A Bloody Business Read online

  Uncle Sam is by no means the only employer of war zone contractors. Contracting agencies offer services to companies and allied governments around the world that require their expertise in executive protection, hostage rescue, language translation, strategic defense planning, airborne security operations, building oil pipelines, securing Africa’s diamond mines, and, in the case of Sierra Leone, the ousting of a renegade government from power.

  In 1998 in Sierra Leone, the elected government had been overthrown by a handful of merciless senior military officers. They began brutally executing all opposition forces. Public executions of elected officials and former government employees were conducted on a daily basis. The United States could not muster the public support required to assist, so the United Nations was asked to intervene. The United Nations made a feeble attempt to punish the renegades by imposing a trade embargo. When that didn’t work, a country with interests in the region hired a contracting agency. In this rare instance of contractors initiating direct combat actions, the rebel officers were quickly eliminated, and remnants of Sierra Leone’s elected government reassumed power.

  This episode left little doubt that wholesale slaughter cannot be prevented with trade sanctions and embargoes alone. Absent an effective force, the United Nations is often rendered impotent without outside help. But nations are loathe to publicly support the use of contractors in helping resolve international problems. Still, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan reportedly admitted that the contractors in Sierra Leone saved lives, and if they had been allowed to do the job sooner, a hundred thousand people might still be alive. In yet a later humanitarian disaster, London’s Financial Times reported in November of 2003 that Annan was considering the use of private contractors to address the slaughter taking place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). There was no support anywhere within the United Nations. “The world may not be ready to privatize peace,” Annan concluded.

  The United Nations has been reluctant to employ private contractors to resolve international security issues. Such considerations have frequently been labeled as immoral. However, their reluctance begs the question: Is it moral to do nothing? The morality of employing private contractors, or the lack thereof, is succinctly summed up in an article by David Shearer, in which he states, “There is a serious question here: if a private force, operating with international authority and within international law, can protect civilians, how moral is it to deny people protection just because states can’t or won’t find the forces to do it? Or put another way, is the means of response more important than the end for which it is used particularly where a failure to respond results in the death and abuse of civilians?”

  In spite of these objections, government contracting agencies are thriving. The Defense Logistic Agency is attempting to privatize most of its $1.6 billion network of warehouses and distribution facilities. The government has reported that nine hundred thousand government employees are doing work that could be performed by private firms. Private military contractors are working with at least forty-two countries, and that number is growing by the month. Future growth projections are exponential. Revenues from the global international security market are expected to rise from $55.6 billion in 1990 to $202 billion in 2010, according to private industry projections. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (February 2000) reported that private security companies with publicly traded stocks grew at twice the rate of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the 1990s. Governments and businesses that employ their services get the short-term benefit of their expertise without the long-term investment in recruiting, hiring, training, employing, and insuring the lives of these personnel, who are the combat equivalent of account temps.

  When the work is there, they do it. When it’s not, they return to a less profitable—if less life-threatening—existence. It is hard to imagine a job with the risk of being beheaded, like the unfortunate Turkish truck-driver contractor, or the contractors in Fallujah who were burned and hanged naked from a bridge. In another incident, thirty contractors were wounded in a targeted car-bomb attack. More than three hundred American contractors have been killed in Iraq alone. We haven’t heard much about most of them. Most war zone contractors know they have a thankless job; they ask for little sympathy, and receive even less. Their deaths are looked upon by most of the world as a natural consequence of the job. It’s all blood money, anyway, so why should it come easy? They know the risks they face, and if they touch a hot stove, they should expect to get burned.

  But one question hardly ever seems to get asked—where would we be without them?

  This book will introduce you to a number of contractors in Kuwait, Jordan, and Iraq for whom, you will find, it is rarely about money. We will explore the legal, moral, ethical, and practical questions they face every day. To mention a few:

  What is the legal status of a contractor in a war zone? How much flexibility do they have to operate in a war zone? Can contractors be restricted or prohibited from going certain places within a hostile country?

  Contractors in high-risk areas have gotten into the target countries but found themselves without weapons, without properly shielded vehicles, without body armor, and most importantly, without access to intelligence information. How well do soldiers and contractors interact and communicate? Who do contractors call when they get into trouble? How do contractors get information on the current friendly and enemy situation, such as if the U.S. Army is planning an attack in the area, or if an aerial reconnaissance drone has detected an improvised road mine planted during the night on the route they will be traveling?

  Does being privy to too much information make a contractor a security risk? If a contractor is taken prisoner by enemy forces, does he have an obligation to resist interrogation? Is he protected under the Geneva Convention?

  Soldiers can receive a court-martial for failure to respond to orders—is there a similar disciplinary action for contractors? For instance, if a technician contractor is working on ground-surveillance radar equipment in support of an army unit, and that unit comes under attack, must the contractor respond to directives from military personnel?

  Are all contractors allowed to carry weapons? When should a contractor take offensive action against a person who appears to be the enemy? What happens to a personal security contractor who mistakenly shoots innocent civilians? Who adjudicates the incident?

  Perhaps most importantly, to whose authority do the various categories of war zone contractors answer? It is worth noting that the U.S. Constitution prohibits military authority over civilians except when war has been declared, but as you will read, contractors have pragmatic reasons for not rocking the military’s boat.

  What happens when the contractor and the military get their signals crossed? Consider this scenario: You are a contractor. Remember that you are in the war zone to help a local government, military, or law enforcement agency. You cannot assume they will let you do your job without occasional interference, intentional or otherwise. That may not seem like a problem until you get in a situation where their actions place your own life in serious danger. A group of armed security contractors are traveling in a Toyota SUV. It’s nighttime. All of them are dressed in civilian clothing. They stumble onto a military checkpoint or, worse yet, a military operation. An aircraft circling overhead observes them through the onboard thermal imaging system. A thermal device is not capable of distinguishing national or ethnic identity. The contractors are merely human figures emitting a heat signature with weapons in hand. The aircraft reports to the ground troops that they have identified a vehicle with armed, nonuniformed personnel. Can you fault the U.S. Army for firing a Javelin missile at such a threatening target?

  In spite of the high risks involved, the line of U.S. and foreign applicants willing to become war zone contractors gets longer every day. According to a statistic reported by the PBS series “Frontline,” there are well over one hundred thousand civilian contractors working in Iraq. A recruiter for Kellogg, Brown & Root,
a major war zone construction company, reported having more than sixteen thousand applicants in a month to fill two thousand job openings in Iraq. Even after a thorough orientation, including exposure to images of blown-up contractors’ living quarters, personal war stories, and the fact that construction sites are attacked on the average of two dozen a week, only one in five applicants withdraws.

  No question, the military is losing many of its most highly skilled personnel to contracting firms, but the great majority of contractors are not direct transfers from the military. In fact, many have never served in the military, but they believe in the cause or they need to fill some void in their life. For many, it’s a chance to fulfill a patriotic sense of duty they missed by not joining the service when they were military age. Perhaps many men and women feel the need in their lifetime to have done something for their country, something above average, something beyond the norm. Maybe it’s just for the adventure. While the risk to life and limb is essentially the same, it probably doesn’t hurt that the pay is much better than in the military, and contract work comes without any long-term obligation.

  As you read this book, you will meet men and women who are not much different than your next-door neighbor. You’ll travel with them through a typical day in the war zone. You’ll be with them in their best and their worst times, sharing moments of grief and joy. You’ll discover their varied reasons for being in Iraq, their fears, their mistakes. Sometimes they’ll gloat in celebration over a successful mission; sometimes they’ll hang their heads in failure, sometimes they’ll question whether victory was worth the price.

  This is no whitewash, no glorification. These are not perfect people, but they are real. I’ve tried to convey their reality as objectively as possible. Perhaps we can all benefit from an open-eyed assessment, discard our preconceived notions, and take a fresh look at these civilians willingly engaged in a truly bloody business.

  Chapter 1

  The Growth of War Zone Contractors

  When the U.S. government experiences battlefield deficiencies, it proposes institutional, organizational, and training changes that take years to implement. But the U.S. public seems to want quicker, easier solutions than the military can deliver. The political pressure to keep wars short is intense, and capitalist business practices tend to emphasize efficiency—in other words, quick and easy solutions. Perhaps, then, the merger of war and business would inevitably lead to the employment of more and more war zone contractors.

  Capitalists are one step ahead of our government’s request for assistance. Unlike government institutions, a business has an obligation to make profits for its shareholders and investors. In the constant pressure to act in the best financial interest of the firm, they must fulfill contractual obligations efficiently or go out of business.

  The U.S. government has proven to be less than agile in adapting to wars that don’t go its way. In Vietnam, we were surprised by the resiliency of the enemy, the lack of support for a corrupt South Vietnamese government, the level of empathy for the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, and our failure to understand the needs of the people. This shortsightedness generated opportunities for contractors to fix the problems our government had not anticipated. As the war progressed, we hired more and more contractors for infrastructure construction, political development, agricultural enhancements, education, intelligence collection, and combat-support activities. When the United States was a day late and more than a few dollars short, contractors picked up the slack.

  In Iraq, the United States was once again caught off guard by the scope and dimension of the counterinsurgency battle and the requirements of that dirty word the administration doesn’t like to use—nation-building. Assumptions about the availability of oil revenues, active support of the Iraqi people, and the limitations of outside groups to influence events were entirely incorrect.

  For some reason, pundits and politicians in Washington seemed surprised by the lack of active post-war support. Much of this lack of support can be attributed to the U.S. abandonment of an Iraqi uprising a few years earlier, adding to an already blemished track record from Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia. Once again, civilian contractors were required to fill a void in government planning. It is often stated that the U.S. government is always prepared to fight the last war. In fact, our preparedness is worse than that. We are not prepared to fight even the last war. The U.S. government is prepared to fight only a World War II–style conflict. With the exception of our combat action on behalf of the tiny island of Grenada in the fall of 1983, it’s a stretch to call any conflict since the end of World War II a victory for U.S. forces.

  Even the first Gulf conflict, where we soundly defeated Saddam Hussein on the battlefield, the United States did not win the war; we won only a series of battles. Iraqi soldiers may have left Kuwait, but Iraq and Saddam continued to be a threat to world peace. To keep them out of Kuwait and under some semblance of control, we had to conduct combat air patrols up to and through the next set of battles: the second Gulf war. The number of years it will take the U.S. government to adjust to its own deficiencies is anyone’s guess.

  In the meantime, war zones continue to present opportunities for enterprising businesses. The resurgence of contractors is both a reflection of the changing nature of war and the inability of nations to adjust. While the magnitude of contractor employment is on the rise, the history of contractors is legendary. Following the death of Alexander the Great, the Greeks employed mercenaries to advance Hellenistic civilization. In 755, the Chinese T’ang Dynasty was nearly overthrown by mercenaries from Indian pastoral tribes. England used Flemish mercenaries for several decades in the twelfth century. In the sixteenth century, the Pope employed the Swiss Cantons, now called the Swiss Guards, who made available more than fifteen thousand of the finest warriors of their time. So good were they in battle that the Pope titled them, “The Defenders of the Church of Freedom.”

  In the American Revolutionary War, a group headed by none other than Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Harrison hired mercenaries to conduct intelligence operations overseas. The British hired more than thirty thousand mercenaries, many of them Germans, to fight against the colonists. In a twist of history, many German mercenaries switched sides and ultimately fought against the British. During the United States’ two great wars, the use of mercenaries declined, but in the early 1960s African nations incapable of defending themselves reinvigorated mercenary employment. At the same time, private contractors in Vietnam, such as Air America, were experiencing rapid growth.

  Air America has roots in an organization formed in pre–World War II days. When Japan invaded China, a group of freelance pilots, called the American Volunteer Group, flew missions against the Japanese. Later this group, renamed the Civil Air Transport, supported Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists in combat against Mao Zedong’s communists. Air America and its cousins by various names (Air Asia, Southern Air Transport, Civil Air Transport, etc.) flew operations in support of the French at the conclusive battle of Dien Bien Phu. All were U.S.-sponsored contractors assisting in the implementation of U.S. foreign policy, doing what contractors do: executing missions where U.S. military presence is not politically supportable.

  During Vietnam, Presidents Johnson and Nixon repeatedly affirmed that there were no U.S. troops in Laos or Cambodia. However, neither of them are known to have denied that there were Air America contractors in Laos or Cambodia. The truth was that Air America helicopters and DC-3s were flying missions daily throughout those two countries. Air America was so commonplace in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia that one could identify their silver aircraft coming and going at nearly every airfield in the region. Only the most naïve visitors to Vietnam actually thought that Air America was a noncombatant civilian air transport company. Air America crews were running search-and-rescue missions to recover secret operatives and teams behind enemy lines. They were dropping food and ammunition to paid tribal mercenaries. And they were dying on a daily b
asis.

  During the first Gulf conflict, one in fifty personnel “in country” were American contractors. Many of them were involved in technical support and reconstruction of Kuwait. In the second Gulf conflict, that number rose to one in fifteen. Granted, part of that growth is due to the scope of nation-building activities launched after the end of major hostilities, as they were called. Nevertheless, the number of contractors in the second Gulf conflict is double that of the first conflict, with less than half the number of U.S. forces involved. In addition to the numbers of contractors, of particular note, are the dangers in unprecedented proportions that all contractors now face. Unlike Kuwait, which provided a secure environment for construction contractors, there are no safe environments in Iraq.

  Countries with abundant natural resources and poorly trained, ill-equipped, and untrustworthy armies hire agencies such as Executive Outcomes to protect their wealth, or in some cases, to recover it. In exchange, security firms get a cut of the action. This resembles the classic mercenary profile, which has come into greater prominence in the last thirty years, especially in Africa. Africa’s contractors, some of whom are U.S. citizens, fit the stereotype of taking any side that will pay them well. Many of these contractors are former members of the South African army’s Buffalo Battalion, a notorious group with an unsavory reputation for perpetuating apartheid. Executive Outcomes insists that it performs work for only legitimate governments, but there are a fair number of skeptics to this claim.