Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (27 page)

Each of the one hundred or so
SOFAs between the United States and countries
in which our military remains for long-term deployments is unique, ranging in length from less than three pages (our 2002 SOFA with East Timor, for instance) to more than 150 (our 1966 SOFA with South Korea, which also contains more than thirty annexes). They cover things as diverse as criminal and civil jurisdiction for soldiers, taxes and fees, carrying of weapons, use of radio frequencies, and customs regulations. There is tremendous flexibility for bargaining between the host country and the State and Defense Department personnel who negotiate SOFAs before the president signs them. And invariably, according to the Congressional Research Service, “
The issue most commonly addressed in a SOFA
is the legal protection from prosecution that will be afforded U.S. personnel while present in a foreign country.” That includes contractors—and the moment I read that, I knew my men were in trouble.

From the outset of the tense SOFA negotiations in Iraq, State and the DoD looked to fulfill President Bush’s mandate for a military presence that would last “years,” ensuring stability in the country and preventing undue influence from extremists and neighboring Syria and Iran. American representatives reportedly pushed for U.S. access to more than fifty military bases, the right for Americans to detain terror suspects without prior Iraqi approval, control over Iraqi airspace—and continued legal immunity for their civilian contractors.

On the other side of the debate, Iraqi radicals like Muqtada al-Sadr—and his supporters in Iran—blasted the United States as a “
cancer that has spread and must be removed
,” and pressured al-Maliki to accept nothing less than the complete withdrawal of American forces. That got the prime minister’s attention: The initial U.S.
proposal would “
deeply affect Iraqi sovereignty
,” al-Maliki told reporters, “and this is something we can never accept.”

When it came to the contractors, State made a handful of public gestures to show the Iraqis that its guards would be held more accountable. The department pledged to embed one of their own Diplomatic Security agents in each WPPS mission motorcade (never mind that there were only thirty-six total DipSec agents in Baghdad at the time), to record all radio transmissions, and to install cameras in each vehicle. We found that third suggestion ironic because a false accusation about Blackwater brutality more than two years prior had prompted us to ask State for permission to install cameras on board our trucks. We knew video footage of our missions would exonerate us almost every time against the myriad wild stories people told, and my men had even identified the “dash-hound” system—the same one used in many police cars—as a cost-effective option. Yet a State Department official in Washington shot down the idea in May 2005 because he said the department’s
lawyers “had some issues
” with the cameras.

Beyond those public gestures, however, State grasped that cameras and radio records weren’t going to satisfy an affronted Iraqi government during SOFA negotiations. An internal department report obtained by the
Washington Times
noted that “since [Nisour Square], print and broadcast media have referred to Blackwater USA and its personnel as ‘mercenaries privatizing war, war-dogs, trigger happy shooters, soldiers of fortune, guns-for-hire.’” It added, “
almost all global observers expressed anger
that Blackwater—and other private security firms—can operate in a grey legal area as a ‘private army’ because . . . the U.S. does not have a formal Status of Forces Agreement” with Iraq. More and more, State personnel seemed to recognize that bias against my company meant the “fair and transparent investigation” Rice had promised the prime minister would likely have to be anything but.

Finally, in November 2008, Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari signed the twenty-four-page
“Agreement Between the United States of America and Republic of Iraq On the Withdrawal of United States Forces from Iraq and the Organization of Their Activities during Their Temporary Presence in Iraq.” I believe to this day that the Nisour Square charges against Blackwater’s men were a coordinated bargaining chip. I don’t find it a coincidence that “the Justice Department ha[d] been considering manslaughter and assault charges against the guards for weeks,” according to reports, yet no indictments were actually handed down until immediately after the
Presidency Council of Iraq officially approved the SOFA
on December 4, 2008.

President Bush signed the agreement as one of his final acts in office. As of January 1, 2009, the U.S. military would be allowed to keep as many as 130,000 troops in Iraq until December 31, 2011—and the Iraqis were granted primary jurisdiction over American contractors operating in their country. And there were about to be many more of them.

As the DoD-led military mission fully transitioned to a State-led diplomatic effort, the war-torn nation hadn’t exactly found much in the way of stability. “Terrorist and insurgent groups are less active but still adept; the Iraqi army continues to develop but is not yet capable of deterring regional actors; and strong ethnic tensions remain along Iraq’s disputed internal boundaries,” read an ominous assessment from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Although
a government has finally been formed
, it remains to be seen how cohesive and stable it will be.” The committee added: “The U.S. embassy and certain satellite sites, such as the forward operating base outside Mosul, are under daily threat from mortar and rocket fire.”

With the withdrawal bearing down, it became clear to State that, without military support, the security problems the department would face in Iraq were not only profound, but also unheard of. The borderline panic was predictable. “
Secure ground and air movements
within Iraq, essential to DoS’ current and proposed provincial presence, are now possible only because of U.S. military capabilities and availability of support,” State undersecretary of
management Patrick Kennedy wrote to his counterpart at the Department of Defense. “We will continue to have a critical need for logistical and life support of a magnitude and scale of complexity that is unprecedented in the history of the Department of State.”

To help the diplomats achieve their mission in Iraq, that Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Democrat John Kerry, recommended Congress provide a budget for the obvious: more contractors. The math was pretty straightforward. Without the State Department hiring fifty-five hundred private security personnel, along with thousands more general “life support” contractors who would provide food, health care, and aviation services to the federal employees stationed at embassies and outposts
across Iraq for the foreseeable future
, U.S. combat troops simply could not be brought home. It was still a war zone, after all. Someone had to stand guard.

Meanwhile, back home in Washington, my men and I were gearing up for a different sort of battle.

2007

September 20, 2007, was a hectic day in McLean, Virginia—particularly for our lawyers. Everyone on my team was still trying to make heads or tails of the news from Nisour Square days earlier. And we weren’t the only ones. The shooting had barely stopped when another letter arrived at our offices from Congressman Waxman, announcing a new hearing on Blackwater in front of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Apparently sensing that February show trial on contractor cost-effectiveness hadn’t landed the haymaker he’d intended, Waxman saw in Nisour Square a new flank to attack. “
The hearing will focus on the mission
and performance of Blackwater USA and its affiliated companies in Iraq and Afghanistan,” read my invitation to testify. “One question that will be examined is whether the government’s heavy reliance on private security contractors is serving U.S. interests in Iraq. Another question will be whether the specific conduct of your company has advanced or impeded U.S. efforts.” I stared at that letter for quite a while.

I knew that Waxman had long been known for getting his
man—as long as it fit his agenda. I remembered how in 1994 the seven CEOs of Big Tobacco earned their place in infamy before him, testifying that “
nicotine is not addictive
.” His committee room was where
Valerie Plame spoke for the first time
, in March 2007, after her role as a CIA undercover officer had been revealed to columnist Robert Novak by then deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage. The next month,
Waxman grilled former defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld about the cover-up following soldier Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire. I knew that in July 2007 Waxman had merely mentioned an impending hearing on “
FEMA’s toxic trailers
,” as he called them, and the disaster relief agency promptly announced a study into formaldehyde levels in the temporary housing it had set up for Hurricane Katrina victims two years earlier.

Clearly,
Time
magazine had been prescient in a
2006 profile of the new committee chairman
: “Waxman is hardly an equal-opportunity muckraker,” the magazine reported. “Republicans and industry groups say his investigatory zeal is limited to conservative targets: He spent the Clinton years trying to fend off congressional investigations, including the ones into the White House’s questionable campaign fundraising practices, and once led a Democratic walkout when Republicans released a report on the firing of White House travel-office workers. While Waxman promises what he calls oversight, the Republicans say it’ll be more like a witch hunt.” Now I was the target of his hunt.

All the negative attention over the past few years had only entrenched my reluctance with public appearances; I preferred to travel incognito and simply do the jobs our government clients asked for. It wasn’t even unusual for me to cover my face around swarming photographers in an effort to guard my privacy and that of my family. I always preferred a low profile. But by late 2007 the company I’d built from scratch was being ground down by the plate tectonics of political battles in Washington. It was clear that if I didn’t take a stand for the company now, I might never get another chance.

As I looked at the letter from Waxman’s committee, a friend
reminded me of Theodore Roosevelt’s
wonderful speech at the Sorbonne
in Paris a century ago:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

I decided that, on behalf of everyone connected to Blackwater, I would testify. It wouldn’t be one of our general counsels this time. I knew that I would never again be able to operate in the shadows. If Congress really wanted to take a shot at us, it was time for me to step into the ring.

Yet even that wasn’t so simple.

Other Prince Group officials had wondered aloud if I should testify, worrying I might lash out at politicians who condescended to me about my company’s performance. They were joking. Mostly. State, on the other hand, was legitimately terrified of the operational secrets I could divulge—specifically, the fact that everything Blackwater’s men did in Iraq was by State’s direct command. Because of this fear, Waxman’s invitation wasn’t the only correspondence we received that late September day.
No sooner had the congressional invitation
arrived in our Virginia offices than Fred Roitz, Blackwater’s top compliance officer, heard from State Department contracting officer Kiazan Moneypenny.

Moneypenny practically attempted to derail the entire investigation. “
This letter serves to advise
Blackwater that the U.S.
Department of State requires strict adherence to the provisions of [the WPPS] pertaining to contract records and the disclosure of information,” Moneypenny’s correspondence read. She cited the contract’s order against unapproved media coverage, then concluded:

It is plain from the cited clause
that all documents and information generated in the course of performance of [the WPPS] are fully subject to the control of the Department. I hereby direct Blackwater to make no disclosure of documents or information generated under [the contract] unless such disclosure has been authorized in writing by the Contracting Officer.

She was basically demanding we offer no background documents to Waxman’s committee, and that I appear before Congress, on national TV, and say effectively nothing.

And still that wasn’t the strangest request that came to our offices that same day. Soon after, Daniel Callahan, the lawyer representing the four Fallujah families and the one who seemed to be drafting the playbook for these congressional inquiries,
reached out to my personal counsel
at Prince Group.

That counselor, Joseph Schmitz, had been with my company for two years. He had previously served as the Pentagon’s inspector general, from 2002 to 2005, heading an office of 1,250 military and civilian personnel tasked with preventing waste and fraud. Schmitz came to work for me afterward, both as a lawyer and as the chief operating officer of Prince Group, which oversaw both Blackwater and Prince Manufacturing, back in Michigan. He sat in the office next to mine on the eighth floor at 1650 Tysons Boulevard, in McLean, so I basically heard about it the moment Callahan called Schmitz out of the blue with a settlement offer.

I feel quite confident it was not dumb luck that the very afternoon a Democratic California politician asked me to appear before his congressional committee, a California trial lawyer reappeared with a settlement attempt. In that call, Callahan insisted Blackwater
could “
bury” its bad press
“by paying $20 million . . . consisting of $5 million per family.”

Callahan, we understood, was representing those Fallujah families for a contingency fee, which generally runs about 25 percent of any settlement or 30 percent of any trial award. After years of a fruitless legal battle with my company, a $5 million payoff must have sounded great to Callahan.

•   •   •

I
began October 2, 2007, with mass at our parish in McLean. My mother, Elsa, back in Michigan, began it with a prayer.

I had no experience with these sorts of congressional appearances, but it was obvious I was in for a grilling. To prepare, I’d picked through each internal incident report since Blackwater began its work in Iraq. I’d pored over the WPPS training requirements for our men in Moyock, and the tactical operation requirements for our contractors abroad. We brought on BKSH & Associates Worldwide—a subsidiary of PR megafirm Burson-Marsteller—to drill me on all manner of attacks that might come from the politicians. For almost a week, Robert Tappan, a former State Department senior public affairs official then working for BSKH, and his team had staged mock hearings to steady me for the inquisition.

The night before my appearance, I had received calls of support from two men who had been influential in my life. The first was Chuck Colson, the former White House special counsel who in 1970 acted as Richard Nixon’s “political point man,” as the president described him, then spent seven months in federal prison for obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal. “
I went to prison voluntarily
,” Colson would later say. “I deserved it.” There, he had a remarkable turnaround, launching Prison Fellowship Ministries and devoting the final four decades of his life preaching to those behind bars. He was something of a mentor for me.

The other call of support came from Oliver North, the Marine famous for his role in President Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal.
In the mid-1980s, administration officials had secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iranians for the release of American hostages and cash, then quietly diverted some of the funds to Nicaragua to bankroll the Contra rebel groups rising up against their Sandinista government. “
You’re a SEAL
,” North told me. “I’m a Marine and I testified something like forty-five times. You can handle one.” Those calls meant the world to me.

When I arrived at the Rayburn House Office Building just before ten a.m., the line outside Room 2154 snaked all the way down the white marble hallway. I entered the chamber surrounded by a team of lawyers and advisers, including Gary Jackson, who’d flown up from Moyock for the event. Vast blue carpet stretched up to two rows of wooden rostrums, and behind them dozens of seats for the committee members. I sat a few feet in front of them, alone behind a massive brown table featuring a simple white paper nametag that read, “
MR. PRINCE
.”

In a detail that seemed to show up in every news account of the day, I wore a tailored blue suit, a starched white shirt, and a red tie—perhaps surprising those who apparently thought I might appear before Congress in a SEAL combat uniform. (I picked up that blue suit a few days earlier at Neiman Marcus; it was the very lightest-weight one they had in the store. I nearly choked when I saw the price tag, but my advisers had told me how the temperature in the room would climb thanks to the klieg lights for TV cameras and all the bodies cramming in. I wasn’t going to let anyone see me sweat.)

Directly behind me that morning sat Blackwater attorney Stephen Ryan, partner and head of the Government Strategies and Government Contracts practice groups at the law firm McDermott Will & Emery. Two rows behind him sat Donna Zovko and other Fallujah family members: Rhonda Teague, June Batalona, and her daughter, Kristal. Zovko would later tell a reporter for the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
that I looked like a different man than the one she’d first met three years earlier—“
like life had taken a toll on him
.” She was probably right.

At least I was newly freer to speak my mind in front of Waxman’s committee. A few days after the State Department sent its first salvo to Blackwater, Moneypenny bowed to congressional criticism with a second letter that softened the department’s stance. “I understand that [Blackwater has] received certain requests for documents and/or information from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,” she wrote us on September 25, 2007. “[State] has
no objection to Blackwater providing unclassified documents
to the committee in response to its requests. To the extent that any unclassified documents raise concerns about disclosure of privacy information, sensitive security/operational information, or proprietary data, we ask that you identify those concerns to the Committee when providing such documents to the Committee so that they can be properly handled and protected by Committee staff.”

Ironically, no one at the hearing was able to discuss the event that had sparked the entire gathering. The day before I appeared, the FBI had launched its investigation into the shooting at Nisour Square. Some critics contended that timing couldn’t have been accidental and that someone was trying to keep the case out of the news. I saw something different: Once the FBI was drawn into that investigation, it seemed clear my men were in trouble. I’ve always figured that had the FBI stayed out, allowing me to lay out our complete case for their innocence, it would have been harder for my men to be prosecuted. Or persecuted.

With Nisour Square off the hearing agenda, Waxman was forced to include in his opening statement
this awkward addendum
: “This morning, the Justice Department sent a letter to the committee asking that in light of this development the committee not take testimony at this time about the events of September sixteenth.”

That left the committee members with little to pick through but long-standing grievances and misinformation about Blackwater and our work—not that they weren’t eager to do it. “The last point I want to make is directed to the families of the Blackwater employees killed in Fallujah . . . some of whom are here today,”
Waxman said to
conclude his opening statement. “I know many of you believe that Blackwater has been unaccountable to anyone in our government. I want you to know that Blackwater will be accountable today!”

The chairman, as always, earned high marks for showmanship. It was that sort of rhetorical flourish that soon after prompted the
Washington Post
to regularly award satirical “
Waxman of the Week” honors
to any lawmaker who “takes congressional oversight duties to the next level” and “maximiz[es] publicity for his committee.” On that day, however, his committee struggled to bring much substance along with its style.

For nearly four hours, as I rolled a white ballpoint pen in my hands, lawmakers stumbled through one misconception after another.