Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (30 page)

Braley’s thought process caught me off guard. “
Your calculations there don’t make any sense to me
,” I finally said. I didn’t think it was unreasonable to debate the appropriate amount for condolence payments. Unfortunately, the members of Congress weren’t prepared for just how cold-blooded the State Department’s math could be.

In the days following the Christmas Eve shooting, Blackwater’s management team had multiple discussions with State about how much to offer the vice president’s guard’s family. A gesture too small could understandably be insulting—particularly for a decedent with a political connection—and Patricia A. Butenis, the chargé d’affaires at Embassy Baghdad,
suggested a solatium as high as $250,000
. But in a country riven by war, desperation pushes people toward awful ends. The precedent of financial windfall for injury or even death, our State Department contacts said, could have dramatically unintended consequences.

On December 26, 2006, a special agent in the State Department’s Office of High Threat Protection sent an email to a coworker, referencing the “crazy sums” of solatia suggested by Butenis. “Originally
she mentioned $250,000 and later, $100,000,” that agent wrote. “Of course, I think that
a sum this high will set a terrible precedent
. This could cause incidents with people trying to get killed by [Blackwater’s] guys to financially guarantee their families’ future.” War is a nasty business.

Democrat Stephen Lynch, a representative from Massachusetts, read aloud the email at the hearing—prompting shock from lawmakers whose worldviews seemed limited to the sprawling marble of the Capitol Complex. Again incorrectly conflating solatia with hush money, Lynch said to me, “
It would help the credibility
of [your] company to have an independent inspector general reviewing these cases instead of having the State Department basically make you pay up $5,000 every time.”

Lynch was cut off for exceeding his allotted time before I was able to respond. Given the chance, though, I would have reiterated that tragic accidents happen in war zones—as the DoD knows all too well. Blackwater, like the Pentagon, I would have said, offers those condolences to acknowledge a sad situation and help everyone move on. And I would have read the conclusion of that internal State Department email regarding the Christmas Eve shooting, which Lynch did not:

“
This was an unfortunate event
but we feel that it doesn’t reflect on the overall Blackwater performance,” the note said. “They do an exceptional job under very challenging circumstances. We would like to help them resolve this so that we can continue with our protective mission.”

•   •   •

B
y the time clocks in the hearing room struck two p.m., the committee members were throwing practically anything at the wall to see what might stick. There was no coordinated flow or grander arc to the lawmakers’ questions; rather, the hearing consisted of scattershot individual set pieces that didn’t necessarily connect to anything else discussed.

I saw that the party lines were exact. Democrats asked me if Blackwater poached manpower from the military ranks (we didn’t); they asked if I encouraged greater legal oversight of PMCs (I did); they asked about the crash of Blackwater 61. Republicans praised our extraordinary performance record. Lynn Westmoreland, the Republican representative from Georgia, added, “
There is a party in Congress that does not like
companies who show a profit. . . . They do not understand someone who is an entrepreneur and offers a valuable service that is above its competitors and that is based at a competitive price.” Even after hours of questions, the collective keyhole glimpses into the industry—and my life—did little to illuminate nuanced issues.

Then Republican Darrell Issa changed tack by discussing my sister Elisabeth and her political leanings. In 1980, Betsy married Dick DeVos, who soon became vice president—and later president—of Amway International. My sister went on to be elected chair of the Michigan Republican Party; in 2006, her husband was the Republican Party candidate for the state’s governorship. “
Isn’t it true that your family
—at least that part of the family—are very well-known Republicans?” Issa asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Of course, it wasn’t just them: From the time of my first political donation during college until I appeared before Congress, I had personally given about $235,000 to Republican causes. My parents were conservative, my siblings were conservative, I was conservative—none of us hid that. Issa, a Republican himself, was looking to characterize the Blackwater attacks from the opposite side of the aisle as partisan bickering: “
Wouldn’t it be fair to say
that [Blackwater] is easily identified as a Republican-leaning company?” he asked.

Regardless of which politician is asking the question, suggesting that my company’s billion-dollar growth was somehow tied to who my family votes for was lazy logic.

Despite the narrative hammered into the public consciousness (and apparently the minds of our politicians), it wasn’t conservatism
that somehow built my business. Over and over, across presidential administrations, the government had come to us. From the aftermath of the shootings in Columbine, to training sailors after the bombing of the
Cole
, to the CIA needing guards at makeshift bases in Afghanistan, to the Pentagon needing a shield around Bremer, to the State Department needing a battalion for its diplomats, to jobs far beyond that, U.S. agencies had repeatedly reached out to Blackwater with urgent needs, regardless of who sat in the Oval Office.

My company held more than fifty different U.S. government contracts by the time I appeared before Congress, bringing in some $600 million a year. We hired two thousand contractors at any given time for jobs in twenty different countries. Just ten years after a handful of us had cleared a swath of the Great Dismal Swamp, my company had grown to include a fleet of forty aircraft, the armored personnel carrier production line, the 183-foot repurposed NOAA ship—and we had plenty more ideas in the pipeline. We guarded everything from CIA bases in Afghanistan to the Missile Defense Agency’s anti-ICBM radar installation in northern Japan, while still training more than twenty-five thousand men and women each year back home in Moyock. That included not only this country’s most elite forces, but those of other countries as well, such as the Taiwanese National Security Bureau’s special protection service, which guards its president.

By late 2007,
my company made news whenever we earned work
—as when the Pentagon’s Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office asked us to compete against contracting giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon for parts of a $15 billion deal to battle terrorists with drug trade ties. We even made news if we didn’t get a job—as tragically detailed soon after the hearing, when Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto requested our protective services upon returning to her homeland after eight years in exile. (Sadly,
President Pervez Musharraf refused
. “It’s an insult and a humiliation for Pakistan, its police, its army,” he said. “Nobody takes this humiliation that we have to get Blackwater and all. What
the hell?” Two months after Musharraf’s refusal, the first woman prime minister of an Islamic state was murdered in Rawalpindi.
A UN investigation found
that “Ms. Bhutto’s assassination could have been prevented if adequate security measures had been taken.”)

“
Blackwater’s not a partisan company
,” I shot back at the committee. “We execute the mission given us, whether it is training Navy sailors or protecting State Department personnel.”

The government came to us because Blackwater did what it couldn’t do, didn’t know how to do—or, just as often, simply didn’t want to do. Representative Diane Watson, the Democrat from California, came closest to hitting on that issue during the hearing. “
You have been paid over one billion dollars
,” she said, “and will continue to be paid so that you can buy the helicopters that are shot down. And so, my question to you: Are we going to have to continue to privatize because [soldiers] are not training to do what you do?”

My mind raced in a dozen directions at once—starting with an unequivocal yes: Blackwater would likely continue to fill those capability gaps for the military and the State Department. But the answer to the question Watson
didn’t
ask—the same one politicians have gladly ignored for years—is just as crucial to the discussion: What gaps do we fill for
them
?

Politicians claim they want to get rid of contractors? I’d have been happy to see them send to Iraq more than the 135,000 troops Donald Rumsfeld had planned for. Even post-“surge,” in 2007, the 165,000-strong
U.S. force couldn’t match the 180,000 PMCs
on the ground there. Do lawmakers really expect the secretary of defense to declare on TV that his plan was wrong, and that generals below him were right to fight for more soldiers—and that future generals should continue risking their careers by publicly questioning their superiors?

Are those same politicians ready for more dead soldiers, and all the scrutiny that comes with it? Because by the time I appeared before Congress, the
Department of Labor had counted
more than a thousand contractors killed and thirteen thousand wounded in Iraq
and Afghanistan. And the media never fought to take photos of those coffins being off-loaded at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

And where would the Department of Defense find all those troops, anyway? That would require Congress demanding a full-scale call-up of the reserves and the National Guard, tearing apart families, fighting a war with grad students, schoolteachers, and office managers—and ending those politicians’ reelection campaigns in one fell swoop. Or maybe they’d rather have NATO allies put boots on the ground—and then force the Pentagon to cede major operational control to the UN in exchange for its contributions to an unpopular war. (Never mind the question of reinstating the draft—an idea so absurd today that it qualifies as a punch line on Capitol Hill.)

Or the politicians could just continue sending contractors like Blackwater. We were, after all, part of what then CENTCOM head Admiral William Fallon once gruffly referred to as
the government’s “surrogate army
.” We offered the real savings those politicians cared about.

Finally, I looked up at the rows of wooden rostrums, and Waxman’s hungry committee. “
Are we going to have to continue to privatize
?” Representative Watson had asked me. I aimed for the bottom line. “If the government doesn’t want us to do this,” I said at last, “
we’ll go do something else
.”

When my testimony was done, I grabbed the “
MR. PRINCE
” nameplate from in front of me and stashed it in my pocket. That souvenir sits today on my desk at home.

2005–2008

Leaving Capitol Hill after the hearing, I finally wolfed down the PowerBar my lawyers insisted I not actually eat on national TV. On one of the most frustrating days of my career, I was struck by the coincidence that about the last time I’d been in D.C. had produced the proudest moment of my work with Blackwater, just two miles from those klieg lights.

Earlier in 2007, I had spoken at the National War College, on Fort Lesley J. McNair, which sits at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers at the southern tip of Washington. The college is part of the National Defense University, where midlevel officers in each service—as well as the State Department and other federal agencies—prepare for likely promotions into command roles. I had been invited to give a talk about leadership. After that speech, I was approached by a full-bird Army colonel who had just returned from Iraq. He had overseen a brigade there, he said—as many as five thousand soldiers. “I want you to know,” he told me, “as my guys drove through Baghdad, on the top of the dashboards in their Humvees
was a piece of paper with Blackwater’s call signs and radio frequencies.” They knew, the colonel said, that in a crisis my men would always come for them, no matter what.

It was actually a sentiment I’d heard before—though never from someone with the Army’s silver eagle emblems on his shoulders. During our time in Iraq, Blackwater’s men and women rescued, treated, or medevaced more than forty U.S. soldiers, Marines, and government officials.

We did so dozens more times
during security work in Afghanistan—including coming to the aid of Senators Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel, and John Kerry and a three-star general after their helicopter made an emergency landing in the perilous Hindu Kush. Amid a sudden, blinding snowstorm, their chopper pilot opted to set down instead of continuing the flight. An Army force was dispatched to collect the men, but the troops became disoriented in their quest to locate the helicopter. Blackwater’s men plowed through, regardless of the potential danger,
arriving first on the scene
to evacuate them all back to Bagram Airfield. “
If you want to know where al-Qaeda lives
, you want to know where [Osama] bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me,” Biden said during a 2008 campaign stop. “Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.” Those grateful passengers—including President Obama’s future vice president, a future secretary of state, and future secretary of defense—even posed for a quick photo at the makeshift landing site before being escorted away.

Blackwater’s men responded to fires, mortar attacks, and suicide bombings that destroyed entire sections of neighborhoods. During one mission in October 2006 two of our Little Birds were returning to base after a State escort mission when our men spotted an Army motorcade that had just been hit with an EFP. Soldiers were splayed out on the ground around the shattered convoy.
The first helicopter, with medic
Mark York aboard, peeled off for a spontaneous landing at the site; the other Little Bird hovered overhead, providing cover.
York began triage on the ground, loading the most seriously wounded into the helicopter—and guaranteeing there was no further room for him. As his chopper lifted off and headed for a combat surgical hospital in the Green Zone, York hunkered down at the attack site and waited for Blackwater reinforcements to arrive. The Army said
Blackwater’s men saved
five soldiers that day.

No one associated with my company was looking for awards, or commendations, or fawning magazine profiles. For us, the ultimate gratification came from hearing a simple thank-you from people such as that colonel. That sentiment said everything I wanted to hear about what my company had become, and what it could be.

Still, I feel it is important to recognize here a few remarkable stories about what Blackwater’s contractors have done. Because as I left Washington after my appearance before Congress, I thought about the politicians in that hearing room who thought we were cowboys and mercenaries. I thought about the men and women getting shot at seven thousand miles away who called us heroes. I knew whose opinions would generate more headlines.

And it took no more than a few hours after my testimony for another distress call from our troops to sound in our Baghdad operations center.

•   •   •

A
t ten a.m. local time on October 3, the day after my testimony before Congress,
Poland’s ambassador to Iraq
climbed into a reinforced Toyota Land Cruiser in the affluent Karrada district of eastern Baghdad. Edward Pietrzyk’s white SUV was surrounded by two more Toyotas, full of his Polish special forces protective detail. The motorcade drove away from the Polish embassy, then turned the corner to navigate palm-lined back streets as they made their way to the city center.
The convoy made it two hundred yards
.

A first roadside bomb scorched the vehicles and stopped the motorcade in its tracks.
Then two more bombs
, detonated moments after the vehicles stopped, blew the wheels off the cars and engulfed
them all in a fifteen-foot-high fireball.
Then two dozen insurgents swarmed
upon the burning wreckage.

Pietrzyk’s guards responded valiantly. Bloodied and shaken—initial reports described the men as
sustaining “massive wounds
” and some even missing limbs—they pulled the injured ambassador from his SUV and burst into a nearby household for cover.
The reasons for the attack were never fully clear
, but Poland had been an ardent supporter of the U.S. mission in Iraq from the outset. Twenty Poles had been killed in the four years since they first assisted the American invasion of Iraq; on October 3, Bartosz Orzechowski, one of Pietrzyk’s guards, became the twenty-first. The ambassador seemed destined to be next.

Battling insurgents from the house, the security detail contacted State’s tactical operations center in urgent distress. American soldiers would come, the RSO told them, but the canopy of streetlights and electrical wires in the neighborhood attack zone made landing a military chopper there impossible. Ground troops couldn’t reach them in time. So the U.S. embassy radioed Blackwater’s operations office with a request:
Get there now
.

Our quick reaction force was off the ground moments later.
Three minutes after takeoff
, pilot Dan Laguna, who, like many with Blackwater Aviation had spent his military career with the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, picked out the red plume from a smoke grenade that signaled his landing spot. Laguna bent his helicopter into a steep turn above the narrow street; the special tethers we’d developed known as “monkey harnesses” were the only things that kept Laguna’s door gunners connected to the aircraft.
The pilot knifed between arcing streetlights
that would have splintered his rotor blades, then set the helicopter down on the rubble strewn across the cratered gray roadway.

At the sound of the incoming aerial support, insurgents scattered into the alleyways between the three-story beige buildings. On the ground, Blackwater’s door gunners unclasped their harnesses and fanned out in a perimeter for the evacuation team.
Another Little
Bird followed at the landing site; a larger Blackwater Bell 412 chopper hovered overhead. Pietrzyk’s blackened SUV was crumpled against the yellow-and-white-painted curb.

Our men found the barrel-chested ambassador wearing little more than a dirty white T-shirt. In the house, his guards had torn off his suit and the right leg of his pants—all but his diplomatic ID, which still hung around his neck. The fifty-seven-year-old had been burned over 20 percent of his body and had
sustained internal injuries as flames shot into his nose
and mouth and down his respiratory tract. His leg, hands, and head were heavily bandaged, but he was alert, and he could move.

Together,
Blackwater’s men and Pietrzyk’s guards
formed a huddle of helmets and Kevlar vests, rushing the ambassador to Laguna’s chopper. Pietrzyk and Orzechowski were loaded into that Little Bird; other injured guards climbed into the second helicopter. Laguna flew the ambassador to a U.S. military hospital in the Green Zone, where Pietrzyk was stabilized before being flown to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and ultimately to a hospital in Gryfice, in northern Poland, where he was placed in an artificial coma for two weeks. “
The patient is unable to breathe
and was put on a respirator,” the head of the Gryfice hospital told a Polish newspaper. “His state is very serious and his prognosis is very cautious.”

I used any contacts I could find in Poland to keep track of the ambassador’s progress. Pietrzyk underwent extensive surgery, but the indomitable former general of all land forces in Poland refused to succumb to his injuries.

Poland’s foreign minister soon released a statement noting how Blackwater’s team “undoubtedly saved the lives of the Polish ambassador, Mr. Edward Pietrzyk, and his personnel, trapped in a deadly ambush.” (
Orzechowski, the fallen guard
, was posthumously decorated with his country’s Commander’s Cross of the Order of Military Cross and promoted to the rank of second lieutenant.) The ambassador was back in Baghdad a mere three months later—immediately insisting Blackwater’s men appear with him for a medal ceremony at
the Polish embassy, which had since been moved into the Green Zone.

On January 25, 2008, surrounded by U.S. Ambassador
Ryan Crocker and the commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq, General David Petraeus, Pietrzyk pinned a Silver Star on Laguna’s chest.
Fellow Blackwater contractors
Frank Paul, Rick Stout, Abe Bronn, John Nussbaum, Paul Chopra, Dick Aanerud, Hoyt Fraiser, Brian Perlis, Clint Matoon, Josh Kinny, Brian O’Malley, Daniel Pray, Wilson McKiethan, Nathan Pohl, Anthony Sanganetti, Scott Bruggemann, and Ali Murjan were honored with Bronze Stars for their heroism. It was the first time Poland bestowed the medals upon foreigners since World War II. “
I’m here because of you
, the people who are proudly carrying the name ‘Black Waters,’” an emotional Pietrzyk said in his halting English. “My family—my wife, Anna Alicja, both my sons, Jan and Nicolas, and myself—we will always remember the Americans who came in a few decisive minutes to the proper place.”

I’m filled with pride when I see photos from that ceremony. I used to look at them when the rhetoric about my company became too heated and the PR battle seemed to get completely out of hand. By late 2007, that was happening a lot—including on the very day my men rescued Pietrzyk. That afternoon, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki opened his weekly Wednesday press conference by declaring, “The kind of accusations leveled against [Blackwater] means
it is not fit to work in Iraq
!”

I don’t know if he’d heard about the ambassador’s evacuation earlier that day. I doubt it would have mattered. The public portrayal of my company had long since lost any nuance or more than one dimension. But I never forgot the mandate my father had left me with—and those of us at Blackwater would never stop trying to be a force for good in the world.

•   •   •

B
ack in late August 2005, Presidential Airways took delivery of a twin-engine Aérospatiale SA330 Puma utility helicopter. Blackwater’s
aviation arm was just over a year old at that point, and Richard Pere knew that an all-weather chopper that could haul seven thousand pounds of cargo would come in handy at some point. No one realized it would be less than a week later.

On August 29,
Hurricane Katrina made landfall
on the Gulf Coast. Wind speeds over 140 miles per hour lashed at southeastern Louisiana. More than an inch of rain fell each hour. Soon, the storm surge breached levees in and around New Orleans in dozens of places, and 75 percent of the city was plunged underwater. The phone rang that Monday while I was out on a training trip; it was Pere, calling from Presidential’s headquarters in Florida. We were both hearing the news.

“We have this Puma,” he said.

“Send it,” I blurted out. He didn’t even have to ask the question.

Pere called the Coast Guard, the National Guard, and the Red Cross with an offer to donate the services of a helicopter and crew. That call was a bit of a formality; the Puma was already in the air by the time the Coast Guard gladly said yes. Blackwater’s volunteers arrived in New Orleans before FEMA, the National Guard, the Red Cross, or any other disaster relief organization. From Moyock, Gary Jackson and Ana Bundy put fifty additional contractors on a pair of our cargo planes to the Gulf, augmenting the team from Florida. Less than thirty-six hours after Katrina’s landfall, Blackwater had more than one hundred men in the area.

Together, those men soon moved
eleven tons of supplies around the region and rescued 121 stranded people.
For two weeks, the Puma flew missions
for the Coast Guard, providing roughly a million dollars in aviation services, shuttling tons of food, fresh water, and other supplies around the region. All we asked was that the Coast Guard cover the cost of our fuel. “
Every aircraft we had
was committed, and it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t find anyone who could give us more,” Coast Guard commander Todd Campbell, who directed much of the rescue operation, told the
Virginian-Pilot
newspaper. “Just the way [Blackwater’s men] walked in, with confidence
in their faces—they weren’t rattled one bit by what was going on. They just listened to what we wanted and went out and did it.” As Bill Mathews, Blackwater’s executive vice president at the time, explained to the newspaper, “
We ran to the fire
because it was burning.” It was what we’d always done.

Soon, of course, the mission on the ground shifted. Within days of the storm,
more than fifteen hundred people were dead
. Looting in New Orleans began almost instantly—some life sustaining, much of it merely opportunistic. The stories that filtered out of the city were surreal: rampant lawlessness, police officers shot, residents fearing for their lives. I couldn’t believe it when New Orleans police superintendent Edwin P. Compass III appeared on
Oprah
soon after the storm and said, “The tourists are walking around there, and as soon as these individuals see them, they’re being preyed upon.
They are beating, they are raping
them in the streets.”