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

by Jeremy Scahill

  The main drag through Fallujah is a congested strip, lined with restaurants, cafes, souks, and lots of people milling around. At some point before the men arrived in Fallujah that morning, according to witnesses, a small group of masked men had detonated some sort of explosive device, clearing the streets and causing shopkeepers to shutter their doors.48 From the moment the convoy entered the city limits, the men stood out. In fact, it was very possible that the whole thing was a setup from the start. In a video purportedly made by an Iraqi resistance group, insurgents claimed they had been tipped off to the movements of the Blackwater convoy, which they believed consisted of U.S. intelligence agents. “A loyal mujahideen arrived who was a spy for the Islamic Jihad Army,” said a masked insurgent on the video. “He told our commander that a group of CIA will pass through Fallujah en route to Habbaniyah.”49 The insurgent said, “They would not have bodyguards with them and they would wear civilian clothes—this to avoid being captured by the mujahideen, because every American that passes through Fallujah will be killed.”50 Blackwater representatives later alleged that units purportedly from the U.S.-installed Iraqi police had escorted the men into the city.51 A senior U.S. intelligence official “with direct access to that information” later told journalist Thomas Ricks that there had been a leak out of the Green Zone about the Blackwater convoy’s movements.52 Claims of Iraqi police involvement were later contradicted by the findings of a CPA investigation provided to Congress.53

  As it happened, Zovko and Batalona—who had been in country much longer than Helvenston—led the way, followed by three flatbed trucks, that were to be stocked up with kitchen equipment on the other side of Fallujah. Taking up the rear, Helvenston and Teague were in the red Pajero. Shortly after they rolled into the city, the convoy began to slow. To their right were shops and markets; to the left, open space. As the vehicles came to a standstill, witnesses say, a group of four or five boys approached the lead vehicle and began talking to the Blackwater men inside. Before Helvenston or Teague could figure out what was happening, the unmistakable rip of machine-gun fire bellowed out on Fallujah’s streets. Bullets tore through the side of the Pajero like salt through ice.

  It was the worst thing that could happen to a Special Forces guy—the realization that you’re trapped. No one knows for sure the last thing Scott Helvenston saw before he breathed his last breath, but there is no doubt it was terrifying. He may have lived long enough to know that he would die a gruesome death. As his fatally wounded body lay in the jeep, blood gushing from him, a mob of men jumped on the hood of the Pajero, unloading cartridges of ammo and pounding their way through the windshield. Next to Helvenston lay Mike Teague, blood spitting from his neck. Chants of “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great) filled the air. The attackers had moved in swiftly, like hawks on fatally wounded prey. Soon, more than a dozen young men who had been hanging around in front of a local kebab house joined in the carnage.54 According to one eyewitness, one of the Blackwater men survived the initial attack after being hit in the chest with gunfire, only to be pulled from his vehicle by the mob, begging for his life. “The people killed him by throwing bricks on him and jumping on him until they killed him,” the witness said. “They cut off his arm and his leg and his head, and they were cheering and dancing.”55

  By the time Helvenston’s jeep was shot up, Jerry Zovko and Wes Batalona realized an ambush was under way. Batalona slammed on the gas, rammed over the median, and tried either to rescue the other two or get the hell out. According to a former private military-company operator, Blackwater trains its men “not to aid the other when one vehicle is hit in an ambush. They are taught to get off the X. Your own survival is the ultimate monkey.”56 But with little armor on the jeep and only one gunner, Batalona and Zovko were as good as dead. Within moments, they found themselves in a hail of gunfire as their jeep slammed into another vehicle. Zovko’s head was blown apart. Batalona’s Hawaiian shirt was full of bullet holes; his head slumped over. Down the road, the mob was tearing apart Helvenston’s Pajero. Their weapons and gear had been looted; someone brought in gasoline and doused the vehicles and the bodies. Soon they were in flames. The eerie soundtrack to the massacre, captured on videos made by resistance fighters, was a mix of horns blaring and random screams of “Allahu Akbar!”

  In the midst of the carnage, journalists arrived on the scene and captured images that would soon become infamous. The crowd swelled to more than three hundred people, as the original attackers faded into the side streets of Fallujah. The scorched bodies were pulled from the burned-out jeep, and men and boys literally tore them apart, limb from limb. Men beat the bodies with the soles of their shoes, while others hacked off burned body parts with metal pipes and shovels. A young man methodically kicked one of the heads until it was severed from the body. In front of the cameras, someone held a small sign emblazoned with a skull and crossbones that declared, “Fallujah is the graveyard of the Americans!” Chanting broke out: “With our blood and our souls, we will sacrifice for Islam!” Soon the mob tied two of the bodies to the back of a dark red Opel sedan and dragged them to the main bridge crossing the Euphrates.57 Another body was tied to a car with a poster of the assassinated Hamas leader Sheik Yassin.58 Along the way, someone tied a brick to one of the men’s severed right leg and tossed it over a power line. At the bridge, men climbed the steel beams, hanging the charred, lifeless remains of Helvenston and Teague over the river, forming an eerily iconic image. Their bodies dangled over the Euphrates for almost ten hours—like “slaughtered sheep” in the words of one Fallujan.59 Later, people cut the bodies down and put them on a pile of tires, setting them ablaze once again.60 When the fire died out, men tied what was left of some of the bodies to the back of a gray donkey cart and paraded them through Fallujah, eventually dumping them in front of a municipal building.61 Dozens of Iraqis followed the cart in a macabre procession chanting, “What makes you come here, Bush, and mess with the people of Fallujah?”62 One man warned, “This is the fate of all Americans who come to Fallujah.”63

  It was the Mogadishu moment of the Iraq War, but with two key differences: the murdered men were not U.S. military, they were mercenaries; and unlike Somalia in 1993, the United States would not withdraw. Instead, the deaths of these four Blackwater soldiers would spark a violent U.S. siege, ushering in a period of unprecedented resistance to the occupation almost a year to the day after the fall of Baghdad.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “WE WILL PACIFY FALLUJAH”

  THE CHARRED bodies of the Blackwater contractors were still hanging from the Fallujah bridge when news of the ambush began to spread across the globe. “They can’t do that to Americans,” said Capt. Douglas Zembiac as he watched the scene on TV in a mess hall at a military base outside Fallujah. 1 But there would be no immediate response from the thousands of nearby U.S. Marines. Perhaps that was because that same morning, five Marines were killed near Fallujah after hitting a roadside bomb. Maybe it was because the Blackwater men were not “official” U.S. forces. In any case, the contractors’ bodies hung over the Euphrates for hours as a grim reminder that one year after the fall of Baghdad, eleven months after President Bush declared an end to major combat operations, and ninety days before the official “handover of sovereignty” to the Iraqis, the war was just beginning. U.S. military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt initially tried to downplay the significance of the ambush, calling it an “isolated” and “small, localized”2 case, part of a “slight uptick in localized engagements.”3 Fallujah, Kimmitt said, “remains one of those cities in Iraq that just don’t get it.”4 “While this one incident was happening in Fallujah, throughout the rest of the country, we are opening schools. We’re opening health clinics. We are increasing the amount of electrical output. We are increasing the amount of oil output,”5 Kimmitt declared at a press briefing the day of the ambush. “So is this tragic? Absolutely it’s tragic. There are four families in this world today that are going to get knocks on the doors. And you don’t want to be
on either side of that door when it happens, either hearing the news or delivering the news. . . . But that isn’t going to stop us from doing our mission. In fact, it would be disgracing the deaths of these people if we were to stop our missions.” 6 Paul Bremer’s spokesperson, Dan Senor, told reporters that “the people who pulled those bodies out and engaged in this attack against the contractors are not people we are here to help,” saying, “Those are people we have to capture or kill so this country can move forward.”7 Senor said the people who carried out the ambush and supported it represented “a tiny, tiny minority” of Iraqis. “The overwhelming majority of Iraqis are grateful for the liberation—95, 98 percent are the numbers that come up,” he said.8

  Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C., President Bush was on the campaign trail, speaking at the posh Marriott Wardman Park Hotel at a Bush-Cheney dinner. “We still face thugs and terrorists in Iraq who would rather go on killing the innocent than accept the advance of liberty,” the President told his supporters. “This collection of killers is trying to shake our will. America will never be intimidated by thugs and assassins. We are aggressively striking the terrorists in Iraq. We will defeat them there so we do not have to face them in our own country.”9 The next morning Americans woke up to news of the gruesome killings in Fallujah. “Iraqi Mob Mutilates 4 American Civilians,” screamed the banner headline in the Chicago Tribune. “U.S. Civilians Mutilated in Iraq Attack,” announced the Washington Post. “Americans Desecrated,” proclaimed the Miami Herald. Somalia was being mentioned frequently.

  After Kimmitt’s initial downplaying of the ambush, the White House—and Paul Bremer—recognized the prolonged, public mutilation of the Blackwater men as a major blow in the propaganda war against the fast-emerging anti-U.S. resistance in Iraq. Some went so far as to believe the ambush was a direct attempt to re-create Somalia in 1993, when rebels shot down a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter, killing eighteen U.S. soldiers and dragging some of their bodies through the streets of Mogadishu, prompting the Clinton administration to pull out of the country. With less than three months before the much-hyped “handover,” the Bush administration faced the undeniable reality of an emboldened resistance to an occupation that was increasingly unpopular, both at home and inside Iraq. “The images immediately became icons of the brutal reality of the insurgency,” wrote Bremer, saying they “underscored the fact that the coalition military did not control Fallujah.”10 Bremer says he told Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, “We’ve got to react to this outrage or the enemy will conclude we’re irresolute.”11 Sanchez, according to Bremer, responded, “We’re dusting off the operation we planned last fall . . . the one to clean out Fallujah.” 12 Almost immediately, plans for crushing the “city of mosques” were put on the fast track. “We will not be intimidated,” declared White House spokesperson Scott McClellan. “Democracy is taking root and there’s no turning back.”13 Senator John Kerry—then the Democratic candidate for President—concurred, saying, “These horrific attacks remind us of the viciousness of the enemies of Iraq’s future. United in sadness, we are also united in our resolve that these enemies will not prevail.”14 Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, said, “We’re not going to run out of town because some people were lawless in Fallujah.”15 Meanwhile, political pundits on the cable networks called for blood. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News spoke of a “final solution,”16 saying, “I don’t care about the people of Fallujah. You’re not going to win their hearts and minds. They’re going to kill you to the very end. They’ve proven that. So let’s knock this place down.”17 Later, in calling for the United States “to use maximum force in punishing the Fallujah terrorists,”18 O’Reilly declared, “Fear can be a good thing. Homicidal terrorists and their enablers must be killed or incarcerated. And their punishment must be an example to others. How do you think Saddam controlled Iraq all these decades? He did it by fear.”19 Meanwhile on MSNBC, former Democratic presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark said, “The resistance is not declining in Fallujah, so far as I can determine. It’s building and mounting. And we can’t have that challenge to our authority.”20

  Many questioned why—with four thousand Marines positioned around Fallujah—such a prolonged mutilation of the bodies of the Blackwater contractors was possible and why their charred corpses were left for hours to hang from the bridge. “[E]ven while the two vehicles burned, sending plumes of thick, black smoke over the shuttered shops of the city, there were no ambulances, fire engines or security dispatched to try and rescue the victims,” UPI reported. “This time, there were no Blackhawks to fly to the rescue. Instead, Fallujah’s streets were abandoned to the jubilant, chaotic, and violent crowds who rejoiced amid battered human remains.”21 Col. Michael Walker, a Marine spokesman, said: “Should we have sent in a tank so we could have gotten, with all due respect, four dead bodies back? What good would that have done? A mob is a mob. We would have just provoked them. The smart play was to let this thing fade out.”22

  Responding to a reporter’s question about whether the Marines did not go into Fallujah right after the ambush to confront the mob attacking the Blackwater men because it was “too dangerous,” Kimmitt shot back, “I don’t think that there is any place in this country that the coalition forces feel is too dangerous to go into.”23 That day on CNN, Crossfire host Tucker Carlson said, “I think we ought to kill every person who’s responsible for the deaths of those Americans. This is a sign of weakness. This is how we got 9/11. It’s because we allowed things like that to go unresponded to. This is a big deal.”24

  Within twenty-four hours, Kimmitt’s tone had changed. “We will respond. We are not going to do a pell-mell rush into the city. It’s going to be deliberate, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming,” he declared at a press briefing in Baghdad.25 “We will be back in Fallujah. It will be at the time and the place of our choosing. We will hunt down the criminals. We will kill them or we will capture them. And we will pacify Fallujah.”26

  Paul Bremer made his first public remarks on the killings during an address in front of nearly five hundred new graduates from the Iraqi police academy in Baghdad. “Yesterday’s events in Fallujah are a dramatic example of the ongoing struggle between human dignity and barbarism,” he declared, warning that the killing of the Blackwater men “will not go unpunished.” The dead contractors, he said, “came to help Iraq recover from decades of dictatorship, to help the people of Iraq gain the elections, democracy, and freedom desired by the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people. These murders are a painful outrage for us in the coalition. But they will not derail the march to stability and democracy in Iraq. The cowards and ghouls who acted yesterday represent the worst of society.”27

  In most U.S. news reports on the ambush, Fallujah was described as a Sunni resistance stronghold filled with foreign fighters and Saddam loyalists. The dominant narrative became that the Blackwater men were innocent “civilian contractors” delivering food who were slaughtered by butchers in Fallujah. At one point after the incident, Kimmitt told reporters that the Blackwater men were “there to provide assistance, to provide food to that local area,”28 as though the men were humanitarians working for the Red Cross. But inside Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq, the ambush was viewed differently. The news that the men were technically not active U.S. forces did not change the fact that they were fully armed Americans who had traveled into the center of Fallujah at a time when U.S. forces were killing Iraqi civilians and attempting to take the city by force. The New York Times reported, “Many people in Falluja said they believed that they had won an important victory on Wednesday. They insisted that the four security guards, who were driving in unmarked sport utility vehicles, were working for the Central Intelligence Agency. ‘This is what these spies deserve,’ said Salam Aldulayme, a 28-year-old Falluja resident.”29

  On CNN’s Larry King Live, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who had just returned from Iraq a few days before the Blackwa
ter killings, said, “There is a sort of second army of Americans out there now in the form of security personnel, who can be seen almost anywhere in the country there is a member of the coalition doing something. And they struck me as being very high-profile targets. They’re armed to the teeth. A lot of them look like they come out of a Sylvester Stallone movie. And so, and they move around the country. And I think that the insurgents, whomever they are, have picked up on them and may be tracking them. So when it happened in Fallujah, as bad as it was, I must say I wasn’t deeply surprised.”30

  Others described the ambush as a response to the recent U.S. killing of civilians in Fallujah, particularly the gun battle the previous week that left more than a dozen Iraqis dead. “Children and women were killed. They were innocent,” said Ibrahim Abdullah al-Dulaimi. “People in Fallujah are very angry with the American soldiers.”31 Leaflets began circulating in Fallujah claiming that the killings were carried out as revenge for the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin.32 A Fallujah shop assistant named Amir said, “The Americans may think it is unusual, but this is what they should expect. They show up in places and shoot civilians, so why can’t they be killed?”33 These sentiments were even echoed among the ranks of the U.S.-created Iraqi police force. “The violence is increasing against the Americans,” said Maj. Abdelaziz Faisal Hamid Mehamdy, a Fallujan who joined the police force in 2003 after Baghdad fell. “They took over the country and they didn’t give us anything. They came for democracy and to help the people, but we haven’t seen any of this, just killing and violence.”34