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

by Jeremy Scahill

  On August 29, 2006, the Prohibition of Mercenary Activities Act passed by a whopping 211-28 vote in South Africa’s National Assembly.84 South Africa’s Defense Minister Mosiuoa Lekota rejected the attempted rebranding of mercenaries, framing the debate by drawing on Africa’s bloody history with mercenaries, which he said dated back to 1960 in the newly independent Congo. “No sooner than Congo achieved independence, the dogs of war were unleashed on the country,” he said. “Mercenaries are the scourge of poor areas of the world, especially Africa,” Lekota declared shortly before the act was passed. “These are killers for hire. They rent out their skills to the highest bidder. Anybody that has money can hire these human beings and turn them into killing machines or cannon fodder.”85 South Africa had dealt a rare blow to the rapidly expanding world of mercenary firms, but it was just one setback in a story of progress for the industry as a whole—and Blackwater in particular.

  Greystone

  Blackwater’s plan wasn’t just about breaking into the world of peacekeeping. Prince and his allies envisioned a total reshaping of the U.S. military, one that would fit perfectly into the aggressive, offensive foreign policy that had emanated from the White House since 9/11. The main obstacles that prevented the Bush administration from expanding its wars of occupation and aggression were a lack of military manpower and the on-the-ground insurgencies its interventions provoked. Domestic opposition to wars of aggression results in fewer people volunteering to serve in the armed forces, which historically deflates the war drive or forces a military draft. At the same time, international opposition has made it harder for Washington to persuade other governments to support its wars and occupations. But with private mercenary companies, these dynamics change dramatically, as the pool of potential soldiers available to an aggressive administration is limited only by the number of men across the globe willing to kill for money. With the aid of mercenaries, you don’t need a draft or even the support of your own public to wage wars of aggression, nor do you need a coalition of “willing” nations to aid you. If Washington cannot staff an occupation or invasion with its national forces, the mercenary firms offer a privatized alternative—including Blackwater’s twenty-one-thousand-man contractor database.86 If the national armies of other states will not join a “coalition of the willing,” Blackwater and its allies offer an alternative internationalization of the force by recruiting private soldiers from across the globe. If foreign governments are not on board, foreign soldiers can still be bought.

  “The increasing use of contractors, private forces, or, as some would say, ‘mercenaries’ makes wars easier to begin and to fight—it just takes money and not the citizenry,” said CCR’s Michael Ratner. “To the extent a population is called upon to go to war, there is resistance, a necessary resistance to prevent wars of self-aggrandizement, foolish wars, and, in the case of the United States, hegemonic imperialist wars. Private forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on retaining its declining empire.”

  With an adventurous President in the White House, mercenaries could enable an endless parade of invasions, covert operations, occupations, coups d’etat—all with the layers of bureaucratic protections, plausible deniability, and disregard for the will (or lack thereof) of the population. Moreover, private soldiers are not counted among the dead, providing yet another incentive for the government to utilize them. “These forces can be employed without a lot of publicity—and that’s a very useful characteristic for any government. It’s politically easier, and there is less red tape,” said Thomas Pogue, a former Navy SEAL who enlisted in the Blackwater Academy. “We’re expendable. If ten contractors die, it’s not the same as if ten soldiers die. Because people will say that we were in it for the money. And that has a completely different connotation with the American public.”87

  While Blackwater’s operations in Iraq and New Orleans have garnered the most attention and controversy, they are temporary deployments and only part of the company’s global reach and aspirations. Despite the firm’s projection as an all-American business ready to fight genocide at the drop of a hat, Blackwater is deeply invested in a secretive project that has the company recruiting mercenaries in some of the shadiest human-rights-abusing locales on the planet, some of whom could be repackaged as privatized international peacekeepers or ground forces in another military action of the coalition of the willing. The project is called Greystone.

  About a month after the infamous 2004 Fallujah ambush, Blackwater’s quietly registered “Greystone Limited” in the U.S. government’s Central Contracting office, which listed its “business start date” as May 13, 2004.88 But instead of incorporating it in North Carolina or Virginia or Delaware, like Blackwater’s other divisions, Greystone was registered offshore in the Caribbean island-nation of Barbados.89 It was duly classified by the U.S. government as a “tax-exempt” “corporate entity,” listing as its services: “Security Guards and Patrol Services.”90 But this description, which evokes images of shopping mall guards, is nothing like the picture that emerges in Greystone’s promotional literature and videos for prospective clients. Blackwater’s original Web site for Greystone opened with a flash presentation where the word “Greystone” appeared on the screen over a large rock. Suddenly from the top of the screen, a fancy silver medieval sword came smashing into the rock forming the “T” in GreysTone à la King Arthur. After this little intro, the site then jumped to a page with the sword in the stone next to the motto “In Support of Peace and Security Everywhere!”

  On February 19, 2005, Blackwater held an extravagant, VIP, invite-only Greystone “inauguration” at the swank Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C. The guest list for the seven-hour event was a revealing mixture of foreign embassy diplomats, weapons manufacturers, oil companies, and representatives of the International Monetary Fund.91 The diplomats were from countries like Uzbekistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Romania, Indonesia, Tunisia, Algeria, Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Kenya, Angola, and Jordan. Several of those countries’ defense or military attachés attended. “It is more difficult than ever for your country to successfully protect its interests against diverse and complicated threats in today’s grey world where the solutions to your security concerns are no longer as simple as black and white,” Greystone’s promotional pamphlet told attendees. “Greystone is an international security services company that offers your country or organization a complete solution to your most pressing security needs. We have the personnel, logistical support, equipment, and expertise to solve your most critical security problems.”92 The invitation promised guests “the opportunity to meet with recognized experts from the global security industry. You will have the opportunity to see cutting edge capabilities presentations, and view tactical displays showcasing innovative equipment, and technology solutions for the global war on terror.”93 The keynote speaker was Cofer Black, who, on the invitation, was identified only as the “Former Ambassador for Counterterrorism Department of State and Former Director of CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.”

  Materials distributed to prospective corporate and nation-state clients proclaimed, “Greystone is dedicated to providing the best physical security assets from around the world in support of freedom, peacemaking, and the maintenance of peace. Our international focus enables us to develop unique and creative solutions to match each client’s individual needs.” Greystone said its forces were prepared for “Ready Deployment in Support of National Security Objectives as well as Private Interests.” Among the “services” offered were Mobile Security Teams, which, among other functions, could be employed for personal security operations, surveillance, and countersurveillance. Greystone’s Proactive Engagement Teams could be hired “to meet emergent or existing security requirements for client needs overseas. Our teams are ready to conduct stabilization efforts, asset protection and recovery, and emergency personnel withdrawal.” It also offered a wide range of training services, including in “defensive and offensive small group operations.” Greystone boasted
that it “maintains and trains a workforce drawn from a diverse base of former special operations, defense, intelligence, and law enforcement professionals ready on a moment’s notice for global deployment.”

  A Greystone two-minute promotional video opens with the sword-in-the-stone graphic and quickly fades to a scene of a Blackwater helicopter delivering supplies to its troops on a rooftop.94 Next it cuts to a scene of mercenaries in civilian clothes distributing aid by hand to a desperate crowd of people, perhaps Iraqis or Afghans. A cheesy Casio keyboard beat plays in the background. The video then runs through a montage of images: heavily armed commandos in camouflage and ski masks storming a room, paramilitaries patrolling a smoky street, troops busting down a door and throwing a smoke grenade inside. Then the words “Providing Protection” flash on the screen, and mercenaries are shown securing a perimeter with a K-9 unit before escorting a “principal” from his SUV to a building. The words “International Security” appear before dissolving into a smoke-filled corridor through which black-clad commandos storm forward, weapons raised. More images of VIP escorts, then a helicopter zooming over a body of water. The video cuts to scenes of jungle warfare, then to paratroopers jumping from planes, and back to the jungle. “Vulnerability Assessment” flashes on the screen. A camouflaged face appears, followed by white men in black T-shirts, khaki vests, and sunglasses wielding automatic weapons as they escort another VIP from her vehicle. The video cuts to a car aggressively cutting off another vehicle before the Greystone sword-in-stone logo reappears.

  While Blackwater portrays itself as an all-American operation, even Greystone’s name is a play on the moral and legal ambiguity of its mission and modern warfare, one backed up by its recruitment efforts. Greystone’s application asked prospective mercenaries for their “recruitment source”—listing agencies with names like Beowulf, Spartan, and AVI. The countries from which Greystone claimed to draw recruits were: the Philippines, Chile, Nepal, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Peru. It asked applicants to check off their qualifications in weapons: AK- 47 rifle, Glock 19, M-16 series rifle, M-4 carbine rifle, machine gun, mortar, and shoulder-fired weapons (RPG, LAAW). Among the qualifications the application sought: Sniper, Marksman, Door Gunner, Explosive Ordnance, Counter Assault Team.

  Outside of its targeted marketing to prospective clients, Blackwater was quiet about Greystone. Not long after launching the project, Blackwater took down the original Web site, replacing it with a softer image and a new brand. The sword in the stone was gone, and so, too, was the overt combat imagery, replaced by a camouflaged soldier in a beret holding a small child on his lap with the phrase “Humanitarian Aid” above the photo. Another picture was of a man in a fancy suit speaking into a walkie-talkie—this picture was labeled “Security.” The new slogan, “Fostering Stability, Promoting Peace,” was splashed across the top of the page, and the services offered were security, training, logistics, and humanitarian aid/peacekeeping. Greystone’s mission statement too had been revamped. “Greystone focuses on providing stability to locations experiencing turmoil whether caused by armed conflict, epidemics or natural or man-made disasters. Greystone has the ability to quickly and efficiently deploy anywhere in the world to create a more secure environment for our customers,” the new statement read. Greystone could support “large scale stability operations requiring large numbers of people to assist in securing a region. Our goal is to foster a positive environment that promotes civilian security allowing commerce to flourish.”

  “The Knights of the Round Table”

  The same month Blackwater launched Greystone, Erik Prince began, at least publicly, raising the prospect of creating what he called a “contractor brigade” to supplement the conventional U.S. military. “There’s consternation in the DoD about increasing the permanent size of the Army,” Prince told a military symposium in Washington, D.C., in early 2005. “We want to add 30,000 people, and they talked about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier.”95 Prince confidently asserted Blackwater could do it cheaper. For Prince it was a rare public appearance, and like most of his speeches, it was based on the free-market gospel and delivered in front of a military audience.

  That was the case in January 2006, when Prince addressed “West 2006,” a massive conference of military commanders, weapons manufacturers and dealers, contractors, and other militarist entities. It was sponsored by the biggest names in war technology: Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.96 Prince was the lone mercenary representative on a panel of senior military commanders including Dennis Hejlik, commander of the Marine Corps Special Operations Command; Sean Pybus, commander of the Naval Special Warfare Group; and Col. Edward Reeder, Commander of the Seventh Special Forces Group. “Why us? Why a private organization? Why am I even here?” Prince asked rhetorically. “This idea of private organizations doing things that used to be the sole realm of the U.S. government.”97 In his presentation, Prince outlined the rapid rise of Blackwater, speaking proudly of building his “field of dreams,” Blackwater’s massive compound in Moyock, North Carolina. “We now have 7,300 acres, it’s a large private military facility,” he said as he gave an overview of some of the company’s operations, saying it trains about thirty-five thousand military and “law enforcement” representatives a year, including active-duty military, special operations forces, and personnel from the Department of Homeland Security as well as state, federal, and local governments. “We’re vertically integrated up and down across the board,” he said. “We have our own target business, we do full-on construction of tactical training facilities, we have our own aviation arm with twenty aircraft, canine operation with sixty dog teams deployed overseas, full-on construction, and a private intelligence service.” At the time, Prince said Blackwater had eighteen hundred people deployed around the world, “all of them in dangerous places.”

  Prince also spoke with remarkable candor about his vision for the future of mercenaries. “When you ship overnight, do you use the postal service or do you use FedEx?” he asked the crowd and his fellow panelists. “It’s kind of—our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service—never going to replace it, but we want to make it run better, faster, smarter, make people think out of the box.” The Department of Defense, Prince told the audience, consumes 48 percent of the world’s military spending, “and it’s very hard for an organization that large to transform itself. But if it has outside parties that are doing somewhat similar things, it gives people something to benchmark against.” Comparing the military industry to the auto industry, Prince said, “General Motors can only get better if it looks at how Toyota and Honda do. It makes them think out of the box and it gives them a vehicle to perform against.” Prince told a story of how in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin wall, he was driving down the Autobahn in Germany in a rented car. Suddenly, “a Mercedes S500 blew by me at about 140 mph. It was the latest and greatest Mercedes that was available, 300 horsepower, airbags, automatic transmissions, all the bells and whistles.” But after the West German-manufactured Mercedes passed Prince, a slow-moving Tribant—the national car of communist East Germany—changed lanes in front of the Mercedes, almost causing an accident. “I thought, what a study in contrasts,” Prince said. “You have the same two countries, the same language, same culture, same background, different command structure: one of them was central planning, one of them was much more free-market oriented, innovative, risk-taking, and efficient.”

  If you take Prince’s message that day at face value, it all boils down to efficiency. At the end of his talk, Prince said he didn’t want to “slight” the Pentagon. “The DoD has great numbers of fantastic people, but they get so trapped in so many bureaucratic layers that have been around for probably the last seventy years that it stifles a lot of innovation,” he said. “We come with a different footprint.” That “small
footprint,” which Prince loves to speak about, is growing larger by the day. And it is growing because of the very concerted effort of a powerful clique of modern-day mercenaries who understand public relations, hire lobbyists, and engage in spin, and who have been very effective at riding the tide of privatization. As the size of the pool of official active-duty U.S. soldiers has plummeted over the past twenty years, from 2.1 million in the 1980s to 1.3 million at the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion,98 the payouts and contracting to mercenary firms have skyrocketed. Before the United States invaded Iraq, from 1994 to 2002, the Pentagon doled out more than three thousand contracts to U.S.-based firms worth more than $300 billion.99 As P. W. Singer has observed, “While contractors have long accompanied U.S. armed forces, the wholesale outsourcing of U.S. military services since the 1990s is unprecedented.”100 This certainly escalated under the Bush administration with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pledging early on in the war on terror to “pursue additional opportunities to outsource and privatize,”101 in part because of his personal obsession that the modern military has a “small footprint.” As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman observed, “Conservatives make a fetish out of privatization of government functions; after the 2002 elections, George Bush announced plans to privatize up to 850,000 federal jobs. At home, wary of a public backlash, he has moved slowly on that goal. But in Iraq, where there is little public or Congressional oversight, the administration has privatized everything in sight.”102 Iraq was not the end of the trend but rather the model for the future. “Militaries are smaller than they were at the end of the Cold War,” said IPOA’s Doug Brooks. “So if anybody wants to do anything, essentially they have to go to the private sector now. And what they’re finding is that it’s faster, better, cheaper. Militaries are incredibly capable organizations, but they’re not designed to be cost-effective.”103