Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

by Jeremy Scahill

  For a while in the 1990s, Helvenston tried his luck with Hollywood. He trained Demi Moore for her film about the SEALs, G.I. Jane, was an adviser on John Travolta’s film Face/Off, and he even had a cameo as a stunt double in a movie here and there. He also did a few stints on reality television, including a starring role in the Special Forces military reality show Combat Missions, which was produced by Survivor creator Mark Burnett. One reviewer described Helvenston as having “a spitfire temperament” on the show, and he was widely seen as the villain.11 “He’s very emotional, and he reads things a certain way and is of a mind about how he’s perceived,” said Burnett of Helvenston. “But you know what? Put a gun on him and send him into battle. You’d want him on your side. He’s a great Navy SEAL and one of the best athletes in America.”12 In another series, Man vs. Beast, Helvenston was the only contestant to defeat the beast, outmaneuvering a chimpanzee in an obstacle course.

  Not for lack of effort, the acting work wasn’t panning out for Helvenston, and he was struggling to make ends meet. “It was good money but it was never enough,” his mother, Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, remembers. He was divorced from his wife, Patricia, but continued to support her and their two teenage children, Kyle and Kelsey. Helvenston was also in debt, and when he heard through the SEAL grapevine that serious money was to be made as a high-risk bodyguard, he began looking around. He was offered a job by DynCorp protecting Afghan President Hamid Karzai, but he ultimately declined because it required a one-year commitment and Helvenston didn’t want to leave his children.13 Then, in late 2003, when he heard that Blackwater was hiring—and that he could deploy for just two months—the idea immediately appealed to him. Scott’s mother says he viewed it as an opportunity to turn his life around. “He said, ‘I’m gonna go over there, make some money, maybe make a difference, then I’ll be coming back starting my new job. I’ll only be away from my kids for a couple of months.’ That’s why he chose Blackwater,” she recalls.

  When he would talk about it with his family or friends, Scott Helvenston would tell people that he was going to be guarding the U.S. Ambassador in Iraq. After all, that’s what Blackwater was known in the private security world to be doing over there. Plus, the company was run by ex-SEALs like Helvenston—he’d be right at home and around guys who’d have his back in Iraq. “Scott had a warrior mindset,” said his friend Mark Divine, a Navy SEAL reservist trained by Helvenston. He said Helvenston planned to make $60,000 in Iraq, but that he also was looking forward to seeing the kind of action he’d trained for but hadn’t really seen during his “peacetime” years in the SEALs. “When you’re not in the game, you feel a little bit like a caged animal. Like training your whole life to be a pro football player and not getting to suit up for the game,” Divine said.14 Helvenston’s brother, Jason, said that although Scott had participated in covert operations as a SEAL, he felt none were risky enough to feel fulfilled. “He sometimes felt he never served his country because he didn’t encounter enough danger,” Jason Helvenston said. “That’s why he went to Iraq.”15 Divine spoke to Helvenston two days before he shipped out. “This was a last hooray for Scott,” he said. “It was his last opportunity to get back in the arena.” As for the serious risks of deploying in Iraq, Divine said, “His feeling was, ‘If your time is up, there’s going to be a bullet out there with your name on it.’”16

  If it had been up to Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, her son wouldn’t have gone to Iraq at all. “We had argued about him going over there,” she recalls. “I believe that we should have gone into Afghanistan, but I never believed we should have gone into Iraq. And Scott bought the whole story about Saddam Hussein being involved with Al Qaeda and all that. He believed in what he was doing.” Except guarding the Ambassador—or any other U.S. official, for that matter—is not what Scott Helvenston would be doing in Iraq.

  In early March 2004, Helvenston arrived at the Blackwater training center in the wilderness of Moyock, North Carolina, where he would spend two weeks preparing for deployment in Iraq. He was surrounded by ex-SEALs and other Special Ops guys. Also at the compound were some of the first batch of non-U. S. mercenaries Blackwater would hire: Chilean commandos—some of whom had trained under the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet—whom Blackwater had flown to North Carolina a few days earlier.17 Like Helvenston, they, too, were destined for deployment in Iraq as part of the rapidly expanding privatized forces. “We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals,” Blackwater president Gary Jackson said at the time. “The Chilean commandos are very, very professional, and they fit within the Blackwater system.”18

  Shortly after Scott Helvenston arrived in North Carolina, trouble started. One of the men heading the training at Blackwater was a man some of the guys called Shrek,19 presumably after the green ogre movie cartoon character. By all accounts Helvenston was excited to be working for Blackwater and heading into action. But shortly after the training, he alleged in an e-mail to Blackwater management that a conflict had developed between him and Shrek. Among other things, Helvenston alleged that Shrek was an “unprofessional” manager, and he portrayed Shrek as becoming defensive when Helvenston would ask questions of him during training. “In my class participation, I truly attempted to serve my comments in a manner that would not imply [Shrek] was wrong but that this was the experience I gained while going through a Department of State Certification course,”20 Helvenston alleged, adding that because of how Shrek reacted to his comments and suggestions, he stopped offering them. After the training session in North Carolina, Helvenston and Shrek ended up deploying to Kuwait together, flying over in mid-March with the team of Chilean commandos recently contracted by Blackwater.21

  Despite what Helvenston saw as a conflict with Shrek, the deployment seemed like a decent situation for him, as two of his friends from his days on the reality TV show Combat Missions were helping to run the Blackwater operations: John and Kathy Potter. “I spent a week in Kuwait with Scott right before he went into Iraq,” recalled Kathy Potter, who was running Blackwater’s Kuwait operations while her husband was in Baghdad. “We were able to have some wonderful conversations about his family, life, and lessons learned. Scott was a totally changed man from the last time I saw him.”22 She described Helvenston as “a joy to be around! There wasn’t a day I wasn’t cracking up at him and his comments!”

  “His favorite saying (which he used every opportunity he had) was ‘I’m just damn glad to be here!’ This would make me laugh and bring a smile to all of our faces when he said this,” Potter wrote. She described Helvenston as supporting her in the face of other Blackwater “guys coming in with a very negative and disrespectful attitude, and a chauvinistic and challenging demeanor.”23 But it took only a few days before things started to go very wrong for Helvenston.

  When he set off for the Middle East, Scott Helvenston’s family thought he was going to be guarding Paul Bremer. As it turned out, he was slated to carry out a far less glamorous task. As part of Blackwater’s power-drive for more business, the company had recently teamed up with a Kuwaiti business called Regency Hotel and Hospital Company, and together the firms had won a security contract with Eurest Support Services (ESS), a Halliburton subcontractor, guarding convoys transporting kitchen equipment to the U.S. military. Blackwater and Regency had essentially wrestled the ESS contract from another security firm, Control Risks Group, and were eager to win more lucrative contracts from ESS, which described itself as “the largest food service company in the world,” in its other division servicing construction projects in Iraq. Blackwater was quickly pulling together teams to begin immediately escorting the convoys, and it was one of these details that Helvenston would ultimately be assigned to in Iraq. In the meantime, unbeknownst to him, there were secret business dealings going on behind the scenes.

  Blackwater was paying its men $600 a day but billing Regency $815, according to the contracts and reporting in the Raleigh News and Observer.24 “In addition,” the paper reported, “Blackwater billed Regency
separately for all its overhead and costs in Iraq: insurance, room and board, travel, weapons, ammunition, vehicles, office space and equipment, administrative support, taxes and duties.” Regency would then bill ESS an unknown amount for these services. Kathy Potter told the News and Observer that Regency would “quote ESS a price, say $1,500 per man per day, and then tell Blackwater that it had quoted ESS $1,200.”25 In its contract with Blackwater /Regency, ESS made reference to its contract with Halliburton subsidiary KBR, apparently indicating that Blackwater was working under a KBR subcontract with ESS. The News and Observer reported that ESS billed KBR for the Blackwater services and that KBR in turn billed the federal government an unknown amount for these same services.26 KBR/Halliburton, which makes a policy of not disclosing its subcontractors, said they were “unaware of any services” that Blackwater may have provided to ESS.

  In February 2007, representatives of ESS, KBR, and Blackwater appeared together before a Congressional committee investigating waste and abuse among Iraq War contractors.27 A representative from Regency was scheduled to appear but did not attend. In sworn testimony during the hearing, Blackwater’s legal counsel, Andrew Howell, stated, “The assumption that anything other than the amount paid in labor costs is pure markup and pure profit is wrong,” saying the difference reflected other costs incurred by Blackwater. The ESS representative made a similar claim. Howell said Blackwater would have made just over $10 in profit per man per day on that contract, which he claimed Blackwater was never paid for. During the hearing, Representative Dennis Kucinich disputed Blackwater’s portrayal of its billing practices, charging that Howell’s statements didn’t “square with some facts.” This would remain a point of contention as Congress continued its investigation.

  The original contract between Blackwater/Regency and ESS, signed March 8, 2004, recognized that “the current threat in the Iraqi theater of operations” would remain “consistent and dangerous,” and called for a minimum of three men in each vehicle on security missions “with a minimum of two armored vehicles to support ESS movements.”28 [Emphasis added.] But on March 12, 2004, Blackwater and Regency signed a subcontract that specified security provisions identical to the original except for one word: “armored.” It was deleted from the contract, allegedly saving Blackwater $1.5 million.29

  John Potter reportedly brought that omission to the attention of Blackwater management and Regency.30 Further delays could have resulted in Blackwater/Regency losing profits by hindering the start of the ESS job, and they were gung-ho to start to impress ESS and win further contracts. “Regency, all they cared about was money,” Kathy Potter alleged. “They didn’t care about people’s lives.”31 But the call to go ahead with the project without armored vehicles would have been Blackwater’s to make. As the News and Observer reported, “The contract gives Blackwater complete control over how and when the convoys move, based on its judgment and the threat level. Kathy Potter said that Blackwater signed off on the mission.”32 On March 24, Blackwater removed John Potter as program manager, allegedly replacing him with Justin McQuown, who lawyers for Helvenston’s family allege was the man known as “Shrek” whom Helvenston had clashed with at training in North Carolina.33 McQuown, through his lawyer, declined to be interviewed. Word reached Helvenston in Kuwait that both Kathy and John Potter had been removed. “The one thing I do know is that both John and Kathy put their hearts and souls into this job,” Helvenston wrote. “It is my opinion that whatever the severity of their wrongdoing they should not have been fired.”34

  In the meantime, Helvenston had been shuffled around a bit in Kuwait before being assigned to the Blackwater team he was slated to deploy to Iraq with in a few days. “We spent the last two days working, going out for meals, getting to know one another and in general bonding,” he wrote on March 27, 2004. “We have been told that we are scheduled to leave two days from now to escort a bus up to Baghdad.”35 Helvenston wrote that he and his new team went out for dinner that night in Kuwait to continue their bonding and then to a “hukha bar” when a series of fateful events began to unfold, beginning with a call on Helvenston’s mobile. “At roughly 2200 hrs. this evening I receive a call asking me if I can leave tomorrow 0500 with a new team leader,” he wrote. “God’s honest truth. . . . I am sitting there with a fruit drink and a piece pipe in my mouth (completely legal) feeling . . . well . . . dizzy as shit and a bit nasuated and my response was no. My bags were not packed and I just didn’t feel up to it.” Helvenston said he returned to his room in Kuwait and his team leader “went to speak with Justin. He frankly did not want to lose me as a team member and I think he felt that there was a hidden agenda. ‘Lets see if we can screw with Scott’” [sic].36

  Then, according to Helvenston’s e-mail, things got ugly. He alleged that Shrek and another individual came to his hotel room late that night “to front me. No, not confront me. FRONT ME!” The man with Shrek, Helvenston wrote, called Helvenston a “coward” and “Stands as if he wants to fight Justin does the same. I draw my ASP [handgun] and this coward is ready to rock & roll. I just had a premintion [sic] it was going to happen. My roommate Chris breaks it up and Justin says I am fired and on a plane tomorrow. We exchange pleasantries and the result is him assuming my GLOCK [pistol] for which he has giving [sic] me permission to keep in my room.”37 Helvenston’s family would later allege that McQuown “threatened to fire Helvenston if he did not leave early the next morning with the new team.”38 Regardless of the alleged conflict that night, Helvenston would soon find himself in Iraq. McQuown’s lawyer said his client lacked any “involvement in the planning or implementation of [the] mission,”39 on which Helvenston would be dispatched a few days later. The e-mail Helvenston sent the night before he deployed to Iraq was addressed to the “Owner, President and Upper Management” of Blackwater. Its subject: “extreme unprofessionalism.”40 It was the last e-mail Scott Helvenston would ever send.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE AMBUSH

  AROUND THE time Scott Helvenston arrived in the Middle East, in mid-March 2004, the situation in Fallujah was reaching an incendiary point. Following the massacre outside the school on Hay Nazzal Street in April 2003, the U.S. forces withdrew to the city’s perimeter. Like Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite followers in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, Fallujans had organized themselves and, before U.S. forces entered the city, created a local system of governance—appointing a Civil Management Council with a manager and mayor—in a direct affront to the authority of the occupation. According to Human Rights Watch, “Different tribes took responsibility for the city’s assets, such as banks and government offices. In one noted case, the tribe responsible for al-Falluja’s hospital quickly organized a gang of armed men to protect the grounds from an imminent attack. Local imams urged the public to respect law and order. The strategy worked, in part due to cohesive family ties among the population. Al-Falluja showed no signs of the looting and destruction visible, for example, in Baghdad.”1 They were also fierce in their rejection of any cooperation with the United States and its Iraqi allies. In January 2004, Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, commander of the Army’s Eighty-second Airborne Division, said the region was “on a glide path toward success,” declaring, “We have turned the corner, and now we can accelerate down the straightaway.”2 But Swannack’s forces had largely operated on the outskirts of the city, which, to the great consternation of Bremer and other U.S. officials, remained semiautonomous and patrolled by local militias. “Iraqis consider this period only a truce,” said Fallujan shopkeeper Saad Halbousi in the weeks following the massacre at The Leader School and the subsequent U.S. withdrawal to the city’s perimeter. “They will eventually explode like a volcano. We’ve exchanged a tyrant for an occupier.”3 In February, in a highly organized, broad-daylight raid, resistance fighters stormed a U.S.-backed Iraqi police center in Fallujah, killing twenty-three officers and freeing dozens of prisoners.4 The next month, with militia openly patrolling Fallujah and antioccupation sentiment rising across Iraq,
the U.S. determined to make an example of the city. “The situation is not going to improve until we clean out Fallujah,” declared Bremer. “In the next ninety days [before the official ‘handover’ of sovereignty], it’s vital to show that we mean business.”5

  On March 24, the First Marine Expeditionary Force took over responsibility of the city from the Eighty-second Airborne and immediately attempted to impose U.S. dominance over the antioccupation residents of Fallujah. A few days earlier, Marine commander Maj. Gen. James Mattis had outlined his strategy for dealing with Fallujah and the other areas of the largely Sunni Anbar province at a “handover” ceremony. “We expect to be the best friends to Iraqis who are trying to put their country back together,” Mattis said. “For those who want to fight, for the foreign fighters and former regime people, they’ll regret it. We’re going to handle them very roughly. . . . If they want to fight, we will fight.”6 Less than a year later, Mattis spoke about his time in Iraq and Afghanistan, telling an audience, “Actually it’s quite fun to fight them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot,” adding, “It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right up there with you. I like brawling.”7

  As Mattis’s forces took Fallujah, the Associated Press reported from inside the city, “Newly arrived U.S. Marines are leaving no one in doubt about their resolve to defeat insurgents. Residents are awed by the show of force but remain convinced that the Marines will fail to stamp out the resistance.”8 In a message to arriving troops, Mattis compared the Fallujah mission to battles in World War II and Vietnam: “We are going back into the brawl. . . . This is our test—our Guadalcanal, or Chosin Reservoir, our Hue City. . . . You are going to write history.”9 Khamis Hassnawi, Fallujah’s senior tribal leader, told the Washington Post, “If they want to prevent bloodshed, they should stay outside the city and allow Iraqis to handle security inside the city.”10 Two days after they arrived, the Marines engaged in street battles with Iraqis in the working-class al-Askari neighborhood that raged for hours. In the end, one Marine was killed and seven were wounded. Fifteen Iraqis—among them, an ABC News cameraman11 and a two-year-old child12—died in the fighting. A Marine crackdown quickly followed that “many residents say was unlike any they’d seen in nearly a year of U.S. occupation.” 13 The Marines’ aggressive move into Fallujah also presented many residents with a harsh sea of choices: surrender to foreign occupation, flee their homes, or resist. While some chose to leave, the more civilians that died, the more emboldened people in Fallujah became.