Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (21 page)

Any non-American Blackwater employees brought on underwent similar vetting procedures, and they were required to receive from the State Department a favorable Moderate Risk Public Trust determination—a designation that allowed them to work on sensitive assignments that didn’t involve access to national security information but did involve situations in which the “public trust” might be at moderate risk because of potential disruptions to government programs or facilities. All told, Blackwater’s men in Baghdad, American or not, received far tougher screenings than most U. S. soldiers and law enforcement personnel undergo at home—as exhibited by a U.S. Capitol Police fiasco in 2008, when it was revealed that fifteen of the force’s new hires had actually failed criminal background checks and psychological examinations or had submitted false information on their applications.

Further, most if not all of the personnel Blackwater protected had been required at some point to take the traditional oath of office: “I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully
discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter. So help me God.” With that in mind, I made it policy across the entire Prince Group that all officers, employees, and independent contractors of Blackwater who were required to have security clearances took the same oath when coming on board.

•   •   •

T
hat’s not to say we never got it wrong. It’s true that with a workforce growing exponentially almost overnight to fill those contracts abroad, even the most careful scrutiny by Blackwater hiring managers and State Department clearance personnel didn’t catch a handful of bad actors. It’s a problem all companies face. (One survey I read recently showed that nearly 70 percent of
American employers are affected by bad hires
each year, and that more than 40 percent of them point to needing to fill a job quickly as the main culprit. I can relate.)

I believed strongly in standing by our employees and contractors when they made honest mistakes, allowing us all to learn from them. But if we hired fast, I fired faster when confronted with people who were wrongly motivated, or knowingly broke the law, or ignored the standards of professionalism I demanded. “You hire people, they don’t work out, you move on”—that became a mantra of mine. No one ever accused me of coddling the people under me.

Those fireable offenses didn’t even have to result in headline-grabbing situations. Of the thousands who contracted with us in Iraq over the years, we fired more than 120 of them for various things—such as possessing unauthorized weapons (that is, one whose serial number doesn’t match the weapon assigned to that person, or his carrying a make or model weapon not authorized by the contract); or drug and alcohol violations; or sometimes just because someone had a bad attitude. One early situation that drew significant attention provided a perfect example of that hiring and firing cycle—and also of the major misunderstandings about the capabilities of a private company like mine.

On December 24, 2006, Blackwater contractor Andrew Moonen, who had served in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division from 2002 to 2005, left a holiday party in the Green Zone. By almost all accounts,
he’d been drinking heavily
. Soon after leaving the party alone, Moonen—an armorer who repaired weapons for us, not a protective security professional—encountered Raheem Khalif Sa’adoon, a thirty-two-year-old guard assigned to protect the compound of Iraqi vice president Adil Abdul-Mahdi.

Whatever exchange ensued is impossible to re-create with any certainty—though I’ve always found it interesting that some six months later, a number of
Mahdi’s security guards were arrested
after robbing a Baghdad bank and making off with the equivalent of nearly five million dollars. The men on that protective detail were never known for their agreeableness.

Still, there on Christmas Eve, Sa’adoon was shot three times.
He died early the next day
at an American military hospital. Moonen was the only suspect in the killing, and the relatively rare shooting inside the Green Zone provided perfect fodder for those looking to accuse Blackwater’s men of recklessness.

Our corporate response was every bit as tough as it—legally—could have been: Within hours, we fired Moonen for a “
blatant and egregious” violation
of Blackwater’s policy prohibiting the possession of a firearm while under the influence of alcohol. Whatever else had transpired that night, the booze infraction alone got him canned. Then Moonen forfeited his $3,000 Christmas bonus and, at the State Department’s direction, was immediately loaded on a plane back to the United States—at his own expense—while various American authorities investigated the shooting. Employees who didn’t maintain our standards were always left with just one decision to make: window or aisle? (In fact, examining the full dollar amounts involved, Moonen also sacrificed the $3,000 Fourth of July bonus he would have earned a few months later on that contract, and a $7,000 completion bonus for finishing his time with us in good standing. Adding in the sudden $1,600 airfare home, that alcohol infraction cost the armorer nearly $15,000.)

Critics were dismayed at our response, apparently figuring that amid dramatic uncertainty about whether or not a crime was even committed, we were obligated to detain a civilian against his will. Even had the night’s events been clearer, a private company like Blackwater is not empowered to enforce U.S. law; holding him could well have constituted false imprisonment. We fired Moonen for breaking company rules. We fined him. But, as I later said publicly, we couldn’t flog him. We couldn’t incarcerate him. We could only follow State Department demands for sending him back to the United States, and assist in the investigations however we could. We always welcomed that oversight, along with the prosecution of any of my men found to have broken the law. “We have supported the investigation, and if a grand jury sends it to trial, Blackwater will support that as well,”
Gary Jackson told reporters
at the time. “As we have said all along, we strongly support holding responsible anyone who engages in misconduct.”

Over the next four years, federal prosecutors and FBI agents traveled to Baghdad multiple times to interview witnesses and collect evidence on the case. Ultimately, in October 2010, the Justice Department decided not to bring murder charges against Moonen, citing the difficulty of preserving evidence in war zones, questions of legal jurisdictions, and immunity implied to him by the initial State Department investigators under what’s known as
a Garrity warning
—the threat that Moonen would lose his job for not answering questions truthfully, but a simultaneous grant that anything he said could not be used to later prosecute him. Blackwater cooperated fully, every step of the way—and quickly replaced Moonen. Whenever a bad hire washed out, there was a line of applicants looking to take his place.

•   •   •

B
ut it wasn’t just for the money. Despite conventional wisdom, the reality is that my company didn’t offer the massive financial windfall generally assumed. “[Blackwater’s] armed commandos
earn an
average of about $1,000 a day,” one early
Washington Post
report contended. “Many of these contractors
make up to $1,000 a day
, far more than active-duty soldiers,” parroted an op-ed in the
Los Angeles Times
. The figure was repeated over and over. Yet no matter how often people said it, the thousand-dollars-a-day figure simply wasn’t accurate.

Blackwater pay rates ranged from $450 to $650 per day in the hot zone, and averaged about $500 per day across the entire contractor force. Workdays often stretched twelve hours; company-wide, it wasn’t unusual for contractors to average a little over $40 an hour in the most hazardous work environments imaginable. Which is not to say that couldn’t add up: $500 a day in Baghdad over the course of a six-month contract could mean roughly $90,000. An average Navy SEAL makes about $54,000 a year before factoring in special skills bonuses that can bump his salary significantly higher. So of course Blackwater’s base pay was a draw, and one I felt was only reasonable to attract men and women with the elite skills that we needed. But simply comparing those two numbers, as so many have been wont to do, offers a constrained and dramatically incomplete view of compensation. And you don’t have to take my word for it.

“
It’s more than just salary
,” the Army’s recruiting literature proudly declares. “The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently estimated that the average active-duty service member received a compensation package worth $99,000. Non-cash compensation represents almost 60 percent of this package. Non-cash compensation includes health care, retirement pay, childcare and free or subsidized food, housing and education. Coupled with regular cash compensation, this adds up to attractive compensation for Soldiers.” That pitch is part of
the Army’s recent heavy push
to try to draw top talent: For high school or home school graduates pledging three or more years of service, the enlistment bonus can be up to $40,000.
Soldiers are offered as much
as $73,836 to help pay for college, and
the College Loan Repayment Program
offers up to $65,000 for
first-time enlistees who sign up for various military occupational specialties. Soldiers on active duty receive thirty days’ paid vacation a year, with sick days as needed.
The list of incentives goes on
: a $16,000 housing allowance, a $3,900 food allowance, a $2,700 tax allowance—and those sorts of packages have become available throughout the armed forces.

At Blackwater, none of that applied, starting with the obvious. We hired contractors and let them go as needed—the concept of job security never really applied. We offered no regular salary or overtime to the contractors, and we didn’t cover their Medicare, Social Security, or federal income taxes. There wasn’t a retirement plan, health insurance, life insurance, or paid sick leave available, much less paid vacation. And Blackwater wasn’t paying for anyone’s college education. My company’s base pay was solid in order to attract the best candidates, but in this line of work, that really is worth only so much. “Once you get here, the money isn’t really an issue,” Richard Hicks, Blackwater’s operations manager in Baghdad told the
Washington Post
in 2005, “
because you could be dead the next day
.”

An extensive nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office report from June 2007, “Evaluating Military Compensation,” further explored the financial issue. The
Military Times
summarized the forty-four-page study
this way:

Neither service members nor the lawmakers and policymakers who decide pay levels understand the true value of cash compensation and non-cash military benefits, according to [the report]. . . . The problem, the [study’s] authors argue, is that service members fixate on basic pay and housing allowances, but fail to factor in the value of benefits like family health care, discounted shopping and subsidized child care. Add to that deferred compensation, like retirement and veterans benefits, they say, and the value of members’ compensation is effectively doubled. So when all that is taken into account, the authors say, the so-called pay gap between military and civilian wages disappears.

Further, the incorrect and incomplete compensation figures thrown around led to suggestions that companies like Blackwater somehow poached from, or undermined, the military. A July 2005 analysis by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO), however, cut the legs out from under that argument: “
While both Special Forces and military police
officials
believe
”—emphasis mine—“that attrition is increasing in their military specialties, partially because of increased employment opportunities with private security providers, our review of DoD data shows that the attrition levels in fiscal year 2004 increased compared to fiscal years 2002 and 2003, but are similar to the levels seen in fiscal years 2000 and 2001, prior to the establishment of stop loss.” The GAO’s investigators found that the stop loss, which “prevents servicemembers from leaving the service even though they may have reached the end of their enlistment or service obligation,” artificially deflated attrition rates from 2002 to 2003. “
This similarity indicates
that former military members in the Special Forces and military police communities are leaving in the same proportions as before the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

I can only speculate that the mistaken figure of a thousand dollars a day might have originated from confusion about Blackwater’s charges to the State Department. That bit of accounting made numerous headlines in 2007, when an
oft-cited congressional memo about my company
announced: “Using Blackwater instead of U.S. troops to protect embassy officials is expensive. Blackwater charges the government $1,222 per day for the services of a private military contractor. This is equivalent to $445,000 per year, over six times more than the cost of an equivalent U.S. soldier.”

The problem was that that treatment, prepared for members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, failed to grasp that the $1,221.62 Blackwater charged per protective security specialist per day—only for days he was in the hot zone, not the 365 days that congressional math presupposes—included all our overhead.
It covered the contractor’s daily rate, the gear my company provided for him, his training, and aviation support. Every institution has overhead, whether in Moyock or West Point,
as I later explained to Congress
: “I don’t believe it’s as simple as saying, ‘Well, this sergeant costs us this much,’ because that sergeant doesn’t show up [in Iraq] naked and untrained.”
On top of the overhead
, our billing rate included a 10.4 percent profit margin—well below the allowable 15 percent on cost-plus deals, and one that was low enough to let us win competitively bid contracts.