Armed Humanitarians (33 page)

In other words, the State Department's Regional Security Office in Baghdad was so preoccupied with protecting diplomats that it was willing to let Moonen walk free. Blackwater was performing its narrow mission magnificently, shielding U.S. diplomats from harm. Company officials often pointed out with pride that no diplomat in their care had ever been killed. But the risk-averse (and counterproductive for nation building) mentality of the diplomatic security apparatus had reached a logical extreme in Iraq. The incident was hushed up, although a slightly inaccurate report did air on the Al-Arabiya satellite television network identifying the murderer as a U.S. soldier. Blackwater continued operating in Iraq. That sent a message to Iraqis that one of our diplomats is worth a hundred of you.

In September 2007, a Blackwater security detail operating under the call sign Raven 23 responded to a call for backup from a second diplomatic security motorcade that was evacuating diplomats from a meeting in a compound in the Red Zone after a car bomb had gone off nearby. A first motorcade was already under way. Raven 23 was dispatched to Nisour Square, an area not far from the International Zone, to block traffic for the second motorcade. Seconds after Raven 23 entered the traffic circle, shooting started. Members of the team said they believed they were under attack by insurgents. They unleashed a hail of gunfire on civilian cars stopped outside the roundabout; at least thirty-four unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed or injured.

Before the Nisour Square incident, Blackwater had been a minor public-relations headache for the U.S. government. The company was already a favorite target of the antiwar left. It was secretive and militaristic and it cultivated a distinctly menacing corporate brand. As a former SEAL who sported a flag pin and severe military haircut, Erik Prince was a made-to-order caricature of the right-wing war profiteer. The scion of a Michigan Republican dynasty that bankrolled conservative causes, he had been a White House intern but found the administration of George H. W. Bush insufficiently conservative. The appearance of Blackwater operatives on the streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina bolstered the company's sinister aura; to critics, Blackwater looked like a sort of Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration.

Nisour Square marked a turning point for private security companies in Iraq. For years, rage had been growing in Iraq over the foreign private security firms who operated with impunity on Iraqi roads. Iraqi politicians were quick to seize on public anger, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki vowed to find the company responsible for the murder and put it out of work. The Iraqi government eventually revoked Blackwater's operating license and negotiated an end to the arrangement that had given contractors immunity from prosecution. The U.S. government began a belated push for better oversight of hired guns in Iraq.

In September 2007 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered a high-level security panel to review the practice of using private guards for diplomatic security in Iraq. The panel, led by Ambassador Patrick Kennedy, found serious failings. Contractors employed by the State Department did not properly coordinate their movements with the military, the embassy's Regional Security Office was not adequately sharing information with the military commanders, and few contractors had sufficient knowledge of Arabic. But “in-sourcing,” giving the job of protecting diplomats back to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, was not an option. The State Department did not have enough special diplomatic security agents to handle the job of running protective details in Iraq. It didn't even have enough people to exercise proper oversight of the hired guns. Likewise, the military did not have the manpower to spare to provide security escorts for diplomats. The panel also acknowledged there was no real framework for legal oversight and concluded that it was “unaware of any basis for holding non–Department of Defense contractors accountable under U.S. law,” despite MEJA being on the books.
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The panel recommended a series of administrative remedies such as better communication and coordination, more diplomatic security personnel, clarification of legal jurisdiction. But those solutions did nothing to address the risk-averse culture of the State Department. The practice of diplomatic security was, at its core, antithetical to the nation-building mission, which required civilians to take risks and work outside the walls of the embassy. Even in relatively secure areas, the Baghdad-based Regional Security Office imposed strict limitations on where diplomatic officers could travel and what kinds of vehicles and convoys they could travel in, meaning that it was often difficult to get out to the field and do meaningful work. A Foreign Service officer who worked in two provinces in Iraqi Kurdistan as a provincial action officer explained the dilemma: “The embassy Regional Security Office imposed strict country-wide standards, but I was the only one doing those two provinces in econ [economics] and political … You are spending enormous amounts of energy on your [transportation], which is subtracting enormous amounts from your budget and your time.”

The military took risks to accomplish its missions. The State Department, by contrast, responded to the Nisour Square incident with a lockdown, barring diplomats from travelling in Iraq by land, a move that brought into question the whole purpose of having a diplomatic mission there in the first place.
22
And the State Department's practice of relying on contractors to provide protective service did not change. Guards from Blackwater (later rebranded as the more innocuous-sounding Xe Services) continued to protect U.S. diplomatic convoys in Iraq, even though the company's license to operate there had been revoked. The State Department decided it would not renew Xe's Iraq contract, but the company's aviation wing continued to provide air cover for U.S. diplomatic convoys well into the fall of 2009, two years after the Iraqi government had said Blackwater had to go.
23
Apparently, the State Department could not get by without them.
*

*
The contractors received laminated “rules for the use of force,” or RUF cards, similar to the “rules of engagement” cards issued to soldiers. A RUF card issued in May 2005 said private security contractor personnel were authorized to use deadly force only when necessary in “self-defense, defense of facilities / persons as specified in their contract; prevention of life-threatening acts directed against civilians; or defense of Coalition-approved property specified within their contract.”

*
The Inman report's formal title is “Report of the Secretary of State's Advisory Panel on Overseas Security.”

*
Peter Singer, the author of the authoritative study
Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry
, reckoned in 2004 that the size of the global market for private military companies was around $100 billion. But that figure included logistics and construction firms like KBR, consulting and training companies like MPRI, and major defense contractors like General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, which maintained complex military equipment. ArmorGroup's survey was limited to companies that provided armed protective services in high-threat areas.

*
On December 31, 2009, in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina dismissed charges against four former Blackwater guards over the Nisour Square shootings. The judge cited repeated missteps by prosecutors, who built their case around sworn statements given by the guards, who were promised immunity from prosecution after the shootings.
24
The same month, Xe (the renamed Blackwater) settled a civil case brought by the families of the victims, reportedly paying $100,000 for each of the Iraqis killed by its contractors.
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CHAPTER  10

Peace Corps on Steroids

The rust-flecked Toyota Land Cruiser skidded to an abrupt halt, and half a dozen armed men spilled out of the truck bed. The soldiers, wearing a motley assortment of khaki and forest-green camouflage, fanned out in the dirt, Kalashnikovs at the ready. A small group of boys who had been rolling old bicycle tires around the mud-walled courtyard stopped to watch the soldiers as they inched forward in the dirt, ready to return fire.

Captain Lassine Keita, a reed-thin officer in pressed desert fatigues, urged the soldiers on, and his men leapfrogged toward the ambush point to launch their counterattack. Then Keita, his spectacles pushed back on his forehead like a professor, stepped forward and waved his arms to stop the drill. The troopers clambered back in the pickup and prepared to make another circuit around the yard.

Keita was commander of the 512th Compagnie d'Infanterie Motorisée, a Malian infantry unit that in 2007 was patrolling the country's Fifth Military Region, a vast territory that stretched across the northern deserts of Mali, reaching all the way to the borders of Algeria and Mauritania. The 512th was stationed at what some would consider the end of the world. Their training base was in Timbuktu, the fabled trading center at the very southern edge of the Sahara. At the intersection of ancient caravan routes, Timbuktu was once a center of Islamic scholarship, and over the centuries its leading families had preserved the city's priceless manuscripts in private libraries. Now it was an exotic tourist destination. Though the city had fallen on hard times, the phantasmagoric mud mosques and street markets still attracted adventurous, well-heeled travelers. It even hosted two world music festivals, Sahara Nights and the Festival in the Desert.

This part of Mali did not have a peaceful history. In the early twentieth century, it was a center of resistance against French colonial rule. In the early 1990s, portions of northern Mali and neighboring Niger were rocked by uprisings of the Touareg, nomadic Berbers who traditionally inhabited the Sahara and the Sahel. A “flame of peace” monument on the outskirts of Timbuktu marked the end of the most recent large-scale rebellion, in 1995, and the rusting barrels of weapons that were symbolically burned to mark the end of the conflict were embedded in the concrete. Fighting occasionally flared up. Just a few weeks earlier, government forces in northern Mali had engaged in a few gunfights with Touareg rebels led by Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, who had led two previous revolts against the government in the capital city of Bamako.

The training overseen by Keita reflected a newer threat faced by Mali's army. The expanses of the Sahara had become a staging ground for Islamic extremists because they could move easily between the porous, badly policed borders intersecting West Africa and North Africa. Four or five pickup trucks might rendezvous in a remote wadi, spend a week training with rifles or explosives, then disappear across the horizon. Extremist groups were also tied to narcotics and weapons trafficking rings, which often relied on old caravan routes that stretched across Libya, Chad, Mauritania, Mali, and Niger. Occasionally the militants were bold enough to confront local militaries. A year earlier, members of one faction of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, a militant group known as GPSC (for Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat), attacked a Mauritanian military outpost near the border with Mali. The Mauritanians responded with force, chasing the insurgents across the border into Mali.

Keita's drill, called a “reaction to contact,” was supposed to train the lightly armed Malian soldiers to respond to an ambush if they encountered insurgents on a long-range desert patrol. For Keita and his trainees, this was no run-of-the-mill training day. At the edge of the dusty parade ground, a few foreign visitors stood out, broad-shouldered men in digital-pattern Army combat uniforms. Their uniforms were “sterile”—they bore no name tapes or rank insignia, just
U.S. ARMY
on the left over the chest pocket and American flag patches on the right shoulder. All of the men wore wraparound shades. This was a training team from First Battalion, Third Special Forces Group—Green Berets—out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, assigned to Special Operations Command Europe. The U.S. government was providing the trainers, the fuel for the trucks, and the extra ammunition for marksmanship practice.

Since 2003, the U.S. military had been quietly increasing its military-to-military ties with Mali. As part of the assistance, around two or three times a year a Special Forces team would deploy to this outpost near Timbuktu for three or six weeks of intensive instruction with the Malian military. The training began under the rubric of the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a post-9/11 border security and counterterrorism program started in 2003 by the State Department. The aims of the Pan-Sahel Initiative were straightforward: African soldiers would get schooling from some of the best infantry instructors in the world, and the Green Berets would get the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the cultures, terrain, and languages of four West African countries—Mali, Chad, Niger, and Mauritania. In 2005, the Pan-Sahel Initiative was renamed the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership, or TSCTP, and now had a much more ambitious scope. With a budget of around $100 million per year, TSCTP would offer military aid to Nigeria and Senegal and also encourage the countries in the region to expand their security ties with Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.

The idea of the project was to make the region inhospitable to groups such as the GPSC, which formally aligned itself with al-Qaeda in 2006 and renamed itself Al Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM.
1
This local insurgency fighting the Algerian government had become a regional franchise of a global terror organization, and the U.S. assistance to West Africa was supposed to help keep the region from becoming a base for extremists.

This Special Forces training mission coincided with a larger, three-week military exercise, called Flintlock 2007. Flintlock, held that year in Bamako, was a “command post exercise.” It was built around a fictional (but quite plausible) scenario, the simultaneous staging of several cross-border incursions by a terror group, along with coordinated terror attacks in several cities. The goal of the exercise was to encourage representatives of regional militaries to share information with each other as the crisis unfolded. Military representatives from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia would all take part (Libya was invited, but declined to participate).