Armed Humanitarians

by Nathan Hodge

  During the hour-long fight, Hunter also helped hand up ammo to the turret gunner in the Humvee who was sweeping insurgent positions with his machine gun. His actions sent a message to the soldiers that the lone civilian could also handle himself in a firefight, although he knew that many of his colleagues back at the embassy in Kabul would prefer that he never pick up a weapon. Hunter was not one to overdramatize: Later he self-deprecatingly said, “It sounds a lot more dramatic than it felt like at the time. And my role was a minor one.”

  The incident drove home how the diplomatic service was quietly becoming more militarized. It also underscored a lingering gap. The State Department and other civilian agencies were struggling to find enough personnel to support the nation-building effort, and the military was stretched thin. That gap would be filled by another force: an army of contract hires.

  CHAPTER 9

  Kalashnikovs for Hire

  The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan transformed the American way of war. Many of the changes were technological: The proliferation of robotic systems, digital communications, and high-end surveillance equipment gave military commanders an extremely fine-grained picture of the battlefield. Advances in battlefield medicine and protective gear made the individual soldier much more likely to survive contact with the enemy. The pairing of new precision weapons with twenty-first-century command and control gave the U.S. military unprecedented reach, lethality, and accuracy. But another, equally potent transformation was also under way: the privatization of armed force. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were accompanied by a phenomenal expansion of government outsourcing.

  By the summer of 2008, the number of civilian contractors supporting U.S. military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans matched the number of deployed troops one to one. In Iraq, the contracted workforce at its peak was 190,000, roughly equal to the total number of uniformed personnel.1 In Afghanistan, contractors also outnumbered troops: By December 2009, the number of Defense Department contractors in the country had reached 104,100, greater than the total number of U.S. troops (98,000) that were expected to be in the country after new reinforcements arrived.2

  The phenomenal rise of battlefield contracting completely changed the incentives for serving the government overseas. It created a perception that money came first and service second. But without the contracted workforce, the U.S. military could not stay on an expeditionary footing. Contractors serviced and maintained sophisticated military equipment; ran city-sized forward operating bases and airstrips; supervised an army of imported laborers who worked in dining facilities, cleaned latrines, and delivered fuel; and provided intelligence support, translation services, and myriad other services. Manpower was needed for nation building, too, but when a U.S. citizen could earn a six-figure salary working as a contractor, why would she take a pay cut to serve as a temporary government bureaucrat seconded to the State Department or USAID? If the government needed a civilian nation-building corps, it was competing with private companies for talent.

  The business of diplomatic protection was the starkest example of this manpower crisis. The State Department did have a small cadre of diplomatic security officers who provided protective services to ambassadors and other VIPs. They specialized in what was called “close protection,” or personal security details—PSDs, to use the inevitable acronym. Personal security work was essentially VIP protection, guarding a “principal,” and it implied that some lives were worth more than others. It required a different mind-set than soldiering. When an infantry team hits an ambush, soldiers are taught to respond, return fire, and then counterattack. But in close protection, the idea is to get the principal “off the X”—away from the point of contact. If a PSD doesn’t provide the principal with a cover and evacuation force, they are potentially leaving the principal in the open to get shot.

  With more diplomats and Foreign Service types working in harm’s way on nation-building missions, however, there were simply not enough PSDs to keep up with the new demand. The government turned to the private sector, creating a new boom market for bodyguards. This army of private soldiers became one of the most problematic aspects of the American experiment in nation building.

  “What’s your blood type?”

  It was an unusual question for a driver to ask when picking up a passenger at the airport. But this was not your ordinary car service: We were about to make the drive between Baghdad International Airport and downtown Baghdad, a dozen kilometers away. “Route Irish,” as the military designated the Baghdad airport road, was a magnet for suicide car bombers and rocket-propelled grenade teams. By December 2005, when I touched down at Baghdad airport, stories about the world’s most dangerous road were already journalistic cliché. U.S. and Iraqi troops had in fact stepped up patrols along Route Irish, but the journey to the center of Baghdad was still a white-knuckle ride.

  I was in Iraq as a guest of Erinys, a British security firm. Expert, a Russian newsmagazine, had sent me on assignment to tag along with Erinys’s “Russians,” a group of professional soldiers from the former Soviet Union. Though most of the company’s expatriate management was British, North American, or South African, they also employed a handful of Slavs: The team meeting me at the airport was composed of Russians and Ukrainians, and their team leader was a former French soldier. It was a reminder of how much the United States relied on a multinational army of hired help to keep the occupation functioning. I had flown into Iraq on a Royal Jordanian flight crewed by South Africans, disembarked under the gaze of an armed Fijian employed by a company called Global Strategies Group, and queued for a visa with guest workers from South Asia.

  We entered the underground parking garage at the airport, where the gun trucks of different security firms were idling before making the next dash down Route Irish. The place fairly reeked of testosterone. As we suited up in body armor and helmets for the ride into town, the competing teams sized each other up. It was easy to spot the road warriors with the U.S. firm Blackwater, who were mounting up in their South Africa–built Mamba mine-proof vehicles. They cultivated a look of deliberate menace, favoring Terminator-style wraparound shades, goatees, and lots of tattoos. Another protective team in the garage sported Mohawks. Erinys had a spiffier, more corporate image. Its contractors wore blue polo shirts and khaki trousers, though they were unmistakably well armed. It was easy to detect a sort of hierarchy here. At the top, U.S. Special Operations veterans could command salaries of up to a thousand dollars a day to guard diplomats and VIPs. Further down the chain, veterans of cash-strapped former Soviet armies earned two hundred dollars a day or less to ferry around civilian engineers and guard supply convoys. At the bottom of the pay scale, Ugandan soldiers earned a thousand dollars a month to guard dining halls. (Security was particularly tight at military dining facilities after a suicide bomber struck one at Forward Operating Base Marez near Mosul in late 2004.)

  Today’s mission was fairly straightforward: to deliver the new arrivals from the airport to the company’s headquarters just outside the International Zone. As the convoy of armored trucks rumbled past the outer perimeter of the airport, the contractors racked back the slides on their Kalashnikov rifles: We were entering the Red Zone (in military protocol, a “red” weapon has a round in the chamber and is ready to fire). Out on the Baghdad airport road they would have to be on maximum alert, watching in all directions for any potential attacker. As they hurtled along at high speed, the lead driver called out possible threats on the radio: a car rolling up on an access road, a taxicab that was slow to pull over to the right, an oncoming highway overpass (bridges and overpasses were a favorite ambush spot). As the three-vehicle convoy blew through traffic, I could see the turret gunner in the lead truck scanning the traffic with his rifle. The contractors stopped only for coalition checkpoints, which they flashed through after showing a vehicle pass.

  Night was falling, and a fine cloud of dust further obscured visibility on the highway. Did that scrap of trash on the side o
f the road conceal a roadside bomb? Was that taxicab tilting on its suspension because of a heavy suitcase, or a bomb in the trunk? Was that man watching the traffic from a plastic chair acting as a spotter for insurgents, or was he just bored and unemployed?

  The convoy finally exited the highway and entered a traffic roundabout that led to a residential neighborhood. This was Mansour, an upscale residential neighborhood of Baghdad not far from the International Zone. Baghdad in late 2005 was the scene of a brewing sectarian war, and the entrances to streets were barricaded by concrete barriers. High blast walls pasted with posters from the recent general election shielded many of the houses. Our convoy pulled into a side street barricaded with more concrete and razor wire. Iraqi guards with Kalashnikovs pulled aside a traffic barrier, and we rolled into Erinys headquarters, a couple of villas fortified by blast walls plus an assortment of trailers.

  After I stowed my gear in a trailer, the tattooed former British soldier who was a manager for the firm gave me a short tour of the compound. Erinys contractors’ stay in Baghdad was an all-inclusive deal: The company provided all the necessities—weapons, body armor, tactical gear, polo shirts. A small canteen provided three meals a day, usually sandwiches or burgers for lunch, and rice and kebabs for dinner. Accommodations were basic. Some staff lived in the trailers parked outside, and the Russian team bunked in a couple of small rooms inside the main house, where they shared a single desktop computer for e-mailing friends and family, and had a satellite television with a subscription to Russian channels. The atmosphere was sober. After a mission, they could lift weights outside, chat online, or clean their weapons. On Thursday nights there was a barbecue. In Iraq, the mission roster was usually pretty light on Fridays. Alcohol was available: Unlike U.S. troops, who were under General Order No. 1, which prohibits alcohol consumption, contractors could unwind over beers. But the Slavs, playing against type, did not indulge. They told me they needed to stay sharp on the road.

  The manager then escorted me to the roof of the villa. From the top floor we had a spectacular panorama of Baghdad by night, and a commanding view of the surrounding streets. Aside from the unsettling sight of some tracers arcing in the distance, it was almost pleasant in the cool evening breeze. But my companion had not brought me up here to appreciate the view. “If we get attacked, we need you to get up here as fast as you can,” he told me.

  The roof of the villa was sandbagged, an Alamo in the event of an attack. My companion then pointed out the main approaches to the neighborhood, with a traffic roundabout here, a checkpoint there, and then another fortified compound that belonged to an Iraqi politician. “The good news is,” he said, “they’ll have to get through two firefights to get here.”

  But he was getting around to another point. “I want you to carry a weapon.” I hesitated, but only for a second: I was here as an observer, not as a participant, and the only thing I was planning on shooting were pictures. In the Red Zone, the contractors were on their own. In theory, if they came under attack they could call for backup from the military. In practice, they weren’t counting on a quick reaction force to save them. The company armorer issued me a 9mm pistol, two magazines of ammo, and a holster. For good measure, he put a Kalashnikov rifle in my trailer. If the place did come under attack, I was expected to pitch in.

  If you needed a journalist to help out in a firefight, then you were probably already done for. But the contractors were mindful of incidents like the ambush of a KBR supply convoy in April 2004, in which half a dozen unarmed civilian truckers were killed, along with two Army soldiers who were escorting their convoy. It later emerged that the convoy drove down a road that was supposed to be off limits, but an officer who was supposed to send an e-mail about the no-go route inadvertently sent the memo to himself.3 Also in April 2004, four Blackwater guards blundered into an ambush in Fallujah. The mutilated and burned bodies of two of them were strung up from a bridge, an image that blanketed international news channels.

  The situation also underscored the lawlessness of Iraq. Erinys contractors were contractually limited to defensive work. Under guidelines issued by the coalition, they were not allowed to participate in offensive combat operations. They could use force to protect their clients, defend installations and equipment, and protect themselves.* Multi-National Force Iraq was supposed to issue weapons cards authorizing contractors to carry certain light weapons, but the guidelines also made it clear that they were not combatants. It was an important legal distinction for the military, which wanted to ensure that civilian contractors didn’t cross the line into being active combatants. In mid-2005, the Defense Department had quietly revised the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, or DFARS, to underscore the rules governing contractors who deployed with or supported the U.S. military overseas. According to a notice issued by the Defense Department, DFARS “has been amended to caution that contractor personnel are not combatants and shall not undertake any role that would jeopardize that status.”

  The careful bureaucratic language could not change a simple fact: Contractors in Iraq fell into a legal gray area. They carried weapons and worked on behalf of the U.S. government (in the case of Erinys, their main client was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Gulf Region District), although they wore no uniforms and did not report to the military chain of command.

  Sending diplomats and aid experts to rebuild Iraq sounded like a good idea: Civilians had the kind of expertise in governance, state building, and development that few soldiers had. But the State Department and other civilian agencies were even less prepared than the conventionally trained U.S. military for the kind of hit-and-run warfare they faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor had the State Department originally planned that its embassies would become fortresses.

  At the height of the Cold War, U.S. diplomatic missions were designed around a single architectural principle: openness. The United States was locked in an ideological struggle with the Soviet Union, and its embassies were supposed to convey a message of progress, innovation, and accessibility. After the Second World War, the State Department was able to tap foreign credits from Lend-Lease settlements and postwar reconstruction funds to pay for new embassies, consular offices, and cultural centers. According to Jane Loeffler, a historian of U.S. diplomatic architecture, this novel financing arrangement allowed the State Department to fund new embassies with minimal congressional interference and to commission designs that celebrated transparency and modernity.4

  These new embassy buildings, Loeffler writes,

  became symbols of the United States and its desire to be perceived as an energetic and future-oriented nation. Thus the buildings themselves served as cultural advertisements, propaganda perhaps, but nothing less than reflection of architectural theory married to political necessity. Not surprisingly, the symbols themselves were ambiguous—at once elegant and refined, decorative and flamboyant. Though often concealed behind wood, metal, or masonry screens, the buildings called attention to themselves with the openness of their glass walls, their overall accessibility, and their conspicuous newness.5

  The violent, tumultuous 1960s and 1970s forced something of a rethink in U.S. embassy design. The Viet Cong assault on the fortresslike U.S. embassy compound in Saigon during the 1968 Tet Offensive was a tactical failure, but it had a profound symbolic effect. Images of the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975 and the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 further underscored the vulnerability of U.S. diplomatic missions overseas. The decisive shift away from open embassy design occurred in the aftermath of the suicide bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983, an incident that claimed the lives of seventeen Americans and thirty-four Lebanese employees and decimated the CIA’s Middle East operation, which was based out of the compound.

  In the wake of the bombing, Secretary of State George Shultz appointed a retired admiral, Bobby Inman, to head an advisory panel on diplomatic security. His report, which came out in 1985, identified vulnerable facilities
overseas, and it recommended stringent new building standards for U.S. embassies.* No more sleek, smoked-glass facades: Buildings would have blast-proof walls and windows and would be surrounded by high walls, security cameras, and monitors. The panel recommended that the State Department embark on a long-term plan to renovate or replace office buildings at 126 overseas posts in order to reduce their vulnerability to attack. Instead of the open plan, embassies would have to be designed around a new principle: “setback.” New embassy compounds would have layered defenses. They would be built at least one hundred feet from the street, have a more forbidding outer perimeter, and be far less accessible.6 And they would no longer be situated in busy downtown areas and open to visitors, which would make the job of public diplomacy much harder. The embassy and its inhabitants would become more isolated from the world outside.

  Equally important, the Inman report called for creation of a Bureau of Diplomatic Security. The bureau was given a wide remit: issue security clearances for diplomatic personnel; conduct background checks; investigate passport and visa fraud; and supervise the security of diplomatic and consular offices. It was also to provide bodyguard details for the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and foreign VIPs visiting the United States. Diplomatic Security special agents are federal law enforcement officers. In the United States, they help guard foreign embassies and consulates. Overseas, they serve as regional security officers responsible for embassy security and the safety of diplomatic personnel.

  The bureau, however, was not equipped to handle a massive nation-building enterprise. The Inman panel originally recommended a force of 1,156 special agents, hardly enough to take on the full range of missions at the time. (Two decades later, the bureau had grown to about 1,450 special agents.) In the mid-1990s, the bureau began quietly augmenting its force with contracted personal security specialists, first hiring contractors to provide security in Haiti, then deploying them to the Balkans, Gaza, and the West Bank. The State Department also contracted DynCorp to provide personal security details to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan in 2002.7