Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (48 page)

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Authors: Jeremy Scahill

BOOK: Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
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The U.S. Army’s Collateral Investigations Board and the National Transportation Safety Board generated hundreds of pages of documents as they investigated the crash. A black box captured the final moments of the flight. Unlike in Fallujah, some of the victims of the incident were active-duty U.S. soldiers, and those who caused the deaths, even if not intentionally, were private contractors. On the surface, it would seem that with the exception of Blackwater being involved in both incidents, the crash atop Baba Mountain and the Fallujah massacre had little in common.
 
The similarities, though, began to reveal themselves after the families of the three U.S. soldiers killed in the crash filed a wrongful death lawsuit on June 10, 2005. In fact, the issues surrounding the crash would prove to be much the same as those surrounding Fallujah, though they would draw far less attention. The families of the soldiers killed in the Blackwater 61 crash alleged that the company had cut corners, sidestepped basic safety procedures, and recklessly caused the deaths of their loved ones in the process.
3
At the center of the case, as in that of the Fallujah lawsuit, was once again Blackwater’s claim that its forces were immune from any lawsuits because the company was part of the U.S. “Total Force” in the war on terror.
4
 
Blackwater’s aviation division, Presidential Airways, has largely operated off of the public radar, though its aircraft overseas have frequented the same airports as those used in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program.
5
Blackwater’s pilots are required to have the same security clearances as those involved in renditions. David P. Dalrymple, the Bagram site manager for Presidential, said, “I, and all other Presidential personnel serving in Afghanistan, possess or are in the process of obtaining ‘secret’ or higher security clearances from the United States Government.”
6
The company also asserted that it “holds a US DoD Secret Facility Clearance.”
7
 
The contract that Blackwater 61 operated under in Afghanistan had been inked in September 2004, just two months before the crash.
8
After three months of negotiations, the Air Force agreed to a $34.8 million contract for Presidential Airways to provide “short take-off and landing” (STOL) flights in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan.
9
Presidential agreed to fly six regularly scheduled daily routes to small airfields throughout Afghanistan, and other flights as needed. It was estimated that Presidential’s three aircraft would fly about 8,760 hours per year under the contract.
10
“With this contract, [Blackwater Aviation] has extended its reach out of Iraq and is providing much needed assistance to US Service men and women in Afghanistan and further into the southern countries of the former Soviet Union,” Blackwater boasted in October 2004 in its
Tactical Weekly
newsletter.
11
 
John Hight, Presidential’s director of operations, explained that the company based its bid on its “experience operating in and out of unimproved landing strips and work for the military carrying sky divers.”
12
Once the company got word that its bid was successful, Hight said he started recruiting “experienced CASA pilots” for the Afghanistan missions. Five days after the contract was signed, “we arrived in Afghanistan with our first aircraft,” Hight recalled.
13
 
But, experienced or not, flying in Afghanistan is substantially different from flying in most of the United States. Afghanistan is crisscrossed with mountain ranges that tower above even the highest point in the continental United States, which is California’s Mt. Whitney at 14,495 feet. By contrast, Afghanistan’s highest point is nearly 25,000 feet. Pilots also faced an additional hurdle in that there was limited communication with other aircraft and no air-traffic control to guide planes should they encounter a thick patch of clouds or other bad weather, which experts said could be incredibly variable in Afghanistan. This could cause serious problems very quickly because flights were often piloted using “visual flight rules”—in other words, pilots were on their own with little more than instinct and common sense to guide them. As one Blackwater pilot put it, “The flight crews know that if you can’t get over it or under it, then you turn around and come home. There’s no pressure to get the flight complete.”
14
 
While some bases in Afghanistan—like those at Kabul, Bagram, and Shindad—had ground control towers, others did not. Basically, according to Presidential’s pilots, “once the aircraft are twenty miles out of radar coverage, they are on their own.”
15
Flying in Afghanistan was low-tech to the point where pilots often had to use satellite phones to report their locations when they landed anywhere but the most frequented areas, and even the satellite phones often proved unreliable.
16
Aside from the impracticality of flying set routes, pilots also “don’t want to fly set routes for force protection reasons”
17
—fear of being targeted by antioccupation or “enemy” forces.
 
Taken together, the weather, visual flight rules, threat of enemy fire, light turboprop aircraft with varying cargo and passenger loads, and extreme elevations made for a difficult combination even for experienced pilots. In essence, the Afghan skies were an unpredictable frontier. Indeed, all of Blackwater’s flights in the country were piloted using visual flight rules. “Therefore there were no prescribed routes of flight to and from Bagram or any of the other locations which we supported other than the sound aviation practice of flying as direct a route as possible while avoiding terrain and weather,” said Paul Hooper, the site manager for Presidential. “Common practice was to fly the most direct route possible. Terrain, weather and a desire to avoid establishing a flight pattern in an environment with hostile ground forces, were some reasons our flight crews varied the specific ground track of each flight.”
18
 
Among those hired by Blackwater to fly under these unusual and dangerous circumstances were two experienced CASA pilots, thirty-seven-year-old Noel English and thirty-five-year-old Loren “Butch” Hammer. Both men had experience flying under unorthodox circumstances with little ground support in variable weather and terrain, as well as landing in nontraditional locations. English had logged nearly nine hundred hours in a CASA 212—most of it as a “bush pilot” in Alaska—while Hammer had spent years piloting and copiloting “smokejumpers” during the summer fire seasons in the United States, “dropping smoke divers and para-cargo on forest fires,” according to Kevin McBride, another Blackwater pilot who had previously worked with Hammer. “He was a knowledgeable and skilled First Officer, with lots of experience in mountain flying and low level missions.”
19
 
After several weeks of training for the Afghanistan mission in Melbourne, Florida, Hammer and English arrived in Afghanistan on November 14, 2004.
20
According to the U.S. Army, Presidential had a policy of not pairing any two pilots with less than a month “in the theater.”
21
Presidential, however, paired Hammer and English, both of whom had been in the country for only two weeks, because they were the only crew the company had who, in addition to the CASA planes, could fly an SA-227 DC, or Metro plane, which could be used for flights to Uzbekistan.
22
Presidential had two CASAs and one Metro plane in the theater. During their brief time in Afghanistan, Hammer and English had each logged thirty-three hours of flight time.
23
 
On November 27, the pilots woke up at 4:30 a.m. to a crisp and clear forty-degree day at Bagram airport—the main prison facility for people detained by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and an alleged site of prisoner torture.
24
The Presidential crew would be leaving the base in a little less than three hours on a mission to transport a couple of U.S. soldiers and four hundred pounds of 81 mm mortar illumination rounds. The route would take them first to Farah, 450 miles southwest of Bagram, then to Shindad to refuel, and then back to Bagram, where they were scheduled to return at 1:30 p.m. Neither Hammer nor English had flown the route before.
25
 
Bunking with the men at Bagram the night before were two other Presidential pilots who would be leaving at about the same time as Blackwater 61 and traveling on a similar route. Like Hammer and English, pilots Lance Carey and Robert Gamanche would fly a Blackwater CASA westward that morning, stopping at Shindad to refuel. Carey, who shared a room at Bagram with both English and Hammer for the three days prior to the flight, said, “They were both looking forward to [it].” Gamanche ate breakfast with English on the morning of the flight. Both crews reviewed that day’s weather forecast. “Since our flights would eventually take us to the same place [Shindad] and the forecast was marginal due to visibility, we decided to make a group go-no go decision,” Gamanche recalled. “If the current weather at [Shindad] was not favorable, we would stay on the ground.” There were no weather problems reported at either of the crews’ initial destinations. “The current weather was favorable so we all decided to go,” said Gamanche. Though there were indications that at Farah and Shindad gusting winds and blowing dust could make landing difficult, at Bagram “the weather was forecasted as clear with unlimited visibility.”
26
 
The flight was a go. Melvin Rowe, a forty-three-year-old flight mechanic, joined the crew of Blackwater 61. Two passengers were slated to come on the flight, Spc. Harley Miller and Chief Warrant Officer Travis Grogan. They had loaded up the four hundred pounds of ammunition and begun to taxi when a soldier ran along the runway toward their plane. A third passenger would be joining them: Lt. Col. Michael McMahon, commander of the twenty-five-thousand-soldier Task Force Saber, which was responsible for the entire western region of Afghanistan—where Blackwater 61 was headed.
27
McMahon, a Desert Storm veteran and West Point graduate,
28
“was just an extra guy that showed up and [asked] if he could get on the flight,” one Blackwater employee explained. If they “ask us to do it and it’s not out of the common sense category, then they’ll do it.”
29
There were now six people on board the plane.
 
At 7:38 a.m., Blackwater 61 took off from Bagram and headed northwest. The last thing the six of them would hear from anyone outside the flight was the Bagram tower telling them they would “talk to you later.” Five minutes after that, the plane dropped off Bagram’s radar, about nine miles out from the airport.
30
Hammer, Blackwater 61’s copilot, quickly commented on the visibility, saying, “can’t ask for a whole lot better than this.” But it was apparent, even early in the flight, that the pilots didn’t quite know exactly where to go, as evidenced from the flight’s black box recording:
 
 
Pilot English: “I hope I’m goin’ in the right valley.”
Copilot Hammer: “That one or this one.”
English: “I’m just going to go up this one.”
Hammer: “Well we’ve never or at least I’ve never done this Farah . . .
from Bagram so it would be a valley up here.”
 
 
 
 
The novice Afghanistan pilots clearly didn’t have a command of the route they would be covering, and English ultimately said, “We’ll just see where this leads.” The pilots and Rowe spent the next several minutes fumbling through maps trying to determine their location and route. Hammer said that he hadn’t brought a handheld global positioning system with them that would have issued a warning when the plane came close to the ground. About eight minutes into the flight, English expressed some concern about the weather in western Afghanistan, saying, “normally . . . on a short day like this we’d have time to play a little bit, do some explorin’, but with those winds comin’ up I want to [expletive] get there as fast as we can.”
 
Despite the early indications of some complications, the pilots spent some time during the flight chatting with each other, making small talk. “I swear to God, they wouldn’t pay me if they knew how much fun this was,” English said. The pilots had been riding through the Bamian Valley, although from the transcript of their in-flight conversations, it seemed they were somewhat uncertain and unconcerned as to exactly where they were. “I don’t see anythin’ over about thirteen three is the highest peak in the whole route I think,” said Rowe, the flight’s engineer. “Plenty of individual valleys,” English replied, “Yeah, so we’ll be able to pick our way around it. Yeah, with this good visibility [expletive] it’s as easy as pie. You run into somethin’ big and you just parallel it until you find a way through. Yeah, like I said, this is the first good visibility day I’ve had in the CASA. It’s not just good, it’s outstanding.”
 
At one point, the passengers asked the pilots what they’d be passing by on their way to Farah. Rowe, the man with the maps, replied, “I don’t know what we’re gonna see, we don’t normally go this route.” Seconds later, English said, “All we want to avoid is seeing rock at twelve o’clock.” Then Hammer—the copilot—turned his attention to pilot English’s apparent maneuvering of the plane: “Yeah, you’re an X-wing fighter
Star Wars
man.”
 
“You’re [expletive] right,” English shot back. “This is fun.”

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