Newsweek described the “Salvador option” in Iraq as the United States using “Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers.”27 The magazine also reported that then-interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi “is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option.”28 This was interesting, given that the New York Times reported, “Negroponte had taken a low-key approach, choosing to remain in the shadows in deference to Ayad Allawi.”29
Though allegations that the United States was engaged in Salvador-type operations in Iraq predate Negroponte’s tenure in Baghdad, they did seem to intensify significantly once he arrived. As early as January 2004, journalist Robert Dreyfuss reported on the existence of a covert U.S. program in Iraq that resembled “the CIA’s Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, Latin America’s death squads or Israel’s official policy of targeted murders of Palestinian activists.”30 The United States, Dreyfuss reported, had established a $3 billion “black” fund hidden within the $87 billion Iraq appropriation approved by Congress in November 2003. The money would be used to create “a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups. Experts say it could lead to a wave of extrajudicial killings, not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists.”31 The former CIA chief of counterterrorism, Vincent Cannistraro, said U.S. forces in Iraq were working with key members of Saddam Hussein’s defunct intelligence apparatus. “They’re setting up little teams of Seals and Special Forces with teams of Iraqis, working with people who were former senior Iraqi intelligence people, to do these things,” Cannistraro said.32 “The big money would be for standing up an Iraqi secret police to liquidate the resistance,” said John Pike, an expert on covert military budgets. “And it has to be politically loyal to the United States.”33
Veteran journalist Allan Nairn, who exposed U.S.-backed death squads in Central America in the 1980s, said whether Negroponte was involved with the “Salvador option” in Iraq or not, “These programs, which backed the killing of foreign civilians, it’s a regular part of U.S. policy. It’s ingrained in U.S. policy in dozens upon dozens of countries.”34 Duane Clarridge, who ran the CIA’s “covert war against communism in Central America from Honduras,” visited his old colleague Negroponte in Baghdad in the summer of 2004. In Iraq, “[Negroponte] was told to play a low-key role and let the Iraqis be out front,” Clarridge told the New York Times. “And that’s what he likes to do, anyway.”35 According to the Times, “Negroponte shifted more than $1 billion to build up the Iraqi Army from reconstruction projects, a move prompted by his experience with the frailty of the South Vietnamese Army.”36
Negroponte called the connection of his name to the “Salvador option” in Iraq “utterly gratuitous.”37 But human rights advocates who closely monitored his career said the rise in death-squad-type activity in Iraq during Negroponte’s tenure in Baghdad was impossible to overlook. “What we’re seeing is that the U.S. military is losing the war [in Iraq], and so the Salvador option was really a policy of death squads,” said Andres Contreris, Latin American program director of the human rights group Non-violence International. “It’s no coincidence that Negroponte, having been the Ambassador in Honduras, where he was very much engaged in this kind of support for death squads, was the Ambassador in Iraq, and this is the kind of policy that was starting to be implemented there, which is not just going after the resistance itself but targeting for repression and torture and assassination the underlying support base, the family members, and those in the communities where the resistance is. These kinds of policies are war crimes.”38
Negroponte’s time in Iraq was short-lived—on February 17, 2005, President Bush nominated him as the first Director of National Intelligence. Some would say Negroponte had a job to do in Iraq, he did it, and then left. By May of that year, he was back in the United States, while reports increasingly appeared describing an increase in death-squad-style activity in Iraq. “Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country’s divide along ethnic and sectarian lines,” the Washington Post reported a few months after Negroponte left Iraq.39 “In 2005, we saw numerous instances where the behavior of death squads was very similar, uncannily similar to that we had observed in other countries, including El Salvador,” said John Pace, a forty-year United Nations diplomat who served as the Human Rights Chief for the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq during Negroponte’s time in the country. “They first started as a kind of militia, sort of organized armed groups, which were the military wing of various factions.”40 Eventually, he said, “Many of them [were] actually acting as official police agents as a part of the Ministry of Interior. . . . You have these militias now with police gear and under police insignia basically carrying out an agenda which really is not in the interest of the country as a whole. They have roadblocks in Baghdad and other areas, they would kidnap other people. They have been very closely linked with numerous mass executions.”41
Shortly before Negroponte left Iraq, former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter predicted that “the Salvador Option will serve as the impetus for all-out civil war. In the same manner that the CPA-backed assassination of Baathists prompted the restructuring and strengthening of the Sunni-led resistance, any effort by US-backed Kurdish and Shia assassination teams to target Sunni resistance leaders will remove all impediments for a general outbreak of ethnic and religious warfare in Iraq. It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members, and many more Iraqis.”42 Ritter’s vision would appear prophetic in the ensuing months, as Iraq was hit with an unprecedented and sustained level of violence many began describing as an all-out civil war.
In October 2005, correspondent Tom Lasseter from the Knight Ridder news agency spent a week on patrol with “a crack unit of the Iraqi army—the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Division.”43 He reported, “Instead of rising above the ethnic tension that’s tearing their nation apart, the mostly Shiite troops are preparing for, if not already fighting, a civil war against the minority Sunni population.” The unit was responsible for security in Sunni areas of Baghdad, and Lasseter reported that “they’re seeking revenge against the Sunnis who oppressed them during Saddam Hussein’s rule.” He quoted Shiite Army Maj. Swadi Ghilan saying he wanted to kill most Sunnis in Iraq. “There are two Iraqs; it’s something that we can no longer deny,” Ghilan said. “The army should execute the Sunnis in their neighborhoods so that all of them can see what happens, so that all of them learn their lesson.”
Lasseter reported that many of the Shiite officers and soldiers said they “want a permanent, Shiite-dominated government that will finally allow them to steamroll much of the Sunni minority, some 20 percent of the nation and the backbone of the insurgency.” Lasseter described the First Brigade, which was held up by U.S. commanders as a template for the future of Iraq’s military, like this: “They look and operate less like an Iraqi national army unit and more like a Shiite militia.” Another officer, Sgt. Ahmed Sabri, said, “Just let us have our constitution and elections . . . and then we will do what Saddam did—start with five people from each neighborhood and kill them in the streets and then go from there.” By November 2006 an estimated one thousand Iraqis were being killed every week,44 and the Iraqi death toll had passed an estimated six hundred thousand people since the March 2003 invasion.45
In retrospect, if one stepped back from the various substories playing out on the ground in Iraq in 2005, the big-picture reality was that the country was quickly becoming the global epicenter of privatized warfare
with scores of heavily armed groups of various loyalties and agendas roaming Iraq. In addition to the U.S.-backed death squads, operating with some claim to legitimacy within the U.S.-installed system in Baghdad, there were the private antioccupation militias of various Shiite leaders, such as Muqtada al-Sadr, and the resistance movements of Sunni factions, largely comprised of ex-military officials and soldiers, as well as Al Qaeda-backed militias. The Bush administration made it a policy to denounce certain militias. “In a free Iraq, former militia members must shift their loyalty to the national government, and learn to operate under the rule of law,” Bush declared.46 Yet at the top of this militia pyramid were the official mercenaries Washington had imported to Iraq—the private military companies, of which Blackwater was the industry leader. While calling for the dismantling of some Iraqi militias, the United States openly permitted its own pro-occupation mercenaries to operate above the law in Iraq.
“There Continues to Be the Need for This Kind of Security”
At the end of Negroponte’s time in Baghdad, with militia violence on the rise, Blackwater’s forces once again grabbed headlines in what would be—at the time—the deadliest incident the company acknowledged publicly in Iraq. On April 21, 2005, the day Negroponte was confirmed to his new position as Director of National Intelligence in Washington, some of his former bodyguards were dying in Iraq.47 That day, a Bulgarian-operated Mi-8 helicopter on contract with Blackwater was flying from the Green Zone to Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.48 On board were six American Blackwater troops on contract with the U.S. government’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.49 With them were three Bulgarian crew members and two Fijian mercenaries.50 A day before they left, one of the Blackwater men, twenty-nine-year-old Jason Obert of Colorado, had called his wife, Jessica. He “told me that he was going to be sent on a mission. He had a bad feeling about it,” she recalled. “I begged him not to go. I just told him just to come home. But he would never quit; that’s not him.”51 Jessica Obert said her husband did not tell her the nature of the mission. Like many who signed up for work with Blackwater in Iraq, Jason Obert viewed it as a chance to build a nest egg for his wife and their two young sons.52 In February 2005, he quit his job as a police officer and signed up with Blackwater. “The financial gain was incredible,” said Lt. Robert King, Obert’s former boss at the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department. “He had communicated to me and several other people that he would do one year, and his children and his wife would be taken care of. Their college education would be funded, houses paid off.”53 The day after he told his wife about his “bad feelings,” he boarded the Mi-8 helicopter with his Blackwater colleagues, the Fijians, and the Bulgarian crew.
At about 1:45 in the afternoon, as the helicopter buzzed toward Tikrit, it passed near the Tigris River town of Tarmiya, a small community of Sunni Muslims twelve miles north of Baghdad.54 The pilots were flying the craft low to the ground, a common military tactic to thwart potential attackers. On an elevated plain nearby stood an Iraqi who reportedly had been waiting three days for an occupation aircraft to come close enough so that he could carry out his mission.55 When the chopper whizzed within range, the Iraqi fired off a Soviet-made Strela heat-seeking missile and directly hit the helicopter, setting it ablaze as it crashed into the flat desert.56 The attacker and his comrades filmed the attack and kept the cameras rolling as they jogged toward the crash site. On their video, they can be heard out of breath repeating the chant “Allah-u-Akbar! Allah-u-Akbar!” When they arrive at the site, helicopter parts are spread across the open field and several small fires continue to burn. A badly charred body of one of the dead men lies on the ground with one arm raised in an L shape as though cowering from some form of attack.57 “Look at this filth,” says one of the attackers. “See if there are any Americans left.”58
The attackers continue to explore the remains of the helicopter when they come across the Bulgarian pilot, Lyubomir Kostov, in a dark blue flight suit lying in a patch of tall grass. One of the men, realizing Kostov is still alive, shouts in Arabic and English, “Any weapons?” The camera pans to the pilot as he winces in pain. “Stand up! Stand up!” one of the attackers shouts in accented English. “I can’t,” replies the pilot. Motioning to his right leg, Kostov tells them, “I can’t, it’s broken. Give me a hand.” One of the attackers replies, “Come here, come here,” as he helps Kostov to his feet. “Go! Go!” someone shouts at the pilot. Kostov turns around and begins to limp away with his back to the camera. As he hobbles forward, Kostov turns his head around and puts his hand up as though to say, “Stop!” when someone suddenly yells, “Carry out God’s judgment.” The attackers, shouting “Allah-u-Akbar,” open fire on Kostov, filming the execution as they pump eighteen bullets into his body, continuing to shoot the pilot even after he has fallen.
Within two hours, a group identifying itself as the Islamic Army in Iraq provided the video to Al Jazeera, which broadcast it. “Heroes of the Islamic Army downed a transport aircraft belonging to the army of the infidels and killed its crew and those on board,” the group said in a written statement that accompanied the video. “One of the crew members was captured and killed.”59 The group said it had executed the surviving pilot “in revenge for the Muslims who have been killed in cold blood in the mosques of tireless Fallujah before the eyes of the world and on television screens, without anyone condemning them.”60 The statement was interpreted as a reference to the apparent execution by a U.S. soldier of a wounded Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque in November 2004 (which was caught on tape) during the second U.S. assault on the city.61
In a statement released shortly after the helicopter was shot down, Blackwater said the “Six were passengers in a commercial helicopter operated by Sky Link under contract to Blackwater in support of a Department of Defense contract.”62 Despite its obvious military use, media reports overwhelmingly referred to the helicopter as a “civilian” or “commercial” aircraft. Reporters at the Pentagon, meanwhile, began reporting that “these commercial aircraft fly without the type of air protective measures that military aircraft fly with.”63 Shortly after the helicopter was downed, retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd, who once headed the Air National Guard, told CNN, “All of the airplanes over there, if possible, should have infrared countermeasures and flares to protect themselves against shoulder-fired missiles, which are the biggest threat to low-flying helicopters. . . . Once an infrared shoulder-fired missile is fired at you, you can confuse it and divert either with flares or with sophisticated maneuvers.”64 Shepperd added, “All those protect you.”65 At the Pentagon press briefing after the shoot-down, a reporter asked spokesman Larry Di Rita about the apparent lack of these “countermeasures” on the Blackwater-contracted helicopter:
REPORTER: The Department of Defense is contracting these folks. Are there any sort of restrictions that you have to force these contractors to make sure that the private individuals who are doing work on behalf of DOD have the same sort of protections that uniformed service members are getting? And shouldn’t somebody who is doing the work of the Department of Defense, same mission, just because they’re getting their paycheck from somewhere else, have the same—enjoy the same protections that somebody in a uniform would be?
DI RITA: I’m not sure that that premise is the basis on which people operate over there. In other words, there are contractors who assume a certain amount of risk. Everybody over there is—no, I don’t say everybody—there are a number of contractors to the U.S. military, to the Department of Defense, some to the Department of State, and they assume a certain risk by being over there. And I wouldn’t want to characterize exactly what status this particular—obviously we mourn the loss of life, and I’m sure that the contractor would have taken all of the appropriate precautions. I mean, I think that’s what—they have the same regard for their employees as we do for our forces. But I can’t say that that necessarily means they’re going to be on the same status. I just don’t think that’s the case.
REPORTER: They have the same countermeasures. Shouldn’t they have the same protective gear, shouldn’t they have the same kind of ballistic gear, shouldn’t they have the same—
DI RITA: As I said, I think contractors recognize the environment that they’re operating in. It’s like they’re around the world, and they make appropriate adjustments on their own determination.66
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