Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (8 page)

After World War II, the government began leaning more and more heavily on PMCs. That intermarriage was a trend noted by no less than President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who’d previously been supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II. Twenty years after receiving that command, the then president gave his farewell address from the White House in 1961. In it, he warned: “
In the councils of government, we must guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”

Yet reliance on contractors continued unabated. During the politically explosive Vietnam War, the Pentagon paid private firms to build and operate bases, as well as supply water and ground transport from the beginning of the American involvement in 1954. “The airfields, roads, and bridges [built in Vietnam] that now bear military traffic can serve as lifelines for the distribution of goods and services throughout the nation,” Ellsworth Bunker, the American ambassador to South Vietnam, said in 1972. “
At a time when all too many forces
are bent on destruction, RMK-BRJ’s ten years of accomplishment have been in my opinion one of the finest episodes in our nation’s history.”

PMCs were again used in the first Gulf War, in early 1991, which I saw from inside the bubble in Washington, as the conflict coincided
with my brief internship in the George H. W. Bush White House. And following the war, the Pentagon turned to contractors to bolster UN peacekeeping missions throughout the rest of the decade.

I’m proud that when our first Blackwater team stepped foot in Afghanistan in 2002, we became part of a deeply rooted American tradition: private business supplying logistical, intelligence, and military support services that the government can’t provide on its own. (To be clear, it’s hardly a tradition unique to the United States. Globally,
PMCs operate in more than fifty
countries as part of a $100 billion annual industry.) Perhaps the Army said it best. In describing its nearly thirty-year-old LOGCAP—or Logistics Civil Augmentation Program—contract, the service’s official logistical bulletin wrote, “
LOGCAP provides contingency support
to augment the Army force structure. With large global commitments, the Army must use contractors to provide logistics support in theaters of operations so that military units can be released for other missions. In essence, contractors provide the Army with additional means to adequately support its forces. This is not a new concept for the Army, which has used contractors to provide supplies and services since the Revolutionary War.”

One big shift, however, came in the 1990s.
During the first Gulf War, PMCs made up
about 2 percent of U.S. manpower. But their usage grew exponentially throughout the decade—not only because of contractors’ demonstrated versatility, but also because they allowed Pentagon planners to fudge the numbers. During the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Bosnia in 1995, for instance, Congress imposed a twenty-thousand-strong cap on American troop involvement.
But the DoD wanted a larger presence
, so it quietly augmented that number with two thousand contractors who did not constitute “troops” and who could fulfill various logistical duties behind the scenes. The end run worked so well that in the coming years
DoD contracts with PMCs grew
from $85.1 billion in 1996 to more than $150 billion in 2006.

That, of course, included Iraq and Afghanistan. Those conflicts have been
described as the first contractor wars
, and rightly so: PMCs—more than two hundred thousand of them—ultimately made up 54 percent of the Defense Department’s workforce in those countries (and that figure doesn’t include approximately three thousand contractors, including Blackwater’s men, working directly for the State Department).
The vast majority of the DoD’s PMCs
provided transportation and engineering services, or worked laundry details, or staffed dining halls at forward operating bases—the necessary support functions that enable the military to project combat power. The “tail-to-tooth ratio,” as some analysts describe it. And those PMCs quickly became such indispensable parts of the U.S. war machine that the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review included contractors—along with active-duty military, reserves, and civilian employees—as one of the
four key components of the DoD’s “Total Force
.”

Those sorts of statistics underscore an uncomfortable reality for some analysts: Waging war requires sheer numbers of personnel this country’s military no longer possesses.
During the first Gulf War, the Army
had 780,000 troops; a decade later that number had fallen 40 percent, to about 480,000. Not since the last men were conscripted in December 1972 has the United States faced a draft—yet without one, the manpower necessary for the United States to effectively wage war simply doesn’t exist today.

At the height of the Iraq conflict, in 2007, even with contractors providing more than half the workforce,
the Army could still meet recruiting benchmarks
only by lowering standards, raising the maximum enlistment age, accepting more troops with “moral waivers,” and
offering $20,000 bonuses for recruits
who agreed to report to basic training in thirty days or less. (
Only 71 percent of Army recruits that year
had graduated high school, the lowest rate in twenty-five years.) “
We cannot operate without private security
firms in Iraq,” Patrick F. Kennedy, the undersecretary of state for management, said in 2008. “If the contractors were removed, we would have to leave Iraq.” Former Marine colonel Jack Holly put
it slightly differently: “
We’re never going to war
without the private security industry again in a nondraft environment.”

The reliance on contractors crosses administrations and political affiliations. The 1995 Bosnia peacekeeping contracting came during the Clinton administration, the ramp-up in Iraq and Afghanistan under President Bush. And today under President Obama, left-wing critics seem somehow surprised that little has changed. In fact,
in Obama’s first year in office
, the DoD increased the use of PMCs in Afghanistan by 29 percent and in Iraq by 23 percent. The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, released well after the term “private military companies” had become venomous in public debate, describes ongoing
efforts by the DoD to “reduce the number
of support service contractors, thereby helping to establish a balanced workforce that appropriately aligns functions to the public and private sector.”

Yet it also clearly states
: “The [Defense] Department is facing mission requirements of increasing scope, variety, and complexity. To ensure the availability of needed talent to meet future demands, we are conducting a deliberate assessment of current and future workforce requirements. This effort will ensure that the Department has the right workforce size and mix (military/civilian/contractor) with the right competencies. . . . The services provided by contractors will continue to be valued as part of a balanced approach.”

•   •   •

A
nd that’s the crux of the issue here. PMCs that provide laundry service or drive trucks or empty toilets—the crucial “life support” tasks that support our troops—are as old as America itself.
But of the thousands of contractors
who worked in Iraq and Afghanistan, a small fraction—only about 10 percent—were employed in a relatively new subset of the industry. It’s the one the State Department needed then, and still needs at locations around the world now: security. The active protection of a
noun
—a person, facility, or property—“for
which,” the National Defense Authorization Act reads, “
contractors are required to be armed
.”

For many critics, that final clause makes all the difference: Blackwater’s men carried guns. And the subjective moralizing is fascinating.

At home, armed private security guards help protect airports and banks and office buildings. They staff checkpoints at military bases across the country and they’re stationed at government offices in Washington D.C. Meanwhile, the private sector supplies the U.S. military with bullets and bulletproof vests, rifles and communications gear, tanks and ships and jets. The general public—much less Congress—never really questions whether or not those duties should be outsourced. Yet Blackwater became famous—some might say infamous—for combining the two. We were a private company providing armed guards to a war zone. For that, critics branded us “war profiteers.” No one ever says that about the contractors delivering the mail to the soldiers every day.

I understand security work can be dramatic. Blackwater’s men—elite special forces personnel, far better trained than the average enlisted man on the ground—protected the most important figures in the region and performed what might have been the most dangerous work there. By 2009, more contractors were dying in Iraq than military personnel; that same bloody rubric flipped in Afghanistan in 2011. “
Privatizing the ultimate sacrifice
,” as one George Washington University law scholar described it. Unlike the guy cleaning the mess hall, doing security work well meant that it was possible someone would have to die.

I realize, too, that my conservative politics made us a target for critics on the left who saw our work as a threatening usurpation of what they considered “
inherently governmental functions
.”

Still, I never understood the singular spotlight that seemed to be trained on my company. We were not the largest military contractor in Iraq or Afghanistan, nor were we making the most money. Odds are, though, the average citizen can’t name even a handful of the
other providers. It seems nearly impossible to talk about military contractors today without reflexively mentioning Blackwater—and in the past few years, there’s been a lot of talk. The brand still comes up in one-sided magazine articles and newspaper editorials—and, unfortunately, in hearings by various committees on Capitol Hill.

But those mentions just underscore what those editorial writers and politicians—in every chamber and across every aisle—would rather the public overlook: Contractors were here long before my company was, and the job will still need to be done long after I’m gone. Debates about pay rates or operational tactics or contractor immunity—all of which I’ll clarify in the coming pages—simply obscure this momentous realization: “The United States no longer can project power of any significance over any protracted period of time without reliance on the private sector,” read a 2010 assessment by the Lexington Institute, a public policy research center named for the spot where more than two centuries ago Americans defied the military might of the most powerful empire on earth. “Civilians are
now the equivalent of a new service
.”

As part of this service, it seemed only fitting that our next key step forward came from protecting the most important civilian in Iraq.

2003

I first met L. Paul Bremer III when we measured him for body armor.

That was early in May 2003, nearly two months after President George W. Bush had stood behind a blue podium in Cross Hall at the White House and looked directly into a TV camera. “For more than a decade, the United States and other nations have pursued patient and honorable efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime without war,” President Bush said. “Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime have failed again and again because we are not dealing with peaceful men.”
He issued this ultimatum
: “All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end. Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing.”

They refused.

Two days later,
March 20 dawned in Baghdad
with air raid sirens. Blackwater executives all watched the footage on TV as U.S. warships in the Red Sea pummeled targets across Iraq with Tomahawk cruise missiles. Operation Iraqi Freedom had begun;
by April 9, U.S.
troops would secure Saddam’s presidential palace in the capital city and, surrounded by celebrating Iraqis, Marines would topple the despot’s statue in central Firdos Square. Less than a week later, as Iraqi troops laid down their weapons before advancing coalition forces,
the United States captured Tikrit
, the final major bastion of the Hussein regime. On May 1, 2003, Bush stood on the flight deck of the USS
Abraham Lincoln
and delivered
his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech
to the nation. Forty-five days after his initial threat to Saddam, the president declared, “
Major combat operations in Iraq have ended
. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” It was what came next that was the problem.

As far back as December 2001, the
Iraq War plan delivered to President Bush
had four basic stages: Phase I, building an international coalition and support for the war; Phase II, gathering intelligence and drawing up decisive battle plans; Phase III, successful combat operations; and Phase IV, rebuilding a shattered nation. Much like the war plans for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, Phase IV in Iraq called for minimal continued military presence thanks to the rapid handover of power to a provisional local government. That same December, the
Afghan Interim Authority had appointed
Hamid Karzai chairman of its temporary administration and cemented plans to soon establish the Afghanistan Transitional Authority. Eschewing long-term U.S. nation building in favor of striking quickly and moving on had seemed to work in that country. It made sense to many DoD planners that it would work in Iraq, too.

Besides, military leaders thought, Phase IV was the job of civilians, particularly the State Department. As CENTCOM’s former commander General Tommy Franks wrote in his memoirs, “
While we at CENTCOM were executing the war plan
, Washington should focus on policy-level issues. . . . I knew the president and Don Rumsfeld would back me up, so I felt free to pass the message along to the bureaucracy beneath them:
You pay attention to the day
after
and
I’ll pay attention to the day
of.” (Emphasis in Franks’s original.) The general retired just weeks after the president’s speech announcing his
mission was accomplished, saying that it was now the responsibility of civil organizations to ensure safety and stability. “As I had said throughout our planning sessions, civic action and security were linked—
inextricably
linked,” Franks wrote. “
There was a commonly held belief
that civil action would not be possible in Iraq without security. I would continue to argue that there could be no security without civic action.”

From the start of the war planning, however, those civilians had warned that the transition in Iraq might not be so easy.
State Department officials believed
that the country’s exiled leaders wouldn’t be hailed as returning heroes, the way Karzai had been in Afghanistan. Further, as outlined in
a December 2002 memo titled “A Perfect Storm
” by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Ryan Crocker and Special Assistant to the Secretary of State William Burns, the fall of Hussein’s Ba’ath regime had the potential to unleash violent competition among Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian groups. Neighboring nations such as Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia might try to exert their influence. In part because of that memo, it is believed, the State Department’s head civilian, Secretary of State Colin Powell, issued his well-known warning to President Bush: “
When you hit this thing, it’s like a crystal glass
. It’s going to shatter,” Powell told the president. “There will be no government. There will be civil disorder. You’ll have twenty-five million Iraqis standing around looking at each other.”

The predictions proved frighteningly accurate. Looting and killing in Baghdad began almost the moment Hussein’s statue was toppled. According to
a 2009 report by the Special Inspector General
for Iraq Reconstruction, the military’s rush through the country—and toward central Iraq, where it was believed Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction—meant that only about twenty-five thousand soldiers remained to occupy Baghdad, with its population of six million. In comparison, a city that size would easily be the second largest in the United States; with so few American troops scattered across it, organized crime in the war-torn capital was unstoppable.

Soon, violence spread across the country. Millions in cash was stolen or destroyed at the Rasheed and Rafidain bank branches and at the Central Bank of Iraq. “
In a military compound under nominal guard by U.S. soldiers
,” according to the inspector general’s report, “one of these gangs smashed through a rear wall and used a crane to remove valuable precision milling equipment used to manufacture Scud missiles.” In Mosul, the report added, a prison guard sold all the prison beds for scrap metal. In the capital, the Ministry of Health was set on fire multiple times because there was insufficient U.S. force to stop it.
Iraqis were not, in fact, greeting U.S. forces as liberators
, as Vice President Dick Cheney had predicted. Mere days after the downfall of a tyrant, the vengeful lawlessness of Iraq’s citizenry threatened to plunge the country into even greater darkness.

Into that chaos stepped Bremer
, a State Department veteran and former chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism. Appointed by Bush to head the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and take charge of the rebuilding, the then sixty-two-year-old Bremer was given a clear and
sweeping directive by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
: “You shall be responsible for the temporary governance of Iraq, and shall oversee, direct and coordinate all executive, legislative, and judicial functions necessary to carry out this responsibility, including humanitarian relief and reconstruction and assisting in the formation of an Iraqi interim authority.”

With the stroke of a pen, the career diplomat had been made the most powerful man in Iraq. The invasion was about to become a bloody occupation that would last for nearly a decade, and as the head of the CPA, Bremer would become the insurgents’ primary target. For a free Iraq to take shape, someone had to keep him alive. For Blackwater Security Consulting, it was our introduction to Iraq.

•   •   •

T
he safety of the ambassador in Baghdad
was overseen by a small component of the Army known as the Criminal Investigation Command, within which its even smaller Protective Services
Battalion provides security for executive-level Defense Department personnel during wartime. If that sounds niche, that’s because it is: The Army’s main function is to project force, not protect targets. Protective Services is one of the few divisions in all the military forces trained in this sort of thing—and so there’s little manpower to go around. So to bolster Bremer’s security detail, the Defense Department added a pair of Blackwater’s ex–Navy SEALs to the team. I joined them for their first meeting with Bremer at the Pentagon.

As with every “principal,” or the figure being guarded, we discussed his goals and mission and what we would be doing to protect him. I couldn’t go with them to Iraq, but I wanted Bremer to know I would still be personally involved—and that I understood the dangers he faced: When the new head of the CPA landed in Baghdad, on May 12, 2003, the city was on fire. The ambassador was taking control of a country in political and economic chaos, as the inspector general’s report later described it, “
with no government, no electricity, and no functioning security
forces.” Prior to the invasion,
one of Hussein’s final acts of power
had been to throw open his prisons and release roughly a hundred thousand convicts into the streets—many of them violent criminals. There wasn’t enough personnel to protect humanitarian convoys and staging areas, much less government installations—a problem made all the more acute by one of Bremer’s first acts in Iraq: He
disbanded Iraq’s entire military
.

The CPA’s “Order 2”—a directive second only to removing loyalists of Hussein’s Ba’ath Party from positions of authority in Iraqi society—left half a million members of Iraq’s army, navy, air force, Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard, and intelligence system out of work. And the
CPA wasn’t big on severance packages
. Major General David Petraeus, who would be named to head Iraq’s Multi-National Security Transition Command, would later say the decree fueled the growing insurgency, finally offering disparate rebels something they could unite around: hatred of the CPA. Order 2, Petraeus said, created “tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of
additional enemies of the Coalition
.”

For three harrowing months, Blackwater’s men helped protect the ambassador from ambush attempts on the roads, rocket attacks in the Green Zone, and increasingly hostile Iraqis in general. “When I got here,” Bremer would later say, “
I slept with earplugs
, the noise [from all the gunfights outside] was so loud.” He was never harmed. But by August 2003, lousy conditions on the ground were rapidly getting worse.

Early that month, a car bomb had destroyed
the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, killing nineteen.
Less than two weeks later
, during a single twelve-hour stretch, insurgents blew up the pipeline that supplied much of Baghdad’s water, killed or wounded sixty-five Iraqis by firing mortar rounds into Abu Ghraib prison, and
set fire to a major pipeline
carrying Iraqi oil into Turkey. On August 19, a cement truck carrying a five-hundred-pound bomb from Hussein’s prewar arsenal exploded outside the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, home of the United Nations’ offices. Among many other casualties,
Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN’s top envoy in Iraq
, lay trapped amid the rubble for hours before dying of his injuries. Then,
at the end of August, a car bomb exploded
outside the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf during morning prayers, killing more than eighty—including Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the largest Shia movement in postwar Iraq. Those terrorist attacks “clearly suggested a new order of magnitude of violence,” Bremer would later say. “I mean,
we had certainly been losing soldiers
and we’d been having some problems, but nothing on that scale.”

In response, the ambassador’s security detail was immediately contracted out in full. The Pentagon’s protective services had been stretched increasingly thin, and
in the three months since major combat operations had ended
, DoD planners had seen some hundred fifty members of the U.S. military killed in Iraq, and more than six hundred wounded. They were happy to let someone else take the heat for a while. And this detail was guaranteed to get fiery: “At Rumsfeld’s request,” Bremer would later write in his memoirs, “the U.S. Secret Service had done a survey of my security and had
concluded that I was the
most threatened American official anywhere in the world
.”

The turnover in security teams was so rapid, the DoD didn’t initially have time to choose among competing bids. In late August 2003, the
Pentagon awarded my company
a $21.3 million no-bid contract to protect the ambassador until the Iraqi Interim Government could take power eleven months later. For us, it was another chance to chase the school bus. Keeping the ambassador safe would prove we could keep anyone safe, anywhere. Screwing it up, on the other hand, could cripple Blackwater. We couldn’t pitch security services to prospective clients by saying, “Everything with Bremer went well—you know, until he got killed.” The DoD’s entire contract was twenty-two pages long—laughably short, we would later learn, for this sort of work. The Pentagon basically said, “Do whatever you have to. Just keep him alive.”

The “Bremer detail,” as it became known, was a sole-sourced, fixed-price deal. “That contract process was based on urgency,” Fred Roitz, Blackwater’s former vice president of contracts and compliance, remembers now. “
They needed men around him really fast
. Someone in the Army’s contracting department recommended Blackwater, the company was thoroughly vetted, and they determined Blackwater could get the job done.” We made it easy for them to say that, because that agreed-upon fee was all the money we’d get—meaning we accepted all the financial risk if costs began to spiral. It was how I preferred to operate—I’d seen it work in Holland, Michigan, and it ought to work in Baghdad, too. But the potential for runaway costs became immediately apparent.

Blackwater initially provided a thirty-six-man team
headed by Frank Gallagher, a former special warfare operator with the Marines and onetime director of security for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Bremer had first met Gallagher
during the CPA leader’s time working as managing director of Kissinger Associates in the 1990s. They got along well, and we knew Bremer would listen when Gallagher advised him on safety issues.