One indication of the strategic importance of Azerbaijan comes from the list of names associated with the U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, an organization formed in 1995 to “facilitate and encourage trade and investment in Azerbaijan” and to “serve as a liaison between foreign companies and Azerbaijani businesses and officials.”21 Its “Council of Advisors” reads like a who’s who of the hawks of the Reagan-Bush era: James Baker III, Henry Kissinger, John Sununu, and Brent Scowcroft.22 The board of directors includes senior executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, and Coca-Cola, while the trustees include Azerbaijan’s dictator, Ilham Aliyev, and top neoconservative Richard Perle. Listed as “former” officials of the organization are none other than Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage.23 “These men are the power behind the throne in Azerbaijan,” observed investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, adding that Blackwater’s deployment would be “impossible to imagine . . . without a nod from one of these principals.”24
A March 2004 Blackwater recruitment ad sought a manager to oversee the contract “to train, equip, and permanently establish a Naval Special Operations Unit in the Azerbaijan Armed Forces.”25 The announced salary was $130,000 to $150,000 annually. Blackwater referred to the project as part of a “Maritime Commando Enhancement” program. “The Caspian Sea is a region of interest for many, many reasons,” said Blackwater vice president Chris Taylor at a conference on contracting in 2005, where he held up Blackwater’s Azerbaijan work as evidence of successful U.S. government contracting to help allied governments build up their forces. “This is not a zero-sum game. We’re not trying to take as much of the pie and leave the government with nothing so we can get as much money as we possibly can. It just doesn’t work out that way. And if you want quote unquote repeat business, if you want to have a solid reputation, it’s actually affecting the strategic balance in an area for the government or assisting in doing that, then you’ve got to be part of that give and take. And we like to think that we do that on a daily basis.”26
Caspian Guard appeared to be part of a strategy Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had articulated publicly in a visit to the region in early 2004. At a press conference in Uzbekistan on February 24 of that year, Rumsfeld revealed that he and other senior U.S. officials had been discussing the establishment of “operating sites” in the area, which he described as facilities “that would not be permanent as a base would be permanent but would be a place where the United States and coalition countries could periodically and intermittently have access and support. . . . What’s important to us is to be arranged in a way and in places that are hospitable, where we have the flexibility of using those facilities.”27 In Georgia, where the Pentagon has also deployed private military contractors, a Western diplomat told the Guardian that the United States was considering “creating a ‘forward operational area’ where equipment and fuel could be stored, similar to support structures in the Gulf.”28 “The two moves would combine to give Washington a ‘virtual base’—stored equipment and a loyal Georgian military—without the diplomatic inconvenience of setting up a permanent base,” according to the paper.29
That appeared to be the strategy with Blackwater in Azerbaijan as well. In strategically important Baku, Blackwater renovated a Soviet-era maritime special operations training facility that Pentagon planners envisioned as a command center modeled on those used by the Department of Homeland Security.30 As part of Caspian Guard, the United States also contracted defense giant and Iraq War contractor Washington Group International to construct a radar surveillance facility in Astara, just north of the Iranian border, one of two such facilities built under the program.31 The other was positioned atop a mountain south of Russia’s North Caucasus region, not far from Chechnya.32 Washington also renovated the nearby Nakhchewan airport to accommodate military aircraft, including from NATO.33 In the meantime, encouraged by its cozy relationship with Washington, Azerbaijan dramatically increased its military spending by 70 percent in 2005 to $300 million.34 By the end of 2006, it had reached a whopping $700 million, with the country’s president pledging it would soon grow to $1 billion annually.35
In the event of a U.S. war against Iran, Azerbaijan would play a central role; to Tehran, the U.S.-orchestrated buildup along the Caspian was an ominous threat. Iran actually responded to word of Blackwater’s involvement in the region by announcing the creation of its own special naval police force that would patrol the Caspian.36 As an exclamation point to Iran’s concerns, Ariel Cohen of the right-wing Heritage Foundation wrote in the Washington Times in 2005 that Caspian Guard was “significant . . . for any future conflict with Iran.”37 As Jane’s Defence Weekly reported, the U.S. presence near the Caspian allowed Washington to “gain a foothold in a region that is rich in oil and natural gas, and which also borders Iran. ‘It’s good old US interests, it’s rather selfish,’ said US Army Colonel Mike Anderson, chief of the Europe Plans and Policies Division at US European Command (EUCOM). ‘Certainly we’ve chosen to help two littoral states, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, but always underlying that is our own self interest.’”38
By April 2005, Rumsfeld had visited Azerbaijan, a small country of 8.5 million people, at least three times.39 The visits were secretive, and U.S. and Azerbaijani officials would only speak in generalities about what exactly Rumsfeld was doing dropping into the country so often. After Rumsfeld’s third visit, the popular daily newspaper Echo ran the headline “Rumsfeld Is Interested in Oil!”40 Indeed, the flurry of U.S.-military-related activities in Azerbaijan, including the Blackwater deployment, was timed for the launch of one of the most diplomatically controversial Western operations on former Soviet soil since the fall of the Berlin Wall: the massive eleven-hundred-mile oil pipeline that for the first time would transfer oil out of the Caspian on a route that entirely circumvented Russia and Iran—a development both Moscow and Tehran viewed as a serious U.S. incursion into their spheres. The $3.6 billion pipeline project was heavily funded by the World Bank, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, 41 and spearheaded by a consortium led by oil giant BP along with U.S. companies Unocal, ConocoPhilips, and Hess. As originally planned, the pipeline would run from Baku, Azerbaijan, through Tbilisi, Georgia, to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, where the oil would then be shipped for Western consumption.
Known by its acronym, the BTC pipeline was labeled “a new round in the Great Game” by veteran Russia analysts, who viewed it as part of a wider plan to isolate Moscow. Analyst Vladimir Radyuhin said the “pipeline is a key element in the U.S. strategy to redraw the geopolitical map of the former Soviet Union and supersede Russia as a dominant force in the former Soviet Union. The U.S. has pushed through the project over more profitable pipelines via Russia and Iran to create an alternative export route for oil produced in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, which have so far depended on Russian pipelines to export their oil to Europe.”42 Radyuhin said Washington’s Caspian Guard program “together with the U.S.-promoted GUUAM alliance of Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova, will enable Washington to exercise control over an absolute majority of post-Soviet states and create a cordon sanitaire around Russia.”43 The head of the International Committee of Russia’s upper house of parliament, Mikhail Margelov, said, “Russia will always oppose the presence of any foreign military contingents within the boundaries of the [Caspian region]. . . . First and foremost, it is a question of [Russia’s] national security.”44
Prior to the launch of the BTC pipeline, the United States had invested in the Russian-controlled Caspian Pipeline Consortium, a $2.6 billion project made up of a 935-mile crude oil pipeline that ran from the Tengiz oilfield in Kazakhstan to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.45 The White House called it “the largest single United States investment in Russia.”46 In November 2001, when the first tanker loaded with oil from the Caspian under the project was launched, Commerce Secretary Don Evans remarked, “It tells the world that the United States, Russia, and
Central Asian states are cooperating to build prosperity and stability in this part of the world.”47 But once the new BTC pipeline became active in 2005, Bush publicly encouraged “companies producing oil [in Kazakhstan] and elsewhere in the Caspian region [to] embrace BTC as a gateway to global markets.” 48 It seemed that was the plan from the start. Indeed, the Cheney energy task force had envisioned a scheme to allow multinational oil giants like Chevron and Exxon operating in Kazakhstan under the Russian pipeline to redirect oil through the BTC pipeline, effectively taking away from Russia’s profits. It was all laid out in May 2001 in the recommendations made by the White House National Energy Policy Development Group, headed by Cheney. The group recommended that President Bush “direct the Secretaries of Commerce, State, and Energy to continue working with relevant companies and countries to establish the commercial conditions that will allow oil companies operating in Kazakhstan the option of exporting their oil via the BTC pipeline” instead of through the Russian controlled pipeline. It called for the Administration to “deepen [its] commercial dialogue with Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and other Caspian states to provide a strong, transparent, and stable business climate for energy and related infrastructure projects.”49
The BTC pipeline was inaugurated in May 2005, and President Bush dispatched his new Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman to represent him at the ceremony. “BTC opens a new era in the Caspian Basin’s development. It ensures Caspian oil will reach European and other markets in a commercially viable and environmentally sound way,” Bush said in a letter read by Bodman at the ceremony.50 The letter was addressed to the dictator of Azerbaijan, whom Bush praised. “As Azerbaijan deepens its democratic and market economic reforms, this pipeline can help generate balanced economic growth, and provide a foundation for a prosperous and just society that advances the cause of freedom,” Bush wrote.51 But as David Sanger of the New York Times reported, a few days before Bush’s letter was read at the ceremony, “the Azerbaijani police beat pro-democracy demonstrators with truncheons when opposition parties, yelling ‘free elections,’ defied the government’s ban on protests against President Ilham Aliyev. Mr. Aliyev is one of President Bush’s allies in the war on terror, even though he won a highly suspect election to succeed his father, a former Soviet strongman.”52
Azerbaijan’s human rights record is dismal. “Torture, police abuse, and excessive use of force by security forces are widespread,” according to Human Rights Watch.53 The U.S. State Department, meanwhile, labeled Azerbaijan’s human rights record “poor” and said President Aliyev, the ally of Kissinger, Baker, Cheney, et al., maintained power through an election “that did not meet international standards for a democratic election due to numerous, serious irregularities.”54 The State Department charged that in Azerbaijan there was: “restriction on the right of citizens to peacefully change their government; torture and beating of persons in custody; arbitrary arrest and detention, particularly of political opponents; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; excessive use of force to disperse demonstrations; [and] police impunity.”55 It also determined, “Members of the security forces committed numerous human rights abuses.”56 Even still, the United States has spent millions of dollars to deploy Blackwater in the country with the explicit purpose of bolstering Azerbaijan’s military capabilities, including creating units modeled after the United States most elite Special Forces, the Navy SEALs. As with other convenient allies of the administration, Azerbaijan was valued for its usefulness in securing oil profits and as a potential staging site for future wars. Blackwater’s contract in the country strengthened the U.S. foothold in a region that will only grow in importance to U.S. policy, and the company has publicly advertised its work in Azerbaijan as a model in seeking more business.57 Journalist Tim Shorrock concluded, “Blackwater’s project in Azerbaijan is clear evidence that contractors have crossed the line from pure mercenaries to strategic partners with the military-industrial complex.”58
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BLACKWATER’S MAN IN CHILE
WHILE THE Bush administration struggled and failed to build a “Coalition of the Willing” among nations for its invasion and occupation of Iraq, the private military firms Washington hired to support its Iraq operation recruited aggressively around the globe—often in nations whose military and security forces had horrible human rights records and reputations. Along with the workers from across the developing world—many of whose home countries strongly opposed the war—hired by Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, and other “reconstruction” megafirms, the mercenary companies in Iraq largely made up the “international” or multilateral nature of the occupation. The United States may not have been able to convince many governments to deploy forces in Iraq, but it certainly could entice their citizens with promises of significantly higher wages than they could earn at home. Unlike some other private military firms operating in Iraq—which contracted cheap Iraqi labor to staff security projects—Blackwater was viewed as an elite security company because of its high-profile contract guarding the top U.S. officials and several regional occupation headquarters. But while Blackwater encouraged this view, in both Baghdad and in Washington, of a highly professional all-American company patriotically supporting its nation at war, it quietly began bringing in mercenaries from shady quarters to staff its ever-growing security contracts in Iraq.
U.S. training of foreign forces to support covert operations and overtly repressive policies is hardly a new development, particularly in Latin America. Over its six decades of existence, the U.S. Army School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001) trained more than sixty thousand Latin American soldiers “in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence, and interrogation tactics.”1 According to Amnesty International, the SOA was “notorious for training and educating Latin American military personnel who went on to commit human rights violations in their own countries. . . . The SOA used manuals that advocated torture, extortion, kidnapping and execution.”2 Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the United States also fueled “dirty wars” by covertly arming, funding, and training death squads or repressive militaries to crush popular movements Washington deemed a threat to its interests. The Iraq occupation saw a greatly expanded use and training of foreign forces by the private sector. Latin American countries that had been victims of U.S.-sponsored death squads and repressive policies—and whose populations and governments opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion—became the new training grounds and recruitment centers for mercenaries enlisted in the Iraq War.
Among the largest contingents of non-U.S. soldiers imported to Iraq by Blackwater were former Chilean commandos, some of whom trained or served under the brutal military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The story of how nearly a thousand Chileans made their way to Iraq is in many ways the story of the ex-Chilean Army officer Erik Prince contracted to do Blackwater’s recruiting in Chile: Jose Miguel Pizarro Ovalle.3 Pizarro, a passionate defender of Pinochet, worked as a translator for the U.S. military in Latin America in the 1990s before becoming a liaison between more than a dozen Latin American governments and U.S. weapons manufacturers. When the U.S. invasion of Iraq began in 2003, Pizarro discovered Blackwater USA and almost overnight became a trailblazer in recruiting hundreds of low-cost Latin American mercenaries for it and other private military firms operating in Iraq. “From a Latin-American point of view, my story is not believable,” Pizarro said in a lengthy two-and-a-half-hour interview. “From an American point of view it’s the American story of success.”
Pizarro, who prefers to be called “Mike,” is a dual citizen of Chile and the United States, having been born in 1968 in Los Angeles, where his father worked at Paramount Pictures as an artist, drawing cartoon characters. His father also worked as a driver for UPS, and his mother worked as a teller for Bank of America. Shortly after Socialist presidential candidate Salvador Allende won the presidency in Chile in 1971, becoming the
first democratically elected Marxist head of state in the hemisphere, the Pizarros returned to their native Santiago. Two years later, Allende’s government would be overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup d’etat that brought to power one of the world’s most notorious dictators. To understand the significance of Blackwater recruiting Chilean mercenaries for deployment in Iraq—and enlisting an apologist for Augusto Pinochet as Blackwater’s point man—it is necessary to understand the U.S. government’s role in Chile over the four decades that preceded the 2003 Iraq invasion.
When he launched his campaign for Chile’s presidency, Salvador Allende had been a Chilean senator for twenty-five years; he campaigned with his “Popular Unity” movement on pledges to improve the lives of millions of impoverished Chileans.4 On September 4, 1970, Allende narrowly—but freely and fairly—won a hotly contested presidential race in which right-wing parties, the CIA, and large transnational corporations aggressively backed his opponent. Allende had defied a decade-long “major covert effort,” in the words of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to “reduce chances of Chile being the first American country to elect an avowed Marxist president.” 5 Allende’s victory, a historic moment in Latin American politics, alarmed the Washington power structure and large U.S. corporations like PepsiCo, Anaconda Copper, and ITT, which had backed Allende’s opponent. The Nixon White House immediately undertook a two-track covert plan to prevent Allende from being inaugurated or to overthrow his government if it took power.6
The Chilean Congress, however, overwhelmingly ratified Allende as president, and the Socialist leader moved quickly to implement his program, known as “La vía Chilena al socialismo” (“the Chilean Way to Socialism”). This included nationalization of large industries, the implementation of government-run healthcare and educational systems, land redistribution, literacy campaigns, and free milk programs for children. Allende reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba in defiance of Washington and was close to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who spent a month in Allende’s Chile.
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