Licensed to Kill (15 page)

A couple of cases have set precedent for other types of contractors to be tried in their home countries for an offense committed in a war zone—such as the CACI (California Analysis Center, Inc.) and Titan translators charged after the public outcry over Abu Ghraib. David Passaro, an ex–Green Beret and independent contractor employed by the CIA as part of a paramilitary unit hunting terrorists in Afghanistan, was actually charged under terms of the Patriot Act for the death of a detainee he interrogated too harshly. Since both of these cases were brought only after controversy had erupted over the revelations about torture carried out at Abu Ghraib, it raises the question about whether the prevailing powers care about accountability only when the glare of the public spotlight is upon them.

Order 17 dissolved with the handover of Iraq, and in the ensuing time contractors have supposedly been subject to Iraqi law. For safety reasons as much as for avoidance of legal trouble, contractors do not stick around a scene after an incident. After numerous assaults mounted by insurgents disguised as official Iraqi security forces, contractors also refuse to pull over for sirens and flashing lights. So it would be up to the Iraqi police to investigate an incident, track it back to determine the individual at fault (if that would even be possible), and then appeal to the American forces for cooperation in picking up the person and turning him over to Iraqi custody—a highly unlikely scenario. If any grumbling is made over the inappropriate or overly violent behavior of any security contractor, his employers, if they judge the person to be a liability, will typically release him from his contract and send him home. He may end up out of a job, but he is unlikely to see the inside of a prison cell.

Order 17 established a virtually nonexistent standard of accountability for security contractors in Iraq that has persisted, though the specific legal grounds may have since shifted. This order not only gave non-Iraqi private security companies a “get out of jail free” card, but from what I have learned in my travels, it altered their view of the operating environment. Instead of being able to abide by local limits of force or regulation, many security contractors view Iraq as a lawless wasteland, “the sandbox,” a land where one must kill or be killed. To contractors bolting out of safe blastwall-gated enclaves in armored SUVs, the local population most often appears simply as a blur of dark faces viewed through gun sights.

Allowing these armed groups to operate with impunity and very little oversight is disquieting, but it is a credit to the quality of many of the security companies and the training and discipline of their employees that there have not been any major controversies. For the most part, the vast majority of security contractors working in Iraq abide by the rules of engagement originally established by the State Department and dramatically simplified by the head of security for the Project and Contracting Office (PCO), retired British Brigadier General Anthony Hunter-Choat. The simplest and most concise summary of the security contractors' rules of engagement in Iraq is “If they shoot at you, shoot back.”

That seems like such an easy rule to follow, and in the early months after the invasion—perhaps up to the entire first year—it was. However, as occupation stretched on through 2003 without providing any significant benefits to the typical Iraqi, resentment grew, the insurgency gained strength, and contractors began to recognize increasing looks of sheer hatred directed at them when they moved through civilian areas. Working in an insecure environment, and facing an ill-defined enemy that hides easily among the civilian population, that somewhat intangible but definite shift in the mood on the street can greatly influence the rapidity of the trigger finger's response. Then the Fallujah attack on Blackwater contractors changed everything.

The four contractors who died that day did not even have time to fire back. The vivid brutality of that attack put many contractors on edge and removed this naïve assumption that they were somehow immune from targeted attacks since they technically enjoy a quasicivilian status. After watching the deaths and bodily desecration of some of their colleagues played over and over again on a seemingly endless loop on TV, security contractors became much more ready to shoot if they felt threatened.

Just a few days after the incident in Fallujah, two of the most significant incidents involving contractors in the Iraq war occurred, though the reporting on these developments was overshadowed by other events throughout the country. Though the rules of engagement require that security contractors shoot only to break contact with an attacker, the formulators of those rules did not foresee that contractors providing static security at a CPA compound could come under fire for hours or days. Security contractors, surrounded, cut off from escape, and abandoned by the military, have no choice but to fight if they come up against a lengthy onslaught by hundreds of attackers. At a time when Pentagon representatives and news commentators were making the case that the Blackwater contractors should have been protected under the laws of war as civilians, since they just provided security and did not engage in combat, contractors at Al Kut and An Najaf
were
engaging in combat.

CHAPTER 5

         

Blackwater Bridge

“We knew even before we left Kuwait that this contract was doomed.”

—T-B
OY,
B
LACKWATER CONTRACTOR ORIGINALLY
SLATED FOR THE ILL-FATED TEAM

I'm sitting in Las Vegas's Bellagio Hotel bar after midnight, and the room buzzes with the chatter of martini-sipping women and the boasts of gamblers flush with new winnings. Across from me sits a middle-aged man with thinning hair and a small mustache. We could be hardware salesmen or businessmen relaxing after a trade show. But he is a veteran Special Forces team leader telling me about the battle for Fallujah. “The bodies were stacking up. I had one intersection with fifteen bodies. Our team must have killed at least five hundred Iraqis that day. At least five hundred is when we stopped counting,” he remembers calmly. He is due for retirement soon. He has no interest in being a contractor. The man remembers Fallujah as the single most violent encounter of his career—an offensive that focused the anger for the entire war on one town and sought payback for an attack on contractors that had triggered a violent orgy of destruction.

The battle for Fallujah began in November of 2004 as six thousand U.S. troops and two thousand Iraqis swept into the city from the north, confronting insurgents and pushing out residents. After the battle died down, Fallujah appeared a battered ghost town haunted by the reported twelve hundred fighters and six hundred civilians who died there. About seventy Americans gave their lives and two hundred suffered serious wounds in the fight to control the city. Although it can be argued that the battle for Fallujah was part of a larger plan to destroy insurgent strongholds in the Sunni Triangle, it was the brutal death and postmortem mutilation of four Blackwater contractors eight months earlier, in March of 2004, that served as the rallying cry and inspiration for the troops who fought there.

During the initial phase of operations in Iraq in the spring of 2003, troops had begun to take over Fallujah but were ordered back. For the first year of the occupation, the city remained an uncontrolled hot spot for violence and sheltered a base of operations for the spreading insurgency. Woefully unprepared for violent resistance to the occupation, the American military was strained to the limits as it dealt with manpower and supply problems.

The desperate situation created an ideal business opportunity for Blackwater. At the time, Blackwater was providing security for the CIA in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and had just set up about five dozen of their contractors on the Bremer detail. Blackwater was eager to aggressively expand their business in the most lucrative and fastest-growing market for security providers in the world. To understand the full picture of what happened to the four contractors in Fallujah, it makes the most sense to start at the top rather than the bottom, since Blackwater actually occupied a low rung on the ladder in the contract the four men were servicing.

Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) manages the lucrative $7.2-billion cost-plus LOGCAP contract to handle support functions for the U.S. military on a global basis. In the execution of the LOGCAP, KBR utilizes a massive network of contractors to manage different elements of the contract, who in turn hire contractors to manage an even narrower delegation of responsibility, who in turn may hire even more contractors to handle specific tasks—often creating layers upon layers of subcontracting.

In the Fallujah incident, Blackwater had been hired to provide security for the Kuwaiti-based Regency Hotel and Hospitality Company, which was a subcontractor of German food service company Eurest Support Services (ESS), which was itself a subcontractor of KBR in the vast mosaic of companies hired to execute the LOGCAP. Even within Blackwater, there were subcontracts to purchase equipment and hire both management and the independent contractors who would carry out the actual tasks, creating multiple layers of contracts and profits to perform the function of feeding troops.

At the time, U.S. military and State Department policy was that, although it could provide convoy protection from Kuwait, it could not provide individual or short-notice escorts to private companies, even if the corporations were working to provide vital resources to the military. Since KBR is required to provide logistics and support on a cost-plus basis, it is far more expedient and profitable to contract private security forces to protect the convoys of its suppliers. Blackwater aggressively and successfully competed for these contracts knowing that once in place, the profits could grow dramatically as the need for security became more critical.

The ESS contract picked up by Regency and Blackwater required thirty-four armed men on ninety-day contracts to guard the movement of ESS equipment and personnel. The initial security survey provided by Blackwater was not a hard bid, but rather an estimate of the $867,033.34 needed to get them going for the first month. Blackwater signed a primary contract with ESS on March 8 and a subcontract with Regency on March 12.

Although the contract with Regency was for just under $900,000, with a third paid up front, the actual costs were to be billed as the client required them. The Regency contract allotted for two “tier-one” management positions, twelve “tier-two” PSD operators, and twenty “static” or “tier-three” operators. Management positions typically paid roughly $750 a day; tier two—those operators with extensive military or police experience who would be the main providers of security—earned about $600 per day; and tier three—those with less experience who played support roles—earned approximately $450 to $500. They would all earn $150 a day for travel or standby days.

For their billing, Blackwater would mark up the base labor costs, adding on additional charges for overhead, training, equipment, housing, and so on, and pass on the bill to Regency. Regency would add its own costs incurred, if any, and mark up Blackwater's cost with its own profit and hand the bill off to ESS. Then ESS, in turn, would mark up and bill KBR, who then would mark up and bill the U.S. government based on its standard LOGCAP cost-plus arrangement. There is no direct accountability for cost or performance, since KBR considers its LOGCAP billing to be confidential and not disclosed to the taxpayer or journalists. Even the act of discussing work done for a contractor like Blackwater can result in instant fines of $250,000, something agreed to in writing by each contractor. At no point is there any incentive to reduce the layers of subcontracting, since every markup provides a profit for somebody. This particular contract had four levels of profit-making before the actual service was provided. It is conceivable that the rate charged to the U.S. taxpayer for a $600-a-day security contractor could end up being thousands. The comparable cost for an enlisted soldier of the same experience and paygrade is about $100 to $250 a day. Even if a four-star general were to provide the services, it would cost around $450 a day.

Although much is made of the high rates for contractors, their contractually stipulated twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week job makes $600 a day an effective $25 an hour with no benefits or guarantee of employment beyond the stipulated term of the contract. The biggest benefit for the U.S. military is that using contractors adds no long-term liability in insurance, retirement, training, benefits, or medical costs. Relying on contractors essentially provides a hard one-time cost with no commitment or liability before or after the required use date. Contractors are the ultimate use-once, throwaway soldiers—an expensive but disposable source of muscle and steel when problems occur.

Though the contracting companies have no incentive to reduce costs to the U.S. government, cutting corners in their own expenditures can maximize their profits. For example, a simple line deletion in Blackwater's subcontract with Regency, replacing armored vehicles with soft skins, could have added over a million and half dollars in profit. Blackwater's March 8 primary contract with ESS stipulated that PSDs be comprised of six-man teams traveling in two armored cars. However, the subcontract to Regency left out the armored-car requirement, an omission that could have been key to the survival of the contractors. Prior to the Fallujah incident, John “JP” Potter, a former SEAL and Kuwait liaison officer for Blackwater, was reportedly fired for pointing out the danger of this change. While much has been made of this decision in the subsequent lawsuits by the murdered contractors' families, each man had signed an obsessively detailed contract that protected Blackwater from any liability.

Blackwater's twenty-three-page contract details how Blackwater cannot be held accountable in the event of a contractor's injury, dismemberment, or emotional distress caused by “terrorists” or even “U.S. governmental employees.” The list of potential threats is impressive: being shot, permanently maimed, and/or killed by firearms or munitions, falling aircraft or helicopters, sniper fire, landmines, artillery fire, rocket-propelled grenades, truck or car bombs, earthquakes or other natural disasters, poisoning, civil uprising, terrorist activity, hand-to-hand combat, disease, plane or helicopter crash, hearing loss, eye injury or loss, inhalation or contact with biological or chemical contaminants (whether airborne or not), or injury by flying debris. The contract specifies that it is the responsibility of the contractor to get insurance. The only standard recourse Blackwater employees have is Defense Base Act (DBA) insurance, and hopefully backup assistance from the U.S. military if they get into a jam, something that would be rare and not readily available in dangerous areas.

Blackwater was taking over services previously provided by Control Risks Group (CRG), which had begun phasing out their security operations on March 18, with full pullout scheduled by the twenty-ninth of that month. The thirty-day implementation period in Blackwater's original contract would have left ESS without security from the twenty-ninth to April eighth. Since every day waiting for the contract to begin meant a loss of profits, Blackwater reduced the prep time in order to be operational by April 2. When it became clear that ESS would require a security escort to move some kitchen equipment on March 30, Blackwater management pressed harder to get their men in place. When there is a changeover in the provider of security, the incoming contractors typically do a few days of ridealongs with the departing teams, in order to develop an awareness of the terrain and potential dangers they would face. But because of the tight schedule, the Blackwater contractors were dropped in place their first day on the job and did not get the benefit of learning from the experience of CRG. Additionally, State Department standard operational procedures require at least twenty-four-hours' notice for a move, which is supposed to be used for advance prep work such as scouting the intended route, generating alternate route plans, evac instructions, and putting together a detailed briefing for the security contractors—usually in the form of a PowerPoint presentation with handouts and communications codes. What actually happened was very different. Like all preventable disasters, a series of major and minor mistakes would lead to the violent deaths of Scott Helvenston, Mike Teague, Wes Batalona, and Jerry Zovko.

The four men represented a fairly typical mix of a Blackwater contract. The oldest, forty-eight-year-old Wesley J. K. Batalona, had twenty years of experience in the army and had retired as a Ranger sergeant. A native Hawaiian, Wes was working as a security guard at the Hilton Waikoloa Village on Hawaii's big island when the Iraq war began. He reportedly wanted to start a program to help troubled youth and also needed money to help prevent the foreclosure on his ill father's home—both requiring a serious inflow of funds Batalona did not have. Having been out of the service for nearly ten years, the appeal of a return to the action likely also drew Batalona to the world of private contractors. The silver-haired and physically fit Batalona stood out from his fellow contractors in Iraq, not just because of his advanced age, but because of his proclivity for dressing in colorful Hawaiian shirts while on duty. At the time of his death, he had worked two months in Iraq with Blackwater and had put in previous time on an earlier contract with MPRI. Wes had done a thirty-day stint training the fledging Iraqi Army for MPRI in the fall of 2003, which is where he had met his partner, the youngest of the group, thirty-two-year-old Jerko Gerald “Jerry” Zovko.

A Cleveland-born Croatian-American, Zovko had joined the army in 1991 as part of the 82nd Military Police at Fort Bragg, and went on to pass qualifications to become a Ranger—but did not attend the school. Zovko was a hulk of a man, standing six foot three and weighing approximately two hundred thirty-five pounds. He had served in Croatia, and as his stint in the army was coming to an end, he decided that he wanted to transition into another career more exciting than being a sheriff's deputy or security guard. His first gig as a private security contractor began in late 1997—a straight shot into a DynCorp contract in Qatar. He learned Arabic while in the Middle East and moved on to MPRI in the fall of 2003 to train the Iraqi Army in Kirkush. He and Batalona became close friends, bonding over their difficult task of training disorganized, demoralized, and inexperienced soldiers. In November, the Iraqi recruits had gone home for Ramadan, but few returned, apparently terrified they would be killed by insurgents and unhappy with the tough training meted out by the contractors. With no troops to train, the MPRI contract evaporated. Batalona and Zovko's search for other job opportunities eventually led them to Cochise (from which they were fired) and then to Blackwater.

Their doomed team had another former Ranger, Michael R. “The Ice Man” Teague, who had been a door gunner for the elite 160th SOAR (Special Operations Aviation Regiment) out of Fort Bragg. A thirty-eight-year-old family man from Clarksville, Tennessee, Teague had spent twelve years in the army with time in Grenada, Panama, and Afghanistan. He had recently retired and decided to become a contractor after having difficulty finding any work to support his wife and son other than as a low-paid security guard. As ex-Army, Batalona, Zovko, and Teague enjoyed a tribal bond that required no translation of terminology, tactics, or acronyms.