by Cam Simpson
The day after he first entered the base, Madhani returned with the whistleblower for a second round of interviews. Electricity died campwide, which was not unusual, and the TCN workers kept the hatch of their hooch flung wide open, to try to circulate the stale desert air in the steel box they called home. They crowded onto bunks to speak to Madhani. He wanted to focus most on the seizure of their passports but quickly lost track of the time, riveted by tales of how the men had landed in an American war zone. After a couple of hours, the shadows of two men crossed the threshold of the open steel door. They were private security guards, and they ordered Madhani out of the container.
He turned off his tape recorder and complied, identifying himself as a journalist. “I’ll be glad to leave,” he recalled telling the guards. “I have a ride out that I can go meet.” He started to walk away at a brisk pace—not quite a sprint, but not a stroll, either—but the guards grabbed him, each one taking an arm, and marched him to their guard shack at the front of “Indian Camp.” They, too, were Nepalis, former Gurkhas; even the security contractors used TCNs. One made a phone call to his boss. Shortly afterward, a British private-security man pulled up in a pickup truck.
The security chief asked Madhani for his identification but refused to identify himself. Madhani handed over his military-issued press ID. “Can I have your passport? I want to see your passport,” the security guard said. Madhani reached into his back pocket, pulled out his passport, and handed it over. Inside his vehicle, the security man sat down and placed the passport under his rump. Madhani asked for it back. “We’ll eventually give it back to you,” the security boss told him. They drove to the headquarters of the KBR subcontractor Prime Projects International, a Dubai-based company. Two other security men with British accents greeted them. The pair were a bit less polished than their boss. “They were furious that I had gone to interview their workers, and they started screaming at me,” Madhani said. “They said they were going to get the military police involved—but they first thought it might be a good idea to take me out back and kick my ass.”
The men also told Madhani that he had trespassed and they wanted him to be charged with a crime. Fine, he said. Call the military police. Let’s bring them here now. No indication emerged that any military officials were coming, but the security men refused to release Madhani. He continued to worry that they would carry through on their threats to harm him as they interrogated him about precisely what the workers had told him. The security contractors then told Madhani that because he had trespassed, he could not print anything he had learned from any of the men he’d interviewed. Madhani scoffed. Then they said he would be endangering the men’s lives, and those of their families back home, by printing their stories. Madhani scoffed at that, too.
Eventually, the security contractors released him, without carrying out their threatened beating. They gave back his passport, too. Military police never came.
We had more than enough evidence to put the twelve Nepalese men into the supply chain of Daoud and Partners, KBR Halliburton, and the U.S. military’s operations in Iraq. Thanks to Madhani’s efforts before his detention, we also had enough to show that the wider system went far beyond the twelve men and a single, rogue subcontractor. Not surprisingly, KBR Halliburton and the U.S. military did not reveal how much they knew about the twelve or about how Daoud and Partners and the two hundred other firms on KBR’s contract had acquired the tens of thousands of foreign workers making up the invisible U.S. Army, the one keeping the Iraq War fueled, fed, and running.
We gave Halliburton sixty detailed, specific written questions resulting from an investigation that spanned several countries and involved interviews with scores of people and thousands of pages of documents. Lawyers crafted Halliburton’s replies, or at least provided substantial input. The company directly answered few questions, and avoided acknowledging any connection to the twelve dead men. Halliburton would not say whether anyone had been reprimanded—not just in the case of the Nepalis, but also for any conduct involving so-called TCNs anywhere during the war. It said that it hired subcontracting firms through a “government-approved procurement system,” and explained that the TCNs employed under its contract in Iraq, and how they got there, were the responsibility of the subcontractors, and that “questions regarding the recruitment practices of the subcontractors should be directed to the subcontractors.” It said it would “fully investigate” any allegations of wrongdoing by those firms, but would not say whether it ever had investigated any of them. It refused to provide copies of contracts or even contract clauses, because that might “impact future contractual relationships and represent a breech [sic] in operational security.”
Also, someone had cut-and-pasted one line multiple times into the response. Each occurrence included the same typo. “KBR operates under a rigorous Code of Business Conduct that outlines and [sic] legal and ethical behaviors that all employees and subcontractors are expected to follow in every aspect of their work.”45
The U.S. Army, which had oversight for the contract, went a step further in washing its own hands of responsibility. “Questions involving alleged misconduct towards employees by subcontractor firms should be addressed to those firms, as these are not Army issues.”46 Not army issues. Given all that, figuring out specifically what KBR and the U.S. government knew before, during, and after the ordeal of the twelve men, about their case and the broader system, looked impossible. Determining what they reasonably should have known, and what they had failed to do, was easier.
Beyond the obvious litany of failures within the step-by-step journey of each man to his death, neither KBR Halliburton nor Daoud did anything after the murders to seek out the twelve men’s families. Clearly, those families were entitled to legally mandated compensation. Payments are made out of an insurance pool, so they would not have cost either company a dime. The reason behind their failure to do anything on this front dovetailed with Halliburton’s refusal to answer questions about Jeet and the other men. Lawyers for both companies likely feared that the slightest admission of involvement regarding the twelve might subject Halliburton and Daoud to litigation, potential liability, or even a criminal investigation. Implicating Daoud even through a compensation case also would involve KBR Halliburton, by necessity.
More broadly, KBR Halliburton executives at multiple levels knew, or clearly should have known, that there was a massive human trafficking problem in the very same countries they relied on to source foreign workers for their Iraq contract. Numerous warnings and reports about the routine nature of human trafficking across the region were readily available, both publicly and inside government files.
For starters, U.S. diplomats the world over had gathered enough evidence by 2004 to put the White House’s four leading Middle Eastern allies in the Iraq War on the U.S. watch list for human trafficking, even as the Pentagon relied on scores of firms from those nations to bring tens of thousands of foreign workers into Iraq under KBR’s contract.
And prominent figures had publicly raised specific concerns with government officials and company executives. Hillary Clinton, then a senator from New York, and her fellow members of the U.S. Helsinki Commission had in 2003 flagged fears to the Bush administration about human trafficking into Iraq. The commission is an independent government agency run by appointed U.S. senators and House members. Clinton also specifically asked Department of Defense officials in a hearing on September 21, 2004, to investigate labor trafficking and debt bondage in Iraq, which they had promised to do. Still, in its correspondence with me a year later, the military had absolved itself of any related responsibility.47
In meetings with senior U.S. military officials, representatives from the government of India, and other “feeder” countries also had complained about the treatment of their nationals by contractors and subcontractors working for the United States.48 There even had been a handful of news stories in 2004 and 2005 raising questions about the same issues, including questions addressed directl
y to Halliburton, in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and a couple of other publications. There were stories in the foreign press, too.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally had an idea about what was happening, although his actions at the time would not emerge for a decade. Just two weeks after the twelve Nepalis were murdered, Rumsfeld penned an internal memorandum addressed to the secretaries of all the military departments, to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to all undersecretaries of defense, to his own lawyers, and to the Pentagon’s inspector general. The subject line read, “Combatting Trafficking in Persons.”
The reason for the timing of the memo is unclear, but in his very first sentence, Rumsfeld pointed out that he had, in fact, originally sent around a memo on this very subject way back on January 30, 2004. Next, he wrote, “Trafficking in persons is the third largest criminal activity in the world, after illegal arms and drugs sales. It enslaves thousands of people. I am especially concerned with commercial sex exploitation and labor trafficking practices in areas near our overseas locations . . . Trafficking includes involuntary servitude and debt bondage. These trafficking practices will not be tolerated in DoD contractor organizations or their subcontractors supporting DoD operations.” He also wrote, “No leader in this department should turn a blind eye to this issue.” The memo went into files at the upper reaches of the Pentagon. Whether Rumsfeld’s memo was written out of genuine concern or was simply a classic work of that Washington literary genre known as CYA (Cover Your Ass), defined by William Safire as the bureaucratic art of avoiding future accusations of wrongdoing through advance deflection of responsibility, remains unknown.49
While Halliburton’s answers to our questions did little to shed light on what had happened, the company had offered some valuable insights in a completely different context. They came via Alfred V. Neffgen, the CEO of KBR’s government operations division, as he defended KBR Halliburton from allegations of profiteering.
By mid-2004, controversy within the Beltway and beyond engulfed Neffgen’s company over its cost-plus, no-bid contract awards for Iraq. The furor reached levels the company had not experienced since Vietnam. Fanning the flames: Cheney, the former Halliburton CEO, and his White House boss were up for reelection in November. The situation was similar to what had happened to President Johnson with Brown and Root during Vietnam: critics blasted Cheney, charging that his continuing financial relationship with his former company gave him a personal stake in the war. In fact, the ties between Cheney and the company were even clearer and more personal than they had been with Johnson. Throughout his first term in the Bush White House, Cheney got a deferred salary and bonuses from Halliburton totaling almost two million dollars by the end of the summer in 2004. He also held unexercised stock options.50
GAO auditors issued a report in July 2004 citing poor management practices at both KBR Halliburton and the Pentagon. Auditors said the company lacked adequate control of its subcontractors, along with “poor cost-reporting, difficulties with producing and meeting schedules, and weaknesses in purchasing system controls.”51 These were among the earliest signs of far greater troubles to come. Ultimately, officials would identify or question vast amounts of unsupported Iraq costs, estimating that the lack of competition alone cost taxpayers $3.3 billion just on LOGCAP. Overstaffing, as in the Balkans, would lead to official estimates that almost $400 million had been wasted through “underutilization” of workers in just a single category of labor, vehicle maintenance. Corruption also thrived. A Kuwaiti company had started paying kickbacks to KBR managers during the run-up to the war in 2002, yielding awards of more than $700 million for dining facility services.52
One day after the release of a 2004 GAO report, Neffgen and three other senior KBR Halliburton executives came to Capitol Hill in what would be the first hearing of the war in which Halliburton’s leadership testified. Neffgen and his fellow executives came prepared to mount a vigorous public relations defense for all the heat the company had endured in the sixteen months since the invasion. It started with one small accessory in their attire: each wore a yellow ribbon on his lapel. As Neffgen made a point of explaining to the cameras and members of the House Committee on Government Reform, the ribbons were meant to signify that their “colleagues,” as he called employees and contract workers, “are on the front lines, putting themselves in harm’s way to support U.S. soldiers in a war zone.” Among those already killed were ordinary, average Americans, he said, “truck drivers, construction workers, and food service personnel,” people who had “made the ultimate sacrifice to support American troops.” In fact, very few of the estimated forty-two workers killed up to that point had been “ordinary Americans”; the vast majority comprised foreign nationals working for KBR through contractors such as Daoud and Partners.
Neffgen then detailed the tremendous pressure his company faced in Iraq from the start. The LOGCAP contract’s already demanding requirements to rapidly deploy in support of up to 50,000 troops had been shattered. He counted 211,000 personnel in more than sixty camps. “The pace of new requirements and changes to ongoing missions greatly exceeded the original plans of both the government and of KBR,” Neffgen said. The company had to “build an extensive network of subcontractors, and assemble the people and systems to supervise them.” He also said that “it was difficult to find subcontractors in the Middle East who were knowledgeable about, and could comply with, U.S. regulations. It took time and effort to bring them up to standards.” Facing such realities, he asked himself rhetorically, “Did KBR make mistakes? Without question, we encountered difficulties in mounting such a large enterprise in a hostile, dangerous environment . . . our business and subcontract management systems were stretched.” Still, he maintained that one thing never wavered. “All the while, we worked within army rules and regulations, supplemented by our own checks and balances and our Code of Business Conduct, which requires employees to conduct business honestly and ethically.”53
On that very day, as Neffgen and the other KBR Halliburton executives were testifying, Jeet and his compatriots were inside the house at No. 58 Malfuf Street in Amman.
We needed to determine how much company executives and U.S. military personnel on the ground at Al Asad Air Base knew about the men who were being held in that room, and their awareness of Daoud’s operations for KBR Halliburton. Once Madhani had finished at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, we had planned for him to embed with U.S. forces at Al Asad, where dozens of Nepalis from the same convoy had made it through. Madhani would use the embed to search the invisible faces at the base for Nepalese workers, and then try to find some of the other men who had been in the same convoy with our twelve, to provide some living, breathing testimony to an investigation that was, by the fact of the men’s deaths, still circumstantial. But his experience at Camp Liberty had rattled Madhani, and we feared he might be a marked man. As the plan seemed too risky, we decided to call it off.
On two consecutive days in October 2005, the Chicago Tribune published an almost ten-thousand-word investigation covering a total of six pages. The main story appeared as a two-part serial narrative, revealing the larger system of exploitation by retracing the twelve men’s journeys to their deaths. For the sake of clarity, we stuck mostly to what had happened to the men and those involved at every stage of the journeys. We chose not to focus on those on the command side who had tried to cover their trail or obscure their role in the invisible army that kept the war running.
The specifics of what had happened at Al Asad—what senior military commanders there might have known; what senior KBR officials knew, not just about the treatment of foreign workers, but also about alleged corruption involving Daoud and KBR managers—still remained beyond our grasp in 2005.
8
2005
Kathmandu
Above the wooden door of a workshop on the campus of the Tulsi Meher Ashram hung a dictum from the founder, hand-painted in white lettering across a small blue placard. It embodied the Gand
hian philosophy underpinning life on the campus: “Labor Is Religion. Work Is Worship.” Approaching the workshop, Kamala could hear the day’s devotion in the gentle metronomic ticktock of the wooden looms where the women of the campus wove the cloth they used to make their own saris. Kamala would sit on a narrow bench in the center of a loom, rocking slightly left, then right, to alternately depress two long paddles with her feet, while simultaneously using her hands to weave together hundreds of threads intersecting lengthwise and crosswise on a wooden frame. Gandhi and his Nepalese disciple, Meher, believed that people found dignity in work, in addition to the Zen state induced by the repetition of spinning thread and weaving cloth, but the two also believed that everyone could gain independence by making the very fabric in which they clothed themselves. The cloth Kamala and the other women made for their saris was sky-blue with wide navy-blue borders. Making cloth was among the first skills each woman had to master at the ashram, but it held significance beyond engendering self-sufficiency and a kind of mindfulness. It was a first step in each widow’s deeper liberation.