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

by Jeremy Scahill

  Despite the controversy, the State Department post allowed Black to remain at the center of U.S. counterterror policy. Black worked directly under Colin Powell, with whom he reportedly shared a common adversary within the administration—Donald Rumsfeld. As the Pentagon attempted to change U.S. policy after 9/11 to allow the military to insert Special Operations forces into countries without approval from the U.S. ambassador or CIA mission chief, Black became the point person in thwarting Rumsfeld’s plan. “I gave Cofer specific instructions to dismount, kill the horses and fight on foot—this is not going to happen,” Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, told the Washington Post, describing how he and others had stopped a half dozen Pentagon attempts to weaken chief-of-mission authority.96 (Interestingly, Black, Armitage, and Powell all resigned within two weeks of one another in November 2004 after Bush’s reelection, while Rumsfeld continued on for another two years.)

  Among Black’s other duties in his new post was coordinating security for the 2004 Olympics in Greece. He traveled to Athens and oversaw the training of more than thirteen hundred Greek security personnel under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Assistance (ATA) program.97 More than two hundred of those trained were instructed in handling underwater explosives and responding to possible WMD attacks.98 Blackwater was awarded a contract for an undisclosed amount of money in 2003 to train “special security teams” in advance of the international games.99 The company denied there was anything untoward about that contract and that Black’s subsequent hiring was unrelated.100

  On April 1, 2004, a day after the Blackwater Fallujah ambush, Black was testifying before the House Committee on International Relations in a hearing on “The Al Qaeda Threat” when he made his first public comments about Blackwater. “I can’t tell you how sad we all are to see that. And this takes me back; I have seen these things before,” he said. “I think since it specifically happened in the Fallujah area, which is very Saddam Hussein-oriented, tribally oriented, they do see us as the enemy, and their natural inclination, until we prove them otherwise, is to vent their frustration, what they see as their humiliation and defeat against an outside force, against representatives of that entity. It’s not that uncommon.”101 Black continued, “The people that did this were not, you know, three guys, you know, on an excellent adventure. You know, these are people that have had the training, have a vested interest.” Asked about “any relationship you see between Al Qaeda and that kind of Islamic terrorism” evidenced in Fallujah, Black responded, “I think it is, from our perspective, it’s associated, it’s in proximity. There’s not, specifically, a direct tie between that crowd and Al Qaeda as we know it. They just find themselves with the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”102

  The next month, Black was giving a keynote dinner address at Blackwater’s World SWAT Challenge. In a mass e-mail announcing the speech, Blackwater president Gary Jackson wrote, “Dinner on Thursday night at Water-side has a fantastic guest speaker in Ambassador Cofer Black. Ambassador Black’s responsibilities include coordinating U.S. Government efforts to improve counterterrorism cooperation with foreign governments, including the policy and planning of the Department’s Antiterrorism Training Assistance Program.”103

  In late 2004, two months before the U.S. presidential election, Black grabbed headlines after claiming on Pakistani television that the United States was near to capturing bin Laden. “If he has a watch, he should be looking at it because the clock is ticking,” Black declared. “He will be caught.”104 These bold declarations were controversial and quickly put senior White House and Pakistani officials on the defensive in the media. In November 2004, Black resigned his State Department post, he said, to explore new professional opportunities. “He thought it would be a good time between administrations to go,” said State Department spokesperson Adam Ereli. “He has a number of offers in the private sector, and he’s going to take some time to think about them.”105

  For a brief moment after 9/11, Cofer Black had helped run an unprecedented covert war that some officials had salivated for their entire careers. That now was history as human rights groups and lawyers worked feverishly to dismantle the shadowy system Black had worked so diligently to build. In 2005, he was targeted for sanction, along with George Tenet and another CIA official, by the agency’s Inspector General (IG) for bearing responsibility in the 9/11 intelligence failure.106 The Bush Administration, however, worried that Tenet would retaliate and embarrass the White House by revealing damning information, buried the IG’s report, saving Black in the process.107

  Congressional Democrats would later use Black’s covert program as evidence that the Administration had “outsourced” the job of hunting bin Laden. But while his work as a government official may have ended, Black found a gold mine of opportunity in the dramatically expanding world of private military, intelligence, and security contracting—where human rights oversight was optional at best. On February 4, 2005, Blackwater USA officially announced that it had hired Black as the company’s vice chairman. “Ambassador Black brings with him thirty years of experience in combating terrorism around the globe and absolute devotion to freedom and democracy and the United States of America,” said Erik Prince. “We are honored to have him as part of our great team.”108

  For Blackwater, hiring Cofer Black was an unbelievable score. In marketing terms, it would be almost impossible to rival. The company moved swiftly to use him as a brand in and of himself. In August 2005, Black incorporated his own “consulting” practice, The Black Group, which would specialize in executive protection and security. “The 9/11 attacks were designed to damage the economy of the United States,” Black said in a statement on his Web site. “To successfully inflict the greatest possible harm, terrorists will target the lifeblood of a nation: its economy. For that reason, Fortune 500 companies are especially attractive targets as governments continue to emphasize Homeland Security. We seek to anticipate and defeat the next terrorist tactic—disruptions of supply chains, coordinated attacks on key assets or customers, or even assassinations of top executives. Corporations are the most vulnerable targets. It’s our job to keep them safe.”109 The Black Group boasted, “With leadership drawn from the Executive Branch of the United States Government, The Black Group has the practical experience and the network to mitigate any security issue. Ensure the security of your people and your assets.”110

  On The Black Group’s Web site, various images of potential targets flash on the screen: a crowd gathered at the Mall in Washington, D.C., a power plant, a man in a suit using a device to inspect the bottom of a car in an underground garage, a Wall Street sign. On the contact page, the other main figure listed on the site is Francis McLennand, another career CIA officer, who worked alongside Black at the agency.111 The contact phone number for the company was the same number used by Erik Prince’s “Prince Group” in McLean, Virginia, not far from the CIA Counterterrorism Center Black once headed.

  Few other Americans had their hands as deeply into the inner workings of U.S. covert operations in the post-9/11 world as Cofer Black. He soon would begin acting as a godfather of sorts to the mercenary community as it refined its rebranding campaign. Potential Blackwater clients could now assume they were getting direct access to the resources of the CIA and intelligence world from “a leadership team drawn from senior levels of the United States government”112—something few other private firms could boast or imply. Black was a heavy hitter among the heaviest of them, the man who caught Carlos the Jackal and brought down the Taliban. He would soon take the lead in promoting Blackwater as a privatized peacekeeping force that could deploy at a moment’s notice in places like Darfur, Sudan, or domestically in U.S. Homeland Security operations. Other influential ex-government officials would soon join him at Blackwater as the company turned its sights on lucrative disaster contracting in the United States in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in late 2005. But just as Black was rolling up his sleeves in his fancy new digs, more Blackwater men were dying in Iraq in what would be the d
eadliest days to date for the company.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  DEATH SQUADS, MERCENARIES, AND THE “SALVADOR OPTION”

  WHEN PAUL Bremer skulked out of Iraq on June 28, 2004, he left behind a violent, chaotic mess that the White House called “a free and sovereign” Iraq.1 Just how unstable the country was when Bremer departed was evident in the fact that he actually had to stage an exit in one plane for the press and then fly out of Baghdad in another to “get me out of here . . . preferably in one piece.”2 In real terms, this “sovereignty,” which President Bush described as “the Iraqi people hav[ing] their country back,”3 was a way to set the stage for U.S. officials to blame the puppet government in Baghdad for the worsening American-made disaster. When Bremer’s secret flight fled Iraq, anti-U.S. attacks were increasing by the day as more mercenaries poured into the country—now officially operating with immunity. In the meantime, more Iraqi factions began arming militias, and talk of civil war began drowning out that of a united resistance to the U.S. occupation. It was in the midst of these developments that Bremer’s successor arrived on the ground in Baghdad.

  Ambassador John Negroponte was certainly no stranger to wanton bloodletting and death-squad-style operations, having cut his teeth working under Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War.4 Beginning in 1981, Negroponte was the Reagan administration’s point man in fueling death squads in Central America.5 As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte had presided over the second largest embassy in Latin America at the time and the largest CIA station in the world.6 From that post, Negroponte had coordinated Washington’s covert support for the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and for the Honduran junta, covering up the crimes of its murderous Battalion 316.7 During Negroponte’s tenure in Honduras, U.S. officials who worked under him said the State Department human rights reports on the country were drafted to read more like Norway’s than anything reflecting the actual reality in Honduras.8 Negroponte’s predecessor in Honduras, Ambassador Jack R. Binns, told the New York Times that Negroponte had discouraged reporting to Washington of abductions, torture, and killings by notorious Honduran military units. “I think [Negroponte] was complicit in abuses, I think he tried to put a lid on reporting abuses and I think he was untruthful to Congress about those activities,” Binns said.9 The Wall Street Journal reported that in Honduras, “Negroponte’s influence, backed by huge amounts of U.S. aid, was so great that it was said he far outweighed the country’s president and that his only real rival was Honduras’s military chief.”10 He was “such a powerful ambassador in Honduras in the early 1980s that he was known as ‘the proconsul,’ a title given to powerful administrators in colonial times,” the Journal noted in a story published shortly after Negroponte’s nomination to the Iraq post. “Now President Bush has chosen him to reprise that role in Iraq.”11

  Perhaps there was little irony, then, that shortly after Negroponte’s appointment as ambassador to Iraq, in April 2004, the Honduran government announced it was pulling its 370 troops out of the “coalition of the willing.”12 Despite Negroponte’s well-documented record of involvement with a policy of horrible human rights abuses and killings, his confirmation as ambassador to Iraq went smoothly—he was approved by the Senate in a 95-3 vote on May 6, 2004. Senator Tom Harkin, who as a Congressman in the 1980s had investigated Negroponte’s activities in Central America, said he wished he had done more to stop Negroponte’s appointment. “I’ve been amazed at how this individual—from what he did in Central America, where under his watch hundreds of people disappeared—has moved up. He falsified reports and ignored what was happening,” Harkin said. “This is going to be our ambassador to Iraq at this time?”13

  Negroponte was guarded by Blackwater’s forces upon his arrival in Baghdad in June and as he stepped up the development of the largest U.S. Embassy in the world—overseeing an estimated staff of thirty-seven hundred, including twenty-five hundred security personnel, “a unit only slightly smaller than a full Marine Corps regiment.”14 In an echo of his time in Honduras, the Baghdad Embassy would house some five hundred CIA operatives.15 At the same time, Blackwater had just been awarded a vaunted diplomatic security contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars.16 But it wasn’t just American private armies that were making their mark in Iraq. In addition to the mercenary companies increasingly being employed by the occupation forces and reconstruction industry, there was also a sharp rise in death-squad-style activities in the country in the months directly following the brief joint uprising of Shiites and Sunnis in March/April 2004.

  Six months after Negroponte arrived, on January 8, 2005, Newsweek reported that the United States was employing a new approach to defeating the insurgency in Iraq, one that harkened back to Negroponte’s previous dirty work two decades earlier.17 It was called “the Salvador option,” which “dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported ‘nationalist’ forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers.” 18 The idea seemed to be that the United States would seek to use Iraqi death squads to hunt anti-occupation insurgents, while at the same time siphoning resources from the resistance and encouraging sectarian fighting. While Rumsfeld called the Newsweek report (which he admitted to not having read) “nonsense,”19 the situation on the ground painted a different picture.

  By February 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported from Baghdad that about fifty-seven thousand Iraqi soldiers were operating in “planned units” that were “the result of careful preparation this summer between the U.S. and Iraqi commanders.”20 At the same time, the country saw the emergence of militias “commanded by friends and relatives of [Iraqi] cabinet officers and tribal sheiks—[they] go by names like the Defenders of Baghdad, the Special Police Commandos, the Defenders of Khadamiya and the Amarah Brigade. The new units generally have the backing of the Iraqi government and receive government funding. . . . Some Americans consider them a welcome addition to the fight against the insurgency—though others worry about the risks.”21 U.S. commanders referred to them as “pop-up” units and estimated they numbered fifteen thousand fighters. “I’ve begun calling them ‘Irregular Iraqi ministry-directed brigades,’” said Maj. Chris Wales, who was tasked in January 2005 with identifying the units.22 The Wall Street Journal identified at least six of these militias, one with “several thousand soldiers” lavishly armed with “rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, mortar tubes and lots of ammunition.” One militia, the “Special Police Commandos,” was founded by Gen. Adnan Thabit, who took part in the failed 1996 coup plot against Saddam Hussein. Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who in 2005 was “overseeing the massive U.S. effort to help train and equip Iraqi military units,” told the Journal he gave Thabit’s unit funding to fix up its base and buy vehicles, ammunition, radios, and more weapons. “I decided this was a horse to back,” Petraeus said.23

  Upon his arrival in Baghdad, Negroponte joined up with other U.S. officials who were veterans of the U.S. “dirty wars” in Central America—among them Bremer’s ex-deputy, James Steele, who had been one of the key U.S. military officials managing Washington’s brutal “counterinsurgency” campaign in El Salvador in the 1980s.24 “The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, to which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980,” wrote journalist Peter Maass at the time in The New York Times Magazine25:

  The cost was high—more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and its associated paramilitaries included “extrajudicial executions, other unlawful
killings, ‘disappearances’ and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.” As part of President Reagan’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of 55 Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses. There are far more Americans in Iraq today—some 140,000 troops in all—than there were in El Salvador, but U.S. soldiers and officers are increasingly moving to a Salvador-style advisory role. In the process, they are backing up local forces that, like the military in El Salvador, do not shy away from violence. It is no coincidence that this new strategy is most visible in a paramilitary unit that has Steele as its main adviser; having been a key participant in the Salvador conflict, Steele knows how to organize a counterinsurgency campaign that is led by local forces. He is not the only American in Iraq with such experience: the senior U.S. adviser in the Ministry of Interior, which has operational control over the commandos, is Steve Casteel, a former top official in the Drug Enforcement Administration who spent much of his professional life immersed in the drug wars of Latin America. Casteel worked alongside local forces in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.26