by Nathan Hodge
The invasion of Iraq and the deployment of diplomats and civilians to work in reconstruction projects created an explosion in demand for contracted security. The Coalition Provisional Authority was a major customer for private guards. It hired a previously obscure company called Blackwater to provide a high-end protective detail for Ambassador Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Gulf Region District, which oversaw massive infrastructure projects in Iraq, also hired its own army of private security operators to ferry its engineers and specialists around the country. Through the Corps, the military even hired a contractor to oversee the other contractors. With so many private security convoys operating on the roads, competing firms needed to find a way to share intelligence about threat conditions: routes that were safest to travel, places where roadside bomb attacks and ambushes were taking place, no-go areas where coalition forces were conducting combat operations. They also needed to reduce the risk of shooting at each other or being shot at by coalition forces. Well-armed private security details often traveled in unmarked vehicles. They were easy to mistake for insurgents, and on more than a few occasions, private security details and military forces mistakenly shot at each other (something euphemistically referred to as “blue-on-white” incidents, a reference to friendly, or “blue” forces, and contractors, referred to in military shorthand as “white” forces).8
In May 2004, the British security firm Aegis Defence Services Ltd. won the first Reconstruction Security Support Services contract to build the Reconstruction Operations Center as a hub to oversee a network of reconstruction projects. The ROC was supposed to serve as an interface between uniformed troops and private security. It tracked contractor vehicles with transponders and distributed sanitized military intelligence such as the grid coordinates of recent roadside bomb attacks and information on threat levels. It was also supposed to introduce some kind of accountability and oversight. Security operators were supposed to file route plans and report weapons discharges. The system evolved into a network of six regional ROCs as well as a national intelligence center in Baghdad. The company subsequently won two extensions to a contract initially worth $293 million, and the ROC contract effectively put Aegis on the map.
Iraq in 2003 and 2004 was a Klondike for security firms. Previously unknown firms such as Custer Battles, a start-up founded by two former Army Rangers, scored multi-million-dollar awards to provide security in the chaotic postwar environment. As the Wall Street Journal reported, no banks would lend new firms money, so the Coalition Provisional Authority had to lend Custer Battles $2 million. It arrived in the form of $100 bills that one of the company founders had to stow in a duffel bag and deposit in a Lebanese bank.9 What private security providers called the “Baghdad bubble” created enormous new opportunities in a relative niche market for high-end security services. In early 2003, before the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime, ArmorGroup had conducted a survey of the total global market for “high-end” protective security (bodyguard services for government clients in war zones and other high-threat areas). They estimated a total global market of $900 million per year. In 2007 the company repeated the survey. The estimated value of the security market had risen to $2.5 billion.*
Before Iraq, low-key British firms such as Control Risks and Global, companies often staffed by former commandos from British and Commonwealth armies, dominated the private security field, providing bodyguard services, security consulting for high-risk regions, and occasionally kidnap-and-ransom negotiation services. But with the American government now the biggest customer in Iraq, there were glowing prospects for U.S. firms—especially when they could recruit U.S. citizens with security clearances.
The biggest players in this new market were three U.S. firms: Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and DynCorp. In early 2004, as the Coalition Provisional Authority prepared to hand over power to a provisional Iraqi government, the State Department issued additional task orders to its Worldwide Personal Protective Services contract to hire additional contracted security for the planned opening of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on July 1, 2004. DynCorp was unable to meet the rush requirements for additional guards and personnel, so the State Department signed a second contract, with Blackwater.10 Meanwhile, Triple Canopy won a key contract to provide protective services for the Regional Embassy Office in Basra.11 In July 2005, the State Department formalized the arrangement, selecting the three U.S. security firms to compete for task orders under the new Worldwide Personal Protective Services (WPPS) II contract, a program worth a potential $1.2 billion to each contractor over five years to provide protective services to U.S. diplomatic personnel in war zones. WPPS II task orders included missions in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, and Israel. The private guard force would help protect a gargantuan new embassy rising on the Tigris River, a billion-dollar complex the size of Vatican City that would house a thousand diplomats.12
The new U.S. Embassy Baghdad was the logical culmination of the Inman standards. Many details of the design remained classified, but a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report in 2006 offered some hints of the scale of the project, and the degree to which this giant fortress would isolate U.S. diplomats from the Red Zone of Baghdad. The building would be “hardened” (reinforced to withstand rocket and mortar attacks); self-sufficient (it would have its own generating station, wells, and wastewater treatment facilities); and it would have extraordinary “setback” (the walled perimeter would be ringed with multiple layers of defense, plus an emergency entrance-exit). Loeffler, the historian of U.S. diplomatic architecture, describes it as a modern-day fortress. “Encircled by blast walls and cut off from the rest of Baghdad, it stands out like the crusader castles that once dotted the landscape of the Middle East.”13
The presence of contractors presented a major headache for military commanders, who were wary of hired guns moving around in “their” battlespace. The U.S. military likes to maintain a monopoly on lethal force wherever it operates, and the heavily armed contractor convoys were not under their direct control. Revisions to defense contracting regulations were supposed to tighten oversight of the army of contractors to make sure they complied with both local and U.S. laws, including the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, or MEJA, which theoretically allowed for prosecution under local laws of private contractors employed by the military in foreign countries. But they did not resolve the question of who, ultimately, had legal jurisdiction and control over contractors in Iraq.
I accompanied an Erinys team on a trip to Camp Taji, a sprawling U.S. military installation north of Baghdad that had once been a base for a Republican Guard tank division. The U.S. government had invested a serious amount of money in base infrastructure, and the day’s mission was to pick up a “client,” an engineer working on a construction project at Taji, and deliver him safely to the Green Zone. The trip to Taji from downtown Baghdad should have been a half-hour trip, but driving on Iraqi roads was a risky affair. Insurgents were designing increasingly lethal roadside bombs, and the contractors were particularly worried about a new threat, the “explosively formed projectile,” or EFP.
Unlike typical roadside bombs, made of an artillery shell buried beneath a road or concealed in some trash, an EFP was what some militaries called an “off-route mine,” because it was placed beside a road. An EEP was fabricated out of metal pipe and packed with a high-explosive charge; the business end was sealed with a concave plate, or liner. When the charge went off, the force of the blast turned the liner into a slug of molten metal that could slice through the door of an armored vehicle at supersonic speed. The EFPs were often tripped by passive infrared sensors. When the beam was broken, the bomb went off.
The trip to Taji took an anxious two hours because of an emergency detour. “That road is incredibly dangerous—it’s perfect for setting up an ambush,” said one of the Russians. “The Americans and the Iraqis patrol Route Irish [the Baghdad Airport road] all the time, but on that road, you hardly see any patrols. By the end of
the day, you’re totally wound up.”
Driving through downtown Baghdad was a nightmare for ordinary Iraqis as well. Contractor SUV motorcades drove aggressively, turning on sirens to force other drivers to the side of the road. Get too close, and you might get a warning shot. But there was a reason for the “tactical driving”: If you didn’t keep moving, you became a target. So when one of the armored SUVs in the Erinys convoy got stuck traversing a low concrete barrier, the shooters jumped out of the trucks to form a hasty roadblock, their rifles at the ready. One of the bodyguards, a lanky Ukrainian, stepped out to halt oncoming traffic. At least 6 feet 5, wearing full body armor and wraparound shades, he didn’t need to point his weapon. He stood with his left hand raised, and the Iraqi drivers quickly stopped.
Fortunately, an Iraqi National Guard patrol was nearby. They quickly blocked all the civilian traffic merging from an access road and pulled around their truck, attached a chain, and towed the SUV free. The team members exchanged parting handshakes, boarded their vehicles, and turned back down the access road. We had to make a U-turn and reverse course through central Baghdad. As we sped away, I looked at the faces of the drivers in the opposite lane, where traffic was now backed up all the way to the next intersection; it was easy to see why Iraqis resented the contractors.
The military didn’t like the contractors, either, at least not the armed ones. Colonel Peter Mansoor, an Iraq veteran and a member of the Petraeus brain trust, explained the dilemma to me at Fort Leavenworth in the fall of 2006: Logistics contractors like KBR fit neatly in the military chain of command. But the security firms “could not be controlled. They work for whoever hires them, they work under different rules of engagement than the military, they don’t always have the same communications capabilities. They don’t always have robust access to quick reaction forces—reinforcements—if they get into trouble.”
Part of the problem, military officers realized, was that bodyguards’ primary mission was to protect diplomats, civilian reconstruction experts, and other VIPs. They could be very good at their jobs, but at the expense of the larger nation-building mission. “Their limited role to protect the client may conflict with the overall mission, which is counterinsurgency,” Mansoor said. “And if they push traffic off the roads or if they shoot up a car that looks suspicious—whatever it may be, they may be operating within their contract—[it’s] to the detriment of the mission, which is to bring the people over to your side. I would much rather see basically all armed entities in a counterinsurgency operation fall under a military chain of command.”
Members of the uniformed military could be held accountable for their actions: They were subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If they used excessive or indiscriminate force, killed or injured civilians in violation of the rules of engagement, or engaged in any other serious crime, they could be court-martialed. The U.S. military also had a system of condolence payments to compensate people for damage to property or accidental deaths and injuries caused during combat operations. If a contractor ran a car off the road, or shot an innocent person—deliberately, or by accident—Iraqis had no real legal recourse.
Who could hold contractors accountable for their actions? In late 2005, they were not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In theory they could be prosecuted under the MEJA, which gave the Department of Justice the power to prosecute crimes committed overseas by contractors accompanying U.S. forces. In practice, however, MEJA was a poor enforcement tool. Federal prosecutors were unlikely to commit resources to investigate contractor misconduct in a distant war zone, and the Department of Justice did not have offices in Iraq set up to investigate contractor misdeeds. MEJA at the time was applied in only a few, exceptionally rare cases, and never against private security contractors. And then there was Coalition Provisional Authority Order 17, the get-out-of-jail-free card for contractors. Two days before the dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer signed CPA Order 17, which gave contractors blanket exemption from Iraqi law. It was in effect a form of diplomatic immunity for the foreign hired guns who were working in Iraq.
The management of Erinys liked to stress accountability: to their contract, to coalition forces, and to their internal corporate codes of conduct. They even had a system set up for paying compensation to Iraqis when their contractors were at fault in traffic incidents. Andy Melville, the country manager for Erinys, told a PBS Frontline documentary crew, “We have a contract with the United States [Army] Corps of Engineers, which is through the American Department of Defense. Most of the contractual stipulations are based on Army regulations, and they actually quote Army regulations, and we have to follow our contract very, very closely.”14
But in the end, accountability was a fiction. The ROC system was essentially self-policing. Contractors reported their movements and escalation-of-force incidents to the ROC, and incident reports relied in part on the honor system. No one was even sure how many private security operators were working on behalf of the U.S. government in Iraq.
To Iraqis, the contractors seemed entirely above the law. And one private security company seemed more above the law than others. It had emerged as the main provider of security for the U.S. diplomatic mission in Iraq. Blackwater was founded by Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and heir to a Michigan auto parts fortune (his father’s company invented the lighted vanity mirror for car window visors, among other things). Blackwater began in 1997 as a rather modest business: manufacturing steel targets and teaching combat shooting in a remote corner of northeastern North Carolina. Turnover was unremarkable—until September 12, 2001. After the 9/11 attacks the phone started ringing off the hook. Prince and several of his top executives tapped a network of former SEALs and other special operations veterans to bid for government bodyguard contracts.
The company’s first big security client was the CIA. The agency needed high-end guard details for its widening operations in Afghanistan. In Licensed to Kill, his inside account of the post-9/11 boom in Blackwater’s business, Robert Young Pelton writes, “The Global Response Staff, the CIA’s security division, was overstretched, and they needed protection for their newly established Kabul station. The CIA had hired corporations for collection and other covert needs before, but they had rarely contracted out their field officers’ security to private industry.”15
Enter Blackwater. The company provided men to start protecting the remote outposts on the Afghan frontier, where operatives were pursuing the remnants of the al-Qaeda network. Prince even went over personally to Afghanistan as a security contractor for a few weeks in spring 2002. That stint of working for the CIA “energized him,” Pelton wrote. “He loved the intrigue and excitement so much that the thirty-something head of the Prince family empire decided he wanted to join the CIA’s Special Activities Division and enter the world of covert operations as a paramilitary.”16
Things didn’t work out as Prince hoped, however. He failed to pass the polygraph examination, so he focused instead on growing his business. Blackwater morphed from a small-time security contractor to a major provider of security services to the U.S. government. In 2001, it had federal contracts worth $736,906; by 2006 that figure had grown to $593.6 million. Between 2001 and 2006 Blackwater won contracts for U.S. government business worth over $1.1 billion.17
Prince was notoriously press-shy, but in early 2005 I watched him deliver his company’s sales pitch at a conference on special operations and low-intensity conflict in Washington. It was a unique insight into the scale of Blackwater’s operations in Iraq. In addition to its security details on the ground, the company had its own private air fleet. It operated MD-500 “Little Bird” small reconnaissance helicopters, complete with helicopter door gunners armed with M249 light machine guns, to give air cover to motorcades on the ground. In Afghanistan the company provided contract airlift for the U.S. military with CASA 212s, twin-engine turboprops that could take off and land from remote airstrips. They ferried essential personnel and equipm
ent around the country, a mission similar to the one undertaken by Air America, the CIA front company, in Vietnam. At Blackwater’s giant training facility in Moyock, North Carolina, they were burning through around a million rounds a month.
“Why private military firms?” Prince said. “Why do we exist? There have been a lot of defense contractors for a long time making gear. But not as much doing the kind of services that we provide.”
Prince was advancing an argument that was commonly made by military contractors. The private sector had accompanied the military since the founding of the republic, from the camp sutlers who sold provisions at Valley Forge to European military professionals such as the Marquis de Lafayette, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, and Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who were hired to help train and organize the Continental Army. But contractors were not just in the business of logistics support and equipment maintenance, Prince argued: He pointed to the American Volunteer Group, better known as the Flying Tigers, a wing of the Chinese nationalist air force that fought the Japanese prior to the entry of the United States into World War II. The Flying Tigers were technically employees of the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, an American company that was an antecedent of sorts of modern private military contractors. (After Pearl Harbor the group was disbanded and was succeeded by a regular military outfit.) Companies like KBR had capitalized on a push to outsource “nonmilitary” tasks such as laundry, logistics, and recreational facilities to private firms in the 1990s. Prince was making a more ambitious argument, that private companies like Blackwater could perform many of the core functions of the military, and they could do it more cheaply. He described one of the early assignments the company received, to provide security at a remote U.S. base in southwest Asia. A Blackwater team of 25 men replaced 166 active-duty soldiers: a 28-strong rifle platoon plus 138 other troops to provide headquarters, logistics support, and other administrative functions. “Everyone carries guns, just like Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel—with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other,” Prince said. “They are the guys that keep the generators, water, food, communications, air conditioning, you name it. They run a whole base: 25 guys instead of 166. You can imagine the logistics, the simplicity of doing that.”