The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan transformed the American way of war. Many of the changes were technological: The proliferation of robotic systems, digital communications, and high-end surveillance equipment gave military commanders an extremely fine-grained picture of the battlefield. Advances in battlefield medicine and protective gear made the individual soldier much more likely to survive contact with the enemy. The pairing of new precision weapons with twenty-first-century command and control gave the U.S. military unprecedented reach, lethality, and accuracy. But another, equally potent transformation was also under way: the privatization of armed force. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were accompanied by a phenomenal expansion of government outsourcing.
By the summer of 2008, the number of civilian contractors supporting U.S. military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans matched the number of deployed troops one to one. In Iraq, the contracted workforce at its peak was 190,000, roughly equal to the total number of uniformed personnel.1 In Afghanistan, contractors also outnumbered troops: By December 2009, the number of Defense Department contractors in the country had reached 104,100, greater than the total number of U.S. troops (98,000) that were expected to be in the country after new reinforcements arrived.2
The phenomenal rise of battlefield contracting completely changed the incentives for serving the government overseas. It created a perception that money came first and service second. But without the contracted workforce, the U.S. military could not stay on an expeditionary footing. Contractors serviced and maintained sophisticated military equipment; ran city-sized forward operating bases and airstrips; supervised an army of imported laborers who worked in dining facilities, cleaned latrines, and delivered fuel; and provided intelligence support, translation services, and myriad other services. Manpower was needed for nation building, too, but when a U.S. citizen could earn a six-figure salary working as a contractor, why would she take a pay cut to serve as a temporary government bureaucrat seconded to the State Department or USAID? If the government needed a civilian nation-building corps, it was competing with private companies for talent.
The business of diplomatic protection was the starkest example of this manpower crisis. The State Department did have a small cadre of diplomatic security officers who provided protective services to ambassadors and other VIPs. They specialized in what was called “close protection,” or personal security details—PSDs, to use the inevitable acronym. Personal security work was essentially VIP protection, guarding a “principal,” and it implied that some lives were worth more than others. It required a different mind-set than soldiering. When an infantry team hits an ambush, soldiers are taught to respond, return fire, and then counterattack. But in close protection, the idea is to get the principal “off the X”—away from the point of contact. If a PSD doesn’t provide the principal with a cover and evacuation force, they are potentially leaving the principal in the open to get shot.
With more diplomats and Foreign Service types working in harm’s way on nation-building missions, however, there were simply not enough PSDs to keep up with the new demand. The government turned to the private sector, creating a new boom market for bodyguards. This army of private soldiers became one of the most problematic aspects of the American experiment in nation building.
“What’s your blood type?”
It was an unusual question for a driver to ask when picking up a passenger at the airport. But this was not your ordinary car service: We were about to make the drive between Baghdad International Airport and downtown Baghdad, a dozen kilometers away. “Route Irish,” as the military designated the Baghdad airport road, was a magnet for suicide car bombers and rocket-propelled grenade teams. By December 2005, when I touched down at Baghdad airport, stories about the world’s most dangerous road were already journalistic cliché. U.S. and Iraqi troops had in fact stepped up patrols along Route Irish, but the journey to the center of Baghdad was still a white-knuckle ride.
I was in Iraq as a guest of Erinys, a British security firm. Expert, a Russian newsmagazine, had sent me on assignment to tag along with Erinys’s “Russians,” a group of professional soldiers from the former Soviet Union. Though most of the company’s expatriate management was British, North American, or South African, they also employed a handful of Slavs: The team meeting me at the airport was composed of Russians and Ukrainians, and their team leader was a former French soldier. It was a reminder of how much the United States relied on a multinational army of hired help to keep the occupation functioning. I had flown into Iraq on a Royal Jordanian flight crewed by South Africans, disembarked under the gaze of an armed Fijian employed by a company called Global Strategies Group, and queued for a visa with guest workers from South Asia.
We entered the underground parking garage at the airport, where the gun trucks of different security firms were idling before making the next dash down Route Irish. The place fairly reeked of testosterone. As we suited up in body armor and helmets for the ride into town, the competing teams sized each other up. It was easy to spot the road warriors with the U.S. firm Blackwater, who were mounting up in their South Africa–built Mamba mine-proof vehicles. They cultivated a look of deliberate menace, favoring Terminator-style wraparound shades, goatees, and lots of tattoos. Another protective team in the garage sported Mohawks. Erinys had a spiffier, more corporate image. Its contractors wore blue polo shirts and khaki trousers, though they were unmistakably well armed. It was easy to detect a sort of hierarchy here. At the top, U.S. Special Operations veterans could command salaries of up to a thousand dollars a day to guard diplomats and VIPs. Further down the chain, veterans of cash-strapped former Soviet armies earned two hundred dollars a day or less to ferry around civilian engineers and guard supply convoys. At the bottom of the pay scale, Ugandan soldiers earned a thousand dollars a month to guard dining halls. (Security was particularly tight at military dining facilities after a suicide bomber struck one at Forward Operating Base Marez near Mosul in late 2004.)
Today’s mission was fairly straightforward: to deliver the new arrivals from the airport to the company’s headquarters just outside the International Zone. As the convoy of armored trucks rumbled past the outer perimeter of the airport, the contractors racked back the slides on their Kalashnikov rifles: We were entering the Red Zone (in military protocol, a “red” weapon has a round in the chamber and is ready to fire). Out on the Baghdad airport road they would have to be on maximum alert, watching in all directions for any potential attacker. As they hurtled along at high speed, the lead driver called out possible threats on the radio: a car rolling up on an access road, a taxicab that was slow to pull over to the right, an oncoming highway overpass (bridges and overpasses were a favorite ambush spot). As the three-vehicle convoy blew through traffic, I could see the turret gunner in the lead truck scanning the traffic with his rifle. The contractors stopped only for coalition checkpoints, which they flashed through after showing a vehicle pass.
Night was falling, and a fine cloud of dust further obscured visibility on the highway. Did that scrap of trash on the side of the road conceal a roadside bomb? Was that taxicab tilting on its suspension because of a heavy suitcase, or a bomb in the trunk? Was that man watching the traffic from a plastic chair acting as a spotter for insurgents, or was he just bored and unemployed?
The convoy finally exited the highway and entered a traffic roundabout that led to a residential neighborhood. This was Mansour, an upscale residential neighborhood of Baghdad not far from the International Zone. Baghdad in late 2005 was the scene of a brewing sectarian war, and the entrances to streets were barricaded by concrete barriers. High blast walls pasted with posters from the recent general election shielded many of the houses. Our convoy pulled into a side street barricaded with more concrete and razor wire. Iraqi guards with Kalashnikovs pulled aside a traffic barrier, and we rolled into Erinys headquarters, a couple of villas fortified by blast walls plus an assortment of trailers.
After I stowed my gear in a trailer, the tattooed former British soldier who was a manager for the firm gave me a short tour of the compound. Erinys contractors’ stay in Baghdad was an all-inclusive deal: The company provided all the necessities—weapons, body armor, tactical gear, polo shirts. A small canteen provided three meals a day, usually sandwiches or burgers for lunch, and rice and kebabs for dinner. Accommodations were basic. Some staff lived in the trailers parked outside, and the Russian team bunked in a couple of small rooms inside the main house, where they shared a single desktop computer for e-mailing friends and family, and had a satellite television with a subscription to Russian channels. The atmosphere was sober. After a mission, they could lift weights outside, chat online, or clean their weapons. On Thursday nights there was a barbecue. In Iraq, the mission roster was usually pretty light on Fridays. Alcohol was available: Unlike U.S. troops, who were under General Order No. 1, which prohibits alcohol consumption, contractors could unwind over beers. But the Slavs, playing against type, did not indulge. They told me they needed to stay sharp on the road.
The manager then escorted me to the roof of the villa. From the top floor we had a spectacular panorama of Baghdad by night, and a commanding view of the surrounding streets. Aside from the unsettling sight of some tracers arcing in the distance, it was almost pleasant in the cool evening breeze. But my companion had not brought me up here to appreciate the view. “If we get attacked, we need you to get up here as fast as you can,” he told me.
The roof of the villa was sandbagged, an Alamo in the event of an attack. My companion then pointed out the main approaches to the neighborhood, with a traffic roundabout here, a checkpoint there, and then another fortified compound that belonged to an Iraqi politician. “The good news is,” he said, “they’ll have to get through two firefights to get here.”
But he was getting around to another point. “I want you to carry a weapon.” I hesitated, but only for a second: I was here as an observer, not as a participant, and the only thing I was planning on shooting were pictures. In the Red Zone, the contractors were on their own. In theory, if they came under attack they could call for backup from the military. In practice, they weren’t counting on a quick reaction force to save them. The company armorer issued me a 9mm pistol, two magazines of ammo, and a holster. For good measure, he put a Kalashnikov rifle in my trailer. If the place did come under attack, I was expected to pitch in.
If you needed a journalist to help out in a firefight, then you were probably already done for. But the contractors were mindful of incidents like the ambush of a KBR supply convoy in April 2004, in which half a dozen unarmed civilian truckers were killed, along with two Army soldiers who were escorting their convoy. It later emerged that the convoy drove down a road that was supposed to be off limits, but an officer who was supposed to send an e-mail about the no-go route inadvertently sent the memo to himself.3 Also in April 2004, four Blackwater guards blundered into an ambush in Fallujah. The mutilated and burned bodies of two of them were strung up from a bridge, an image that blanketed international news channels.
The situation also underscored the lawlessness of Iraq. Erinys contractors were contractually limited to defensive work. Under guidelines issued by the coalition, they were not allowed to participate in offensive combat operations. They could use force to protect their clients, defend installations and equipment, and protect themselves.* Multi-National Force Iraq was supposed to issue weapons cards authorizing contractors to carry certain light weapons, but the guidelines also made it clear that they were not combatants. It was an important legal distinction for the military, which wanted to ensure that civilian contractors didn’t cross the line into being active combatants. In mid-2005, the Defense Department had quietly revised the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, or DFARS, to underscore the rules governing contractors who deployed with or supported the U.S. military overseas. According to a notice issued by the Defense Department, DFARS “has been amended to caution that contractor personnel are not combatants and shall not undertake any role that would jeopardize that status.”
The careful bureaucratic language could not change a simple fact: Contractors in Iraq fell into a legal gray area. They carried weapons and worked on behalf of the U.S. government (in the case of Erinys, their main client was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Gulf Region District), although they wore no uniforms and did not report to the military chain of command.
Sending diplomats and aid experts to rebuild Iraq sounded like a good idea: Civilians had the kind of expertise in governance, state building, and development that few soldiers had. But the State Department and other civilian agencies were even less prepared than the conventionally trained U.S. military for the kind of hit-and-run warfare they faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor had the State Department originally planned that its embassies would become fortresses.
At the height of the Cold War, U.S. diplomatic missions were designed around a single architectural principle: openness. The United States was locked in an ideological struggle with the Soviet Union, and its embassies were supposed to convey a message of progress, innovation, and accessibility. After the Second World War, the State Department was able to tap foreign credits from Lend-Lease settlements and postwar reconstruction funds to pay for new embassies, consular offices, and cultural centers. According to Jane Loeffler, a historian of U.S. diplomatic architecture, this novel financing arrangement allowed the State Department to fund new embassies with minimal congressional interference and to commission designs that celebrated transparency and modernity.4
These new embassy buildings, Loeffler writes,
became symbols of the United States and its desire to be perceived as an energetic and future-oriented nation. Thus the buildings themselves served as cultural advertisements, propaganda perhaps, but nothing less than reflection of architectural theory married to political necessity. Not surprisingly, the symbols themselves were ambiguous—at once elegant and refined, decorative and flamboyant. Though often concealed behind wood, metal, or masonry screens, the buildings called attention to themselves with the openness of their glass walls, their overall accessibility, and their conspicuous newness.5
The violent, tumultuous 1960s and 1970s forced something of a rethink in U.S. embassy design. The Viet Cong assault on the fortresslike U.S. embassy compound in Saigon during the 1968 Tet Offensive was a tactical failure, but it had a profound symbolic effect. Images of the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975 and the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 further underscored the vulnerability of U.S. diplomatic missions overseas. The decisive shift away from open embassy design occurred in the aftermath of the suicide bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983, an incident that claimed the lives of seventeen Americans and thirty-four Lebanese employees and decimated the CIA’s Middle East operation, which was based out of the compound.
In the wake of the bombing, Secretary of State George Shultz appointed a retired admiral, Bobby Inman, to head an advisory panel on diplomatic security. His report, which came out in 1985, identified vulnerable facilities overseas, and it recommended stringent new building standards for U.S. embassies.* No more sleek, smoked-glass facades: Buildings would have blast-proof walls and windows and would be surrounded by high walls, security cameras, and monitors. The panel recommended that the State Department embark on a long-term plan to renovate or replace office buildings at 126 overseas posts in order to reduce their vulnerability to attack. Instead of the open plan, embassies would have to be designed around a new principle: “setback.” New embassy compounds would have layered defenses. They would be built at least one hundred feet from the street, have a more forbidding outer perimeter, and be far less accessible.6 And they would no longer be situated in busy downtown areas and open to visitors, which would make the job of public diplomacy much harder. The embassy and its inhabitants would become more isolated from the world outside.
Equally important, the Inman report called for creation of a Bureau of Diplomatic Security. The bureau was given a wide remit: issue security clearances for diplomatic personnel; conduct background checks; investigate passport and visa fraud; and supervise the security of diplomatic and consular offices. It was also to provide bodyguard details for the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and foreign VIPs visiting the United States. Diplomatic Security special agents are federal law enforcement officers. In the United States, they help guard foreign embassies and consulates. Overseas, they serve as regional security officers responsible for embassy security and the safety of diplomatic personnel.
The bureau, however, was not equipped to handle a massive nation-building enterprise. The Inman panel originally recommended a force of 1,156 special agents, hardly enough to take on the full range of missions at the time. (Two decades later, the bureau had grown to about 1,450 special agents.) In the mid-1990s, the bureau began quietly augmenting its force with contracted personal security specialists, first hiring contractors to provide security in Haiti, then deploying them to the Balkans, Gaza, and the West Bank. The State Department also contracted DynCorp to provide personal security details to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan in 2002.7
The invasion of Iraq and the deployment of diplomats and civilians to work in reconstruction projects created an explosion in demand for contracted security. The Coalition Provisional Authority was a major customer for private guards. It hired a previously obscure company called Blackwater to provide a high-end protective detail for Ambassador Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Gulf Region District, which oversaw massive infrastructure projects in Iraq, also hired its own army of private security operators to ferry its engineers and specialists around the country. Through the Corps, the military even hired a contractor to oversee the other contractors. With so many private security convoys operating on the roads, competing firms needed to find a way to share intelligence about threat conditions: routes that were safest to travel, places where roadside bomb attacks and ambushes were taking place, no-go areas where coalition forces were conducting combat operations. They also needed to reduce the risk of shooting at each other or being shot at by coalition forces. Well-armed private security details often traveled in unmarked vehicles. They were easy to mistake for insurgents, and on more than a few occasions, private security details and military forces mistakenly shot at each other (something euphemistically referred to as “blue-on-white” incidents, a reference to friendly, or “blue” forces, and contractors, referred to in military shorthand as “white” forces).8
In May 2004, the British security firm Aegis Defence Services Ltd. won the first Reconstruction Security Support Services contract to build the Reconstruction Operations Center as a hub to oversee a network of reconstruction projects. The ROC was supposed to serve as an interface between uniformed troops and private security. It tracked contractor vehicles with transponders and distributed sanitized military intelligence such as the grid coordinates of recent roadside bomb attacks and information on threat levels. It was also supposed to introduce some kind of accountability and oversight. Security operators were supposed to file route plans and report weapons discharges. The system evolved into a network of six regional ROCs as well as a national intelligence center in Baghdad. The company subsequently won two extensions to a contract initially worth $293 million, and the ROC contract effectively put Aegis on the map.
Iraq in 2003 and 2004 was a Klondike for security firms. Previously unknown firms such as Custer Battles, a start-up founded by two former Army Rangers, scored multi-million-dollar awards to provide security in the chaotic postwar environment. As the Wall Street Journal reported, no banks would lend new firms money, so the Coalition Provisional Authority had to lend Custer Battles $2 million. It arrived in the form of $100 bills that one of the company founders had to stow in a duffel bag and deposit in a Lebanese bank.9 What private security providers called the “Baghdad bubble” created enormous new opportunities in a relative niche market for high-end security services. In early 2003, before the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime, ArmorGroup had conducted a survey of the total global market for “high-end” protective security (bodyguard services for government clients in war zones and other high-threat areas). They estimated a total global market of $900 million per year. In 2007 the company repeated the survey. The estimated value of the security market had risen to $2.5 billion.*
Before Iraq, low-key British firms such as Control Risks and Global, companies often staffed by former commandos from British and Commonwealth armies, dominated the private security field, providing bodyguard services, security consulting for high-risk regions, and occasionally kidnap-and-ransom negotiation services. But with the American government now the biggest customer in Iraq, there were glowing prospects for U.S. firms—especially when they could recruit U.S. citizens with security clearances.
The biggest players in this new market were three U.S. firms: Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and DynCorp. In early 2004, as the Coalition Provisional Authority prepared to hand over power to a provisional Iraqi government, the State Department issued additional task orders to its Worldwide Personal Protective Services contract to hire additional contracted security for the planned opening of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on July 1, 2004. DynCorp was unable to meet the rush requirements for additional guards and personnel, so the State Department signed a second contract, with Blackwater.10 Meanwhile, Triple Canopy won a key contract to provide protective services for the Regional Embassy Office in Basra.11 In July 2005, the State Department formalized the arrangement, selecting the three U.S. security firms to compete for task orders under the new Worldwide Personal Protective Services (WPPS) II contract, a program worth a potential $1.2 billion to each contractor over five years to provide protective services to U.S. diplomatic personnel in war zones. WPPS II task orders included missions in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, and Israel. The private guard force would help protect a gargantuan new embassy rising on the Tigris River, a billion-dollar complex the size of Vatican City that would house a thousand diplomats.12
The new U.S. Embassy Baghdad was the logical culmination of the Inman standards. Many details of the design remained classified, but a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report in 2006 offered some hints of the scale of the project, and the degree to which this giant fortress would isolate U.S. diplomats from the Red Zone of Baghdad. The building would be “hardened” (reinforced to withstand rocket and mortar attacks); self-sufficient (it would have its own generating station, wells, and wastewater treatment facilities); and it would have extraordinary “setback” (the walled perimeter would be ringed with multiple layers of defense, plus an emergency entrance-exit). Loeffler, the historian of U.S. diplomatic architecture, describes it as a modern-day fortress. “Encircled by blast walls and cut off from the rest of Baghdad, it stands out like the crusader castles that once dotted the landscape of the Middle East.”13
The presence of contractors presented a major headache for military commanders, who were wary of hired guns moving around in “their” battlespace. The U.S. military likes to maintain a monopoly on lethal force wherever it operates, and the heavily armed contractor convoys were not under their direct control. Revisions to defense contracting regulations were supposed to tighten oversight of the army of contractors to make sure they complied with both local and U.S. laws, including the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, or MEJA, which theoretically allowed for prosecution under local laws of private contractors employed by the military in foreign countries. But they did not resolve the question of who, ultimately, had legal jurisdiction and control over contractors in Iraq.
I accompanied an Erinys team on a trip to Camp Taji, a sprawling U.S. military installation north of Baghdad that had once been a base for a Republican Guard tank division. The U.S. government had invested a serious amount of money in base infrastructure, and the day’s mission was to pick up a “client,” an engineer working on a construction project at Taji, and deliver him safely to the Green Zone. The trip to Taji from downtown Baghdad should have been a half-hour trip, but driving on Iraqi roads was a risky affair. Insurgents were designing increasingly lethal roadside bombs, and the contractors were particularly worried about a new threat, the “explosively formed projectile,” or EFP.
Unlike typical roadside bombs, made of an artillery shell buried beneath a road or concealed in some trash, an EFP was what some militaries called an “off-route mine,” because it was placed beside a road. An EEP was fabricated out of metal pipe and packed with a high-explosive charge; the business end was sealed with a concave plate, or liner. When the charge went off, the force of the blast turned the liner into a slug of molten metal that could slice through the door of an armored vehicle at supersonic speed. The EFPs were often tripped by passive infrared sensors. When the beam was broken, the bomb went off.
The trip to Taji took an anxious two hours because of an emergency detour. “That road is incredibly dangerous—it’s perfect for setting up an ambush,” said one of the Russians. “The Americans and the Iraqis patrol Route Irish [the Baghdad Airport road] all the time, but on that road, you hardly see any patrols. By the end of the day, you’re totally wound up.”
Driving through downtown Baghdad was a nightmare for ordinary Iraqis as well. Contractor SUV motorcades drove aggressively, turning on sirens to force other drivers to the side of the road. Get too close, and you might get a warning shot. But there was a reason for the “tactical driving”: If you didn’t keep moving, you became a target. So when one of the armored SUVs in the Erinys convoy got stuck traversing a low concrete barrier, the shooters jumped out of the trucks to form a hasty roadblock, their rifles at the ready. One of the bodyguards, a lanky Ukrainian, stepped out to halt oncoming traffic. At least 6 feet 5, wearing full body armor and wraparound shades, he didn’t need to point his weapon. He stood with his left hand raised, and the Iraqi drivers quickly stopped.
Fortunately, an Iraqi National Guard patrol was nearby. They quickly blocked all the civilian traffic merging from an access road and pulled around their truck, attached a chain, and towed the SUV free. The team members exchanged parting handshakes, boarded their vehicles, and turned back down the access road. We had to make a U-turn and reverse course through central Baghdad. As we sped away, I looked at the faces of the drivers in the opposite lane, where traffic was now backed up all the way to the next intersection; it was easy to see why Iraqis resented the contractors.
The military didn’t like the contractors, either, at least not the armed ones. Colonel Peter Mansoor, an Iraq veteran and a member of the Petraeus brain trust, explained the dilemma to me at Fort Leavenworth in the fall of 2006: Logistics contractors like KBR fit neatly in the military chain of command. But the security firms “could not be controlled. They work for whoever hires them, they work under different rules of engagement than the military, they don’t always have the same communications capabilities. They don’t always have robust access to quick reaction forces—reinforcements—if they get into trouble.”
Part of the problem, military officers realized, was that bodyguards’ primary mission was to protect diplomats, civilian reconstruction experts, and other VIPs. They could be very good at their jobs, but at the expense of the larger nation-building mission. “Their limited role to protect the client may conflict with the overall mission, which is counterinsurgency,” Mansoor said. “And if they push traffic off the roads or if they shoot up a car that looks suspicious—whatever it may be, they may be operating within their contract—[it’s] to the detriment of the mission, which is to bring the people over to your side. I would much rather see basically all armed entities in a counterinsurgency operation fall under a military chain of command.”
Members of the uniformed military could be held accountable for their actions: They were subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If they used excessive or indiscriminate force, killed or injured civilians in violation of the rules of engagement, or engaged in any other serious crime, they could be court-martialed. The U.S. military also had a system of condolence payments to compensate people for damage to property or accidental deaths and injuries caused during combat operations. If a contractor ran a car off the road, or shot an innocent person—deliberately, or by accident—Iraqis had no real legal recourse.
Who could hold contractors accountable for their actions? In late 2005, they were not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In theory they could be prosecuted under the MEJA, which gave the Department of Justice the power to prosecute crimes committed overseas by contractors accompanying U.S. forces. In practice, however, MEJA was a poor enforcement tool. Federal prosecutors were unlikely to commit resources to investigate contractor misconduct in a distant war zone, and the Department of Justice did not have offices in Iraq set up to investigate contractor misdeeds. MEJA at the time was applied in only a few, exceptionally rare cases, and never against private security contractors. And then there was Coalition Provisional Authority Order 17, the get-out-of-jail-free card for contractors. Two days before the dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer signed CPA Order 17, which gave contractors blanket exemption from Iraqi law. It was in effect a form of diplomatic immunity for the foreign hired guns who were working in Iraq.
The management of Erinys liked to stress accountability: to their contract, to coalition forces, and to their internal corporate codes of conduct. They even had a system set up for paying compensation to Iraqis when their contractors were at fault in traffic incidents. Andy Melville, the country manager for Erinys, told a PBS Frontline documentary crew, “We have a contract with the United States [Army] Corps of Engineers, which is through the American Department of Defense. Most of the contractual stipulations are based on Army regulations, and they actually quote Army regulations, and we have to follow our contract very, very closely.”14
But in the end, accountability was a fiction. The ROC system was essentially self-policing. Contractors reported their movements and escalation-of-force incidents to the ROC, and incident reports relied in part on the honor system. No one was even sure how many private security operators were working on behalf of the U.S. government in Iraq.
To Iraqis, the contractors seemed entirely above the law. And one private security company seemed more above the law than others. It had emerged as the main provider of security for the U.S. diplomatic mission in Iraq. Blackwater was founded by Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and heir to a Michigan auto parts fortune (his father’s company invented the lighted vanity mirror for car window visors, among other things). Blackwater began in 1997 as a rather modest business: manufacturing steel targets and teaching combat shooting in a remote corner of northeastern North Carolina. Turnover was unremarkable—until September 12, 2001. After the 9/11 attacks the phone started ringing off the hook. Prince and several of his top executives tapped a network of former SEALs and other special operations veterans to bid for government bodyguard contracts.
The company’s first big security client was the CIA. The agency needed high-end guard details for its widening operations in Afghanistan. In Licensed to Kill, his inside account of the post-9/11 boom in Blackwater’s business, Robert Young Pelton writes, “The Global Response Staff, the CIA’s security division, was overstretched, and they needed protection for their newly established Kabul station. The CIA had hired corporations for collection and other covert needs before, but they had rarely contracted out their field officers’ security to private industry.”15
Enter Blackwater. The company provided men to start protecting the remote outposts on the Afghan frontier, where operatives were pursuing the remnants of the al-Qaeda network. Prince even went over personally to Afghanistan as a security contractor for a few weeks in spring 2002. That stint of working for the CIA “energized him,” Pelton wrote. “He loved the intrigue and excitement so much that the thirty-something head of the Prince family empire decided he wanted to join the CIA’s Special Activities Division and enter the world of covert operations as a paramilitary.”16
Things didn’t work out as Prince hoped, however. He failed to pass the polygraph examination, so he focused instead on growing his business. Blackwater morphed from a small-time security contractor to a major provider of security services to the U.S. government. In 2001, it had federal contracts worth $736,906; by 2006 that figure had grown to $593.6 million. Between 2001 and 2006 Blackwater won contracts for U.S. government business worth over $1.1 billion.17
Prince was notoriously press-shy, but in early 2005 I watched him deliver his company’s sales pitch at a conference on special operations and low-intensity conflict in Washington. It was a unique insight into the scale of Blackwater’s operations in Iraq. In addition to its security details on the ground, the company had its own private air fleet. It operated MD-500 “Little Bird” small reconnaissance helicopters, complete with helicopter door gunners armed with M249 light machine guns, to give air cover to motorcades on the ground. In Afghanistan the company provided contract airlift for the U.S. military with CASA 212s, twin-engine turboprops that could take off and land from remote airstrips. They ferried essential personnel and equipment around the country, a mission similar to the one undertaken by Air America, the CIA front company, in Vietnam. At Blackwater’s giant training facility in Moyock, North Carolina, they were burning through around a million rounds a month.
“Why private military firms?” Prince said. “Why do we exist? There have been a lot of defense contractors for a long time making gear. But not as much doing the kind of services that we provide.”
Prince was advancing an argument that was commonly made by military contractors. The private sector had accompanied the military since the founding of the republic, from the camp sutlers who sold provisions at Valley Forge to European military professionals such as the Marquis de Lafayette, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, and Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who were hired to help train and organize the Continental Army. But contractors were not just in the business of logistics support and equipment maintenance, Prince argued: He pointed to the American Volunteer Group, better known as the Flying Tigers, a wing of the Chinese nationalist air force that fought the Japanese prior to the entry of the United States into World War II. The Flying Tigers were technically employees of the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, an American company that was an antecedent of sorts of modern private military contractors. (After Pearl Harbor the group was disbanded and was succeeded by a regular military outfit.) Companies like KBR had capitalized on a push to outsource “nonmilitary” tasks such as laundry, logistics, and recreational facilities to private firms in the 1990s. Prince was making a more ambitious argument, that private companies like Blackwater could perform many of the core functions of the military, and they could do it more cheaply. He described one of the early assignments the company received, to provide security at a remote U.S. base in southwest Asia. A Blackwater team of 25 men replaced 166 active-duty soldiers: a 28-strong rifle platoon plus 138 other troops to provide headquarters, logistics support, and other administrative functions. “Everyone carries guns, just like Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel—with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other,” Prince said. “They are the guys that keep the generators, water, food, communications, air conditioning, you name it. They run a whole base: 25 guys instead of 166. You can imagine the logistics, the simplicity of doing that.”
It was about more than running bases on the cheap. Prince said that the private sector could take on many of the essential tasks of nation building and stability operations. The military, he suggested, could outsource things like traffic control, presence patrols, and convoys to a private army. “There’s consternation in the DoD about increasing the permanent size of the Army; they wanted to add thirty thousand people—they talked about it costing anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. By my math, that comes down to about $135,000 a soldier. And our ability to raise a contractor brigade, using vetted, trained and equipped, reliable third-country national soldiers led by one of our type guys, a nine-to-one ratio. We can do it, certainly cheaper.”
It was a hardcore, free-market argument. Prince sounded like a disciple of Milton Friedman making an argument for private armies—something quite different than the limited defensive role of private security contractors. He cued up a slide showing an S-type Mercedes and a Trabant, the East German car that sounded as though it was powered by a lawnmower engine.
Central planning, [a] noncompetitive, socialist market provided [a Trabant], versus the Mercedes, which is what a competitive, innovative, risk-rewarding culture built. And … you know, same culture, same language, same background. Different command structure. I don’t believe the people we have in a private military firm are better—in fact, they are the same people that are on active duty. It’s just a different set of bureaucracy, or lack of, that we deal with.
Prince did acknowledge one of the main arguments made against armed contractors: that they operated without any oversight or any jurisdiction. “As of 31 December [2004] that ended,” he said. “The president signed a law, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which previously applied to anyone on a defense contract, now it’s any U.S. dollars that fund a contract overseas, that contractor can be brought to justice by the U.S. Justice Department.”
In theory Prince was right. In the fiscal year 2005 Department of Defense Authorization Act, Congress amended MEJA to extend its jurisdictional coverage. The revisions tightened a loophole to extend jurisdiction to all contractors, not just those employed directly by the U.S. Defense Department. The legislation that created MEJA acknowledged that there had been a longstanding “jurisdictional gap” that had allowed crimes by battlefield contractors to go unpunished.
But there was still the problem of enforcement. The language of the report that accompanied the original bill when it was passed in 2000 was prescient:
Often, the only remedy available to the United States Government with respect to military dependents and civilian employees and contractors who commit crimes in foreign countries is to limit their use of facilities on the installation where they live, or bar their entry onto the installation altogether, which often causes them to return to the United States. In any event, however, the fact that the person who committed the act may return to the United States does not give rise to any jurisdiction in the United States to try the crime he or she committed abroad.18
That is what happened when a Blackwater contractor shot and killed the local bodyguard of Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi in Baghdad’s Green Zone on Christmas Eve, 2006. The contractor, later identified in the press as Andrew Moonen, was off duty and had been drinking heavily when he wandered near the Iraqi prime minister’s compound, got into an altercation with the bodyguard, and shot him three times.19 The contractor fled the scene and was later apprehended by the International Zone police, who determined that he was too drunk for questioning. The following day, Blackwater fired him for cause—possession of a firearm while intoxicated—and on December 26, they whisked him out of the country on a flight to Jordan. The contractor then returned to the United States, a free man.
Stunningly, the State Department was informed of the incident and of Blackwater’s arrangements to spirit Moonen out of the country. According to a Diplomatic Security incident report, the contractor was returned to the United States “under the authority of a DOS [Department of State] Regional Security Officer.” In internal correspondence that followed, embassy officials discussed ways to paper over the incident. In an e-mail the day after the incident, the chargé d’affaires (the acting ambassador) urged the regional security officer to follow up and make sure the company did “all possible to assure that a sizeable compensation is forthcoming.” A prompt apology and compensation, the chargé d’affaires reasoned, would be the “best way” to ensure that the Iraqis did not take measures to sanction Blackwater or bar them from operating in Iraq. He proposed a payment of $250,000, then $100,000. This prompted a diplomatic security officer to complain that such “crazy sums” would tempt Iraqis “to try to get killed so as to set up their families financially.” The State Department and Blackwater agreed on a payment of $15,000 to the slain bodyguard’s family. Summarizing the concerns of the Diplomatic Security Service, an official wrote: “This was an unfortunate event but we feel that it doesn’t reflect on the overall Blackwater performance. They do an exceptional job under very challenging circumstances. We would like to help them resolve this so we can continue with our protective mission.”20
In other words, the State Department’s Regional Security Office in Baghdad was so preoccupied with protecting diplomats that it was willing to let Moonen walk free. Blackwater was performing its narrow mission magnificently, shielding U.S. diplomats from harm. Company officials often pointed out with pride that no diplomat in their care had ever been killed. But the risk-averse (and counterproductive for nation building) mentality of the diplomatic security apparatus had reached a logical extreme in Iraq. The incident was hushed up, although a slightly inaccurate report did air on the Al-Arabiya satellite television network identifying the murderer as a U.S. soldier. Blackwater continued operating in Iraq. That sent a message to Iraqis that one of our diplomats is worth a hundred of you.
In September 2007, a Blackwater security detail operating under the call sign Raven 23 responded to a call for backup from a second diplomatic security motorcade that was evacuating diplomats from a meeting in a compound in the Red Zone after a car bomb had gone off nearby. A first motorcade was already under way. Raven 23 was dispatched to Nisour Square, an area not far from the International Zone, to block traffic for the second motorcade. Seconds after Raven 23 entered the traffic circle, shooting started. Members of the team said they believed they were under attack by insurgents. They unleashed a hail of gunfire on civilian cars stopped outside the roundabout; at least thirty-four unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed or injured.
Before the Nisour Square incident, Blackwater had been a minor public-relations headache for the U.S. government. The company was already a favorite target of the antiwar left. It was secretive and militaristic and it cultivated a distinctly menacing corporate brand. As a former SEAL who sported a flag pin and severe military haircut, Erik Prince was a made-to-order caricature of the right-wing war profiteer. The scion of a Michigan Republican dynasty that bankrolled conservative causes, he had been a White House intern but found the administration of George H. W. Bush insufficiently conservative. The appearance of Blackwater operatives on the streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina bolstered the company’s sinister aura; to critics, Blackwater looked like a sort of Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration.
Nisour Square marked a turning point for private security companies in Iraq. For years, rage had been growing in Iraq over the foreign private security firms who operated with impunity on Iraqi roads. Iraqi politicians were quick to seize on public anger, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki vowed to find the company responsible for the murder and put it out of work. The Iraqi government eventually revoked Blackwater’s operating license and negotiated an end to the arrangement that had given contractors immunity from prosecution. The U.S. government began a belated push for better oversight of hired guns in Iraq.
In September 2007 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered a high-level security panel to review the practice of using private guards for diplomatic security in Iraq. The panel, led by Ambassador Patrick Kennedy, found serious failings. Contractors employed by the State Department did not properly coordinate their movements with the military, the embassy’s Regional Security Office was not adequately sharing information with the military commanders, and few contractors had sufficient knowledge of Arabic. But “in-sourcing,” giving the job of protecting diplomats back to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, was not an option. The State Department did not have enough special diplomatic security agents to handle the job of running protective details in Iraq. It didn’t even have enough people to exercise proper oversight of the hired guns. Likewise, the military did not have the manpower to spare to provide security escorts for diplomats. The panel also acknowledged there was no real framework for legal oversight and concluded that it was “unaware of any basis for holding non–Department of Defense contractors accountable under U.S. law,” despite MEJA being on the books.21
The panel recommended a series of administrative remedies such as better communication and coordination, more diplomatic security personnel, clarification of legal jurisdiction. But those solutions did nothing to address the risk-averse culture of the State Department. The practice of diplomatic security was, at its core, antithetical to the nation-building mission, which required civilians to take risks and work outside the walls of the embassy. Even in relatively secure areas, the Baghdad-based Regional Security Office imposed strict limitations on where diplomatic officers could travel and what kinds of vehicles and convoys they could travel in, meaning that it was often difficult to get out to the field and do meaningful work. A Foreign Service officer who worked in two provinces in Iraqi Kurdistan as a provincial action officer explained the dilemma: “The embassy Regional Security Office imposed strict country-wide standards, but I was the only one doing those two provinces in econ [economics] and political … You are spending enormous amounts of energy on your [transportation], which is subtracting enormous amounts from your budget and your time.”
The military took risks to accomplish its missions. The State Department, by contrast, responded to the Nisour Square incident with a lockdown, barring diplomats from travelling in Iraq by land, a move that brought into question the whole purpose of having a diplomatic mission there in the first place.22 And the State Department’s practice of relying on contractors to provide protective service did not change. Guards from Blackwater (later rebranded as the more innocuous-sounding Xe Services) continued to protect U.S. diplomatic convoys in Iraq, even though the company’s license to operate there had been revoked. The State Department decided it would not renew Xe’s Iraq contract, but the company’s aviation wing continued to provide air cover for U.S. diplomatic convoys well into the fall of 2009, two years after the Iraqi government had said Blackwater had to go.23 Apparently, the State Department could not get by without them.*
* The contractors received laminated “rules for the use of force,” or RUF cards, similar to the “rules of engagement” cards issued to soldiers. A RUF card issued in May 2005 said private security contractor personnel were authorized to use deadly force only when necessary in “self-defense, defense of facilities / persons as specified in their contract; prevention of life-threatening acts directed against civilians; or defense of Coalition-approved property specified within their contract.”
* The Inman report’s formal title is “Report of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Panel on Overseas Security.”
* Peter Singer, the author of the authoritative study Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, reckoned in 2004 that the size of the global market for private military companies was around $100 billion. But that figure included logistics and construction firms like KBR, consulting and training companies like MPRI, and major defense contractors like General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, which maintained complex military equipment. ArmorGroup’s survey was limited to companies that provided armed protective services in high-threat areas.
* On December 31, 2009, in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina dismissed charges against four former Blackwater guards over the Nisour Square shootings. The judge cited repeated missteps by prosecutors, who built their case around sworn statements given by the guards, who were promised immunity from prosecution after the shootings.24 The same month, Xe (the renamed Blackwater) settled a civil case brought by the families of the victims, reportedly paying $100,000 for each of the Iraqis killed by its contractors.25