most dangerous, exhilarating fixed-wing flying I’ve ever been a part of.

•   •   •

F
or some members of my team, Blackwater was strictly a business. Others saw it as a larger mission, like a sixth branch of the military. Contractors were, after all, viewed by the Pentagon as part of its “Total Force,” and some of our jobs came from urgent and compelling contracts for which the government needed somebody to solve a problem right away. I saw my growing company as a perfect combination of the two: a way to benefit the armed forces in all sorts of ways, without all the bureaucracy. “The DoD has a lot of great people trapped in it,” I often told people.

Some of the most dedicated, most passionate people I’ve ever met have been part of the United States armed forces. But I also know that where the Pentagon needs a hundred men to get a job done, a private company can do it with ten. Blackwater, I figured, could be the FedEx to the DoD’s postal service: We didn’t want to replace the military; we just wanted to make it more efficient and help patch the inevitable logistical gaps that cropped up in Pentagon planning. The approach benefited the Pentagon—and it benefited our bottom line.

In 2001, Blackwater earned some $735,000
in federal contracts.
In 2002, that increased to $3.4 million
. Then, in the space of eighteen months from 2003 through 2004, our business grew 600
percent. By the time we signed the Presidential Airways supply contract, money was coming from every direction—not just from Iraq and Afghanistan. The small staff in Moyock could hardly manufacture Dehart’s target systems, costing as much as $15,000 apiece, fast enough. Corner office corporate warriors decided $1,500 pistol courses were more fun than golf vacations, and they shared space at the training facility with the international collection of police, military personnel, federal agents, forest rangers, and security guards who streamed through. Soon, the uniform patches those units left as souvenirs filled a pair of wall-size bulletin boards in our mess hall—a far cry from the days when we were sending employees home early. So many bullets were being fired on our Moyock ranges—some 1.5 million rounds per month—we invited local Boy Scout troops to come sweep up the brass shell casings, then recycle them and keep the cash.

Just past the fifteen-acre lake on the North Carolina campus, we upgraded the headquarters to a 65,000-square-foot command center, making it the largest building in Camden County. We even added imitation .50-caliber machine-gun barrels as handles on the front double doors. To accommodate all the foot traffic, the original modest sleeping quarters were rebuilt into a 206-bed hotel.

Overseas, we were filling contracts from the State Department, the CIA, and the DoD, including facility and personnel protection in multiple countries. We
trained Afghan border agents and narcotics officers
for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
State even asked us to train security personnel
to combat unusual threats at the Athens Olympic Games. Then there was a collection of classified contracts I’m not at liberty to discuss, even today. It made up only about 15 percent of our business—but as Gary Jackson liked to say, there were times we couldn’t tell one government agency what we were doing for another.

We opened offices in Baghdad and Amman, Jordan, and Blackwater USA became Blackwater Worldwide. During our rapid rise, the
company created numerous affiliates, branching far beyond Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, Blackwater Armor and Targets, and Blackwater Security Consulting. One early addition was Blackwater K9, which trained law enforcement dog units in Moyock and deployed nearly one hundred teams around the world with bomb-sniffing German shepherds and malamutes.

For water-based practice and antipiracy protection in the Gulf of Aden, we created Blackwater Maritime Security Solutions, the centerpiece of which was the
McArthur
, a 183-foot-long former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel that we retrofitted to carry two Little Bird helicopters, three rigid-hull inflatable boats, and a few dozen Blackwater personnel. Soon we were working with Azerbaijan’s navy, at the approval of the U.S. government, to provide facility upgrades and maritime interdiction training. Those on Capitol Hill supported efforts by the tiny former Soviet republic to send its Caspian Sea oil out to the international market without having to go through neighboring Russia or Iran. But protecting its oil and gas infrastructure required top-notch tactical teams Azerbaijan didn’t yet have. I’m proud that over the course of roughly ten months Blackwater’s trainers took those Azerbaijan naval commandos from the most basic training to the most advanced techniques in hostile ship boarding.

Meanwhile, in Moyock, another team focused on vehicles. Having seen our convoys attacked in Iraq, we began designing and manufacturing our own heavily armored personnel carrier, called the Grizzly. The fifteen-ton beasts could carry ten men, cruise at sixty-five miles per hour, and stop rounds as large as .50 caliber—a vast improvement over the Humvees that had been taking bullets in Iraq. We figured Blackwater Armored Vehicle might sell three hundred of the trucks a year.

Then we built a blimp. No joke.
The airships have been used for defense
since World War II, when Goodyear convinced the Navy they could be cost-effective submarine scouts. From 2000 to 2005,
defense spending on unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs) had increased nearly tenfold, according to the Congressional Research Service. So Blackwater Airships prototyped a 170-foot-long remote-controlled blimp that could hover for days, for half the price of a fixed-wing UAV. “We can sit it over the top of Baghdad at 18,000 feet and watch all that goes on,” Jackson told a reporter at the time. “
The problem is if it really does work
, it will be hard to produce them fast enough. I believe airships will be a multi-billion-dollar business.”

Then, incorporating all these growing capabilities, we pitched to the State Department a privately trained, seventeen-hundred-man peacekeeping package with its own air force, helicopters, cargo ships, aerial surveillance, medical supply chain, and combat group. We called the offshoot company Greystone and registered it in Barbados as an international affiliate that could better ship out to war-torn regions like Darfur, Sudan, in place of the ineffectual UN peacekeepers, who are slow to deploy and hampered by red tape.