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

by Jeremy Scahill

  There was also another significant incident around that time that was fanning the flames of Sunni resistance. It happened not in Iraq but in Palestine. The Israeli military openly assassinated the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in Gaza. As he was being wheeled in his chair out of a morning prayer session on March 22, 2004, an Israeli helicopter gunship fired a Hellfire missile at his entourage, killing Yassin and at least a half-dozen others.14 The “targeted assassination” enraged Muslims globally, particularly Sunnis like those living in Fallujah. Right after the assassination, more than fifteen hundred people gathered for prayers in the city to remember Yassin, with Sunni clerics saying the killing presented “a strong case for jihad [holy war] against all occupation forces.”15 Shops, schools, and government buildings were shut down as part of a general strike in Fallujah. For many in Iraq, the U.S. occupation of their country was part of the broader pro-Israel agenda in the region, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. invasion of Iraq were seen as intimately linked. “The assassination of an old man on a wheelchair, whose only weapon is his fierce drive to liberate his land, is an act of cowardice that proves the Israelis and the Americans do not want peace,” said sixty-four-year-old Muslih al-Madfai, a Fallujah resident.16 The timing of the assassination, which happened as the aggressive Marine takeover of Fallujah was beginning, fueled the belief that the United States and Israel were working in concert. As it was, many ordinary people in Iraq believed private security contractors to be Mossad or CIA.

  As the Marines began fanning out across Fallujah, residents began reporting house-to-house raids and arbitrary arrests. “If they find more than one adult male in any house, they arrest one of them,” said Fallujah resident Khaled Jamaili. “Those Marines are destroying us. They are leaning very hard on Fallujah.”17 On Saturday, March 27, the Marines issued a statement saying they were “conducting offensive operations . . . to foster a secure and stable environment for the people.” It went on to say, “Some have chosen to fight. Having elected their fate, they are being engaged and destroyed.”18 The Marines blockaded the main entrances to the city with tanks and armored vehicles and dug foxholes along the roads. Graffiti began popping up on buildings in the Askari neighborhood with slogans like “Long live the Iraqi resistance,” “Long live the honorable men of the resistance,” and “Lift up your head. You are in Fallujah.” Many in the city began hunkering down as the U.S. forces escalated their campaign to take Fallujah. “We are all suffering from what the Americans are doing to us, but that doesn’t take away anything from our pride in the resistance,” said Saadi Hamadi, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of Arabic studies from Baghdad’s al-Mustansiriyah University. “To us, the Americans are just like the Israelis.”19 Tension was mounting inside Fallujah as the Americans began warning people—using patrols with bullhorns—that their neighborhoods would be turned into a battlefield if the “terrorists” did not leave.20 By then, some families had already begun to flee their homes.

  “The American forces had withdrawn from Fallujah over the winter, saying that they were going to rely on Iraqi security forces to do the work there for them, and so as not to be provocative,” the veteran New York Times foreign correspondent John Burns said at the time. “The Marines, who took over authority for the Fallujah area from the 82nd Airborne Division, only last week changed the template. They decided to go back into Fallujah in force, and take a real crack at some of these insurgents. That resulted in a whole series of running battles last week, in which a number of marines were killed. Quite a few Iraqi civilians [were killed], 16 in one day last Friday.”21 It was part of a Marine strategy to draw the “insurgents” out. “You want the fuckers to have a safe haven?” asked Clarke Lethin, the First Marine Division’s chief operations officer. “Or do you want to stir them up and get them out in the open?”22 According to Washington Post defense correspondent Thomas Ricks, “Marine patrols into Fallujah were familiarizing themselves with the city, and in the process purposely stirring up the situation. Inside the city, insurgents were preparing to respond—warning shops to close, and setting up roadblocks and ambushes with parked cars.” Even still, on March 30, 2004, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters, “The Marines are quite pleased with how things are going in Fallujah, and they’re looking forward to continuing the progress in establishing a safe and secure environment and rebuilding that province in Iraq.”23 In reality, the United States was swatting a hornets’ nest in Fallujah, one in which Scott Helvenston and three other Blackwater contractors would find themselves less than twenty-four hours later.

  Like “Slaughtered Sheep”

  Jerry Zovko was a private soldier years before the “war on terror” began.24 He had joined the U.S. military in 1991 at age nineteen and fought his way into the Special Forces, eventually becoming an Army Ranger.25 The Croatian-American was deployed, by choice, in Yugoslavia, his parents’ homeland, during the civil war there in the mid-1990s, where his family says he participated in covert operations. He was independent-minded, stubborn, and ambitious, and after Yugoslavia he trained to become an elite Green Beret but was never given a team assignment. In 1997, Zovko left the military. “He did something for the government that he couldn’t tell us about,” recalls his mother, Danica Zovko.26 “We don’t know what it was. You know, I never knew what he was doing. To this day, I do not.” She says her son once showed her some small copper “tokens” the size of a silver dollar that he said would prove who he was to people who needed to know. She remembers a conversation where Jerry said, “Mom, it’s easy to be an Army Ranger—that’s physical work. But going into Special Forces, that’s where your intelligence comes in.”

  In 1998, Zovko headed for the relatively unknown (to the public) world of private security. He was hired by one of the largest of these companies, DynCorp, and was stationed in the Arab Gulf nation of Qatar, working at the U.S. Embassy, where he learned Arabic. That assignment grew into a career as a soldier for hire. He traveled a lot and did a stint in the United Arab Emirates. Whenever Danica Zovko would ask her son about what exactly he was doing in all of these exotic places, he would always tell his mother the same thing. “He would tell me he was just taking care of the Embassy and working in the kitchen. But then, all his life in the military—a good seven years—he was always in the kitchen,” she recalls with a doubtful tone. “Now I found out that he wasn’t really in the kitchen.” When the occupation of Iraq took hold, Zovko took a job, in late-August 2003, with the Virginia-based Military Professional Resources Incorporated, training the new Iraqi army. A few months before he left for Iraq, his mother had asked him, “Would you want to be a hired gun or something like that? Why would you put your life in danger for someone else?” He said, “Mom, I’m not. I’m going to train the Iraqis.” The job was short-lived, though, as many Iraqi recruits never returned after a Ramadan break a couple of months later. So Zovko was picked up by Blackwater, which was in the midst of its aggressive recruitment drive for Iraq deployment. It was a good gig for Zovko, especially because his buddy Wes Batalona, a tough former Army Ranger from Hawaii who had been in Panama in 1989 and Somalia in 1993, was by his side.27 The two had hit it off during their brief stint training the Iraqi army, and Batalona was ultimately drawn back to Iraq in February 2004 by Zovko to work with Blackwater after the training job fell apart.28 “Around that time, Jerry called me,” remembers his mother. “He was serious. He said I needed to write something down. I asked, ‘What is it?’ He said it was the number of the insurance policy, and I told him, ‘If I need to write down an insurance policy number, then you need to get your you-know-what home.’ And I hung up on him.” Danica Zovko instructed her other son, Tom, to tell Jerry the same if he called. “That was the first time we’d ever argued with Jerry or ever asked him to come home. He did not tell me he was working for Blackwater,” Danica says. The next time Jerry called, “he promised my husband and me that he would be there for Easter dinner, that we’d go to church together and that he’d take ov
er the family business.”

  But a few weeks before Easter, on the morning of March 30, Zovko and Batalona got teamed up with another Blackwater contractor, thirty-eight-year-old Mike Teague from Tennessee, a former member of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the “Night Stalkers.” Known as “Ice Man” to his friends, Teague was a twelve-year Army veteran who had been in Panama and Grenada before becoming a reservist.29 Most recently, he’d won a Bronze Star for his time in Afghanistan after 9/11.30 After Afghanistan, he returned to the States and took a low-paying security job before joining up for more lucrative work with Blackwater in Iraq.31 “This was the kind of work Mike loved,” his friend John Menische told Time magazine. “He was a soldier and a warrior.”32 That day in Iraq, Teague had sent an e-mail to a friend, saying he loved Iraq and the excitement of his new six-figure-salary job.33 The fourth member of this hodgepodge team was a face Zovko and Batalona had never seen in Baghdad, an ex-SEAL named Scott Helvenston. Their assignment was to escort some trucks to pick up kitchen equipment near Fallujah and then drop it off at a military base.34 It was one of the first missions under Blackwater’s new contract to provide security for ESS’s catering convoys. Before the mission, Batalona complained to a friend that the group had never worked together.35 On top of that, they were sent off that morning short two men, who were allegedly held back for clerical duties at the Blackwater compound.36 Then, there were the vehicles. Instead of armored trucks, the men were provided with two jeeps that had been recently equipped with a single improvised steel plate in the back .37

  On March 30, 2004, Scott Helvenston’s first real workday in Iraq, he found himself behind the wheel of a red Mitsubishi Pajero jeep, speeding through the eerie, empty desert of western Iraq. Next to him was Teague. Helvenston had just met the others a day earlier—not the ideal procedure for men about to deploy to one of the most dangerous areas in the world. Following close behind the red jeep, hulky Jerry Zovko was at the wheel of a black Pajero; next to him was Batalona—at forty-eight, the oldest of the group. The mission they were on that day had nothing to do with Paul Bremer or diplomatic security. They literally were putting their lives on the line for some forks and spoons and pots and pans. The men, though, weren’t getting paid $600 a day to set the priorities or to question the bigger picture, just to make sure the job got done right and that their “noun” of the moment was protected. Today it’s kitchen equipment; tomorrow it’s the Ambassador.

  In retrospect, there were all sorts of reasons those four men shouldn’t have gone on that mission. For one, they were shorted two guys. The CIA and State Department say they would never send just four men on a mission into the hostile territory these guys were heading into—six is the minimum. The missing man in each vehicle would have been wielding a heavy SAW machine gun with a 180-degree scope to mow down any attacker, especially from behind. “I am a designated driver so I am pretty dependent on my buds to pick up field of fire,” Helvenston had e-mailed to his ex-wife, Tricia, a few days before he set off for Fallujah.38 Without the third man, that meant the passenger had to navigate and defend from attacks pretty much alone. The men should have been in better-secured vehicles than SUVs, which are widely referred to as “bullet magnets” in Iraq because of their wide use by foreign contractors.39 The men also were supposed to be able to do a pre-operation intelligence assessment and review the threat level along the route they’d be traveling, but the mission was reportedly pulled together too fast. To top it all off, Helvenston was allegedly sent out that day without a proper map of the dangerous area into which he would be driving.40 It’s easy to look back and say the four men could have said, “No way, screw this, we’re not going.” After all, they were not active military and would not have faced a court-martial for disobeying orders. In the end, all they had to lose in refusing to go was their reputations and possibly their paychecks. “We just shouldn’t have gone [on the mission],” Helvenston’s friend and former Blackwater employee Kathy Potter told the News and Observer. “But these guys are go-getters, and they’ll make do with what they get.”41

  So off they went into the quiet of the western Iraqi desert. It’s hard to imagine that the men didn’t talk about the short stick they seemed to have drawn. Going anywhere near Fallujah in those days was scary business for non-Iraqis, and they didn’t need any intel to know it. The U.S. Marines were in the midst of a major offensive in the city, and nobody from the military in their right mind would have headed through Fallujah with only four men and without serious firepower. Blackwater management was very well aware of this. In its own contract with ESS, Blackwater laid it out, recognizing that with “the current threat in the Iraqi theater of operations as evidenced by the recent incidents against civilian entities in Fallujah, Ar Ramadi, Al Taji and Al Hillah, there are areas in Iraq that will require a minimum of three Security Personnel per vehicle. The current and foreseeable future threat will remain consistent and dangerous. Therefore, to provide tactically sound and fully mission capable Protective Security Details, the minimum team size is six operators.”42 [Emphasis added.]

  In the immediate days preceding this particular mission, the situation in Fallujah was already spiraling out of control. U.S. soldiers had been ambushed in the city, civilians had been killed, and word was getting around that “the city of mosques” was quickly becoming the city of resistance. A day before the four Blackwater men set off for Fallujah, a Marine convoy near the city had hit an improvised explosive device. Within moments resistance fighters had moved in on the vehicle, opening fire with AK-47s, killing a Marine and wounding two others.43 The next morning, as Helvenston and the others headed to Fallujah, the Marines shut down the main highway from the city to Baghdad.44 Nine Marines had died in the past eleven days around the city. After months of relative calm, a giant was rising from the rubble of “Shock and Awe,” and Scott Helvenston and the other three Blackwater contractors would soon find themselves in the middle of it all.

  As luck would have it (or perhaps because they didn’t have a map), on the night of March 30, Helvenston and the three others got lost. They drove around for a while in the Sunni Triangle before making contact with the U.S. military in the area. They made their way to a Marine base that had recently been renamed Camp Fallujah and arranged to spend the night before heading off. It is well-known in Iraq that a lot of active-duty soldiers harbor resentment toward mercenaries. Most soldiers knew that guys like Helvenston and the other three were making in a day what an average grunt makes in a week. So it isn’t surprising that the Blackwater men wouldn’t have exactly been guests of honor at the base. Still, the four men crashed there and ate alongside the troops. One Marine officer from the base angrily called the men “cowboys” and said the Blackwater men refused to inform the commanders—or anyone on the base for that matter—about the nature of their mission.45

  According to a 2007 Congressional investigation, KBR personnel at Camp Fallujah reported that “the Blackwater personnel seemed disorganized and unaware of the potential risk in traveling through the city of Fallujah. One of the KBR contractors said he felt that ‘the mission that they were on was hurriedly put together and that they were not prepared.’”46 The KBR contractors told Congressional investigators that they gave the Blackwater men “multiple warnings to avoid driving directly through Fallujah and informing them that there were ambushes occurring there. After one warning, one of the Blackwater personnel said that they would not go through Fallujah. After a different warning, however, the response of the Blackwater personnel was that ‘they would see how it went when they got out there.’ According to one KBR contractor, ‘It almost felt like they were being pressured to get there and get there as quickly as possible.’”47

  At some point before they set off the next morning, Helvenston called his mother, who said she was already sick with worry about her son being over there. But the fact that he hadn’t called in days made her even more concerned. It was the middle of the night back in Leesburg, Florida, and the ringer
was off on his mother’s phone, so Helvenston left a message: Everything’s fine mom. Please don’t worry. I’m gonna be home soon. I’m gonna take care of you.

  A short while later, Scott Helvenston was behind the wheel of the Pajero driving down Highway 10, heading straight for perhaps the most dangerous city in the world in which four lightly armed CIA-looking Americans wearing wraparound sunglasses could find themselves. It was about 9:30 a.m., and the city of mosques was awake and waiting.