In the end, perhaps as many as eight hundred Iraqis died as a result of the first of what would be several sieges of Fallujah.
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Tens of thousands of civilians fled their homes, and the city was razed. And yet the United States failed to crush Fallujah. Far from asserting U.S. supremacy in Iraq, Fallujah demonstrated that guerrilla tactics were effective against the occupiers. “Fallujah, the small city at the heart of the Sunni Arab insurrection, was considered something of a hillbilly place by other Sunni in Iraq,” wrote veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn in a dispatch from Iraq in late April. “It was seen as Islamic, tribal and closely connected to the former regime. The number of guerrillas probably totaled no more than 400 out of a population of 300,000. But by assaulting a whole city, as if it was Verdun or Stalingrad, the US Marines have managed to turn it into a nationalist symbol.”
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Testifying before Congress on April 20, Gen. Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended the operation. “As you remember, we went in because of the atrocities on the Blackwater security personnel, the four personnel that were killed and later burned, and then hung on the bridge. We went in because we had to and to find the perpetrators. And what we found was a huge rat’s nest, that is still festering today—needs to be dealt with.”
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The April siege of Fallujah would be followed a few months later, in November 2004, by an even greater onslaught that would bring hundreds more Iraqi deaths, force tens of thousands of people from their homes, and further enrage the country. In all, U.S. forces carried out nearly seven hundred airstrikes, damaging or destroying eighteen thousand of Fallujah’s thirty-nine thousand buildings.
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Approximately 150 U.S. soldiers were killed in the operations. Meanwhile, the “perpetrators” of the Blackwater ambush “were never found,”
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as political and military officials had vowed, further underscoring the vengeful nature of the U.S. slaughter in Fallujah. The Marines renamed the infamous bridge “Blackwater Bridge,” and someone wrote in English in black marker on one of its beams: “This is for the Americans of Blackwater that were murdered here in 2004, Semper Fidelis P.S. Fuck You.”
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Journalist Dahr Jamail later concluded, “[I]n April of 2004, as a city was invaded and its residents were fleeing, hiding, or being massacred, there was considerable public awareness in the United States of human beings whose bodies had been mutilated in Iraq, thanks to our news media. But among thousands of references to mutilation in that month alone, we have yet to find one related to anything that happened after March 31 . . . [M]utilation is something that happens to Blackwater-hired mercs and other professional, American killers, not to Iraqi babies with misplaced heads.”
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
MR. PRINCE GOES TO WASHINGTON
BEFORE THE
invasion of Iraq, when most people heard the term “civilian contractors,” they didn’t immediately conjure up images of men with guns and bulletproof vests riding around a hellhole in jeeps. They thought of construction workers. This was also true for the families of many private soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their loved ones were not “civilian contractors,” in their minds but were often thought of and referred to in family discussions as “Special Forces” or being “with the military.” Their actual employer or title was irrelevant because what they were doing in Iraq or Afghanistan was what they had always done—they were fighting for their country. The parents of one Blackwater contractor killed in Iraq said it was their son’s “deep sense of patriotism and his abiding Christian faith that led him to work in Iraq,”
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a common sentiment in the private military community. So on March 31, 2004, when news began to reach the United States that four “civilian contractors” had been ambushed in Fallujah, several of the men’s families didn’t draw any kind of connection. After all, their loved ones were not civilians—they were military. In Ohio, Danica Zovko, Jerry’s mother, heard the news on the radio that “American contractors” had been killed.
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After she saw the images coming out of Fallujah, she actually wrote her son an e-mail, telling him to be careful: “They’re killing people in Iraq just like Somalia.”
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Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, Scott’s mother, was working at her home office in Leesburg, Florida, with the television on behind her.
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“I was sitting here at my desk, doing research, and I had CNN on in the background,” she recalled. “And the noon news just all of a sudden caught my attention, and I looked over there and I saw this burning vehicle and I thought, ‘Oh, my God.’” It didn’t cross her mind at the time that the footage she was watching was her own son’s gruesome death. “When they said contractors, I was thinking construction workers working on pipelines or something. I changed the channel because I thought, This is just getting insane, I can’t watch this anymore.” Helvenston-Wettengel went on with her work, but then she heard the men described on the news as “security contractors,” which made her nervous. “I said, ‘My God, Scotty is a security contractor, but he’s not in Fallujah. He’s protecting Paul Bremer in Baghdad,’” she recalled. “I called my other son, Jason, and he told me, ‘Mom, you worry too much.’” Anyway, she reasoned, her son had just arrived in Iraq a few days earlier. “He wasn’t even supposed to be on any missions,” she said. Helvenston-Wettengel went out that afternoon to a meeting, and when she returned home at seven o’clock that night, her answering machine was blinking like crazy: eighteen new messages. “The first four were from Jason, saying, ‘Mom, it was Blackwater. They were Blackwater guys that got ambushed.’” Helvenston-Wettengel called Blackwater headquarters and got a woman on the other line. “This is Katy Helvenston, Scotty’s mom,” she said. “Is Scotty all right?” The Blackwater representative said she didn’t know. “It’s been twelve hours!” Helvenston-Wettengel exclaimed. “What do you mean you don’t know?” She said the Blackwater representative told her that the company was in the process of doing a sort of “reverse 911” with its contractors in the field in Iraq. “She said there were about 400 of them and that 250 had checked in. I asked if Scotty was one of those and the woman said, ‘No.’” Helvenston-Wettengel said she called Blackwater back every hour, desperate for any information. In the meantime, she found Fallujah on a map and realized that it wasn’t that far from Baghdad. By midnight, she knew in her heart that her son was dead. “Scotty had been so good about calling me and e-mailing me, and I kept thinking, He would have called me and let me know he was OK, because he knew how worried I was,” she recalled. “I just knew it.”
While the families began to absorb the shock and horror of what had happened to their loved ones in Fallujah, the world—including many elected officials in Washington—was getting a window into just how privatized the war had become and how entrenched private contractors, like the dead Blackwater men, now were in the occupation. In the 1991 Gulf War, one in sixty people deployed by the coalition were contractors. With the 2003 occupation, the ratio had swelled to one in three.
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For Erik Prince, the Fallujah killings and the Najaf firefight provided an almost unthinkable opportunity—under the guise of doing damage control and briefings, Prince and his entourage would be able to meet with Washington’s power brokers and sell them on Blackwater’s vision of military privatization at the exact moment that those very senators and Congressmen were beginning to recognize the necessity of mercenaries in preserving the occupation of (and corporate profits in) Iraq. With timing that would have been impossible to create, Blackwater was thrust into the fortunate position of a drug rep offering a new painkiller to an ailing patient at the moment the worst pain was just kicking in.
Blackwater’s Lobbyists
The day after the Fallujah ambush, Erik Prince turned to his longtime friend Paul Behrends, a partner at the powerful Republican lobbying firm Alexander Strategy Group, founded by senior staffers of then-majority leader Tom DeLay.
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Behrends, a U.S. Marine Corps Reserve lieutenant colonel, had been a senior national security adviser to California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a onetime aide to President Reagan. Prince and Behrends had a long history—in 1990-1991, young Prince worked for Rohrabacher alongside Behrends.
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That marked the beginning of a close political, business, and religious partnership between the two men that would only strengthen as Blackwater grew.
Behrends first officially registered as a lobbyist for Blackwater in May 1998 and began advocating for the company in areas ranging from disaster planning to foreign relations.
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That month, Behrends’s firm Boland & Madigan “delivered” Representative Rohrabacher and another “staunch defender” of the Second Amendment, Representative John Doolittle, to Prince’s Moyock compound for Blackwater’s grand opening—at the company’s expense.
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While Prince—with Behrends’s lobbying assistance—built up his Blackwater empire, Behrends was simultaneously becoming deeply involved in areas of U.S. foreign policy that would become front lines in the war on terror and areas of revenue for Blackwater. Among these was a high-stakes Big Oil scheme, led by petrol giant Unocal, to run a pipeline through Taliban-governed Afghanistan. Behrends worked as a lobbyist for Delta Oil, Unocal’s partner in the scheme, pushing for the United States to officially recognize the Afghan government.
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Prince and Behrends’s former boss, Rohrabacher, had long been interested in Afghanistan, since his days working as a senior speechwriter in the Reagan White House, when the United States was aggressively backing the mujahedeen against the Soviet occupation of the country. Rohrabacher, known as a fan of various U.S.-backed “freedom fighters,” traveled to Afghanistan in 1988, personally joining the mujahedeen in the fighting against the Soviet forces before being officially sworn into Congress.
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It was not surprising when Blackwater became one of the first private military firms contracted to conduct operations inside Afghanistan after 9/11.
Prince and Behrends had long served together on the board of directors of Christian Freedom International, the evangelical missionary organization founded and run by veterans of the Reagan administration—several of them major players in the Iran-Contra scandal. Its founder and president, Jim Jacobson, cut his political teeth working under Erik Prince’s friend and beneficiary Gary Bauer, when Bauer served as the head of President Reagan’s Office of Policy Development. Jacobson also served in the George H. W. Bush administration. CFI passionately supported the Bush administration’s war on terror, faulting the White House’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan only for not doing enough to defend Christians.
At the time of the Fallujah ambush, there were few lobbying firms with more influence on Capitol Hill than Alexander Strategy, a centerpiece of the GOP’s “K Street Project,” under which lobbyists raised “enormous sums of money from their clients to ensure that Republicans remain the majority in Congress. For this fealty, the leadership grants the lobbyists access to the decision-makers and provides legislative favors for their clients,” according to the Congressional watchdog group Public Citizen.
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Behrends and his associates wasted no time in going to work for Prince and Blackwater. “[Blackwater] did not go out looking for the publicity and did not ask for everything that happened to them,” said Chris Bertelli, a spokesman for Alexander Strategy assigned to Blackwater after the Fallujah killings. “We want to do everything we can to educate [the media and Congress] about what Blackwater does.”
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A week to the day after the ambush, Erik Prince was sitting down with at least four senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including chairman John Warner.
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Former Navy SEAL turned Blackwater executive Patrick Toohey accompanied Prince to his Congressional meetings,
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as did Behrends. Senator Rick Santorum arranged the meeting, which included Warner and two other key Republican senators—Appropriations Committee chairman Ted Stevens of Alaska and Senator George Allen of Virginia.
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This meeting followed an earlier series of face-to-faces Prince had with powerful House Republicans who oversaw military contracts. Among them: Tom DeLay, the House majority leader and Alexander Strategy’s patron; Porter Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (and future CIA director); Duncan Hunter, chair of the House Armed Services Committee; and Representative Bill Young, chair of the House Appropriations Committee.
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What was discussed at these meetings remains a secret, as neither Blackwater nor the Congressmen have discussed them publicly. But there was no question: the company’s moment had arrived.
With well-connected ASG operatives steering the publicity-shy Erik Prince and other company executives around, Blackwater was positioning itself to cash in on its newfound fame, while staking out a key role in crafting the rules that would govern mercenaries on U.S. government contracts.
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“Because of the public events of March 31, [Blackwater’s] visibility and need to communicate a consistent message has elevated here in Washington,” said ASG’s Bertelli. “There are now several federal regulations that apply to their activities, but they are generally broad in nature. One thing that’s lacking is an industry standard. That’s something we definitely want to be engaged in.”
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By May, Blackwater was reportedly “leading a lobbying effort by private security firms and other contractors to try to block congressional or Pentagon efforts to bring their companies and employees under the same justice code” as active-duty soldiers.
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“The Uniform Code of Military Justice should not apply to civilians because you actually give up constitutional rights when you join the armed forces,” Bertelli said. “You’re subject to a different legal system than you are if you are a civilian.”
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(Two years later, despite Blackwater’s efforts, language would be slipped into the 2007 defense-spending authorization that sought to place contractors under the UCMJ.) In June, Blackwater would be handed one of the U.S. government’s most valuable international security contracts to protect diplomats and U.S. facilities.
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At the same time, Blackwater was given its own protection, as Bremer granted a sweeping immunity for its operations in Iraq.
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