Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (6 page)

Committed to being “doers” ourselves, we said yes. The Navy gave us thirty days to be up and running, and they made it simple: The contract was worth almost $7 million—and everything we needed to execute it came out of our own pocket. It was like my father footing the bill for all his R&D—we bought our own equipment, firearms, and ammunition. With Dehart’s guidance, we built a “ship in a box”—a floating superstructure made of forty-foot steel tractor trailer cargo containers, painted battleship gray and fitted with watertight doors and railings. Think of an elaborate ship’s bridge on a movie set, only one designed to withstand real-life firefights. No one slept much that month, but the structure was ready for the Navy on Day 30, and inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration the day after.

For the next six months we trained nearly a thousand sailors a week to identify threats, engage enemies, and defeat attacks under way on ships in port and at sea. Almost immediately, one of the
Navy’s problems was clear: It had been years since some of those guys had held a gun. Our instructors were stunned to find that sailor after sailor had never used a firearm, except in boot camp.

Filling that contract created a funny juxtaposition between our fledgling operation and the type of business we did. Blackwater Lodge and Training Center was still a small business, but hundreds of sailors flooded Moyock every week. We were bringing in tens of thousands of dollars. And yet, every Friday, some Blackwater employee had to stand in our simple pro shop, swiping the Navy’s credit card through the countertop reader next to a little magazine rack and a stack of old PowerBars. (And swipe it multiple times. When the card’s individual charges were capped at $5,000, ringing up $60,000 on a Friday afternoon meant he was going to be there a while.)

But we impressed the right people.
In May 2001, Admiral Vern Clark
, then the chief of naval operations, was able to report to the Senate Armed Services Committee, “The attack on the USS
Cole
was a terrible tragedy and dramatic example of the type of threat our military forces face worldwide on a day-to-day basis, emphasizing the importance of force protection both today and in the future. The Navy has taken action at home and abroad to meet this challenge, undergoing a sea change in the way we plan and execute self-defense. We have enhanced the manning, training, and equipping of naval forces to better realize a war fighter’s approach to physical security, with ATFP [Anti-Terrorism Force Protection] serving as a primary focus of every mission, activity, and event. Additionally, we are dedicated to ensuring this mindset is instilled in every one of our sailors.”

Our work was so successful that two years later, once the “urgent” part wore off, the Navy put up for bid a five-year contract to conduct two-week training sessions for its personnel on sentry duty, weapons use aboard a ship, and how to board, seize, and search other vessels. We would win that deal, ultimately worth more than $40 million, and by 2008 Blackwater would train roughly seventy thousand
sailors at our facility, busing them in from Norfolk daily to train on that ship in a box. We felt like a scrappy little dog that finally caught the school bus he’d been chasing.

After scoring that first major government contract, plus growing business from local police officers and SWAT team members, plus a $400,000 September order from the FBI for BEAR target systems, we felt flush. I could envision my future here—helping train our military and police forces, eventually breaking even, having old friends visit to test their skills at Blackwater. It could be a nice life. A simple one.

We expanded again—up to seven thousand acres, more than twelve square miles. We set aside conservation areas to preserve wetlands and restore wildlife habitat, and reseeded hundreds of acres with native swamp oak and cypress. And we made one other addition to the Moyock facility: a massive black bear that had been shot on the Blackwater grounds. He stood now on his hind legs in the lobby of our main lodge, a 598-pound symbol of Blackwater’s tenacity—jaws frozen open, right paw raised high, ready to strike.

•   •   •

T
hings were equally busy back in Michigan.
Earnings at Prince Machine had quadrupled
, increasing the company’s value, and we sold that division to an Italian competitor, IDRA Presse, in 2000 at the peak of the market. The 225 employees owned 20 percent of the company and they did well with the sale, too—the newly formed IdraPrince became the world’s largest supplier of die-casting equipment, carrying on my father’s legacy. And now I was freed up to make Blackwater my top business priority.

By then, Joan and I also had a fourth beautiful child at home, Erik Xavier, born in July 1999. We called him “X.” Joan was overjoyed; after having beaten cancer into remission a second time, doctors had predicted that the extensive treatments would prevent her from getting pregnant again. We were a proud Roman Catholic family,
and proud to prove the doctors wrong about having another child. That faith—one she introduced me to—gave her strength, and she in turn was my greatest source of strength.

I got from Joan a sense of loyalty and trust that I’d never felt before. She never cared about the money I’d inherited, or the money we might make—something, unfortunately, I can’t say about an awful lot of people I’ve met over the years. I learned years later that during one trip home while we were dating, my father slipped a thousand dollars in her pocket as he hugged her good-bye. He hoped she would buy herself something special. Instead, she found it when she got home, then divvied it up among her siblings.

There’s no doubt that Blackwater never would have existed without her support and encouragement. In 2000, Joan agreed that we should move back to Virginia, near friends and closer to Moyock. A Navy wife, she loved the SEALs and shared our passion for what we were creating there. She could charm anyone she met at my various Beltway functions—she always said the key to the endless small talk was just knowing when to say, “That is so interesting!”

We chose McLean, Virginia. I knew I could rent an office there for Prince Group, the parent company I’d created to oversee Blackwater and various smaller business ventures. Joan was excited about living fifteen minutes from the Catholic Diocese of Arlington. I looked forward to spending more time at home with my family. Besides, Joan said, there were excellent medical facilities in the region in case we needed them.

That observation proved to be awful foreshadowing. As Joan packed boxes for that move, she felt a nagging twinge in her lower back, as if she’d pulled a muscle. X-rays, an MRI, and a bone scan confirmed her cancer had metastasized, and had spread throughout her spine and pelvis. There was nothing upbeat about the doctors’ demeanors this time. It was January 2001, and my wife was thirty-three. They gave Joan two and a half years to live.

2001–2002

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was a beautiful late summer day in northern Virginia. A little after eight a.m. I dropped the kids off at school. I cranked up the radio in the car and headed off to a haircut; Joan was resting at home, steeling herself for another awful chemo treatment scheduled the next morning at St. Vincent’s Hospital in lower Manhattan. Needless to say, that appointment was canceled.

In the car, I heard that American Airlines Flight 11 had just struck the World Trade Center. My barber, Ali, and I watched United Flight 175 slam into the South Tower as I sat in his chair. Then came news of American Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon, and United Flight 93 crashing in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

My company’s staff showed up in Moyock as always that Tuesday. Everyone sat transfixed by the TV. Gary Jackson was in Dallas; with commercial flights grounded, he rented a car and began the twenty-eight-hour drive to the facility. We were horrified by the news—but, unfortunately, we weren’t shocked. We had seen a
low-cost, low-technology strike slip through our nation’s basic security procedures a year earlier in Aden harbor.

Military insiders and intelligence officials had been monitoring, if some of them discounting, swelling anti-American extremism for years. It seemed clear to me that these sorts of attacks were bound to become more common. I remembered seeing that
two senior colonels in China’s People’s Liberation Army
had gone so far as to publish an entire book in 1999 called
Unrestricted Warfare
.
The book advocated
“a multitude of means, both military and particularly non-military, to strike at the United States during times of conflict,” according to the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which translated the text. “Hacking into websites, targeting financial institutions, terrorism, using the media, and conducting urban warfare are among the methods proposed.” Watching the Twin Towers collapse on TV, I could see the American public had suddenly come face-to-face with unrestricted warfare at home. The question was what our politicians would do about it.

At the time, those of us on the Blackwater staff didn’t care much for policy debates. We were soldiers and sailors and cops and Marines. We thought pragmatically, with an eye toward the future. Soon after 9/11, while some talking heads debated whether we should strike back at all against those who murdered American civilians, conversation in Moyock centered on what the inevitable strike would look like—and what role Blackwater could play. Certainly, we could train the special operations guys who would hunt down the al-Qaeda leadership, but we wanted to do more and needed to find someone who would let us help.

As focused as I’d been on building the company and tending to my family, I hadn’t worried about keeping up with my few political contacts in Washington. I hadn’t set foot in the White House complex since leaving as an intern years before—and
President George W. Bush’s national security team
was dominated at that point by career professionals and President Bill Clinton’s political holdovers. The closest I ever got to any of them was when Joan and I bought tickets
to the president’s inaugural ball eight months earlier—which is to say, we had no relationship at all.

I rifled through my desk in Moyock for the one business card I had for somebody at the CIA. His name was “Buzzy”—Alvin Bernard “Buzzy” Krongard, the agency’s executive director, whom I’d known since Krongard’s son, a Navy SEAL, had trained at Blackwater.

Krongard agreed to meet right away. Why the urgency? Besides wanting to provide training, we knew we had intelligence that could help in the fight. We brought contact information for a warlord.

•   •   •

A
mid Afghanistan’s ever shifting historical political winds,
Abdul Rashid Dostum transformed himself more often, and more successfully, than most anybody else. In the era of Soviet control,
the ethnic Uzbek worked for a time
as a communist union boss at a gas field, then joined the Afghan military in 1978 to battle the insurgent mujahideen, who sought to oust the Russians. In just a few short years,
Dostum rose to the rank of army general
, commanding a twenty-thousand-strong militia in the northern provinces of Afghanistan.
By 1997, thanks in large part to his willingness
to switch sides whenever it became politically expedient (including aligning himself with the new mujahideen government when it successfully took control in 1992, before defecting again to ultimately join the Northern Alliance), the forty-three-year-old Dostum lorded it over a sort of multiethnic six-province miniature state in Afghanistan’s northern steppe.
Its main city was Mazar-i-Sharif
, a thriving home to two million—including the cantankerous leader who reportedly once put a thief to death by running over him with a tank. Dostum was not what anyone in the U.S. intelligence community considered predictable.

In 1998,
Dostum was ousted
by the ultraconservative Taliban, which, since taking over Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul in 1996, had been dismembering the Northern Alliance to expand its power base.
Dostum was forced into exile
in Turkey, but by early 2001 had
reunited with loyal followers in the inaccessible Hindu Kush mountains of eastern Afghanistan.
The return was possible thanks
to an alliance forged with legendary mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud—a man Dostum had once fought against, but who was also the final Northern Alliance leader left to stave off the Taliban.
Massoud, known as the “Lion of Panjshir
” in homage to his hometown, had played a leading role in driving the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1989, had served for a time as the country’s minister of defense, and had been receiving aid for his military efforts, on and off, from the CIA since 1984.

On September 9, 2001, in a preemptive strike by al-Qaeda and the Taliban to destabilize the alliance and remove a key CIA asset before 9/11,
Massoud was killed by a pair of Arab suicide bombers
posing as journalists. Dostum was suddenly thrust to the head of the Northern Alliance. He needed the sort of friends Massoud had.

Through my prior congressional contacts, we at Blackwater had gotten word that Dostum didn’t have much more faith in the Americans than they had in him.
There was only one U.S. contact
the general trusted, we were told: Charlie Santos, an American representative for Saudi Arabia–based Delta Oil, who had previously worked with United Nations mediators in Afghanistan. In the late nineties,
Delta had sent Santos to negotiate the building
of an oil pipeline across the country, which would have handed the Taliban a massive free revenue stream. When those talks broke down, the Taliban effectively declared Santos persona non grata—which was all the recommendation Dostum needed to trust the guy.

It also happened to be the case that Paul Behrends had worked with Santos on Delta’s pipeline project, and the two were in regular contact. I was still in regular contact with Paul—and that made Charlie our friend.

A few days after 9/11, I got a call from Behrends. He had news: “Dostum’s been calling Charlie, saying, ‘What do you want me to do? Nobody’s calling me. I want to help,’” Behrends reported. Apparently Santos and Dostum had been chatting daily.

In the days following the attack, the CIA was scraping for information from contacts in Islamabad, Pakistan, and wondering how much they could trust the intelligence sent by Pakistan’s notoriously untrustworthy Inter-Services Intelligence agency. They had no relationship with the general; a few years prior, the CIA under director John Deutch had purged its rolls of “dirty” assets—those with shady backgrounds, or worse. From May 1995 to December 1996,
the agency cast aside roughly a thousand paid informants
under those so-called “Deutch Rules”—especially in places like Afghanistan, where political alignments seemed to change by the hour. The policy protected the CIA from a PR standpoint, but it also kept them from working with men like Dostum, a leader and a fighter who at the very least bought into the idea that the enemy of his enemy was his friend. He was certainly no Boy Scout—but Boy Scouts don’t command rebel armies. And after 9/11, his influence and authority made him just the sort of contact the agency needed.

As plans were drawn up for America’s military response to the attacks, a number of
higher-ups at the CIA had been urging
something less conventional. They knew the Pentagon’s U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, was considering a raft of options for destroying al-Qaeda and removing the Taliban from power in Afghanistan—including grotesquely conventional approaches that would have led with Special Forces personnel, then seen thousands of soldiers and Marines battling the remaining Taliban fighters. But the CIA and DoD are often at loggerheads, and those in Langley understood that President George W.
Bush had publicly insisted the military campaign
was not an assault upon Islam or the Afghan people. To that end, military strategists needed to remember two things: First, a large coalition ground force might inflame the Afghan population; and second, time was of the essence. The faster the coalition could accomplish its mission and hand political power back to the anti-Taliban Afghans, the better off we’d all be.

These factors swayed CIA planners
toward a new form of warfare—and a sudden reliance on the fifteen-thousand-strong
Northern Alliance. The hope in Langley was that
small teams of CIA operatives and Army Special Forces
personnel could spread out across Afghanistan with Northern Alliance commanders, liberating villages and calling in air strikes on Taliban strongholds. That would minimize the American contingent of ground forces for the campaigns, planners understood, and put a local face on the mission as well. But that meant coordination with contacts the CIA didn’t have.

Working through the contacts Behrends and Santos helped us establish, Blackwater provided the agency with a list of in-country assets. Beyond Dostum, we delivered Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq, who commanded anti-Taliban forces in central Afghanistan, and Ishmael Khan, a former officer in the Afghan National Army, who was jailed by the Taliban in 1997 but escaped three years later hungry for payback. That list also included Payenda Mohammad Khan, a former commander under Dostum, who served as an interlocutor, translator, and idea man. These were men with nasty reputations but an appreciation for getting things done. None of Afghanistan’s officials were clean.
Even Massoud had financed his rebel alliance
partly by smuggling opium and heroin into Europe. Handcuffed by politics, the CIA had not been able to cultivate relationships with the key but messy leaders. Fortunately, though, Blackwater had no such political restrictions. We were careful to maintain the highest ethics while dealing with these contacts, and we were able to set the CIA up with some of the most useful men in the region.

With that assistance, the
CIA’s seven-man Northern Afghanistan Liaison Team
, code-named “Jawbreaker,” arrived in the Panjshir valley, about sixty miles north of Kabul, just fifteen days after 9/11. They began coordination on the ground for the Green Berets to come, and the team’s mission was unmistakable. Before leaving, CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black gave the team leader a mandate straight from a Hollywood script. “
I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs
captured, I want them dead,” Black said. “I want bin
Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the president.”

Then on October 7, 2001,
Operation Enduring Freedom began
with a volley of fifty Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from land-based bombers, two dozen strike aircraft, and U.S. and British ships and submarines. They destroyed much of Afghanistan’s spartan air defenses in advance of the American bombers to come.

The Army’s first twelve-man Special Forces
Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA)—literally, an A-team—reached the Panjshir valley and the Jawbreaker contingent on October 17, 2001. As one prong of Task Force Dagger, which aimed to gain control of Afghanistan’s northern cities, those Green Berets would focus on Kabul.
Two days later, a second A-team
, ODA 595, was choppered in the dead of night to a landing zone roughly seventy miles south of Mazar-i-Sharif, where they linked up with General Dostum and his fifty men on horseback. From CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida, Santos coordinated with Dostum via satellite phone, telling him when his men should light the landing zone.

What came next was “
the Flintstones meets the Jetsons
,” according to the men of ODA 595, and one of the most remarkable military campaigns in American history. For weeks, the Green Berets suffered on horseback, Dostum leading them north in wooden saddles, across parched plains and along two-foot-wide cliffside trails. It had been the better part of a century since the cavalry galloped into battle, and in 2001 the Army didn’t exactly train Green Berets in horsemanship. But with their artillery a phone call away, and Dostum’s cunning, the Special Forces and Northern Alliance liberated dozens of towns.
They called in such ferocious air strikes
on enemy encampments that the laser target designators ODA 595 used to guide the bombs became known to Afghans as “death rays.”

In the early morning darkness
of November 9, 2001, Dostum’s cavalry, six hundred strong, flowed from the mountains down into Mazar-i-Sharif and soon reclaimed the city. Four days later,
Task
Force Dagger retook control of Kabul.
Nearly two-thirds of the country changed hands
in a few weeks, and the Taliban regime was completely toppled in Afghanistan a grand total of 102 days after 9/11—led by only a relative handful of U.S. personnel. “
I asked for a few Americans
,” Dostum would later say of the Special Forces. “They brought with them the courage of a whole army.” And the international connections provided by an ever expanding training center in the North Carolina swamp.

•   •   •