Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (29 page)

Following the CIB report, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) followed up with a damning, half-baked investigation of its own. The board’s findings are often treated as gospel by lawmakers and the media—yet in the case of Blackwater 61, they were as flawed as the CIB report, and equally critical of my company. In fact, there was no way they
couldn’t
be.

The problem with the NTSB’s report was simple. For more than three decades, the heart of the agency’s analytical process has been its “go” teams—as many as a dozen specialists who “
begin the investigation of a major accident
at the accident scene, as quickly as possible,” according to the board, “assembling the broad spectrum of technical expertise that is needed to solve complex transportation safety problems.” But those aviation go teams respond only to accidents on U.S. territory or in international waters. That meant that for its investigation into Blackwater 61, a crucial site visit was missing. Instead, “
the bulk of the so-called investigative work
that the NTSB conducted was listening to the [cockpit voice recorder] and reading through the Army’s collateral board investigation,” Peter
Goelz, a former NTSB managing director and consultant for Presidential, said in 2007.

Twice Presidential filed detailed petitions with the NTSB insisting that it had based its findings almost entirely on a deeply flawed military report. Still, our entreaties fell on deaf ears. And the families of the three soldiers used those reports to anchor a lawsuit against Blackwater, claiming that a variety of company actions (or inactions) had led to their loved ones’ deaths.

When added to the accusations in the Fallujah lawsuit, the soldiers’ families’ claims of corporate negligence further emboldened Waxman and his committee for my appearance before them.
A memo the chairman circulated
to other committee members before my 2007 appearance concluded, “According to government investigative reports and other documents obtained by the Committee”—those largely being the plaintiff’s legal claims—“the crash and the deaths of the crew and passengers were caused by a combination of reckless conduct by the Blackwater pilots and multiple mistakes by Blackwater.”

Even three years after the crash, however, there were a number of unanswered questions about that day that defied such easy explanation, beginning with why the pilots ultimately chose the route they did.
Their communication with Bagram
ground control prior to takeoff was recorded by the controllers, and clearly showed the Blackwater team’s original intent: “Bagram Ground, Blackwater Six One ready for taxi—uh, one-seven-zero departure at one-zero-thousand.” The pilots were planning to depart the airfield and fly at a heading of 170 degrees on the compass dial—practically due south—at one-zero-thousand, or ten thousand, feet of altitude. Yet when the plane took off five minutes later, Blackwater 61 headed in the opposite direction.

Only one key event transpired between those ground communications and the change in the pilots’ flight path: They picked up Lieutenant Colonel McMahon.

Limitations of the CASA’s cockpit recorder—it only recorded the final thirty minutes of sound, so there is no record of conversations
prior to takeoff—mean we’ll never know for sure what influence, if any, the lieutenant colonel had on the pilots’ choice of route that day. McMahon would not have been able to command the contractors to do anything, but the pilots had already gone out of their way to stop for him at the last minute, and I’m confident that any requests he might have made concerning the route would have been deeply influential to contractors looking to best serve their customer.

What we do know is that the 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry McMahon commanded had initially been sent to southern Afghanistan to supervise “
reconstruction and educational initiatives
in Kandahar Province,” according to the squadron’s Web site. Just weeks before the fateful November flight, however, rival Afghan warlords began battling in the western city of Herat—and McMahon’s troopers had been sent to halt the hostilities. “
Task Force Saber remained
in the area to disarm the militias, to successfully secure polling sites for the October national presidential elections and to conduct operations to block Taliban infiltration of Regional Command West,” according to the Web site. The revised, northerly route Blackwater 61 took would have flown the men directly over the new area McMahon’s men patrolled.

With all the lingering uncertainty about the events of the day,
I acknowledged the obvious
in front of Waxman’s committee: “Anytime you have an accident, it’s an accident,” I said. “Something could have been done better.” Clearly, that started with the men in the cockpit needing to be more aware of their surroundings.

Nonetheless, the idea that an instance of what may well have been pilot error was somehow indicative of larger corporate malfeasance simply doesn’t make sense. According to one report, Richard Pere, the president of our aviation division, put it much more candidly in private conversation. In one oft-cited quote from a
60 Minutes
segment about the crash, Kevin McBride, a fellow Blackwater pilot in Afghanistan, recalled, “
Richard Pere pulled me into his office
. He says, ‘Have you seen the cockpit voice recording transcript?’ I said, ‘No.’ He says, ‘You can’t believe it. These guys are talking about
X-Wing
Star Wars
fighters and this and that. They were just having a good old time, and they flew into the [
expletive
] mountain.’” Asked why Pere might have said all that, McBride responded, “
I don’t think he could believe it himself
.”

Pere has since insisted to me that he has no recollection of any conversation like that occurring. But, regardless, all of us in the company agreed that a pair of pilots misjudging the clearance in a dangerous mountain pass was no reflection on the way we ran the business.

Presidential was suspended for one month after the accident while the Army’s investigation ran its course. Then, the day the suspension was lifted, our aviation officials spent four hours answering questions about our policies in front of a military board, briefing me when it was done. The next morning, the board cleared my men for cargo flights in Afghanistan, and a week later we were reinstated to fly passengers in the war zone. We carried a general across country that very day.

By the time I appeared in front of Waxman’s committee, Blackwater was
flying a thousand missions a month
for the DoD. And just days earlier, the Defense Department had
renewed and expanded our contract
with a new four-year, $92 million deal for aviation services in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. “We looked at their flight record. They had one accident,” a military official told the
Washington Post
. “You as a consumer don’t cancel your flight with American Airlines, for example, because they have one crash. I don’t think we’d do that here.”

In front of the TV cameras on Capitol Hill, Waxman sounded incredulous that we continued earning business after one mishap. “
I want to see
whether you are getting a stick as well as all these carrots,” he said. But Presidential’s otherwise stellar performance record aside, there was another key factor Waxman failed to take into account: The military couldn’t have done the job without us. “
We were hired
to fill that void because . . . it is a different kind of airlift mission going in and out of the very short strips in Afghanistan,” I
told the committee. “We are filling that gap because these strips are too small for C17s. They are too small for C130s. [My men] are going in and out of places that the military can’t get to with existing aircraft they have. That is why we are doing that mission.”

•   •   •

I
f Waxman took exception to the money Blackwater had coming in, other congressmen preferred to focus on the money we spent—specifically on something known as “solatia,” Blackwater’s expression of condolences for civilians caught up in the horrors of war.

People are often surprised when I explain the practice to them, but it isn’t new. Since the Korean War in 1950, the Pentagon has quietly handed out cash—primarily in two forms, condolences and solatia—to families of innocent foreign nationals hurt during our military actions. There’s no formal international standard or obligation for it, but there is a strong moral value in helping victims and their families try to make the best of a terrible situation. There’s also a tactical value: Accidents happen, the Pentagon knows, and unresolved deaths at the hands of U.S. forces obviously makes a population sympathetic to enemy efforts. Those payments were just the sort of tool the military looked to as it tried to win those hearts and minds our politicians talked about during the war.

Beginning in 2003, Congress approved approximately $180 million for something known as the
Commander’s Emergency Response Program
, or CERP. That fund actually
began with a lucky accident
: Soon after driving Saddam Hussein from Baghdad, soldiers in the 3rd Infantry Division found $700 million in U.S. cash stashed in a hole in the wall of one of his palaces. The
American government and CPA
designated 25 percent of it for CERP. Congress reupped the funds, supplemented by additional allotments from the UN, at about the same amount for each year of the war.

Lawmakers had originally intended for commanders to spend it on food distribution projects, water and sanitation projects,
educational initiatives, and other needs of the local communities. What those funds were largely going toward, however, was making amends with the families of innocent Iraqis or Afghans killed or wounded in U.S. combat operations. “
Where we think we have been wrong
or have created unnecessary civilian deaths,” Marine Corps commandant General James Conway told PBS, “[we] certainly do the right thing early on with the families, attempt to provide them compensation or solatia payments to acknowledge our potential wrongdoing. It’s not an admission of guilt. It’s an admission of the fact that a civilian has been killed and we have been involved.”

The two types of payment varied only slightly. If condolence outlays were more an official expression of U.S. sympathy for a death, solatia offerings were more in line with local customs that call for an instant, token bit of restitution to make a bad situation right. In many Muslim cultures, the speedy acknowledgment of their loss was far more important than the money. “
We . . . see sort of a unique thing
that takes place in the culture,” Conway said. “There is this almost acceptance, [which] I don’t think would be as true in a Western nation, that says, ‘Well,
inshallah
’—it’s God’s will—‘that these things happen. It’s unfortunate. We certainly regret the loss of our family members, but we must move on.’”

Critics have fixated on the amounts of the payments, some arguing they are too small, some too large. However, the Pentagon, not Blackwater, actually set general price guidelines: $2,500 for accidental death or significant property damage; $1,500 for disabling injuries or disfigurement; and about $200 for minor injuries. However, the amounts were a bit more fluid when commanders paid on the spot from the cash in their unit operations and maintenance accounts, which are a bit like the petty cash funds in an office. One GAO report, “The Department of Defense’s Use of Solatia and Condolence Payments in Iraq and Afghanistan,” even offered
this example of the unfortunate math
: “Two members of the same family are killed in a car hit by U.S. forces. The family could receive a maximum of $7,500 in CERP condolence payments ($2,500 for each death and up to $2,500 for vehicle damage).”

The blogosphere inevitably responded
with headlines such as “How Much It Costs to Kill Someone in Afghanistan”; the Department of Defense could merely concede that war is a nasty business. “
The Army does not target civilians
,” Major Anne D. Edgecomb, an Army spokeswoman, told the
New York Times
in 2007. “Sadly, however, the enemy’s tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan unnecessarily endanger innocent civilians.”

These payments became so common that by the time I appeared before Waxman’s committee, the
Pentagon itself estimated $42.4 million
in condolences had been distributed since the start of 2005. That would have equaled a full $2,500 payout in nearly seventeen thousand cases.

As I explained to the committee, Blackwater responded to civilian deaths just as the DoD does, by way of the State Department’s Claims and Condolence Payment Program. State generally instructed contractors to provide the same $2,500 for instances of death, significant injury, or major property damage, but those numbers shifted based on the facts of individual cases.

We followed State’s lead to determine appropriate sums, at times paying as much as $20,000 (to the family of the man Moonen shot). At no point were we trying to put a dollar value on anyone’s life, and the recipients did not accept our gestures as such.

The members on Waxman’s committee struggled to wrap their heads around the issue, initially framing a gesture of sympathy as something else entirely. “
What I’m concerned about
is the lack of accountability,” declared Representative Danny Davis, a Democrat from Illinois. “If one of our soldiers shoots an innocent Iraqi, he or she can face a military court martial. But when a Blackwater guard does this, the State Department helps arrange a payout to help the problem go away.”

I did my best to set the record straight: “
That [payment] is similar to what DoD does
,” I replied, “what the Army does if there is an accidental death from whether it’s an aerial bomb, [or] a tank backs over somebody’s car or injures someone. There is compensation paid
to try to make amends, but that was done through the State Department. That was not paid to try to hush it up or cover it up. That’s part of the regular course of action.”

Then the politicians attacked the practice from a different angle. Whereas Davis was angry we paid families at all, Representative Bruce Braley, a Democrat from Iowa, left logic behind to claim we weren’t paying these families enough. “
Did you feel that [$20,000] was a satisfactory level
of compensation for the loss of that individual?” he asked me about the guard Moonen shot. “If you . . . look at the U.S. life table, you will find that somebody your age in this country has a life expectancy of forty years. So if you were to take that [incorrect Blackwater contractor pay] rate of $1,222 a day, multiply it times 365 days a year, multiply it by a forty-year life expectancy, you would get a total lifetime earnings payout of $17,841,200. You would agree with me that pales in comparison to a payment of either $15,000 or $20,000.”