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

by Jeremy Scahill

  In Florida, Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, Scott’s mom, had all sorts of questions running through her head. Finally, she decided to call Erik Prince directly. She said it was surprisingly easy to get him on the phone. “I said, ‘I want an incident report on Scotty.’ And I said, ‘I want a copy of his contract that he signed with you,’” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘I just want to know what happened.’ He said he would get it to me in the next few weeks. And I said, ‘Well, you’ve already written a report. Why can’t I have it tomorrow?’ And I said, ‘Are you going to rewrite it for my eyes only?’” She said she “never did get that report. I did get a call a few days later, and [Blackwater] all of a sudden [was] going to have this grand memorial.”

  Indeed, a memorial was scheduled for mid-October 2004 at the Blackwater compound in North Carolina. But a week before the memorial, Blackwater held a different kind of ceremony—to inaugurate a new plant to manufacture military practice targets. Company president Gary Jackson beamed with pride as he discussed Blackwater’s rapid expansion. “The numbers are actually staggering. In the last eighteen months we’ve had over 600 percent growth,” Jackson said, adding that Blackwater’s workforce in North Carolina would soon double.33 The company, he said, had also opened offices in Baghdad and Jordan. “This is a billion-dollar industry,” Jackson said of the target business. “And Blackwater has only scratched the surface of it.”34 The Associated Press noted, “Gov. Mike Easley said having the global security company headquartered in North Carolina is fitting for what he called the most military-friendly state in the country.”35

  A few days later, on October 17, the company flew most of the families of the Fallujah contractors to North Carolina, where Prince was to dedicate the company’s memorial to the men killed in action.36 In addition to the relatives of those men, there were three other families of Blackwater contractors who also had died in the line of duty.37 The company put the families up in a hotel, and gift baskets of cheese and crackers were waiting in the rooms when they arrived. Danica Zovko said that from the moment they got to North Carolina, “It just felt uncomfortable. It’s like sometimes somebody is watching you and you feel it but you don’t know who it is. That’s what it felt like. Stiff. You couldn’t relax.” She said that each family member was assigned a Blackwater minder that escorted them everywhere and was present for all conversations, sometimes changing the subject if the conversation moved onto one topic in particular: Both Zovko and Katy Helvenston-Wettengel said they had the distinct feeling that the company was trying to keep the families from talking with one another about the details of the Fallujah incident.

  The memorial was held, trees were planted, small headstones with the men’s names on them were laid in the ground around a pond on the company property. On October 18, the Zovkos said they were told there would be a meeting where they could ask questions about the Fallujah incident. “We assumed that everyone else was going to go to the meeting,” Danica Zovko said. In the end, only she, her husband, Jozo, and their son, Tom, attended. “There was alcohol served at the luncheon [for the families] beforehand, so maybe people were too tired or they were taken for sight-seeing,” she recalled. “Blackwater was very keen on showing everyone the compound, their training center.” The Zovkos were escorted to a company building, and when they walked in, they saw two large flags, one of which bore the names of Jerry and his three colleagues. A company representative, they said, told them the flag was made by Blackwater staffers in Iraq.

  The Zovkos said they were taken to a meeting room on the second floor, where they were seated at a large twenty-person conference table. Erik Prince was not in the room. At the head of the table, remembered Danica, was a young blonde-haired woman named Anne. A Blackwater executive, Mike Rush, was there, too, as was a gray-haired man introduced to the family as “the fastest gun in Iraq”—a man who they were told had just returned to the United States to “get divorced and sell his house” before heading back to Iraq. None of them, she recalled, said they knew Jerry. “The only person from Blackwater that admitted knowing my Jerry was Erik Prince,” she said.

  Danica said she began by asking for her son’s missing belongings. She was told that he had taken them all with him to Fallujah that day and that they were destroyed. Eventually, the Zovkos began asking questions about the incident itself. “Annie [the Blackwater representative] did not even sit down at that point because I was asking for the contracts, asking at exactly what time my son had died. I was asking how he died. I was asking for his personal things,” Danica said. “The tempers were not calm anymore. I mean, it’s civilized, but it’s not nice. You know, it’s to where you see that they’re not telling you what you want to know and they’re not happy with what you’re asking. So Annie actually stood up from her chair—she was at the head of the table, sitting all by herself. These other people were all sitting across from us. She was on the right-hand side of me at the head of the table. She stood up and said that was confidential and if we wanted to know those things, we’d need to sue them.” Danica Zovko said, “I told them that’s what we would do.” At the time, Zovko did not know what that even meant, but she was now convinced that Blackwater was hiding something—something serious about her son’s death.

  Two weeks later, George W. Bush claimed victory in the 2004 presidential election. Blackwater executives, led by Prince, had poured money into Bush and Republican Party coffers and clearly viewed the reelection as great for business and necessary for the unprecedented expansion of the mercenary industry. On November 8, Gary Jackson sent out a celebratory mass e-mail with a screaming banner headline: “BUSH WINS FOUR MORE YEARS!! HOOYAH!!”38 The U.S. military had just launched the second major siege of Fallujah, bombing the city and engaging in violent house-to-house combat. Hundreds more Iraqis were killed, thousands more forced from their homes, as the national resistance against the occupation grew stronger and wider. Despite the fierce attacks on the city, the killers of the Blackwater men were not apprehended.39 On November 14, the Marines symbolically reopened the infamous bridge running over the Euphrates in Fallujah. It was then that the Marines wrote in black bold letters: “This is for the Americans of Blackwater that were murdered here in 2004, Semper Fidelis P.S. Fuck You.”40 Gary Jackson posted a link to the photo on Blackwater’s Web site, saying, “OOHRAH . . . this picture is worth more than they know.”41 The families of the dead men, though, found little solace in revenge attacks or sloganeering.

  When Katy Helvenston-Wettengel started complaining about Blackwater’s conduct and lack of transparency about the Fallujah ambush, Scott’s godfather, Circuit Judge William Levens, put her in touch with a lawyer who, he said, would help her seek answers. Eventually, a friend of Scott’s, another Blackwater contractor who had been overseas with him, brought the case to the attention of the successful Santa Ana, California, law firm Callahan & Blaine, whose owner, Daniel Callahan, was fresh off a record-setting $934 million jury decision in a corporate fraud case.42 Callahan jumped at the case. In North Carolina, Callahan enlisted the local help of another well-known lawyer, David Kirby—the former law partner of 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards. The new legal team began compiling evidence, talking to other Blackwater contractors, scouring news reports for every detail about the ambush, watching the precious few moments of the scene captured by insurgent video and news cameras. They got a hold of the Blackwater contracts the men were working under and also some contracts between Blackwater and its business partners in the Middle East. It took only a matter of weeks before they felt they had enough of a case to take action.

  On January 5, 2005, the families of Scott Helvenston, Jerry Zovko, Wes Batalona, and Mike Teague filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater in Superior Court in Wake County, North Carolina. “What we have right now is something worse than the wild, wild west going on in Iraq,” said Dan Callahan. “Blackwater is able to operate over there in Iraq free from any oversight that would typically exist in a civili
zed society. As we expose Blackwater in this case, it will also expose the inefficient and corrupt system that exists over there.”43 The suit alleged that the men “would be alive today” had Blackwater not sent them unprepared on that fateful mission. 44 “The fact that these four Americans found themselves located in the high-risk, war-torn City of Fallujah without armored vehicles, automatic weapons, and fewer than the minimum number of team members was no accident,” the suit alleged. “Instead, this team was sent out without the required equipment and personnel by those in charge at Blackwater.”45

  After the suit was filed, the families felt empowered to begin publicly voicing their anger at the company. “Blackwater sent my son and the other three into Fallujah knowing that there was a very good possibility this could happen,” charged Katy Helvenston-Wettengel. “Iraqis physically did it, and it doesn’t get any more horrible than what they did to my son, does it? But I hold Blackwater responsible one thousand percent.”

  At first glance, the lawsuit may have seemed like a stretch. After all, the four Blackwater contractors were essentially mercenaries. All willingly went to Iraq, where they would be well paid, knowing that there was a solid chance they could be killed or maimed. In fact, it was all laid out very plainly in their contract with Blackwater in macabre detail. It warned that the men risked “being shot, permanently maimed and/or killed by a firearm or munitions, falling aircraft or helicopters, sniper fire, land mine, artillery fire, rocket-propelled grenade, truck or car bomb, earthquake or other natural disaster, poisoning, civil uprising, terrorist activity, hand-to-hand combat, disease, poisoning, etc., killed or maimed while a passenger in a helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft, suffering hearing loss, eye injury or loss; inhalation or contact with biological or chemical contaminants (whether airborne or not) and or flying debris, etc.”46 In filing its motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Blackwater quoted from its standard contract, insisting that those who signed it “fully appreciate[d] the dangers and voluntarily assume[d] these risks as well as any other risks in any way (whether directly or indirectly) connected to the Engagement.”47

  Callahan and his legal team did not deny that the men were aware of the risks they were taking, but they charged that Blackwater knowingly refused to provide guaranteed safeguards, among them: they would have armored vehicles; there would be three men in each vehicle (a driver, a navigator, and a rear gunner); and the rear gunner would be armed with a heavy automatic weapon, such as a SAW Mach 46, which can fire up to 850 rounds per minute, allowing the gunner to fight off any attacks from the rear.48 “None of that was true,” said Callahan. Instead, each vehicle had only two men and allegedly had far less powerful Mach 4 guns, which they had not even had a chance to test out.49 “Without the big gun, without the third man, without the armored vehicle, they were sitting ducks,” said Callahan.50

  Contract Disputes

  The contract the four men were working on the day they were killed in Fallujah was a newly brokered one between Blackwater and the Cypriot-registered company Eurest Support Services (ESS), a division of the British firm Compass Group. As previously discussed, Blackwater had teamed up with a Kuwaiti business called Regency Hotel and Hospital Company, and together the firms had won the job of guarding convoys transporting kitchen equipment to the U.S. military. Blackwater and Regency had essentially won the ESS contract over another security firm, Control Risks Group, and the lawsuit alleged Blackwater was eager to win more lucrative contracts from ESS in its other division servicing construction projects in Iraq.51 “The ill-fated March 31, 2004 mission was an attempt by Blackwater to prove to ESS that it could deliver the security detail ahead of schedule, even though the necessary vehicles, equipment and support logistics were not in place,” the suit alleged.52

  Like many of the operations of private contractors in Iraq, the mission the four Blackwater men were on that day in Fallujah was shrouded in layers of subcontracts. In fact, determining whom they were ultimately working for remained a source of contention years after the ambush. Initially, it seemed as though the men were operating under ESS’s subcontract with Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which was reported to be billing the federal government for Blackwater’s security services.53 In the primary contract between Blackwater /Regency and ESS, ESS reserved “the right to terminate this Agreement or any portion hereof, upon thirty (30) days prior written notice in the event that ESS’s is given written notice by Kellogg, Brown & Root of cancellation of ESS’s contracts, for any reason, or in the event that ESS receives written notice from Kellogg, Brown & Root that ESS is no longer allowed to use any private form of private security services [sic].”54 After the Fallujah ambush, KBR/Halliburton would not confirm any relationship with ESS, despite the clear reference to KBR in the contract.

  The story became even more complicated in July 2006, when the Secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey, wrote a letter to Republican Congressman Christopher Shays of the House Committee on Government Reform, stating, “Based on information provided to the Army by Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), KBR has never directly hired a private security contractor in support of the execution of a statement of work under any LOGCAP III Task Order. Additionally, KBR has queried ESS and they are unaware of any services under the LOGCAP contract that were provided by Blackwater USA . . . the U.S. military provides all armed force protection for KBR unless otherwise directed.”55 Harvey wrote that the theater commander had not “authorized KBR or any LOGCAP subcontractor to carry weapons. KBR has stated they have no knowledge of any subcontractor utilizing private armed security under the LOGCAP contract.”56 Testifying in front of the House Committee on Government Reform in September 2006, Tina Ballard, an undersecretary of the Army, said it was the Army’s contention that Blackwater provided no services to KBR.57

  For its part, KBR told the producers of PBS’s Frontline program, “[W]e can tell you that it is KBR’s position that any efforts being undertaken by [ESS or Blackwater] when the March 31, 2004, attack occurred were not in support of KBR or its work in Iraq . . . this was not a KBR-directed mission.”58 KBR also said it was not responsible for supplying kitchen equipment to Camp Ridgeway, the Blackwater contractors’ ultimate destination when they were killed in Fallujah.59 KBR’s assertions had to be viewed in the context of what the Pentagon’s own auditors found regarding the company’s practices in Iraq. “KBR routinely marks almost all of the information it provides to the government as KBR proprietary data . . . [which] is an abuse of [Federal Acquisition Regulations] procedures, inhibits transparency of government activities and the use of taxpayer funds,” according to an October 2006 report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.60 “In effect, KBR has turned FAR provisions . . . into a mechanism to prevent the government from releasing normally transparent information, thus potentially hindering competition and oversight.”61 In Iraq, Halliburton/KBR has been secretive to the point of not naming its subcontractors.62 “All information available to KBR confirms that Blackwater’s work for ESS was not in support of KBR and not under a KBR subcontract,” said Halliburton spokesperson Melissa Norcross in December 2006. “Blackwater provided services for the Middle East Regional Office of KBR. This office is not associated with any government contract. . . . These services were provided outside of the Green Zone and were not directly billed to any government contract.”63 This all raised crucial questions: Whom was Blackwater ultimately working for when it sent those four men on that fateful Fallujah mission? And what was that mission’s official, documented connection to the U.S. military?

  These were questions California Representative Henry Waxman, Congress’s lead investigator, had been looking into since November 2004, when reports first emerged on the layers of subcontracts involved with the Fallujah mission. On December 7, 2006, the story took yet another twist when Waxman revealed that he had obtained a November 30, 2006, legal memo from Compass Group, ESS’s British parent company, that asserted ESS had a subcontract under Halliburton’s LOGCAP contract and used Blackwater “to prov
ide security services” under that subcontract.64 “If the ESS memo is accurate, it appears that Halliburton entered into a subcontracting arrangement that is expressly prohibited by the contract itself,” Waxman asserted in a letter to Rumsfeld, adding that the memo appeared to contradict what Army Secretary Harvey had presented in his July 2006 letter, as well as Undersecretary Ballard’s subsequent sworn testimony. The memo also appeared to introduce another major war contractor into the mix. “The ESS memo also discloses that Blackwater was operating under a subcontract with [KBR competitor] Fluor when four Blackwater employees were killed in Fallujah in March 2004,” according to Waxman. He charged that Blackwater appeared to be “providing security services under the LOGCAP contract in violation of the terms of the contract and without the knowledge or approval of the Pentagon.”65

  Finally, in early February 2007, Waxman was able to get the answer to the question he had been asking for nearly three years. Following the Democrats’ victory in the 2006 Congressional elections, Waxman became chair of the powerful Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and moved swiftly to hold a hearing on the ambush. What the public learned the day of that hearing was that the contract under which the Blackwater men killed in Fallujah were operating was indeed traceable to the largest war contractor in Iraq, KBR.

  This was a complete about-face that contradicted many previous claims, including denials from KBR and the military that any such connection existed. Tina Ballard, the Army’s head contracting officer, had assured the same committee six months earlier that Blackwater had not been hired under a KBR subcontract.