Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (34 page)

That came through in the results:
Every six weeks
,
some thirteen hundred ANA members
graduated Paravant’s training program with skills unparalleled by other units in the Afghan army. I remember sitting in Kabul’s diesel-choked traffic jams in a battered local SUV, watching pickup trucks roll by full of Afghan soldiers holding their weapons with trigger fingers straightened and firmly pressed against the receiver. They’d been trained well. I took nearly as much pride in that as they did.

Drotleff and Cannon were among our instructors on that assignment. Those site visits showed me the quality of their work. It quickly became clear to the team in Moyock that our trouble in Afghanistan didn’t have anything to do with how our contractors did their jobs, but rather with what some of those men did when they
weren’t
working.

I was livid. My company had stretched itself increasingly thin to fill all our contracts, juggling some seven hundred employees in North Carolina, twelve hundred contractors on security details in Iraq and Afghanistan, one hundred contractors on aviation services in those two countries, and two hundred additional contractors to train the Afghan Border Police and Narcotics Interdiction Unit. The new ANA training work had meant about seventy-five more contractors in Afghanistan—who were suddenly managing to shoot people. Blackwater was facing more scrutiny than ever, and
this
was how
they responded? I wouldn’t have it. I fired virtually everyone involved in the incident.

If there was one silver lining, it was that in each of the theaters in which Blackwater operated, our actual job performance remained exemplary. By September 2009, we had
trained more than 38,000 ANA soldiers
, with reviews showing our contractors “
were outstanding, flexible, and delivered
a quality service. [Raytheon] consistently reported . . . that Paravant’s efforts were achieving over a 90 percent qualification rate for the ANA soldiers.” That was
on top of the 3,700 Afghan Border Police personnel
we trained,
and the 5,700 Narcotics Interdiction Unit officers
.

Back home, we continued to train military, state, and local law enforcement personnel at our three U.S. campuses—
roughly twenty thousand men and women in 2009
alone. Regardless of the storm clouds gathering, that track record would keep us in business. My company could survive even with State curtailing our work, but we had to tighten our internal operations—and figure out how to lower a profile that had become undeniably toxic.

•   •   •

B
lackwater’s branding had, in the past, gone through minor corporate cleanups. After Katrina, the gunned-up, black-clad warriors on our Web site were joined by information about the humanitarian work we were capable of. We ran ads featuring starving infants being spoon-fed, with this text: “Now that
we are aware of many atrocities
on this earth, those of us who enjoy secure, peaceful, and free lives are called upon to help share that promise with the world. Through selfless commitment and compassion for all people, Blackwater works to make a difference in the world and provide hope to those who still live in desperate times.”

Then, following the shooting in Nisour Square, our original logo—once described by the
New York Times
as “
a bear’s paw print in a red crosshairs
, under lettering that looks to have been ripped from a fifth of Jim Beam”—was toned down to reduce the visual impact of
the rifle scope and lessen the menacing skeletal image of the bear paw. We’d become more “
Fortune
500” than “gun show.” We dropped the Blackwater name from our logo altogether; by late 2007, we’d become entirely recognizable to the people who wanted to find us.

Still, by 2009, it was clear an updated logo wouldn’t do much in the face of years of harsh press. I couldn’t shake the unsettling lesson that this nation was no meritocracy after all. Clearly, the most able didn’t always end up on top—not when so many people seemed eager to drag us down. So if the PR nightmare was going to doom Blackwater, then “Blackwater” had to go.

We instituted a months-long search for a new corporate identity, considering all sorts of branding. Ultimately, our executives voted to rename the company “Xe Services,” which means . . . nothing. Which was exactly the point.

Pronounced “zee,” Xe is the periodic symbol for the chemical element xenon, a colorless, odorless gas found in trace amounts in the earth’s atmosphere. You’d never know it was there unless someone pointed it out. That was the new, understated direction for the company. We pledged to get back to our training center roots, expand our instructional programs, and disappear into the background. The main Moyock campus was also renamed: “Blackwater Lodge and Training Center” became the simpler “U.S. Training Center, Incorporated.”

Pundits pegged our renaming as damage control, and cheered what they perceived as the company’s death rattle. Blackwater’s makeover was “
not a direct result of a loss of contract
, but certainly that is an aspect of our work that we feel we were defined by,” we said publicly at the time. Critics saw it as a symbolic victory against military contractors in general. That’s because they thought the rebranding was our idea.

In reality, Jennifer
Joy may have been the first
to specifically ask about a name change. Joy was a manager at Raytheon overseeing the ANA training in Afghanistan. When Jim Sierawski, then a vice president at Blackwater, first reached out to her about our competing for
the subcontract, “Ms. Joy expressed some level of concern about having the Blackwater name appear on [Raytheon’s] approved list of vendors for the [training] contract,” we told Congress in 2010. “Mr. Sierawksi recalls Ms. Joy asking if Blackwater had considered changing its name.”

I wasn’t thrilled with the idea. But if customers like Raytheon wanted that built-in deniability—a way to hire us while also being able to later claim, “We didn’t know it was Blackwater!”—I thought it best to let them have it. Regardless of what the paperwork said, everyone at the company knew where we stood. Literally. I knew that in the lobby of our Moyock headquarters the twenty-foot-wide name “Blackwater” remained cast in the concrete floor.

Soon “Paravant” was born to land the ANA work, and we leaned more heavily than ever on our
network of some three dozen affiliates
and subsidiaries to help secure business. Blackwater always had various offshoots—Backup Training Corporation offered computer-based law enforcement training courses, for instance; Pelagian Maritime oversaw applications for our repurposed research vessel; E&J Holdings was the branch that managed our real estate acquisition, including expansions at the Moyock campus. That series of offshoots became only more valuable as the Blackwater name became radioactive. Soon, we were earning repeat government business through Presidential Airways, Greystone, Constellation Consulting Group, GSD Manufacturing, Raven Development Group, and more.

It limited our visibility—though, from a legal standpoint, it also limited our liability in each arena. Blackwater simply followed the lead of other major contractors that create offshoots to compete for various business opportunities. Northrop Grumman has equally mysterious-sounding subsidiaries, such as Litton Industries, TRW Inc., Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical, and Logicon Corporation; Lockheed Martin oversees nearly twenty divisions, including Advanced Marine Systems, CADAM Inc., and Metier Management Systems along with its raft of missile, space, and aeronautical firms. Critics attacked us for using “fronts” and “shell companies”—but there was
no grand secret there: I owned them all. And the majority of them were even registered to 850 Puddin Ridge Road in Moyock—the same well-known address as Blackwater’s headquarters.

Our customers all knew whom they were hiring—and that went for the State Department, which, like other clients, issued us clear and unambiguous verbal guidance that shedding our company name was best for everyone involved. Because regardless of what was happening in Iraq, State suddenly needed our help in Afghanistan—and beyond.

•   •   •

O
n March 27, 2009, President Obama stood
at a podium in Room 450 of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington. Over his right shoulder was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; over his left, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “
Today, I am announcing
a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the president said.

In the eight years since the United States had invaded Afghanistan, stability there had moved at a glacial pace, to the extent it moved forward at all. Taliban suicide bombings continued seemingly at will in the fledgling democracy. Insurgent aggression had prevented enough voter registration that the country’s landmark presidential elections, scheduled for May 2009, had to be
pushed back three months
. The United States had just come off its
deadliest year of the war
there, with 155 service members killed in 2008.
In 2009, it only got worse
.

As part of that “new strategy,” the Obama administration pledged to push
an additional twenty-one thousand troops
into Afghanistan, following that later in the year with
a pledge for another twelve thousand
, ultimately
more than doubling the Bush administration’s force
in the failing war effort. But President Obama included an additional component that he said differentiated this approach from that of his predecessor: “
This push must be joined
by a dramatic increase in our civilian effort,” he said. “To advance security,
opportunity, and justice—not just in Kabul, but from the bottom up in the provinces—we need agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers.” The “civilian surge,” as it came to be known, would send hundreds of people to the country under the State Department’s guidance—and someone had to keep them safe. As soon as I heard President Obama’s speech, I knew what that plan might mean for our newly rebranded firm.

Since 2005, Blackwater had provided protection details for U. S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, Embassy Kabul personnel, visiting diplomats and congressional delegations, and USAID under Task Order 4 of the WPPS II. We had
conducted 2,730 protection missions
across Afghanistan in 2008 alone, earning
all of the $174 million
State paid us for the work. “During the entire time USTC [U.S. Training Center] has operated in Afghanistan, no one under USTC’s protection has been injured or killed, and there have been no incidents involving the use of deadly force,” a
2009 performance audit
by State’s inspector general found. “The representatives [protected by the contractors] reported that USTC employees are professional, make them feel secure, and are respectful to both officials under chief of mission authority and their Afghan counterparts.”

Facing a civilian surge that closely mirrored the security mess State had previously found in Iraq, the department, and its new secretary, Hillary Clinton, found the same solution: They awarded our U.S. Training Center an
eighteen-month contract worth $120 million
for static and protective security services at consulates being built in Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif. That served as a stopgap until State could complete its new global, third-generation WPPS contract in 2010. Bad press in Iraq be damned; State’s mission in Afghanistan needed the most capable PMCs it could find, as soon as they could get there.

Expanding our existing work in the country to additional consulates made sense for everybody—except our detractors on Capitol Hill, including the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and
Afghanistan. “Of course,
the concern is whether in Afghanistan
, where the mission is most critical right now, we might have in the future the same kind of incident that we saw in Iraq,” Clark Kent Ervin, a panel commissioner appointed by Democrat Nancy Pelosi, said during a hearing three days later. Charlene Lamb, State’s deputy assistant secretary for international programs, replied that “past performance played an incredible amount” in determining whether or not to award us that contract. She added: “In this case, with this specific award,
Xe is the only company
of our three under the WPPS II contract currently operating in Afghanistan. Their infrastructure is there already.”

My company again seemed to be finding its stride. With that contract locked down, our next piece of business with State generated even more headlines. In August 2010, the department
leveled an enormous fine against my company
: $42 million, for 288 instances of Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) violations between 2003 and 2009. But
not
for any of the reasons the average person might expect.

ITAR and AECA work in concert to regulate the export of defense goods and services, as well as technical data—everything from training programs to guided missiles—to foreign entities. The enforcement of those laws falls under the purview of State, though bureaucratic machismo enters the picture when the Departments of Commerce and the Treasury throw their weight around on various items. Most commonly, that happens with gear classified as “dual use” or with goods having both a commercial and a military application.

Zip ties are a perfect example. The flimsy ones are useful for tying off trash bags (commercial use); heavy-duty ones can be used by law enforcement agents as impromptu handcuffs (military use). To send a box of plastic zip ties to our teams training Afghanistan’s new counternarcotics police, we had to submit a half-inch-thick application package to State for its sign-off on our exporting defense and training goods; then we had to resubmit the application to the Commerce Department because zip ties are a dual-use item. Failure to
spend literally weeks securing both approvals made our exporting a box of those plastic strips a violation of ITAR, if something far less dramatic than what one might generally think of when it comes to international arms smuggling.

In 2009 alone, those three government export agencies
processed 130,000 applications from U.S. companies, many of which were zip tie–style overlaps. The model was so onerous, in 2012 the U.S. government launched a wide-ranging Export Control Reform Initiative to create a single licensing agency that is “
transparent, predictable, and timely
,” according to the State Department. But it certainly wasn’t that way when we first ramped up Blackwater’s operations abroad and had to make sure our teams were equipped to do their jobs successfully.