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

by Jeremy Scahill

  Unlike the Pentagon—which was limited by budget constraints—Blackwater was limited in its ability to defend its personnel only by its own spending decisions and by how much it was willing to shell out for defensive countermeasures. “I have concerns for many of the contractors who are still over there,” said Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, who already was suing Blackwater for her son’s death in Fallujah. “Our government seems to be subcontracting out this war, and these companies have no accountability.”67

  The same day the helicopter was shot down, forty-two-year-old Curtis Hundley was working a Blackwater security detail outside the city of Ramadi, not far from the site of the helicopter shoot-down. He was just a few days away from a return trip home to his wife in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 68 “When the war in Iraq started, he wanted to fight for our country,” according to his father, Steve Hundley, a former helicopter pilot who fought in Vietnam. “Too old to rejoin the Army, he joined Blackwater Security. That put him on the roads in Iraq almost daily, the most dangerous place to be. I’ve never seen him more proud. He enjoyed throwing candy to kids along the road. Like me in Vietnam, at first, he thought progress was pretty good. But civilian miscalculations—such as not sending over enough troops to secure ammo dumps and borders, and then deactivating the entire Iraq army, which instantly created thousands of potential terrorists—began to take effect. I saw my happy-go-lucky son start to harden. His eyes, which always had had a twinkle, were different in the pictures he sent. When I could get him to talk about his job, he began to sound disgusted at the worsening situation. The last several weeks of his life, disgust had turned to anger.”69 Curtis Hundley died in Ramadi on April 21, when a bomb exploded near a company armored personnel carrier.70 Hundley’s death meant that with the helicopter crash, Blackwater had lost seven men in Iraq that day, its deadliest to date in the war. “Blackwater’s Black Day,” proclaimed one news headline.71

  Back in Moyock, company executives quickly mobilized their response. “This is a very sad day for the Blackwater family,” said president Gary Jackson. “We lost seven of our friends to attacks by terrorists in Iraq and our thoughts and prayers go out to their family members.”72 A company press release said, “Blackwater has a 15-member team of crisis counselors working with those family members to assist them in coping with the loss of their loved ones.”73 At the State Department, meanwhile, the seven men were eulogized as heroes. “These Blackwater contractors were supporting the State Department mission in Iraq, and were critical to our efforts to protect American diplomats there,” said Assistant Secretary of State Joe Morton. “These brave men gave their lives so that Iraqis may someday enjoy the freedom and democracy we enjoy here in America.”74

  Once again, the killing of Blackwater forces in Iraq had cast the spotlight back on the secretive world of mercenary companies. “The fact of the matter is that private security firms have been involved in Iraq from the very beginning, so this is nothing new,” said State Department spokesperson Adam Ereli, responding to questions from the press. “There’s a need for security that goes beyond what employees of the U.S. Government can provide, and we go to private companies to offer that. That’s a common practice. It’s not unique to Iraq. We do it around the world.”75 In Iraq, Ereli said, “I think it’s a statement of the obvious to say that the conditions . . . are such that it’s not completely safe to go throughout the country at all parts, at all times, so there continues to be the need for security—for this kind of security protection.”76

  Those words must have been music to Blackwater’s ears: There continues to be the need for this kind of security. Once again, the death of Blackwater contractors translated into more support for the mercenary cause. The day after the seven Blackwater mercenaries died in Iraq, the U.S. Senate approved a controversial $81 billion spending bill for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, pushing the total cost of the wars to more than $300 billion.77 More money was being allocated for “security” in Iraq. Some 1,564 U.S. soldiers had died since the invasion,78 along with an uncounted number of mercenaries. It was a year after the Blackwater ambush in Fallujah, and business had never been better for Erik Prince and his colleagues, despite the confirmed deaths of eighteen Blackwater contractors in Iraq.79 Back in the U.S., the Blackwater Empire was about to add another powerful former Bush administration official to its roster.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  JOSEPH SCHMITZ: CHRISTIAN SOLDIER

  JOSEPH E. SCHMITZ had long been an ideological soldier for right-wing causes before he was appointed by President Bush to be the Pentagon’s Inspector General, the top U.S. official in charge of directly overseeing military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he proved himself a loyal servant of the administration during his scandal-plagued tenure in that post from 2002 to 2005. By the time he resigned, Schmitz stood accused by Republicans and Democrats alike of protecting the very war contractors he was tasked with overseeing and of allowing rampant corruption and cronyism to go virtually unchecked. On Schmitz’s watch, well-connected companies like Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, Fluor, Titan, CACI, Triple Canopy, DynCorp, and Blackwater made a killing serving the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. By June 2005, the Defense Department had 149 “prime contracts” with seventy-seven contractors in Iraq worth approximately $42.1 billion.1 According to Pentagon auditors, Halliburton “alone represent[ed] 52% of the total contract value.”2

  Allegations of contract fraud and war profiteering during this period could fill volumes, and lawmakers denounced the lack of transparency and open bidding. “It’s been like Dodge City before the marshals showed up,” declared Senator Ron Wyden.3 In the midst of the brewing scandal over Halliburton’s profiteering and corruption in Iraq, Schmitz said in July 2004, “I haven’t seen any real deliberate gouging of the American taxpayer, but we are looking.”4 While there were many layers in the government system that facilitated such corporate misconduct, it was Schmitz whose singular task was overseeing the 1,250-person office with a $200 million budget charged with policing these lucrative U.S.-taxpayer-funded defense contracts.5

  After three years of playing a key role in the system that indemnified well-oiled corporate profiteers, during which Schmitz went out of his way to demonstrate his loyalty to the Bush administration, the Pentagon’s top cop found himself under investigation. The powerful Republican Senator Charles Grassley launched a Congressional probe into whether Schmitz “quashed or redirected two ongoing criminal investigations” into senior Bush administration officials.6 Grassley also “accused Schmitz of fabricating an official Pentagon news release, planning an expensive junket to Germany, and hiding information from Congress.”7

  Finally, under fire from both Democrats and Republicans, Schmitz resigned as Inspector General, though his office denied it was a result of the investigations. Just before he resigned, Schmitz revealed his intention to pursue a career working for Erik Prince at Blackwater. In a letter stamped June 15, 2005, he officially informed the Defense Department and the White House that “I am disqualified from participating in any official matter that will have a direct and predictable effect on the financial interests” of Blackwater USA.8 Schmitz wrote that he had “financial interests” in Blackwater “because I intend to discuss possible employment with them.”9 During Schmitz’s time at the Pentagon overseeing contractors, Blackwater had grown from a small private military and law-enforcement training facility to a global mercenary provider with hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. government contracts.

  But Schmitz’s interest in Blackwater (or Blackwater’s in Schmitz) was not simply about his dedication to the wars of the Bush administration, the fact that he worked for the Reagan administration, that he represented then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, or his involvement in the murky, corrupt world of military contractors. All of these were certainly factors, but the connection ran deeper. Joseph Schmitz, like Erik Prince and other executives at Blackwater, was a Catholic and a Christian fundamentalist. Some would go so far as to say he was
a religious fanatic obsessed with implementing “the rule of law under God.” In numerous speeches given during his time as Pentagon Inspector General, Schmitz articulated his vision and understanding of the global war on terror, employing the rhetoric of Christian supremacy. “No American today should ever doubt that we hold ourselves accountable to the rule of law under God. Here lies the fundamental difference between us and the terrorists,” Schmitz said in a June 2004 speech, just after returning from trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. “It all comes down to this—we pride ourselves on our strict adherence to the rule of law under God.”10 On his official biography, Schmitz proudly listed his membership in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta,11 a Christian militia formed in the eleventh century, before the first Crusades, with the mission of defending “territories that the Crusaders had conquered from the Moslems.”12 The Order today boasts of being “a sovereign subject of international law, with its own constitution, passports, stamps, and public institutions” and “diplomatic relations with 94 countries.” 13 In addition to his Christian zealotry, Schmitz was a fierce devotee and an awestruck admirer of one of the famed foreign mercenaries who fought on the side of Gen. George Washington during the American Revolutionary War: the Prussian militarist Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben, whom Schmitz referred to as “our first Effective Inspector General.”14 Von Steuben is one of four men often cited by Blackwater officials as founding mercenaries of the United States, the others being Generals Lafayette, Rochambeau, and Kosciuszko, whose monuments stand across from the White House in what some Blackwater officials have taken to calling “Contractor Park.”15 All of this made Schmitz an ideal candidate to join the ranks of Prince and his cohorts at Blackwater, where Schmitz would sit directly at Prince’s right hand as the Prince Group’s chief operating officer and general counsel.16 In a press release announcing the hire, Erik Prince referred to him as “General Schmitz.”17

  Joseph Schmitz comes from one of the most bizarre, scandal-plagued, right-wing political families in U.S. history. For decades they have operated on the fringes of a landscape dominated by the likes of the Kennedys, Clintons, and Bushes. The patriarch of the family, John G. Schmitz, was an ultraconservative California state politician who raised his family in a strict Catholic household. As a state lawmaker, he railed against sex education in schools, abortion, and income tax, and he was a fierce supporter of states’ rights. He regularly introduced measures supporting the “Liberty Amendment,” which would have required the federal government to get out of businesses that would have competed with private industry.18 At one point, he proposed selling the University of California.19 In the late 1960s, he accused then-California Governor Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican, of wanting to “run socialism more efficiently” after a tax increase.20 A year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, John Schmitz led the opposition in the California State Senate to commemorating the slain civil rights leader. After winning a Congressional seat as a Republican from Orange County in the early 1970s, he soon “established himself as one of the country’s most right-wing and outspoken congressmen.”21 He ran for President against Richard Nixon in 1972 as the candidate of the American Independent Party, founded in 1968 by segregationist politician George Wallace.22 The elder Schmitz also served as national director of the anti-communist John Birch Society before being kicked out for being too extreme.23 He made comments like, “Jews are like everybody else, only more so,” “Martin Luther King is a notorious liar,” “I may not be Hispanic, but I’m close. I’m Catholic with a mustache”24 and described the Watts riot as “a communist operation.”25 After President Richard Nixon announced he would visit “Red China” in 1971, Schmitz—who represented Nixon’s home district—called Nixon “pro-communist,” saying the visit was “surrendering to international communism. It wipes out any chance of overthrowing the [Peking] government.”26 Schmitz also said he had “disestablished diplomatic relations with the White House”27 and declared, “I have no objection to President Nixon going to China. I just object to his coming back.”28 Schmitz ultimately lost his seat in Congress and, after his failed presidential bid, returned to state politics. In 1981, he chaired a California State Senate committee hearing on abortion and described the audience as “hard, Jewish, and (arguably) female faces.”29 He also called feminist attorney Gloria Allred a “slick, butch lawyeress” during an attack on Allred’s support for abortion rights.30 Allred sued Schmitz, resulting in a $20,000 judgment against him and a public apology.31 His political career, spent preaching about family values, came to a crashing end after he acknowledged fathering at least two children out of wedlock.32 Eventually John G. Schmitz retired in the Washington, D.C., area, where he purchased the home of his hero, the anticommunist fanatic Senator Joseph McCarthy.33 Schmitz wrote two books, Stranger in the Arena: The Anatomy of an Amoral Decade 1964-1974 and The Viet Cong Front in the United States. He died in 2001 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.34

  Joseph Schmitz’s older brother, John Patrick, also a lawyer, was deputy counsel to George H. W. Bush from 1985 to 1993, during Bush’s time as both Vice President and President,35 and he played a key role in protecting Bush from the Iran-Contra investigation. In 1987, Bush received a request from the Office of the Independent Counsel to produce all documents that might be related to the investigation, including “all personal and official records of [Office of the Vice President] staff members.”36 Bush delegated the responsibility for this to his counsel, C. Boyden Gray, and deputy counsel John P. Schmitz.37 It wasn’t until five years later—a month after Bush was elected President—that Gray and Schmitz disclosed that Bush had kept a personal diary during the scandal that was clearly covered under the earlier document request.38 While they turned over the diary, Gray and Schmitz stalled in handing over documents related to the diary and failed to explain why it was not produced during the five crucial years of the investigation.39 Investigators interviewed all those who had something to do with producing documents from Bush’s office except Gray and Schmitz, who refused to comply.40 Schmitz refused to turn over his own diary, which covered 1987 to 1992, claiming it was a privileged work product,41 employing an obfuscatory tactic that would become de rigueur in George W. Bush’s executive branch. Even after Gray and Schmitz were both essentially offered immunity, they still refused to be interviewed; Schmitz left the administration in 1993.42 Joseph Schmitz had his own link to the Iran-Contra scandal, serving in 1987 as special assistant attorney general to Edwin Meese,43 who served under Reagan as Attorney General and, in Meese’s own words, tried “to limit the damage.”44 Prior to his time at the White House, John Patrick had clerked for then-U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Antonin Scalia.45 John Patrick went on to become a lobbyist /attorney with the Washington, D.C., firm Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw.46 Among his clients: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Lockheed Martin, Enron, General Electric, Pfizer, and Bayer.47 He was also a “Major League Pioneer” funder of George W. Bush, donating thousands to his campaign coffers.48

  Perhaps the most famous member of the Schmitz family, though, is the least political: Joseph Schmitz’s sister, Mary Kay LeTourneau. In 1997, the married schoolteacher and mother of four grabbed headlines after being charged with the child rape of Vili Fualaau, her thirteen-year-old student.49 Four months later, she gave birth to Fualaau’s daughter.50 The case was a tabloid obsession for years. After serving a seven-year prison term, during which time she gave birth to another child fathered by Fualaau, LeTourneau married her former sixth-grade student in 2004.51 While her father—the hysterical family-values politician who railed against feminists, homosexuals, and abortion—vigorously defended her, other family members kept a much lower profile about the case, which ran parallel to Joseph Schmitz’s ascension to a position in the Bush administration.52

  Joseph Schmitz was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who had served in the Navy, mostly in the reserves, for twenty-seven years at the time of his nomination in the summer of 2001 to be
the Pentagon Inspector General.53 His limited government work included the stint with Meese and as deputy senior inspector for the Naval Reserve intelligence program. Directly prior to his nomination, Schmitz was a partner at the high-powered and well-connected lobbying and law firm Patton Boggs, where he specialized in aviation law and international trade in high-tech goods, in militarily sensitive areas.54 During Schmitz’s time at the Pentagon, Patton Boggs launched its own “Iraq Reconstruction” practice, in June 2003.55 “An insider’s perspective is crucial . . . for companies seeking one of the many contracts to reconstruct Iraq,” read the copy on Patton Boggs’s reconstruction page, while the firm boasted of “an exceptionally high number of attorneys with extensive Hill experience and contacts, augmented by strong knowledge of key federal agencies involved in Iraq reconstruction” to help corporate clients procure lucrative contracts.56 Like many Bush officials, Schmitz was a well-connected loyalist and a crony appointment. A glimpse into his extreme, at times bizarre, politics can be found in a series of antiabortion letters he wrote to various D.C.-area newspapers, beginning in 1989. In one letter, Schmitz wrote, “As a man, the plight of pregnant rape and incest victims may be hypothetical but as a former fetus, the plight of aborted innocent human life is as real to me as rape is to most women.”57 In another, Schmitz calls Roe v. Wade “illegitimate federal legislation by unelected judges,” saying politicians should “leave political issues not addressed in the Constitution to the states and the people.”58 In yet another, Schmitz declared, “Most pro-lifers are not averse to taking an ‘unpopular position’ in the defense of human life, whether the life be that of a frozen embryo, a fetus, a vegetative old woman or a teen-age rape victim. After all, the God of most pro-lifers once said: ‘Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’”59