In describing his first visit to Blackwater in the summer of 2003, just as the mercenary boom was getting under way in Iraq, Pizarro speaks with the enthusiasm of a child describing Christmas presents to his friends at school. “My hair was on fire,” he recalled. “It’s a private army in the twenty-first century. A private company with their own training, their own private forces to protect U.S. government facilities in a war zone. It was like out of a Dr. No movie. . . . It’s like a movie. It’s a gigantic facility with a military urban terrain. It’s a mock city where you can train with real-life ammunition or paintball, with vehicles, with helicopters. Gosh, impressive, very, very impressive.” Pizarro thought he was essentially going to a souped-up firing and training range, but when he got there, “I saw people from all over the world training over there—civilians, military personnel, army personnel, naval, navy personnel, marines, air force, para-rescue. Wow, it was like a private military base.”
Pizarro said that “within five seconds I dropped the idea of helping them in selling target systems” and began to dream of how he could fit into this incredible movie set. Pizarro said that he didn’t want to blow his opportunity, so “I kept my mouth shut.” In his head, though, he envisioned providing Chilean forces to Blackwater. “I didn’t want to look like a walking suitcase,” he said. “It was a hunch. Like maybe, maybe if I can get enough Chilean Navy SEALs, enough Chilean Army paratroopers, enough Chilean Marine Corps commandos, I know how professional they are, they’re super-young, they’re recently retired, with twenty years or fifteen years of active duty, and working as a supermarket security guard—I mean, I should, in theory, I should be able to create something.” Pizarro said after his first visit to Blackwater, he “spent a few weeks talking to people on the phone back in Chile. I called them from Washington. I hooked up with a few lieutenant colonels, a few retired majors. ‘Can you get a hundred commandos?’ ‘Can you get a hundred paratroopers?’ ‘Can you get Navy SEALs, bilingual within a couple of weeks?’ ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘OK.’ ‘I can get twenty.’ Another guy: ‘I can get seven.’ ‘I can get twenty-five.’” The phone calls led to meetings in Santiago with military officials, but Pizarro said the reception was hardly enthusiastic. He heard the same things over and over: “That sounds illegal”; “That sounds dirty”; “That doesn’t sound right”; “No, we’re not interested”; “You’re going [to] fail.” But Pizarro said these responses “were actually fueling me more. I was convinced that I was doing the right thing.”
A major reason Pizarro said he believed this is that he had been speaking regularly with Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, the private military trade group of which Blackwater would become a prominent member. “[Brooks] doesn’t strike me as an illegal, evil bastard,” recalled Pizarro. “He strikes me as a professional young man. And he told me this is perfectly legal. I mean, I spent countless meetings with his friends at his office. I mean, we both live in Washington, and after I was convinced that I was doing what’s legal, what’s right, what’s correct, then I made up my mind. Nothing will stop me.” In an e-mail, Brooks admitted he met with Pizarro “a few times” but said he didn’t “recall discussion [of the] legality” of Pizarro’s plan. Eventually, after “hundreds of meetings,” Pizarro said he found people from Chile’s military community who believed in his idea of supplying Chilean forces to U.S. companies: “I met the right colonel, the right lieutenant colonel, the right admiral, the right retired personnel.” Pizarro and his comrades hired a private Chilean human resources firm to help recruit men for their plan. When Pizarro felt it was a go, he returned to the United States to make his pitch to Blackwater in October 2003. He said he spoke to Blackwater president Gary Jackson. “Gary didn’t like the project,” Pizarro recalled. “He kicked me out of his office, like, ‘Hey, no way. We’re not going to do this. It’s just, it’s too crazy. Get out of here.’” Then, Pizarro said, he landed a meeting with Erik Prince at Prince’s office in Virginia. As Pizarro told it, he walked into the office and Prince said, “Who the hell are you?”
“My name is Mike Pizarro. Do we have five minutes, sir?”
“You got three,” Prince shot back.
Pizarro said he presented Prince with a PowerPoint presentation on the Chilean forces he wanted to provide Blackwater. Within moments, Pizarro recalled, Prince warmed to the idea. “Guess what?” Pizarro recalled with excitement. “When [Prince] was a U.S. Navy SEAL, he was in Chile.” Prince, he said, had a high regard for Chilean forces. “So he knew the Chilean Navy SEALs. He got friends over there. He knew our professionalism, the orientation of our training, how bilingual are our enlisted personnel, and the quality of our officers.” Pizarro recalled that Prince said, “Mike, listen, you convinced me. If you can get one, just one Chilean Navy SEAL to work for me, this is worth it. Go ahead and impress me.” Pizarro said as he was leaving the Virginia office, Prince told him, “Once you’re ready for a demo, give us a call. I will send a few evaluators” to Chile. The next morning, Pizarro was on a plane back to Santiago.
Back in Chile, Pizarro moved quickly. He and his business partners established a company, Grupo Táctico, and rented a ranch in Calera de Tango, south of Santiago, where they could review prospective soldiers. Pizarro’s commercial manager was Herman Brady Maquiavello, son of Herman Brady Roche, Pinochet’s former defense minister.18 On October 12, 2003, they placed an ad in the leading daily newspaper, El Mercurio: “International company is looking for former military officers to work abroad. Officers, deputy officers, former members of the Special Forces, preferably. Good health and physical condition. Basic command of English. Retirement documents (mandatory). October 20 to 24, from 8:45 am to 5 pm.”19 As applicants began showing up for interviews with Pizarro and his colleagues, word spread that salaries as high as $3,000 a month were being offered,20 far greater than the $400 monthly pay for soldiers in Chile.21 A former soldier who applied for the job told the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, “We were informed that a foreign security company needs around 200 former military officers to work as security guards in Iraq.”22 Another said, “I would like to get that job. They pay $2,500 and they told me at the fort that the job entailed going to Iraq to watch several facilities and oil wells.”23 It didn’t take long for Pizarro to get flooded with applications from retired Chilean officers and those wishing to retire so that they could join this new private force.24
Before he knew it, Pizarro had more than a thousand applications to sort through.25 But just as he was beginning to make progress, the Chilean press began to report on his activities. Reports emerged that a Chilean naval commander had allegedly violated military procedure and announced the job offer to soldiers, while some Socialist lawmakers accused Pizarro’s colleagues of headhunting soldiers.26 Within days of the ad’s appearance in the paper, Chilean parliamentarians began calling for Pizarro to be investigated. “Lawmakers recalled that the Defense Ministry—not a private corporation—is the only body that, at the request of the UN, may select active military members to support the peacekeeping forces in that country. So any other method would be illegal,” reported La Tercera shortly after Pizarro’s project became public.27 Pizarro responded at the time that his activities were “absolutely legal and transparent.”28 The Chilean press also recalled a controversy in July 2002 when Pizarro was quoted by a Brazilian paper, Jornal do Brasil, claiming that Chile’s war academy was reviewing a plan for twenty-six hundred troops from the United States, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Peru to intervene in Colombia’s battle against FARC rebels, under the auspices of the United Nations.29 The Chilean Defense Ministry was forced to issue a public denial, creating an awkward situation between Chile and Colombia.30 There were also rumblings in Chile that Pizarro was working with the CIA. “Obviously, Mike Pizarro is a CIA agent, supported by the FBI and the Imperial Forces of the United States, and obviously, he’s working for President Bush,” Pizarro recalled with sarcasm. “There is a gossip that he also goes to the ra
nch of President Bush in Texas. I mean, the stories are absolutely flat-out ignorance.”
In the midst of all of this, Pizarro forged ahead. He and his colleagues worked feverishly at their ranch to whittle down the number of men they would present to the Blackwater evaluators from one thousand to three hundred.31 They purchased dozens of rubber and ceramic “dummy” rifles for training and painted them black.32 By late October, Pizarro had his three hundred men, and he called Erik Prince. “We’re ready,” he told Prince. “Send your people.” He said Prince told him that he was leaving for Switzerland but gave him Gary Jackson’s cell phone number. Aware of Jackson’s attitude about the project, Prince told Pizarro to wait a few minutes to call Jackson so that Prince could brief the Blackwater president, according to Pizarro. “Then I called Gary, and Gary was obviously not happy,” Pizarro recalled. He said Jackson told him, “OK, I just talked to Erik. This is a fucking waste of time. I’ll send my three evaluators there, but Mike, you better deliver on your promise because this is a complete waste of time,’ blah, blah, blah. He was very negative. But that’s just the way Gary is.”
Back at the ranch in Chile, Pizarro addressed the three hundred men he and his colleagues had chosen for evaluation by Blackwater. “You will be interviewed by American evaluators. They will ask you basic questions,” Pizarro told the Chilean soldiers. “They will test the level of your leadership skills, how smart you are, how well trained you are, etc., your physical ability.” Pizarro said they would be divided into three groups—one for each of the three U.S. evaluators. “It will be a hundred guys per American. It will take basically the entire day. So you need to be patient. I can make no promises. If we can impress these guys, maybe, maybe we’ll be hired to work in Iraq protecting U.S. Consulates and Embassy,” Pizarro said. In the last week of November 2003, Pizarro said, the Blackwater evaluators arrived in Chile. “The three of them, former U.S. Navy SEALs, impressive guys, six foot tall, gigantic, excellent shape, very professional,” Pizarro recalled. “The three of them bilingual. I mean super-impressive. They evaluated 300 guys” in three days. “They went back to the States, and those were the longest fourteen days of my life because for fourteen days there was no news from Blackwater whatsoever.”
In the meantime, the controversy in Chile about Pizarro’s activities was growing. Pizarro said that a few hours before the Blackwater evaluators arrived at the ranch, a Chilean TV station showed up and ended up filming the activities there. On national television in Chile, Pizarro was accused of “training a private army,” under the supervision of U.S. military people, he said. “The news flash presented me like some sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger—Latino version of—it was absurd,” Pizarro recalled. “My family was crying on the phone. My mom was calling, ‘Mike, what are you doing? We’re going to jail.’ ‘No, mom. It’s a dummy rifle.’ ‘It looks so real. You’re going down.’ I mean, even my girlfriend kicked me out.” Despite the mounting controversy and the silence from Blackwater, Pizarro held out hope that his plan would succeed.
Then on December 18, Pizarro said he got an e-mail from Gary Jackson. We’re up. You’re bringing 100 people in February to be evaluated in the United States. Pizarro said he chose his “best 100 guys” and prepared to head to North Carolina. The Chilean soldiers were sequestered in Chile for forty-eight hours before departing and were not allowed to call their families.33 They went to the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, which promptly issued them multiple entry visas.34 On February 4, 2004, Pizarro and seventy-eight Chilean soldiers arrived at Moyock for “evaluation.” Training, Pizarro asserted, “is illegal. You cannot train. They were evaluated.” Pizarro said, “Every single one of them was evaluated for English skills, medical skills, first aid, rifle range, pistol range, driving skills, telecommunication skills, and leadership.” Pizarro was particularly impressed with one exercise in which Blackwater evaluators used toy soldiers to present various scenarios that could occur in Iraq and quizzed the Chileans on how they would handle the situation. It was “very smart, very cheap,” Pizarro recalled with amazement. “It didn’t cost a penny, but it really tested my guys to extreme.” In all, the first batch of seventy-eight Chileans spent ten days at Blackwater. Pizarro said the evaluators “were very impressed” with his men. Only one was sent home, he said, because of an attitude problem.
On February 14, 2004, Blackwater flew the first group of Chilean commandos from North Carolina to Baghdad. “They got deployed immediately,” Pizarro said. “And then I got a contract for another group of seventy-eight within twenty-four hours. So I flew over [to Blackwater] again at the end of February with the second group.” Pizarro recalled with great pride that Gary Jackson—who he said had doubted the project all along—was interviewed by a Chilean newspaper the day the first group of Chileans set off for Iraq, ahead of schedule. “They did incredibly well and they are absolute professionals,” Jackson told La Tercera. “So they are leaving today on a flight that departs in the morning to the Middle East.”35 Jim Sierawski, Blackwater’s director of training, said the deployment happened fast because the Chilean commandos did not need additional training beyond what they had received in the Chilean armed forces. “Their knowledge provides them with the necessary skills to do what they have to do in different missions,” he said.36 “The Chilean guys from group one were so highly trained, I mean the average age was forty-three years old,” Pizarro recalled. “These were highly seasoned commandos.”
Once in Iraq, the Chilean forces were tasked with doing “static protection” of buildings—generally headquarters of State Department or CPA facilities, Pizarro said. The first group of Chileans was deployed in Samawah, where Pizarro said they guarded a CPA building, as well as a regional office in Diwaniyah. The second batch went straight for a hotel in Hillah that had been converted to an occupation building. They also guarded a CPA headquarters in the Shiite holy city of Karbala. “We are confident,” former Chilean Army officer Carlos Wamgnet told La Tercera. “This mission is not something new to us. After all, it is extending our military career.”37 Former Marine John Rivas told the paper, “I don’t feel like a mercenary.” 38 Pizarro traveled to Iraq twice to observe his men on contract with Blackwater, remaining in the country for a month and traveling to all of the sites “from Baghdad to Basra” where Chileans were deployed. “We have been successful. We’re not profiting from death. We’re not killing people,” Pizarro said. “We’re not shooting. We’re not operating on open streets. We’re providing static security services. We do not interact with Iraqi people. We do not patrol the Iraqi street. We never touch, talk, or get involved in any way, shape, or form with civilians in Iraq.” But, as journalist Louis E. V. Nevaer reported soon after the Chileans arrived in Iraq, “Newspapers in Chile have estimated that approximately 37 Chileans in Iraq are seasoned veterans of the Pinochet era. Government officials in Santiago are alarmed that men who enjoy amnesty in Chile—provided they remain in ‘retirement’ from their past military activities—are now in Iraq.”39
Pizarro said that Blackwater was so impressed with the Chileans that the company stopped bringing them en masse for evaluation to North Carolina. Instead, Pizarro said he would bring twenty a month to Blackwater’s compound and the rest would fly directly from Santiago to Jordan, where they would be evaluated by Blackwater officials in Amman before being deployed in Iraq. “We created such level of comfort, of professionalism, of trust. . . . Blackwater was addicted to us,” Pizarro said. “Basically for the price of one U.S. former operator, they were getting four, sometimes five Chilean commandos.” He described Blackwater’s thirst for more Chileans as “very, very, very aggressive.” In all, Pizarro said he provided 756 Chilean soldiers to Blackwater and other companies over two years and a month. By March 2004 Gary Jackson had become a public backer of the Chilean forces. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, he explained that Chile was the only Latin American country where Blackwater had hired commandos for Iraq. “We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals—the Chile
an commandos are very, very professional and they fit within the Blackwater system,” Jackson said. “We didn’t just come down and say, ‘You and you and you, come work for us.’ They were all vetted in Chile and all of them have military backgrounds. This is not the Boy Scouts.”40 Amid allegations from Chilean lawmakers that his activities were illegal and that the men Pizarro was recruiting were “mercenaries,” Pizarro registered his firm in Uruguay to avoid legal troubles in Chile. So the contracting was eventually done between Blackwater and a Uruguayan ghost company called Neskowin.41 “It is 110 percent legal,” Pizarro said in April 2004. “We are bullet proof. They can do nothing to stop us.”42
But as word spread about the use of Chilean commandos trained under Pinochet, it evoked strong condemnation in the country. As a rotating member of the UN Security Council, Chile opposed the war in Iraq.43 “The presence of Chilean paramilitaries in Iraq has caused a visceral rejection in the population, 92% of which just a year ago rejected any intervention of the US in the country,” said Chilean writer Roberto Manríquez in June 2004.44 It also sparked outrage and horror from victims of the Pinochet regime. “It is sickening that Chilean army officers are considered to be good soldiers because of the experience they acquired during the dictatorship years,” said Tito Tricot, a Chilean sociologist who was imprisoned and tortured under the dictatorship.45 The Chilean commandos working for Blackwater “are valued for their expertise in kidnapping, torturing and killing defenseless civilians. What should be a national shame turns into a market asset due to the privatization of the Iraqi war. All this is possible, not only because of the United States’ absolute disrespect for human rights, but also due to the fact that justice has not been done in Chile either. Therefore, members of the Armed Forces that should be in prison due to the atrocities they committed under the dictatorship, walk freely the streets of our country as if nothing had happened. Moreover, they are now rewarded for their criminal past.”46
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