Licensed to Kill (28 page)

That night, the team gets back together for another evening of drinking and smoking on the roof. This time the Green Zone stays relatively quiet. Helicopters thunder in the distance, and sirens are of course pervasive, but the din never really rises above a level you might expect in New York City.

Miyagi and I are sitting off to one side, so I scoot over closer and start asking him way too many questions about his life. At fortysomething, Miyagi is probably one of the shortest, quietest, and most mild-mannered of the entire crew. Over the coming month I will come to view him as impressively impossible to rattle, probably a result of growing up in Echo Park, a rough, gang-infested neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Miyagi worked patrol and undercover in the tough Central and Ramparts divisions on the LAPD for seventeen years. With his wife bringing in a second income, the couple managed to buy a nice little home in Simi Valley, an hour and a half commute from his beat. After seventeen years, however, Miyagi's take-home pay was barely $1,400 biweekly, so he quit the police force to seek more lucrative security work for FedEx. When his ex-sergeant called and told him to write down the phone number of DynCorp, Miyagi did as he was told. “I remember in the late nineties, mostly the brass would leave for one or two years to do peacekeeping missions for DynCorp. You were a private contractor, so there was a loophole—DynCorp paid you from an out-of-country account so you didn't get a W-2. Tax-free. You can make a hundred thousand dollars tax-free.”

So Miyagi ended up signing on with DynCorp in early 2003. “Back then, East Timor was 105K, Bosnia was around 90K, and Kosovo was 89K. I worked in Kosovo for a year. I had applied for Blackwater in November of 2003 and by mid-January they sent me a letter offering me six hundred dollars a day. They were looking for already-trained people to do the Bremer detail. A dozen guys had left DynCorp in December of '03 and sent us an e-mail in Kosovo saying this was the real deal.

“The class I was in was the standard ten-day training. Our class was condensed to six days, but we got paid for ten. They said it was some kind of advanced course and we all had some knowledge. Within the first forty-eight hours, they sent ten guys home. There were forty-seven in the beginning and thirty-seven at the end. One guy couldn't do one pull-up, now he's working with the State Department. By the middle of the week, they were giving assignments out, and our class was split up into those guys who had top-secret clearance, and the other guys. Everybody wanted to be on the Bremer detail. The joke was that if you didn't make it, you weren't pretty enough.”

None of these guys up on the roof must have been “pretty” enough, since they all ended up running Route Irish instead of watching over Bremer. Baz would be the closest thing to a “pretty boy,” considering his status as the Mamba team's only reality celeb. A few years ago, Baz starred in a
Survivor
-type show shot in Fiji for a Kiwi audience. The other guys like to rib him about it, but obviously with a simmering jealousy. It comes out that night that Baz became notorious during the show's broadcast not only for running off into the jungle to “survive” by himself, but for spending most of his time off-camera screwing the show's supermodel host.

It's getting late and a couple of the guys have already gone to bed when Baz moves his chair over to my side and begins telling me the rest of his story. He talks at great length about his two sets of identical twins—fourteen-year-old boys and twelve-year-old girls. He loves talking about them, and his eyes sparkle as he reels off a list of their accomplishments. He also confides happily that he has decided to marry his longtime girlfriend the next time he goes home. She has stood by him, lived with her worry, and tolerated his unconventional lifestyle and extended absences for a long time.

Back when he was in the New Zealand SAS, Baz worked in East Timor, hunting down a group of rebels who had cut off the ears of a kidnapped aid worker. When he got out of the service, he did bodyguard stuff, mostly for celebrities and the Sultan of Brunei. After outlining the basics of his life and career, Baz leans in close. I notice a marked change in the atmosphere between us and sense that a collective weight of painful memories has fallen across Baz's mind. In a strained voice, he tells me, “My dad was so hard on me. He was a jockey—a tiny man who didn't stand this high.” Baz holds up his hand about four feet off the ground and continues. “I could never please him. He had a car accident that left him crippled and in a wheelchair. God, he was tough. I was working for the Sultan of Brunei's family and had to fly with him, so when I found out my dad was ill, I couldn't get back in time. I caught the next flight home, but he died on my way over. I went to take care of his things, and there was all my stuff from the SAS—all my press clippings. He had saved everything I did.” Baz pauses and looks away for a moment, only the glowing red tip of his cigar visible in the darkness. When he looks back, he asks a pained question for which I have no answer: “Why didn't that fucker tell me?”

Although the rooftop gatherings are an important part of the routine, the contractors are restrained in their drinking. Mike asks me if I want to go with him the next day for a wade through the bureaucracy of the palace. The conversation reminds Mike to apologize, since the State Department had recently reversed on its permission for me to ride along with Blackwater's State Department PSD in Hillah. “Frank, the RSO [Regional Security Officer], is on our ass. He said I took a picture of a State Department guy and said he was a mercenary.” He shrugs and shakes his head, obviously confused by the charge. As punishment, it's obviously a no-go for the writer who just wants to hang out, but I am surprised to learn that they have even barred Mike from Hillah. It appears that he is fighting the war on two fronts—the government and the insurgents.

The next day, I head out with Mike to try to get a simple ID badge that would allow us access to bases and government facilities. The DoD has changed the style of their ID again, so Mike needs to get a replacement for his old one. Considering that he holds top-secret security clearance and directs operations for one of the biggest security contractors in Iraq—the one that kept Bremer alive and protected State Department installations—one would think the replacement would be issued automatically. Mike already put in a request for a new pass when he was in the States but hasn't heard anything about it since. He suspects the “20-Minute Rule”—referring to the need to check every twenty minutes to see which new rule is in effect—has somehow voided his first request. Even though he has allotted all day to roam the palace halls if necessary, he does not sound very optimistic about his prospects for getting the pass issued, and even less so for the one I am supposed to get for myself. Mike wants to try working personal contacts and lower-level functionaries first and tells me we will only go to the head of security as an absolute last resort. The two of them don't like each other, and Mike suspects the guy wouldn't help him get a pass even if he was able.

While most of the walled community of the Green Zone has assumed a decidedly functional and commercial American persona, the over-the-top ostentation of the U.S. government's main center of operations, “the Palace,” retains some sort of unrepentant Iraqi character of gaudy splendor. Inside, a great labyrinth of large vaulted rooms with high arched entryways and decorated ceilings unfolds with each step farther into the building. In one particularly grandiose hall, the military has constructed a vast grid of office cubicles out of plywood—a fascinating architectural decision that has transformed a set from
1001 Arabian Nights
into a corporate chicken coop. The vision reminds me of the ancient Greek credo that lofty architecture inspires lofty thoughts.

We walk down a long row of soldiers, airmen, and bureaucrats sending e-mails and shuffling papers before we find the allotted three-foot-wide plywood workspace of a contact Mike heard has helped others get the new pass. The toothy air force officer is pleasant but unhelpful. He explains that the military's ninety-day rotations mean “your first thirty days is figuring things out and cleaning up the mess left behind. Then you have a month of decent work. Then by the third month you realize that anything you start is not going to finish, so you just leave it in a pile for the next guy that replaces you.” The officer has three weeks left in Baghdad and is ready to check out.

The back channel has failed, so we head off to seek a particular State Department underling. We find him in a cluttered office behind a flimsy door, working on a plywood desk with a locked rack of M16s behind him. He seems to approach his job and life with little real enthusiasm and blandly offers to give Mike a lower-security pass, even though most of Mike's work is with high-level people on secure facilities. He suggests that the only alternative is to go over his head to see his boss—the grumpy security chief Mike mentioned earlier. Begrudgingly, Mike agrees.

Frank is an older silver-haired man wearing jeans and a Glock on his hip. He shuffles through the papers on his desk and tells us he is rushing to tie up loose ends since his rotation ends this week. “It's been a rough few days,” he says with the condescending exhaustion of someone with too many important things to do. He informs Mike of the sixteen-attacks-in-forty-eight-hours statistic everyone has been citing this week, as if Mike would not be privy to such info.

While Frank talks about how busy and important he is, my attention is caught by his secretary brusquely informing a dark-haired American woman, “You want thirteen passes? I can't issue thirteen passes. You already have nine. Why do you want more?” The aggravated young woman hisses over the end of the question, “Due to the sensitivity of our mission, I can't discuss this.” She has told the secretary that she needs the additional passes for Iraqi linguists staying at the Al Rashid Hotel—a way station used by American intelligence. The wink and nod is apparently insufficient to sway the secretary, and the woman demands to see her superior. Frank retreats to a small room for private discussion with the woman, but emerges very quickly to ask his cranky secretary to issue the remaining passes. He then turns to Mike and apologizes for not being able to help him, saying, “There is nothing I can do.” It is apparently easier to get passes for Iraqis than for Mike.

Back at the Blackwater team house, Guy Gravino tells me that Mike should have taken me by to meet Lawrence “Not Larry” Peter while we were in the palace. Peter used to coordinate the security companies under the CPA, but when the CPA folded, he hit up the companies for the funding to keep him afloat as a private entity. As director of the Baghdad-based Private Security Company Association of Iraq (PSCAI), he works to come up with standardized methods and better communications for the contractors working in Iraq. Peter had originally been very resistant to my requests for a meeting, so a little face time with a Blackwater representative present may have eased things over a bit. I get the impression from Guy that Peter may be a little high-strung, but realize when I meet with him a few days later that “high-strung” does not quite capture his style.

Lawrence Peter is a short man with a lisp who wants everyone to know that he was SEAL Team 6, though other DEVGRU members who know Peter stress that he was an intel analyst and not an operator. When going to meet him, I wander past cramped offices holding clusters of gray-haired, paunchy, middle-aged civilians doing hunt-and-peck typing before finding the PSCAI “headquarters” buried deep inside the palace. Inside the tiny white box sits Lawrence Peter with two other middle-aged men.

Peter does not want to meet with me. He immediately tells me so himself. He says he is only talking to me because the security companies told him he should. After a few minutes of lecturing, I get the idea that he doesn't like journalists. I'm not really surprised that the dominant decoration in his workspace is a WWII-era poster that reads
HOW ABOUT A NICE CUP OF SHUT THE FUCK UP
?

Peter's last PR coup was inviting in a journalist, Tish Durkin, who insisted she was working on an in-depth and balanced piece about contractors and the industry. Peter introduced her to the major players, but she ended up zeroing in on a flamboyant and atypical contractor. What resulted was probably the single most damaging in-depth industry-related piece ever written. The
Rolling Stone
article “Heavy Metal Mercenary” profiles “Wolf” Weiz, a self-described rock star, born-again Christian, and ex-marine whom Durkin portrays as a muscle-building, steroid-popping, trigger-happy freelancer. Wolf was later killed by an insurgent's bullet, but not before his persona became embedded in the public imagination.
The Rolling Stone
article helped crystallize the image of contractors as blood-thirsty, gun-loving Jesus freaks hyped up on heavy metal music and 'roid raging on innocent Iraqis.

So it's understandable that Lawrence Peter thinks that I, as a visiting writer, might be the latest version of the anti-Christ. I try to emphasize the distinction between a journalist and a writer, but in his mind I am unmistakably “one of them.” I give up trying to convince him and try to start the interview, getting his permission first to tape the conversation.

The first thing he wants to tell me: “I represent upwards of twenty-five companies and we do it all on a handshake. Some contribute around ten thousand dollars, others pay what they can.” Though only twenty-five companies finance his job, Peter says there could be anywhere between sixty to a hundred companies operating in the country. Though the companies are all supposed to register with the Interior Ministry, the government doesn't share the exact number with Peter, and there is no comprehensively accurate public count.

Despite my genuine interest in listening to Peter, he seems edgy and combative, and eager to keep blaming me for all the bad press the industry has gotten. At every opportunity, he reminds me where the media has gotten it wrong. We're interrupted by a coworker stopping by, and I have to suppress a laugh when the two middle-aged men do a somewhat effeminate knuckle bump as a good-bye.