Dirty Wars (90 page)

From his adopted home in the UAE, Prince continued his mercenary activities. He left the United States, he said, to “make it
harder for the jackals
to get my money,” adding that he wanted to explore new opportunities in “the energy field.” A few days before Christmas 2010, Prince landed at Mogadishu's international airport, disembarked a private jet and was taken to the VIP lounge, where he met with unidentified individuals for an hour. He then got back aboard his jet and took off. “We have been hearing more and more about Blackwater's ambitions to
make its mark in Somalia
,” a Western official told me at the time.

Prince had long been interested in building a privatized counterpiracy force that could deploy off the coast of Somalia. In late 2008, he was in talks with
more than a dozen shipping companies
about hiring Blackwater to protect their ships and vessels through the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden. In 2006, he had purchased a
183-foot vessel
, the
McArthur,
and transformed it into an antipiracy mother ship that could be equipped with Little Bird helicopters, inflatable boats, thirty-five private soldiers and a .50-caliber machine gun. “
We could put vessels out there
and go and stop fishing boats the pirates are using a lot cheaper than the Navy could using a billion and a half to two billion dollar war ships,” Prince said. The European Union, he said, was “out there with 24 ships, trying to cover 2 million square miles of ocean in the Indian Ocean dealing with Somali pirates. That comes out to 80,000 square miles per vessel. That's just not getting it done.”

Prince suggested that his force could operate like the privateers during the American Revolution. “A privateer was a private ship, with a private crew, with a private master and they would receive a hunting license. It's
called a Letter of Marque. It's actually provided for in the Constitution,” Prince declared in a speech shortly before he left for the UAE. “They were allowed to go hunt enemy shipping and they did very well. Even General Washington was an investor in one of those privateer operations.”

There was no doubt that piracy was expanding off Somalia's coast. Pirate attacks continued to climb during the second half of 2010—from September 2010 to January 2011, the number of hostages held by pirates rose from
250 to 770
. Pirates had begun demanding increasingly exorbitant ransoms and were using commandeered “mother ships” to carry out more ambitious attacks.

In January 2011, US soldiers conducted a counterpiracy incursion inland,
snatching three young Somali men
and bringing them aboard a ship for questioning. Soon after, the head of CENTCOM's naval forces, Vice Admiral Mark Fox, suggested that the United States should employ counterterrorism measures in the fight against Somali piracy. Citing the increasing sophistication of the pirates' technology, as well as their links to al Shabab, Fox spoke of countering nascent pirate attacks inland. “
Al Shabab is responsible
for a lot of training activity and camps and that sort of thing in Somalia,” he declared. “The pirates use these things. There cannot be a segregation between terrorist activity, in my mind, and counter-piracy.”

Although Fox may have been overstating links between al Shabab and the pirates—many accounts indicate that al Shabab was
extorting from the pirates
more than it was coordinating with them—he was correct that the pirates were becoming bolder.

On February 16, 2011, Abduwali Muse—the lone pirate prosecuted for the hijacking of the
Maersk Alabama,
was sentenced to
thirty-three years
in prison. Two days later, an
SOS
was sent from a personal yacht, the
SV Quest,
owned by California residents Jean and Scott Adam. They were captured, along with Seattle-based crewmates Phyllis Macay and Robert Riggle,
275 miles
from the coast of Oman. An ad hoc flotilla of naval vessels from the US 5th Fleet began trailing the
Quest
soon after its capture was reported,
supported by helicopters
and
unarmed surveillance drones
. The rescue mission caught up to the
Quest
in international waters between the northernmost tip of Puntland and the Yemeni island of Socotra.

By the next day, President Obama had authorized the use of
lethal force
. But in all the ways that the takedown of the pirates who took the
Maersk Alabama
was a success, the mission to liberate the passengers on board the
Quest
was a disaster.

An unusually large, unwieldy band of nineteen pirates had boarded the yacht, making the succinct “three shots, three dead pirates” conclusion of the
Alabama
rescue impossible to replicate. So the stalemate continued
until two pirate representatives from the
Quest
willingly boarded
one of the ships to negotiate with the FBI. The talks soon stalled, and FBI agents detained the pirates. The next morning, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at one of the Navy ships, before gunfire erupted within the yacht. Two pirates were killed. US forces then sprang into action: two motorboats carried fifteen Navy SEAL commandos to the yacht, where intense
hand-to-hand combat
ensued. Two pirates were killed by the SEALS, one shot and the other stabbed. It was already
too late
for the hostages. Two had died, and the others had suffered fatal gunshot wounds. It is unclear whether the hostages had been executed or caught in the crossfire.

In a telephone press conference, Admiral Fox stated that the hostages were shot prior to the boarding and violent clearing operation. A BBC correspondent who spoke with the pirates reported that they
took credit
for killing the captives but had done so only after the US Navy fired the first shots, which killed the first two pirates. The
fifteen remaining pirates
were taken into US custody, and fourteen were later indicted on charges of piracy and kidnapping (one was a juvenile and was determined not to have been a central player in the hijacking).

Manifesting one of the qualities that defined Blackwater's ascent, Erik Prince again saw opportunity in crisis. In 2009, Blackwater had
inked a deal
with the government of Djibouti to operate the antipiracy ship
McArthur
from its territory (the ship was later sold to a Saracen International subsidiary). The arrangement was the result of a series of meetings between Djiboutian officials, Prince and Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, who at the time was a senior executive at Blackwater. Initial estimates indicated that the company could make about $200,000 per escort job for shipping companies. The crew would consist of thirty-three US citizens, including three six-man shooter teams that would operate on a continual rotation. “Blackwater does not intend to take any pirates into custody, but will use lethal force against pirates if necessary,” according to a classified US diplomatic cable on the agreement, noting that Blackwater “has briefed AFRICOM, CENTCOM, and Embassy Nairobi officials.” The cable added that there was “no precedent for a paramilitary operation in a purely commercial environment.”

Somalia's piracy industry was based in the semi-autonomous Puntland region, which had little interest in cooperating with the US-backed government in Mogadishu. The Puntland authorities were facing mounting pressure from the international community to crack down on the pirates, and a local Islamic militant movement was threatening its ability to sign lucrative oil and mineral exploitation contracts with large corporations. Somalia is home to significant deposits of “uranium and largely unexploited
reserves of iron ore, tin, gypsum, bauxite, copper, salt, natural gas,
likely oil reserves
,” according to the CIA. In late 2010, Puntland's government announced that it was creating its own
counterpiracy/counterterrorism force
, saying that it had received funding from an anonymous donor nation from the Gulf. It was
later revealed
that the anonymous donor country was none other than the UAE and that the company that had been contracted to train the security force was bankrolled by one of its newest residents, Erik Prince.

The company, Saracen International, was run by several veterans of the mercenary firm
Executive Outcomes
and had
offices and shell companies
in multiple countries, including South Africa, Uganda, Angola and Lebanon. Among the key figures in the company was Lafras Luitingh, a former officer in apartheid South Africa's
Civil Cooperation Bureau
, a notorious security force known for hunting down and killing opponents of the apartheid regime. According to a confidential intelligence report from AMISOM, Prince was “at the top of the management chain of Saracen” and “provided
seed money
for the Saracen contract.” According to the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, Prince and Luitingh met in Washington, DC, in October 2009, and the two then met with
officials from Abu Dhabi
. The UAE
also hired
a former US diplomat, attorney Pierre-Richard Prosper, who had served as the ambassador at large for war crimes issues under President Bush, and an ex-CIA officer, Michael Shanklin, the former CIA Mogadishu station chief. By late 2010, Saracen was training a
1,000-member counterpiracy force
in northern Puntland. The force also began preparing to take on Islamic militants who were threatening big-business opportunities. The Islamic militants had complained that they had been “cut out of energy exploration deals” in their region. “
You cannot have oil exploration
if you have insecurity,” declared Mohamed Farole, the son and adviser of Puntland's president, Abdirahman Mohamed Farole.

By May 2011, Saracen's Puntland operations were
well under way
: at the Bandar Siyada base near Bosaso, 470 soldiers and drivers had completed training. Plans were in place to equip the force with three transport aircraft, three reconnaissance aircraft, two transport helicopters and two light helicopters. The projected force, according to the UN Monitoring Group, would be the best-equipped indigenous military force anywhere in Somalia and the second-largest externally supported military effort after AMISOM. Photographic evidence indicated that Saracen personnel had already been deployed for VIP security and humanitarian operations.

Saracen also brokered a deal with President Sheikh Sharif's administration in Mogadishu to build a personal security detail for the president and other senior officials. Saracen's Mogadishu operations were visible by October 2010.
Luitingh, Shanklin and a small group of Saracen personnel
traveled to Mogadishu
on October 5. Over the next three weeks they received four armored vehicles, complete with machine-gun turrets, from the UAE. It seemed that President Sharif and his prime minister had been making secret deals with Saracen and
at least five other private companies
that had set up shop around Mogadishu's international airport. These conspicuous activities quickly aroused the suspicions and concerns of AMISOM forces and Somali politicians. AMISOM's commander, Major General Nathan Mugisha, expressed concern about “
unknown armed groups
in the mission area,” in reference to Saracen's operations. Meanwhile, Somali lawmakers announced at the end of 2010 that they were
demanding the suspension
of contracts with private security contractors, claiming that they had no idea what the contractors had actually been hired to do.

Just as Prince and Saracens' latest private war was getting under way, scandal hit. The UN Monitoring Group declared that Saracen had been operating in flagrant violation of the arms embargo on Somalia, concluding in its report that “notwithstanding Southern Ace's short-lived and unsuccessful attempts at arms dealing and drug trafficking, the
most egregious violation
of the arms embargo by a private security company during the course of the UN Monitoring Group's mandate was perpetrated by Saracen International, in association with an
opaque web of affiliated entities
.” The UN Monitoring Group suggested that Saracen's continued operations could actually increase support for local Islamist militias and, possibly, al Shabab. “Saracen's presence has
increased tension
in north-eastern Somalia,” it concluded. A year later, in response to a subsequent UN report, Saracen's lawyer accused the monitoring group of publishing “a collection of unsubstantiated and often false innuendo.”

In early 2011, when Prince's involvement in Saracen became public, his spokesman, Mark Corallo, said that Prince was merely compelled by humanitarian imperative to help “Somalia
overcome the scourge of piracy
” and claimed he had no financial stake in Saracen's work.

“We don't want to have
anything to do with Blackwater
,” Somalia's information minister, Abdulkareem Jama, told the
New York Times,
recalling Blackwater's killing of innocent Iraqis at Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007. “We need help, but we don't want mercenaries.” Jama didn't mention that he was among the Somali officials present during
negotiations around the Saracen deal
.

In the spring of 2011, Puntland announced that it was
suspending Saracen's operations
, pending approval by the United Nations. But a senior Somali official told me that the company was still
discreetly operating
in Mogadishu, working with Somali security forces. Among the
other private security companies
based at the Mogadishu airport were AECOM Technology Corporation, OSPREA Logistics, PAE, Agility, RA International, International Armored Group, Hart Security, DynCorp, Bancroft and Threat Management Group. Some of them trained Somali security services or supported AMISOM, while others provided logistical support for aid groups and journalists. Some companies, like Bancroft, were well known, but the roles of some others were secret and their activities shielded from effective oversight. In that way, they fit in perfectly in Somalia. They were also convenient for Washington. “We do not want an
American footprint
or boot on the ground,” said Johnnie Carson, the Obama administration's lead official on Somalia.