Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (63 page)

It got worse. M.E.N.D. and similar units attacked ExxonMobil supply boats as they moved through narrow channels and river ways. The corporation organized its supply ships into convoys for greater protection but Chaplin found the Nigerian forces were not willing or able to supply adequate security. The country’s wealth depended upon coastal oil production but it lacked the basics of a coast guard.

In Washington, recalled a State Department official involved as the attacks worsened, “the oil companies kept telling us, ‘Goddamnit, can’t the C.I.A. and the navy solve this problem? We’ll tell you where they [the militants] are. . . . Why can’t you fix this swampy corner? It’s a bunch of pirates. Why can’t you just send the navy in there and fix this?’”
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The Pentagon had been reviewing that very question since at least 2004. At that time, Africa fell to the European Command, headquartered in Germany. That was an example of how tacked-on and neglected Africa policy often had been. September 11 had galvanized attention to the threat of Al Qaeda–inspired terrorists taking root in ungoverned spaces, of which Africa had many. With Taliban-inspired militias forming in northern Nigeria and M.E.N.D.-inspired oil insurgents and criminals rising in the south of the country, Nigeria “has the possibility of becoming the next Pakistan within twenty-five years,” Johnnie Carson, then the Bush administration’s national intelligence officer for Africa, noted.
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The growing share of oil imported into the United States from West Africa by American companies, particularly from Nigeria and Angola, gradually attracted the Pentagon’s attention. A proposal to form a distinct Africa Command at the U.S. Department of Defense, a command that would be hived off from the European Command, had surfaced within the Pentagon as far back as the late 1990s, but it was not until Delta militancy exploded after 2005 that the plan gained support from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The command began initial operations in October 2007, headquartered at Stuttgart, Germany.

America’s response when confronted with a problem such as Nigeria’s security services was, as N.S.P.D. 50 outlined, to
build local capacity
. This was a mantra of postcolonial liberalism in the developing world, shaped by the belief that sovereign local governments should take the lead and not have Western solutions imposed upon them. When applied by Africa Command to the particular problem of piracy and kidnapping in the Gulf of Guinea, the philosophy produced plans to strengthen the capacity of the Nigerian navy, so the navy could control its own coastal waters and challenge seaborne M.E.N.D. gangs. The problem, noted an American official involved, was that “it was their admirals that were stealing the damn oil. And then they hired the M.E.N.D. to protect their theft, and they had to cut the M.E.N.D. in.” Since the Nigerian navy collaborated with pirates, a corporate oil security analyst noted, did it really make sense to have the U.S. Navy train Nigerian navy officers in the most sophisticated techniques for, say, the storming and boarding of ships? Wouldn’t that just ultimately create more skilled Nigerian pirates?
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The Pentagon’s Africa policy office viewed the Niger Delta as “the perfect storm of political bosses mixing in with disgruntled populations, and Mafioso kind of enterprise that reached quite high in the Nigerian government,” as a U.S. Defense Department official put it. The Pentagon’s advice to Nigeria’s government, nonetheless, was that “number one, they needed to improve their situational awareness” of what was happening from hour to hour on Delta swamp rivers and open Gulf of Guinea waters. Theresa Whelan’s office shepherded the transfer to the Nigerian navy of excess U.S. Navy sixty-foot “buoy tender” vessels, for coastal patrolling. The Pentagon also spent $16 million to provide Nigeria with a “suite of sensors,” as Whelan described them, tied into a command and control center installed in Lagos by the United States. The command center was designed to provide Nigerian navy officers with a real-time radar-enhanced picture of authorized and unauthorized sea traffic off the Delta coastline. The problem remained that Nigerian admirals did not actually wish to intervene in much of the unauthorized activity because it represented income to them.

From Europe, the U.S. Navy initiated the Africa Partnership Station, a program of periodic U.S. Navy patrols in the Gulf of Guinea, coupled with exercises and shore visits, that were designed to build up the Nigerian navy and the navies and coast guards of smaller neighboring countries. The program found traction in better-organized nations, such as Ghana, but its sponsors struggled in Abuja. The United States Navy had “never really come across an organization that behaves” like the Nigerian navy, said a U.S. official involved. American military officers “come in here and they see a navy with all the trappings, the ranks, the uniforms, and so on, and they think it’s a real navy—poor, but earnest. But it’s not that at all.” It was not obvious what policies the Americans could bring to bear on a sister service that was mainly a criminal enterprise dressed up in epaulets. “It’s hard to get used to the fact that Nigerian officials will lie to you straight up,” the American official continued. “The chief of navy staff told us, ‘There has been no incidence of piracy. You have been misinformed.’” In fact, American diplomatic and intelligence analysts documented nearly four hundred incidents of piracy in Nigerian waters between 2006 and 2009. ExxonMobil itself was struck in some seasons as often as three times per month. Arguably, the effect of American military assistance to the Nigerian navy had been to abet attacks on the property of America’s largest oil corporation.
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Kidnapped, robbed, and suffering from steadily declining oil production volumes, as well as soaring maritime insurance rates, American and British oil executives grew restless after 2006. Around the Horn of Africa, where piracy was about equally bad, statistically, the U.S. Navy led international coalitions to battle Somali pirates. Why not do the same in the Gulf of Guinea?

Nigeria’s navy was down to two boats it could use to escort oil service ships to defend them from attacks. Nigerian oil output fell because of militant attacks and world oil prices rose toward record highs. Daily news stories of fresh M.E.N.D. attacks caused spot prices to gyrate wildly, pinching the world economy. Mark Ward, Chaplin’s deputy, believed it was time to “help the [Nigerian government] rapidly increase its capacity to provide security” on the routes through the Bonny Channel used by supply ships servicing offshore production. “Any help” the United States could provide to Nigeria “for river training” would be “very good,” Chaplin agreed. The corporation resisted Nigerian requests for special funds to buy more boats and equipment, but ExxonMobil did supply its own boats to the navy for use on rivers near corporate facilities and housing.
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In Washington, these suggestions generated brainstorming and war gaming about American options. “We were constantly beating off bad ideas” to provide training, supply equipment, and conduct joint exercises with Nigerian military units in the Delta, proposals that originated with the international oil firms, said a State Department official. The Pentagon and the economic bureau at State, which liaised with the large oil corporations and channeled many of these ideas, brought forward scenarios and war games that contemplated direct American military intervention in the Niger Delta, or high-profile exercises that might intimidate the kidnappers. “These were the guys in whose ears ExxonMobil was whispering,” the State official recalled. “They wanted to persuade us, but it was never clear what they had in mind.” M.E.N.D. challenged the viability of the Exxon way, and the corporation turned to the Pentagon. At Africa Command, Army colonels and navy captains rotated into Germany on short tours, the official continued, and they would declare, “‘Let’s have a Nigeria strategy.’ They were constantly running war games in which Nigeria was the example. . . . ‘What do we do if the marines have to seize the oil facilities?’”

A second American official in Nigeria recalled the prevalence, after 2006, of largely speculative “ideas that floated around” for deploying U.S. Marines in the Delta to address M.E.N.D. militancy and piracy.

The Pentagon proposed joint “riverine training exercises” to Nigeria, of the type suggested by ExxonMobil, but “they had no interest,” a Defense Department official recalled. “There was talk about large force deployments in the Delta,” the Defense official continued, but “we certainly never encouraged or validated that. . . . The Delta could easily suck up 100,000 [American] troops and you’d still not have it covered.” The war games and troop proposals were more “just throwing out ideas,” not action plans for an American military intervention, the official said. The very existence and repetitive recurrence of the Pentagon’s tabletop exercises, however, struck some State officials as a discouraging example of the militarization of American foreign policy in Africa.
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Loose talk about riverine exercises and marine training packages made Nigerian commanders very nervous. The launch of Africa Command as a formal enterprise in 2008 (during its initial operations, it had remained subordinate to European Command) happened to coincide with another wave of violence in the Delta. Nigerian foreign minister Ojo Maduekwe pointedly complained of a “lack of conceptual clarity” about the Pentagon’s intentions in the Gulf of Guinea. Beset by questions and criticisms from African capitals, Theresa Whelan felt compelled to declare publicly, “We have no intention of using Africa Command to try and control oil resources.”
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What, then, was the true connection between the Pentagon’s program to build up the Nigerian and other regional navies in the Gulf of Guinea, and the reality that about 25 percent of America’s imported oil flowed through those waters?

“It is a fact that the United States government does not own any oil companies,” Air Force major general Michael Snodgrass, the deputy commander of Africa Command, said at the Africa command’s headquarters in Stuttgart. “And if the United States decided to take over any country because of its oil, who would then exploit the oil? It’s up to the free market to do that.”

What, then, is the American military’s message to ExxonMobil or Chevron if they point out that they are suffering attacks in the Niger Delta and offshore?

“Our message is nothing, unless the president of the United States directs us to go do something like that,” Snodgrass answered. “It is not the mission of this command to provide the security. And we have no intention of going into an African nation and helping an industry, whatever the industry may be—be it the fishing industry, the oil industry, the textile industry, the fake African elephant industry—be protected within the confines of a sovereign nation. That’s not our role. . . . So my response to those companies is, ‘You need to work out the arrangement with that sovereign nation to your satisfaction. And if you can’t, you might want to reconsider your investment.’ We are not the guarantor of their security.”
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N
igerian piracy presented the first major test of ExxonMobil’s decision to adopt the Voluntary Principles governing corporate conduct in defense, security, and human rights. After ExxonMobil’s fiasco in Aceh, Irving did not want to be placed in a position where security guards had to shoot at Nigerian pirates. By implementing the Voluntary Principles after 2005, ExxonMobil had effectively adopted a different approach to security: passive defense, enhanced by surveillance and partnership with local Nigerian forces, however flawed they might be. That meant, as a practical matter, given the weakness of the Nigerian navy and the reluctance of the United States to intervene directly, that the safety of ExxonMobil’s offshore platform workers and managers depended increasingly on a defense strategy that seemed inspired by the 2002 Jodie Foster movie,
Panic
Room
, in which a New York divorcée and her daughter lock themselves in a sealed room in their apartment as burglars assault them unremittingly.

In general, the Voluntary Principles regime discouraged the direct use by private corporations of offensive tactics or military technology, such as the deployment of military radar on offshore oil facilities, which might make the platforms appear to be legitimate military targets. ExxonMobil Global Security did deploy patrol boats with unarmed observers in the Gulf of Guinea; the security boats motored out in forward sweeps, seeking to detect, as early in an assault as possible, armed attackers who might be en route to ExxonMobil facilities. If pirates were seen approaching, defense protocols kicked in: broadcasted alerts, lockdowns, the disablement of equipment, and retreat into interior safe rooms. Intelligence collection, threat mapping, and surveillance were about as far as ExxonMobil was now willing to go. The corporation’s security officers used Google Earth satellite photography to create graphic maps overlaid with the locations and dates of recent attacks, and the sites of militant camps in Akwa Ibom. They worked human sources and tried to understand who was who inside the camps.
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ExxonMobil security officers called Africa Command in Germany as attacks unfolded on the open ocean. “They call me a lot,” a military officer there said, “mostly to give me situational awareness. Most of the time we’re not in a position to respond—that’s part of what I tell them. It’s not unlike what the Coast Guard tells lots of people in the maritime industry in the United States. . . . ‘You own the first two hours,’” meaning that self-defense would be required for at least that long.
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The oil corporations were “wary of what they share and how much” with the Nigerian navy, a Pentagon official said, because the navy was so transparently part of the crime problem. Even when ExxonMobil summoned the Nigerian navy in desperation, while under attack, said a third American official, “they won’t come. They have no will.” ExxonMobil therefore had little choice but to “go into lockdown . . . hunker down and hope for the best.”