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

by Jeremy Scahill

  But while the embedded U.S. press focused on the “urban warfare” story, unembedded Arab journalists—most prominently from the popular Al Jazeera network—were reporting around the clock from inside the besieged city. Their reports painted a vivid picture of the civilian devastation and gave lie to U.S. commanders’ pronouncements about precision strikes. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya broadcast images of corpses in the streets and destruction of the city’s infrastructure. In fact, when Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt was doing a phone interview on Al Jazeera, insisting the United States was observing a cease-fire, the network simultaneously aired live images of continued raids by U.S. fighter jets on residential neighborhoods inside Fallujah.40 The images Al Jazeera’s cameras captured in Fallujah were not only being broadcast widely in the Arab world but also on TV networks across the globe. Veteran Al Jazeera journalist Ahmed Mansour and cameraman Laith Mushtaq had entered Fallujah on April 3 and were the primary source of footage of the civilian devastation in the city. They regularly filmed scenes of women and children killed by the U.S. offensive—in one case broadcasting a story about an entire family in the al Jolan neighborhood who had allegedly been killed in a U.S. airstrike. “The planes bombed this house, as they did for the whole neighborhood, and they brought the corpses and bodies to the hospital,” Mushtaq recalled. “I went to the hospital. I could not see anything but, like, a sea of corpses of children and women, and mostly children, because peasants and farmers have usually a lot of children. So these were scenes that are unbelievable, unimaginable. I was taking photographs and forcing myself to photograph, while I was at the same time crying.”41

  Mansour, who is one of Al Jazeera’s best-known personalities, said he realized early on that there were only a handful of journalists inside the city and believed he had a responsibility to remain in Fallujah, despite the enormous risk. “I wanted to report this reality to the whole world. I wanted the whole world to know what’s happening to those besieged people. I wasn’t thinking about leaving the city at all. I decided to stay and let my destiny be as those of people. If they die, I’ll be with them; if they escape, I’ll be with them. I decided not to think about any possibilities, what the U.S. forces will do with me if they catch me, and not to think about my family or anything. I only think about those people.”42 In the midst of the siege, Mansour reported live from Fallujah, “Last night we were targeted by some tanks, twice . . . but we escaped. The U.S. wants us out of Fallujah, but we will stay.”43 Despite its firm grip on embedded U.S. correspondents, Washington was losing the global propaganda war—so U.S. officials attacked the messenger. On April 9, Washington demanded that Al Jazeera leave Fallujah as a condition for a cease-fire.44 The network refused. Mansour wrote that the next day “American fighter jets fired around our new location, and they bombed the house where we had spent the night before, causing the death of the house owner Mr. Hussein Samir. Due to the serious threats we had to stop broadcasting for a few days because every time we tried to broadcast the fighter jets spotted us [and] we became under their fire.”45

  On April 12, Kimmitt, facing questions about the footage being shown on Al Jazeera depicting a civilian catastrophe in Fallujah, called on people to “Change the channel. Change the channel to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station.” Kimmitt declared, “The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda, and that is lies.”46 Dan Senor, Bremer’s senior adviser, asserted that Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya “are misreporting facts on the ground and contributing to a sense of anger and frustration that possibly should be directed at individuals and organizations inside of Fallujah that mutilate Americans and slaughter other Iraqis rather than at the Coalition.”47 On April 15 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld echoed those remarks in still harsher terms, calling Al Jazeera’s reporting “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.”48 A reporter asked Rumsfeld if the United States had a “civilian casualty” count. “Of course not,” Rumsfeld shot back. “We’re not in the city. But you know what our forces do; they don’t go around killing hundreds of civilians. . . . It’s disgraceful what that station is doing.”49 It was the very next day, according to a British government memo stamped “Top Secret” reported on in Britain’s Daily Mirror, that President Bush allegedly told British Prime Minister Tony Blair of his desire to bomb Al Jazeera.50 “He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere,” a source told the Mirror. “There’s no doubt what Bush wanted to do.”51 Ahmed Mansour said he believed that what Al Jazeera was providing in its reports from inside Fallujah was balance to a story that otherwise was being told exclusively from the vantage point of embedded correspondents and U.S. military spokespeople. “Is it professionalism that the journalists wear U.S. [military] clothing and they go with them in the planes and tanks to cover this and report this?” Mansour asked. “The battles have to be reported from both sides. We were among the civilians, and we reported, and they had embedded journalists with those who launched this attack from the U.S. forces who occupied Iraq, and they reported what they wanted. We were trying to create an equilibrium or a balance, so that the truth is not lost.”52

  Collective Punishment

  The horrors unfolding in Fallujah, coupled with the U.S. failure to take control of the city and the bold resistance of Fallujah’s residents, was encouraging other Iraqis to rise up. As the siege went on, people from across Iraq began coming to Fallujah to help in the defense of the city. “The battle of Fallujah is the battle of history, the battle of Iraq, the battle of the nation,” Harth al-Dhari, of the Muslim Scholars Association, told thousands of worshipers at Friday prayers in the midst of the siege. “Merciful God, take revenge for spilled blood. Take revenge for slaughter. Send your army against the occupiers. Kill all of them. Don’t spare any of them.”53 By the time what U.S. officials called a “cease-fire” had set in the weekend of April 9, some thirty Marines had been killed. But it was Iraqis who paid the highest price. After the weeklong U.S. siege, some six hundred were dead in Fallujah, among them “hundreds of women and children.”54 On April 13, President Bush delivered a prime-time address on national television in the United States. “Terrorists from other countries have infiltrated Iraq to incite and organize attacks,” Bush declared from the East Room of the White House. “The violence we have seen is a power grab by these extreme and ruthless elements . . . it’s not a popular uprising.”55

  But half a world away, as thousands of Fallujans escaped their city and fled to other parts of Iraq, they brought with them tales of horror and civilian death that no amount of propaganda could combat. Despite U.S. rhetoric about liberating Fallujah from “foreign fighters” and Baathists, it was not lost on Iraqis that the stated justification for the destruction of Fallujah and the deaths of hundreds of people was the killing of four U.S. mercenaries—seen by most Iraqis as the real foreign fighters. “For only four individuals, the Americans killed children, women, elderly, and now a whole city is under siege?” asked Haitham Saha, while at a Baghdad dropoff point for humanitarian supplies to Fallujah.56 “We know who the people were who killed the American contractors,” a cleric at a local mosque told a reporter. “But instead of negotiating with us, Bremer has decided to have his revenge.”57 Even members of the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council expressed outrage. “These operations were a mass punishment,” said Governing Council president Adnan Pachachi,58 who three months earlier sat next to First Lady Laura Bush, as her special guest, at the State of the Union address in Washington, D.C.59 “It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah, and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal.”60

  As Vigilant Resolve continued to exact a deadly toll on the people of Fallujah, Iraqis in the U.S.-created security force began deserting their posts; some joined the resistance to the siege, attacking U.S. forces around the city. “In all, as many as one in four of the new Iraqi army, civil defense, police, and other security forces quit in those
days, changed sides, or stopped working,” according to Anthony Shadid.61 When the United States attempted hastily to hand over “responsibility” for Fallujah to an Iraqi force, some 800 AK-47 assault rifles, twenty-seven pickup trucks, and fifty radios the Marines gave the brigade ended up in the hands of the resistance.62 Lt. Gen. James Conway would later admit, “When we were told to attack Fallujah, I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed.”63 In the midst of a worsening public relations disaster for the United States, Kimmitt said, “I would argue that the collective punishment on the people of Fallujah is those terrorists, those cowards who hunker down inside mosques and hospitals and schools, and use the women and children as shields to hide against the Marines, who are just trying to bring liberation from those cowards inside the city of Fallujah.”64 For most of the world, though, it was the United States that was responsible for the “collective punishment”—a phrase in Arabic that evokes images of the Israeli policy against Palestine—of the people of Fallujah. In fact, those were the exact words that the UN envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, used when he declared, “Collective punishment is certainly unacceptable, and the siege of the city is absolutely unacceptable.” 65 Brahimi asked, “When you surround a city, you bomb the city, when people cannot go to hospital, what name do you have for that?”66

  In the end, perhaps as many as eight hundred Iraqis died as a result of the first of what would be several sieges of Fallujah.67 Tens of thousands of civilians fled their homes, and the city was razed. And yet the United States failed to crush Fallujah. Far from asserting U.S. supremacy in Iraq, Fallujah demonstrated that guerrilla tactics were effective against the occupiers. “Fallujah, the small city at the heart of the Sunni Arab insurrection, was considered something of a hillbilly place by other Sunni in Iraq,” wrote veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn in a dispatch from Iraq in late April. “It was seen as Islamic, tribal and closely connected to the former regime. The number of guerrillas probably totaled no more than 400 out of a population of 300,000. But by assaulting a whole city, as if it was Verdun or Stalingrad, the US Marines have managed to turn it into a nationalist symbol.”68

  Testifying before Congress on April 20, Gen. Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended the operation. “As you remember, we went in because of the atrocities on the Blackwater security personnel, the four personnel that were killed and later burned, and then hung on the bridge. We went in because we had to and to find the perpetrators. And what we found was a huge rat’s nest, that is still festering today—needs to be dealt with.”69 The April siege of Fallujah would be followed a few months later, in November 2004, by an even greater onslaught that would bring hundreds more Iraqi deaths, force tens of thousands of people from their homes, and further enrage the country. In all, U.S. forces carried out nearly seven hundred airstrikes, damaging or destroying eighteen thousand of Fallujah’s thirty-nine thousand buildings.70 Approximately 150 U.S. soldiers were killed in the operations. Meanwhile, the “perpetrators” of the Blackwater ambush “were never found,”71 as political and military officials had vowed, further underscoring the vengeful nature of the U.S. slaughter in Fallujah. The Marines renamed the infamous bridge “Blackwater Bridge,” and someone wrote in English in black marker on one of its beams: “This is for the Americans of Blackwater that were murdered here in 2004, Semper Fidelis P.S. Fuck You.”72 Journalist Dahr Jamail later concluded, “[I]n April of 2004, as a city was invaded and its residents were fleeing, hiding, or being massacred, there was considerable public awareness in the United States of human beings whose bodies had been mutilated in Iraq, thanks to our news media. But among thousands of references to mutilation in that month alone, we have yet to find one related to anything that happened after March 31 . . . [M]utilation is something that happens to Blackwater-hired mercs and other professional, American killers, not to Iraqi babies with misplaced heads.”73

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MR. PRINCE GOES TO WASHINGTON

  BEFORE THE invasion of Iraq, when most people heard the term “civilian contractors,” they didn’t immediately conjure up images of men with guns and bulletproof vests riding around a hellhole in jeeps. They thought of construction workers. This was also true for the families of many private soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their loved ones were not “civilian contractors,” in their minds but were often thought of and referred to in family discussions as “Special Forces” or being “with the military.” Their actual employer or title was irrelevant because what they were doing in Iraq or Afghanistan was what they had always done—they were fighting for their country. The parents of one Blackwater contractor killed in Iraq said it was their son’s “deep sense of patriotism and his abiding Christian faith that led him to work in Iraq,”1 a common sentiment in the private military community. So on March 31, 2004, when news began to reach the United States that four “civilian contractors” had been ambushed in Fallujah, several of the men’s families didn’t draw any kind of connection. After all, their loved ones were not civilians—they were military. In Ohio, Danica Zovko, Jerry’s mother, heard the news on the radio that “American contractors” had been killed.2 After she saw the images coming out of Fallujah, she actually wrote her son an e-mail, telling him to be careful: “They’re killing people in Iraq just like Somalia.”3

  Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, Scott’s mother, was working at her home office in Leesburg, Florida, with the television on behind her.4 “I was sitting here at my desk, doing research, and I had CNN on in the background,” she recalled. “And the noon news just all of a sudden caught my attention, and I looked over there and I saw this burning vehicle and I thought, ‘Oh, my God.’” It didn’t cross her mind at the time that the footage she was watching was her own son’s gruesome death. “When they said contractors, I was thinking construction workers working on pipelines or something. I changed the channel because I thought, This is just getting insane, I can’t watch this anymore.” Helvenston-Wettengel went on with her work, but then she heard the men described on the news as “security contractors,” which made her nervous. “I said, ‘My God, Scotty is a security contractor, but he’s not in Fallujah. He’s protecting Paul Bremer in Baghdad,’” she recalled. “I called my other son, Jason, and he told me, ‘Mom, you worry too much.’” Anyway, she reasoned, her son had just arrived in Iraq a few days earlier. “He wasn’t even supposed to be on any missions,” she said. Helvenston-Wettengel went out that afternoon to a meeting, and when she returned home at seven o’clock that night, her answering machine was blinking like crazy: eighteen new messages. “The first four were from Jason, saying, ‘Mom, it was Blackwater. They were Blackwater guys that got ambushed.’” Helvenston-Wettengel called Blackwater headquarters and got a woman on the other line. “This is Katy Helvenston, Scotty’s mom,” she said. “Is Scotty all right?” The Blackwater representative said she didn’t know. “It’s been twelve hours!” Helvenston-Wettengel exclaimed. “What do you mean you don’t know?” She said the Blackwater representative told her that the company was in the process of doing a sort of “reverse 911” with its contractors in the field in Iraq. “She said there were about 400 of them and that 250 had checked in. I asked if Scotty was one of those and the woman said, ‘No.’” Helvenston-Wettengel said she called Blackwater back every hour, desperate for any information. In the meantime, she found Fallujah on a map and realized that it wasn’t that far from Baghdad. By midnight, she knew in her heart that her son was dead. “Scotty had been so good about calling me and e-mailing me, and I kept thinking, He would have called me and let me know he was OK, because he knew how worried I was,” she recalled. “I just knew it.”

  While the families began to absorb the shock and horror of what had happened to their loved ones in Fallujah, the world—including many elected officials in Washington—was getting a window into just how privatized the war had become and how entrenched private contractors, like the dead Blackwater men, now were in the occupation. In
the 1991 Gulf War, one in sixty people deployed by the coalition were contractors. With the 2003 occupation, the ratio had swelled to one in three.5 For Erik Prince, the Fallujah killings and the Najaf firefight provided an almost unthinkable opportunity—under the guise of doing damage control and briefings, Prince and his entourage would be able to meet with Washington’s power brokers and sell them on Blackwater’s vision of military privatization at the exact moment that those very senators and Congressmen were beginning to recognize the necessity of mercenaries in preserving the occupation of (and corporate profits in) Iraq. With timing that would have been impossible to create, Blackwater was thrust into the fortunate position of a drug rep offering a new painkiller to an ailing patient at the moment the worst pain was just kicking in.

  Blackwater’s Lobbyists

  The day after the Fallujah ambush, Erik Prince turned to his longtime friend Paul Behrends, a partner at the powerful Republican lobbying firm Alexander Strategy Group, founded by senior staffers of then-majority leader Tom DeLay.6 Behrends, a U.S. Marine Corps Reserve lieutenant colonel, had been a senior national security adviser to California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a onetime aide to President Reagan. Prince and Behrends had a long history—in 1990-1991, young Prince worked for Rohrabacher alongside Behrends.7 That marked the beginning of a close political, business, and religious partnership between the two men that would only strengthen as Blackwater grew.