Licensed to Kill

by Robert Young Pelton

  Of all the questionable choices made by Blackwater management, T-Boy has been most confounded and troubled by the decision to send out only four men in the convoy. “The four-man issue is still a mystery to me as of today. Each team was made up of a six-man detail. Lessening their team by two was a decision that Tom Powell made. This was actually the first of two times this happened that I know of. My team was the second time. That morning, March 31 of 2004, my team was tasked with a mission to drive to the Jordanian border to pick up one or more VIPs and transport them to Baghdad…. Myself and another operator were held back by Tom while our team was sent out to complete this mission. We were told we would be assisting Tom with a movement somewhere, and he needed a few guys to help. I believe the other two guys from the other team were to assist as well. We never did, though…. We all know how crazy that would sound today if someone suggested such a trip under those conditions.”

  Minimum standards for a security convoy dictate that an escort vehicle should have a driver, a passenger gunner, and a tail gunner to keep traffic back and respond with heavy fire to any pursuits. Rolling with just two men per vehicle meant that the driver would not only have to drive, but also watch his nine o’clock to twelve o’clock, as well as the rear sector. Even if the driver had a keen eye and quick reflexes, his gun would not be at the ready, but typically slung across his lap with his pistol rotated up to the top of his leg in the thigh holster. The passenger would have to watch the entire front right around to the back but could not respond to a threat outside of his field of fire from his front window. That left most of the vehicle open to rear ambush, hit and run, and continuous fire if the contractors had to speed away. Having another car with only two people did not double the effective force but could provide a getaway car or could double back to provide support fire if one vehicle came under attack.

  Also contrary to Blackwater’s contract with ESS, and each individual operator’s written agreement with Blackwater, as previously mentioned, November One did not have armored vehicles. There are pros and cons to running hard skins or soft skins. Typically, a soft skin allows the team to shoot from open windows and rear tailgates if attacked. Awareness is heightened in a soft skin, since there is more access and sound coming from outside. A hard skin requires the doors to be cracked, since the windows are usually sealed and soundproofed by heavy glass. Blackwater drove hastily modified Pajeros with a steel plate crudely welded into the back to provide some protection for a well gunner, which did November One no good since the contractors chose to ride in the front seats.

  Blackwater reportedly wanted to prove to ESS that they could rise to the challenge of such a tight schedule, and it seems management was under intense pressure to get men on the job. Soon after he had arrived for the ESS contract, T-Boy sensed that too many compromises were being made to get the convoys up and running ahead of schedule. “We knew even before we left Kuwait that this contract was doomed. The lack of resources and equipment were the most talked about issues. Some guys had more experience than others, but the general consensus was that this was going to be a really fucked-up contract…. Knowing what I know now, I will never operate under those conditions again. We didn’t have the proper leadership or equipment to accomplish it. We were moving at warp speed and most of us had never been in a situation like this. The training was too short at that time. We deployed with semiautomatic weapons and NO machine guns, as required by contract. We were given soft skin vehicles and not hardened vehicles as per the contract. There was not enough cohesion amongst the guys to just drop into a hostile area like this and get the job done that quickly. It seemed like the only thing anyone was concerned about was the timetable, and we all know what that means—dollars. It was rush, rush, rush from the beginning. We never had a real chance at success.”

  For their first security escort for ESS, which was scheduled to run days before the Blackwater contract was even scheduled to take effect, Powell was essentially sending out a token force that would barely be able to defend itself, let alone the large red trucks they were hired to protect. Essentially providing a security force in name but not in effectiveness, Powell’s decision sent undermanned and underprotected teams into not just “a” danger spot but “the” danger spot, since the area around Fallujah was then a well-known base for anti-American insurgents.

  In the spring of 2004, after a year of American presence, the violence in Iraq seemed to be evolving into near chaos, with kidnappings and armed attacks mounting. Residents of the Sunni Triangle in particular expressed a growing sense of anger as it appeared that the United States could not stem the tide of violence, but actually seemed to be exacerbating the insurgency by issuing “orders” that crystallized a view that Iraqis were living under American occupation. The perception of America as oppressor increasingly began to replace the idea of America as liberator.

  Fallujah, along with Ramadi and other cities in the Sunni Triangle, were the strongholds of a rapidly expanding Sunni insurgency. Kidnapping gangs, insurgents, and former Baathists were using Fallujah as an operating base. In early March, the marines had taken over positions on the outskirts of the city from the 82nd Airborne, but their policy was to not venture into the urban combat zone that was the center of Fallujah. Instead, they decided to get tough on the growing insurgency by shutting down main roads and doing reconnaissance in force. On March 29, in an event cited by local leaders as the precipitating event that led to the violent orgy of bloody celebration after the contractors’ murders, American soldiers opened fire on a crowd of protesters. Residents of Fallujah had come out to protest the U.S. military’s occupation of a school building, but the soldiers said some among the crowd carried weapons. Seventeen locals died in the incident.

  Fallujans had noticed that in addition to the military presence, groups of military-looking Westerners dressed as civilians were shuttling around the region working in support of the U.S. occupation. They could be easily identified by their sunglasses, short hair, safari-style clothing and, of course, their weapons. They shuttled between military bases and hotels in Iraq in tan pickups and white SUVs and had adopted an abrasive “guns up” attitude to keep plenty of distance between ordinary Iraqis and convoys. The word on the street was that these were CIA and their mercenaries. The Fallujans had no interest in the fine distinctions between real military OGA and civilian military contractors; they were all the enemy.

  On March 29, the November One team stayed at a run-down hotel in Baghdad used by Blackwater as their Iraq headquarters. The next day, they were to drive to Taji, north of Baghdad, to meet up with three empty ESS trucks and escort them to Camp Ridgeway, west of Baghdad and Fallujah, in order to pick up some kitchen equipment. T-Boy thinks the men knew they had not been thoroughly prepared for the drive: “I know that Wes and Jerry didn’t want to do this mission. I had heard that they protested this mission. This, I believe, was the day or evening before to Tom, but of course they went on and did as they were told.”

  Batalona and Zovko had worked the area, but Helvenston and Teague had never been there before. The four men didn’t seem to be sure of how the move was set up, and one Blackwater source says that the night before the move, the men asked the staff at the hotel for directions. Much public controversy has surrounded reports that the contractors had headed into unfamiliar and extremely dangerous terrain without even the benefit of maps to guide them. While T-Boy knows that the men were not issued maps by Blackwater management, he finds it highly unlikely that the men would have commenced their drive without tracking down a map from another source.

  “It was reported that they didn’t have any maps of that area. I’m not sure how true this is—that is, if they had maps in the vehicle with them from another source. I know Blackwater didn’t issue them any maps because we were told they didn’t have any of that area. This was untrue, of course, and I personally found several maps of Fallujah the day of the incident—but before we knew it was happening—amongst many other maps of the entire region of Ira
q. I was tasked with sorting maps that morning, and knowing that we had been told that there were no maps of Fallujah, I was surprised to find them.” T-Boy didn’t really think about the maps again until he read about the various charges made by the families.

  November One had made it to Taji for their rendezvous with the ESS trucks but had become lost as they tried to find their way down to Camp Ridgeway. According to the lawsuit brought against Blackwater by the families, the convoy stopped at Camp Fallujah, a military base five miles east of Fallujah, to spend the night, though other unconfirmed accounts have them checking in to a hotel. What is known with certainty is that they set out on the morning of the thirty-first heading west on the road that would take them directly through the heart of hostile Fallujah. Batalona and Zovko took point in the blue Mitsubishi Pajero, while Helvenston and Teague brought up the rear of the five-vehicle convoy in a red Pajero. If they had been aware of the extreme level of threat they faced in central Fallujah, they may have chosen to take a couple more hours of drive time to do the normal indirect loop around the city. However, they either did not know of the dangers, or believed they could handle it.

  Whenever possible, convoys try to bypass heavily populated areas, especially dangerous ones like Fallujah, since buildings lining city streets offer perfect cover for snipers, and it is far too easy to block off escape routes for an ambush. According to one theory, the convoy intended to link up with an American-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) team on the eastern entrance to town, which would guide them through the city center, providing more firepower if anything happened. However, this would have required coordination the evening before, and there is no evidence that the marines at Camp Fallujah, or the Blackwater contractors themselves, had made this contact. A confidential internal investigation conducted by Blackwater after the attack suggested that the contractors left Camp Fallujah driving along Highway 10 until they came in sight of the ugly eastern industrial end of Fallujah, where they ran into an ICDC checkpoint at about 9:00 A.M. According to a senior Blackwater executive, a phone call from the contractors back to headquarters and eyewitness accounts support this theory.

  Two trucks loaded with tan uniformed ICDC apparently offered to guide them to their destination and headed on a detour through the heavy traffic of Fallajuh. According to an Iraqi policeman who had been working the main intersection into town that morning, the men stopped and asked him for directions, which suggests they may have been concerned about the motives of the men in uniform they were following. They pushed on into the city and got about three hundred yards past the intersection when they were stopped by the traffic for about ten minutes. At about 9:30 A.M., traffic started moving again, and the convoy of three red Mercedes-Benz trucks, two Blackwater Pajeros, and two Iraqi civil defense trucks continued on at a slow pace. Batalona and Zovko took lead directly behind the Iraqi trucks, followed by the three ESS trucks, with Teague and Helvenston bringing up the rear.

  About a mile and a half into Fallujah, as they crawled along Highway 10 through town, the lead Iraqi vehicle suddenly stopped. In a car-to-car chain reaction, the entire convoy ground to a halt. Immediately, a small group of young men carrying AK-47s and wearing kefiyas to cover their faces emerged from the nearby shops and began firing at the contractors from behind. At that close range, the 7.62 bullets punched through the glass and thin steel and into the bodies of the contractors in the rear vehicle. Helvenston and Teague never even had time to react.

  Terrified by the gunfire, the drivers of two of the ESS trucks pulled around the lead Pajero and the Iraqi police trucks and sped away. Zovko and Batalona heard the shooting and immediately started to pull a U-turn into the other lane to provide backup. A wall of insurgent gunfire riddled them with bullets before they could even get in position to respond. Hit multiple times at close range, the car accelerated, rear-ended a white Toyota at high speed, and came to a stop almost wedged under the bumper. The two men had been shot through the head and lower extremities. A Iraqi cameraman began filming as soon as the ambush had achieved its objective, creating a permanent record of one of the most publicly gruesome displays of the Iraq war, parts of which would seem to play for days on a seemingly permanent loop in news broadcasts around the world.

  As the jolting handheld video opens on the scene of carnage, Zovko can be seen in the passenger seat, mouth agape, head back, and dead. Batalona is slumping lifelessly forward into his friend’s lap, his white and red Hawaiian-print shirt stained even more red by his own blood. A chorus of triumphant shouting and tributes of “Allahu Akbar” run in the background, as the insurgents somewhat tentatively begin to strip weapons from the contractors’ still-warm bodies. The cameraman films a carefully staged display of DoD identity cards as “proof” that the mujahideen had just killed “CIA agents.”

  As the shooting and shouting could be heard for many blocks, and word of the attack spread quickly through the streets of Fallujah, locals begin to swarm the scene and set the vehicles on fire. Chanting, dancing, and yelling, the crowd continues to grow, all celebrating the glorious victory against the great American invader. As the gasoline finally burns out, the mob tugs at the charred bodies, pulling them from the still-smoldering shells of the Pajeros. Men with shovels hack at the blackened bodies, children stomp them with the soles of their sandals, one man continually kicks at the head of one until it severs from the burnt body, and another ties a burnt leg to a rock and throws it up to snag a power line. The crowd plays to the camera, shouting anti-American slogans and praises to the mujahideen, as they dance on top of the destroyed vehicles.

  Someone ties two of the bodies to the bumper of a car and begins to drag them down the main thoroughfare, named Sheik Ahmed Yassin Street in honor of the Hamas spiritual leader assassinated by the Israelis. The route takes them right past the police station, though the officers do not appear much interested in getting in the way of the raging mob. One cameraman interviews the police as the bodies are being desecrated, and an officer makes it clear that they don’t think the incident is any of their business. They obviously recognize the swift and brutal penalty for assisting Americans.

  The car dragging the bodies stops as it reaches the Euphrates River, where the crowd then hoists up the contractors’ remains to dangle from the joists of the bridge. Someone posts a sign on the bridge reading that Fallujah is the graveyard for Americans. For hours, the bodies dangle in a macabre spectacle as an everyday flow of traffic passes over the bridge.

  The insurgents quickly put together a video of the event and posted it on the Internet. In claiming responsibility, they edited together film of captured documents and the dead bodies and provided a testimonial from one of the insurgents. He appears in front of a black backdrop, his lower face covered with a black scarf, with only his steely black eyes visible as he intones in Arabic the insurgents’ version of events. The man begins with a typical Koranic tribute:

  “Thanks to Allah and praise to the messenger who is Mohammed. We do not kill them, they kill themselves. If you do not do it, Allah will do it for you.

  “On the morning of Wednesday March 31st, after prayer, a mujahideen spy arrived with information. He told our commander that a group of CIA will pass through Fallujah on the main road to Habbaniya [the town to the west of Fallujah] because they have a special meeting. The commander ordered for us to be ready to kill these people. After we had prepared our weapons and ourselves we left at 6 A.M. We scouted the main street from the bridge to Habbaniya. We did that three times.

  “After that our commander selected the intersection for attack. He chose this intersection because it was busy with traffic so they could not escape. Our commander then identified all of our positions. Myself, the commander, and one mujahideen stayed at the position together.

  “Later on, I went to the teahouse to have my tea. I sat and drank my tea. It was 9:15 A.M. After I finished my tea, my commander and his assistant arrived and sat with us. As final instructions from the commander, we were told to veri
fy the vehicle, since they would be in civilian cars. They would not have bodyguards with them and they would wear civilian clothes—this is all to avoid being captured by the mujahideen, because every American that passes through Fallujah will be killed.

  “I talked to the commander’s assistant, who told me we would need to scout the street again at 11 A.M. to see if they were still coming. We then checked once more with our spies to verify they were still coming. They told us they would be there in one or two hours. We were told originally 10 A.M., but when we checked it was 8 A.M. to noon. They actually arrived at 9:45 A.M. The owner of the coffee shop saw them and said, ‘Why are those people in our land? They will be killed by the mujahideen!’

  “Then the commander ordered all of us to take our positions because the time had arrived. We were told to move the cars into position. We should be ready to use our weapons and to capture the people. We started and everybody moved to their positions. The commander decided to attack the last car and capture the first one. We attacked the last car and the first car tried to escape by turning around. They could not escape and we captured them. We then killed the people in the first car. Thanks to Allah we were victorious and we captured the weapons and supplies.

  “The commander then told us to leave some of the weapons behind. Our families in Fallujah went and set fire to the cars. We then withdrew in the way our commander told us to and we waited for news.

  “Our family in Fallujah came and told us Allah had given us victory. They told us they burned everything in the cars. You saw the results in the news. Allah has given a great victory to the people of Fallujah. Allah gave us the victory and gave the victory to the mujahideen.