by Cam Simpson
The Navy Department suddenly learned that it had to consult with none other than Lyndon Johnson before awarding any contracts in Texas, and almost overnight, a long-stalled plan for a naval air station to train pilots in Corpus Christi went from bureaucratic limbo to top priority.24 Just months after deeming it unqualified to build the naval base in Puerto Rico, the navy gave the nearly $24 million Corpus Christi job to Brown and Root. The contract had an unusual feature, guaranteeing Brown and Root would recoup all its costs, plus earn a 5 percent profit—what is known as a “cost-plus” contract. Guaranteed profits are a contractor’s best friend, but they are not always so great for the taxpayer, as they give the contractor a massive incentive to run up the bills—the bigger the tab, the bigger the profit. As expected, almost as soon as the first shovel turned Texas earth, costs at Corpus Christi soared, with the price tag ultimately inflating more than five times. Still, Brown and Root finished a big piece of the job early, allowing operations to start ahead of schedule. In a pattern that would become familiar for decades to come, the significant price inflation got approved with nary a blink of an eye, and the navy gave Brown and Root a coveted commendation, the Army-Navy Production Award. Cost-plus contracts would become the norm for Brown and Root going forward.
The company’s first experience with defense contracting held clear and valuable lessons. America’s vast wealth endowed its military leaders with the freedom to care much more about deadlines than dollars, especially in wartime, so boosting the price is easy once a contract is awarded. Costs can skyrocket so long as the work is done reasonably well and on time.25 The Browns could apply such lessons also to a separate shipbuilding company they had launched for the war, which would land them more than five hundred million dollars in contracts.26
Over the next two decades, Brown and Root’s taxpayer-funded growth surged, but so did controversy about the company. Critics sent skeptical glares its way, including from Congress, because of the firm’s flagrant use of its political clout. After the 1960 presidential election, Life magazine spoofed a conversation between President John F. Kennedy and his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, linking Kennedy’s Catholic faith to Johnson’s own personal savior.
“Now Lyndon,” Kennedy says in the cartoon, “I guess we can dig that tunnel to the Vatican.”
“Okay,” Johnson replied, “so long as Brown & Root get the contract.”27
After Johnson became president, government business came Brown and Root’s way as never before. Johnson’s decision to sink America deeper into the Vietnam War created the windfall. Nine hundred American soldiers were in Vietnam in 1960. By 1966, the number had reached 385,000, and by 1968, it had hit 536,000. Brown and Root became part of a private joint venture that built infrastructure in Southeast Asia to facilitate Johnson’s massive troop buildup. The firm carved landing strips and roads from jungle, and built bases, ports, and virtually anything else the military required across the length of South Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1972, the firm’s share of the work reached $380 million, the equivalent of more than $2 billion in 2016 dollars. Vietnam was a cost-plus contract.28
Auditors from the then-named General Accounting Office, the independent congressional watchdog agency, found that, in less than five years, the joint venture’s tab had risen from an original estimate of $25 million to $1.3 billion. Controls and oversight were virtually nonexistent in the face of the rapid troop buildup, the auditors said. By 1967, about $120 million in equipment was unaccounted for.
As more American conscripts came home in flag-draped boxes, George Brown became the poster boy for profiteering in an increasingly unpopular war. Newspaper stories about the Vietnam contracts prominently mentioned his role as “one of President Johnson’s principal financial backers.” Antiwar protesters began to target Brown personally, including during a public ceremony in Texas.29 None of this hindered Brown and Root’s fortunes, and by 1969, it had become the world’s biggest construction company, with $1.6 billion in sales that year.30
Herman Brown died before the firm reached that milestone, and Halliburton, an oil services company that rose side by side with Brown and Root in the American South, purchased Brown and Root in the wake of his death. Yet Halliburton allowed Brown and Root to keep its name and operate independently, leaving George Brown at the helm until his retirement in 1975. Before he retired, Texas Monthly declared that some had regarded George Brown as perhaps “the most powerful man in the entire nation, and, by extension, the entire world.”31
Ghosts of Vietnam hovered over American policymakers for nearly two decades. With the Gulf War in 1991, Brown and Root went back to war, too, earning a contract to assess damage inflicted by Saddam Hussein’s occupying army in Kuwait. Halliburton independently had its own war contract, with its workers capping oil fires lit by Hussein’s fleeing forces.
After the rapid success of the Gulf War, the U.S. military in 1992 gave Brown and Root a four-million-dollar contract to produce an unprecedented, classified report. The aim: to show in detail how a contractor could serve all the military’s logistical needs for potential deployments in more than a dozen specific global hot spots. It likely was the first time the Pentagon entrusted such critical planning functions to anyone outside the government, let alone a private company.32
Brown and Root’s study formed a kind of blueprint. Contractors could use it to be at the ready for rapid deployment alongside U.S. forces in each hot spot. They would no longer just build foreign bases and their mess halls, as Brown and Root had done in Vietnam. They would also peel all the potatoes and serve all the food inside those mess halls—and fulfill virtually every logistical need in between, including buying and delivering fuel for vehicles and generators, pumping the gas, storing ammunition, piping in clean water, rooting sewer pipes, cleaning latrines, and washing and folding laundry. It didn’t matter if the hot spot came without roads or other critical infrastructure. Contractors would do it all.
The idea benefited substantially from the times. The promise of a “peace dividend” after the Cold War had created pressure to downsize the military, and the perceived necessity to privatize public services had become something akin to gospel across all levels of American government.
In 1992, as Brown and Root drew up the Pentagon’s secret plans to privatize logistics for the most powerful military in the world, Dick Cheney was serving as the U.S. secretary of defense. His then boss was George H. W. Bush, the father of Cheney’s future White House boss. The Dick Cheney of 1992 believed in privatization in general and in Brown and Root’s ideas in particular. Cheney’s Pentagon therefore converted Brown and Root’s classified blueprint into contract requirements, creating the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP, in militaryspeak. LOGCAP’s size and scope were open ended; its term lasted five years. It also was, of course, a cost-plus contract. A national contractors’ lobbying group would call it “the mother of all service contracts.” Unlike Saddam Hussein’s hollow threat to give America “the mother of all battles” in the Gulf War, the lobbying group’s quip would prove a dramatic understatement.33 LOGCAP would become the fattest prize in the history of wartime contracting.
In 1992, Cheney’s Pentagon awarded the deal to the same company that had drawn up the secret plans: Brown and Root.
Beginning in 1992, with the growing international mission in Somalia, and continuing as interventions multiplied around the world, Brown and Root’s workers increasingly deployed beside U.S. forces. In 1995, after Cheney ditched his presidential ambitions and assumed command of Halliburton, the workload escalated dramatically as a sixty-thousand-man peacekeeping force gathered in the Balkans. When the LOGCAP contract expired two years later, the United States gave it to a competitor, but carved out an exception for the Balkans work, which stayed in Brown and Root’s hands. That’s how valuable the firm had become. “The first person to greet our soldiers as they arrive in the Balkans, and the last one to wave goodbye, is one of our employees,” Cheney said as Halliburton’s CEO. The
Balkans also were, far and away, the most valuable piece of the LOGCAP business.34
Before long, though, government auditors raised concerns about overruns in the Balkans, just as they had thirty years earlier, in Vietnam. The former General Accounting Office, now called the Government Accountability Office, found that the company had overstaffed the vast majority of its projects in Bosnia, paying large swaths of the workforce to sit idle for extended periods. It had also billed taxpayers for other massive redundancies, including unnecessary backup electricity, estimated to cost an extra eighty-five million dollars over five years.35 Still, servicemen and women gave Brown and Root’s work high marks. Comforts from home were available, often in abundance. The firm delivered hot showers, ice cream, folded laundry, and steaks. By 2000, its employees and contractors had served beside U.S forces not just in Bosnia, but also in Albania, Croatia, Greece, Haiti, Hungary, Italy, Kosovo, Macedonia, Rwanda, Somalia, and Zaire. Revenues for the company, now called Kellogg Brown and Root, or KBR, reached two billion dollars that same year, under the original LOGCAP contract and its Balkans extension.36
The LOGCAP contract neared its expiration on September 11, 2001, the day of the worst-ever terrorist attack on U.S. soil. America did not seem likely to shrink from the world, especially with Cheney and George W. Bush in the White House. In December, the government gave a new LOGCAP deal to KBR. In hindsight, the agreement looks like a planner’s road map for a very long war. The contract would last ten years, instead of five, and required rapid action on a massive scale. The company promised to deploy an army of private workers capable of meeting the needs of twenty-five thousand combat troops with only seventy-two hours’ notice. KBR would have to build and run seven camps and a rear-support base with housing for four thousand troops. Total troop numbers could reach fifty thousand per deployment. “Halliburton KBR must be ready to furnish these warfighter services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year under any condition and at any location around the globe,” the company said in a December 17, 2001, press release.37 Beyond that, virtually all mention of the contract award escaped public notice. The world had fixed its attention elsewhere.
The morning Halliburton issued that press release, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld beamed confidently from a picture atop the front page of the New York Times, shaking the hand of an American soldier in Afghanistan. Celebration seemed justified. A small team comprising U.S. Special Forces and allied troops had overrun Al Qaeda positions in a cave complex in the country’s White Mountains, at a place called Tora Bora. They had routed Al Qaeda, and its Taliban allies had been deposed. A new government ruled Afghanistan. This looked like victory. The first paragraph of the story, next to Rumsfeld’s picture, datelined Washington, noted the apparent triumphs but said that the Bush administration was “putting out two messages: It’s not over till it’s over, and even when this first phase of the war does end, Mr. Bush plans to move quickly to other terrorist havens.”
The piece anonymously quoted one of Bush’s “exuberant senior aides” saying that the president was “on a roll,” a phrase captured in the headline. The story openly questioned “where [the president] should next take the war on terrorism,” and then listed a few other purported terrorist havens. President Bush faced “some difficult choices in the next few weeks. Is it taking the war to Iraq, where Saddam Hussein is clearly seeking nuclear and biological weapons? Or does it make more sense to focus on easier Al Qaeda targets—Somalia, or perhaps Indonesia and the Philippines?”
The piece also said, “Pentagon officials have openly agitated to finish off Mr. Hussein. Today, speaking on the NBC News program ‘Meet the Press,’ Secretary [of State Colin] Powell disclosed that efforts to find new ways to destabilize the Iraqi leader were under way.”38
Adjacent to Baghdad International Airport rose Victory Base Complex, a massive, sprawling base of numerous military camps, all enclosed in razor wire, dividing its U.S. and allied soldiers, contractors, and detainees from the rest of Iraq. Under LOGCAP, KBR provided services to the base. Many of Victory’s camps were like distinct neighborhoods, the majority comprising relocatable “containerized housing units” provided by KBR. The Americans called their headquarters within the complex Camp Liberty.
KBR acted as a boardinghouse, construction company, public works agency, repairman, utility company, backup utility company, launderette, gas station operator, car mechanic, barber, plumber, air-conditioner repairman, and maid. The base PX, or “post exchange,” a retail store, resembled a Walmart in the desert. As big as an airplane hangar, it sold Beyoncé CDs, video game consoles, big-screen TVs, Red Bull, and barbecued pork rinds.39 Camp Liberty may have been America’s biggest camp, but similar, albeit smaller wartime cities and hamlets had sprung up throughout the region under LOGCAP. There, too, the comforts of home could exceed even those that KBR had flown into the Balkans, as did the price tag.
Contractors at war were nothing new. In World War II, there was one civilian contractor for every seven American soldiers. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, it brought one contractor for every two and a half soldiers, and by 2006, civilian contractors in Iraq would outnumber U.S. forces.40 The growth of private security firms such as Blackwater drew global attention. Yet security contractors made up only 16 percent of the private workforce. The vast majority of contractors, about 60 percent, were not hired guns but hired hands, as The New Yorker magazine would put it years later.41
Aamer Madhani, a Chicago native born to Pakistani immigrants, was a young, smart, hungry reporter who had risen fast at the Chicago Tribune. He was one of about two dozen reporters the Tribune sent to Iraq when the war started. There, Madhani distinguished himself. Many journalists stayed inside the protective bubble of the Green Zone, or civilian headquarters, in central Baghdad. Madhani climbed into a ratty car and made his way, sans security, to Karbala, about sixty miles southwest of Baghdad, to investigate the murders of two Americans working for the Coalition Provisional Authority and their Iraqi interpreter. These were the first such killings of the war, marking a major turning point. Madhani’s reporting drew praise and international attention. Editors made him a regular in the paper’s Baghdad rotation.42
“You’re immediately struck by how many civilians it takes to keep this war going,” Madhani said of his earliest impressions inside Camp Liberty. Also, gone was the army mess hall of old. In its place, KBR, through LOGCAP, had built something called a DFAC (pronunced DEE-fack), militaryspeak for “dining facility.” At the DFAC, Madhani noticed something else that many had overlooked: the faces of those who served him his meals. “There are all sorts of different skin colors,” he said. “You see Filipinos, you see Indians, you see Pakistanis, you see Nepalis. There are people from throughout the world.” KBR’s army as a whole may have been hard to miss, but individually, they seemed invisible.
Knowing how good Madhani’s reporting from Iraq had been, I asked him if he’d be interested in helping me investigate the wider system that had delivered the twelve Nepalis to their deaths. I needed the help. Basic questions had gone unanswered under the veil of “security” that had lowered as the insurgency rolled across Iraq. We had learned that KBR relied on forty-eight thousand people working for roughly two hundred subcontracting companies to operate at Camp Liberty and direct the rest of the war’s noncombat logistics. Many assumed that these subcontracting firms were fly-by-night Middle Eastern companies cashing in on what P. W. Singer, an expert on the privatization of warfare, called the unprecedented gold rush atmosphere of Iraq. Daoud and Partners was among them.
KBR called a large segment of the forty-eight-thousand-man workforce TCNs, short for “third-country nationals.” They were not Americans, Brits, Australians, or Iraqis. Instead, they came from “third” countries, or what used to be known as Third World countries. Essentially, TCNs was shorthand for the brown faces Madhani had seen behind the counter when he ate burritos inside the DFAC. Like the twelve, they had come to Iraq from some of the poorest c
orners of the world through labor brokers who had routed them via other Middle Eastern nations, often nations that were themselves chided by the United States for human trafficking. A few women were there, too. In all, the TCNs executing KBR’s LOGCAP contract numbered thirty-five thousand during 2004, and their population was growing fast.43 Unlike Westerners, they could not move freely about Camp Liberty or the other camps inside Victory Base. KBR’s subcontractors typically kept the men in internal camps, behind armed guards. If Camp Liberty was a sprawling city, then the TCNs were living in its ghetto.
I had developed a KBR source who worked as a foreman for a crew of TCNs at Camp Liberty. After Madhani agreed to help, he went to Camp Liberty on an “embed” in 2005. The source had agreed to smuggle him in his pickup truck past the guards at Liberty’s “Indian Camp,” which he did with little effort. No one gave Madhani a second look in the company of the white KBR supervisor. Once inside the camp, Madhani found the men living twelve to a single “hooch,” as the containerized housing units were called. With them packed in so tightly, Madhani could barely stand and hold his notebook in front of him as he tried to conduct interviews.
He confirmed much of what we had heard about the TCNs. Many of the men worked under conditions akin to indentured servitude, bound to their jobs in Iraq by crushing debts accumulated by their families to pay excessive brokerage fees back home. Brokers employed myriad bait-and-switch tactics. Many of the men there earned far less than had been promised when they bought the jobs, a fact that gave them little choice but to stay in the war zone to pay back their families’ debts. Typical earnings per man amounted to $65 to $112 per week, depending on which country he came from. Workdays lasted twelve hours, and men could go weeks without a day off. Sometimes companies withheld wages, especially if workers refused to give up their passports. Subcontracting bosses routinely took and held these documents, a practice which the U.S. State Department and others viewed as a key indicator of human trafficking, and which the top U.S. commander in Iraq, General George Casey, would later make clear that he viewed as illegal in Iraq under U.S. law.44 Also, TCNs often got none of the safety equipment Westerners received, even as mortar and rocket fire fell from the sky. In short, we found that the war ran on a pipeline of cheap foreign labor, mainly impoverished Asians, who were often deceived, exploited, and put in harm’s way in Iraq with little protection or regard for their lives.
