But this story was soon directly contradicted by one of the most senior U.S. officials in Iraq at the time—Bremer’s deputy, Jim Steele, who had been sent covertly into Fallujah to recover the bodies and investigate.
23
After Steele met with Jon Lee Anderson of
The New Yorker
magazine in Baghdad, Anderson reported that Steele had “concluded that there was no evidence that the Iraqi police had betrayed the contractors.”
24
This was backed up by Malcolm Nance, a former naval intelligence officer and FBI terrorism adviser who headed a private security firm in Iraq at the time. “In Fallujah especially, an [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps] guarantee is of zero value,” Nance said. “You would never trust the word of local forces in a place like that—especially if you were driving a high-profile convoy, as these people were.”
25
Richard Perry, another former naval intelligence officer, who worked with Scott Helvenston when he was still in the service, said, “[E]verything that happened in Fallujah that day was a serious mistake. I simply cannot understand why the hell they were driving through the most dangerous part of Iraq in just two vehicles without a proper military escort. . . . They were lightly armed, and yet they would be up against people who regularly take on the U.S. Army.”
26
Time
magazine reported that “A former private military operator with knowledge of Blackwater’s operational tactics says the firm did not give all its contract warriors in Afghanistan proper training in offensive-driving tactics, although missions were to include vehicular and dignitary-escort duty. ‘Evasive driving and ambush tactics were not—repeat, were not—covered in training,’ this source said.”
27
Meanwhile, the
San Francisco Chronicle
reported from Baghdad that Control Risks Group, the firm Blackwater had taken over the ESS contract from, had warned Blackwater at the time that Fallujah was not safe to travel through: “According to senior executives working with other Baghdad security companies, Blackwater’s decision to press ahead anyway stemmed from a desire to impress its new clients. ‘There has been a big row about this,’ said one executive, who asked not to be named. ‘Not long before the convoy left, Control Risks said, “Don’t go through Fallujah, it’s not safe.” But Blackwater wanted to show . . . that nowhere was too dangerous for them.’”
28
In response, Blackwater spokesman Bertelli said, “It is certainly not out of the question that some of Blackwater’s competitors would use this tragic occurrence as an opportunity to try and damage Blackwater’s reputation and secure contracts for themselves.”
29
In what would turn out to be the most comprehensive statement Blackwater would provide at the time on the incident, Bertelli told the
Chronicle
:
While our internal investigation continues, we are not aware of any specific warnings by anyone, including other private security contractors, that the route being traveled the day of March 31 was not the safest route to the convoy’s destination. The two men leading the convoy had extensive experience in Iraq prior to the trip that resulted in the ambush and were well aware of the areas that are considered to be highly dangerous. They were all highly trained former U.S. Navy SEAL and Special Forces troops. The ambush took place in such a way that it would not have made a difference if there had been additional personnel protecting the convoy.
30
In the meantime, local reporters in North Carolina started digging for answers in Blackwater’s backyard. A few months after Blackwater’s alibi was published in the
New York Times
, Joseph Neff and Jay Price of the Raleigh
News and Observer
cast further doubt on Blackwater’s narrative. “[C]ontractors who have worked with Blackwater in Iraq were skeptical that the team had arranged for an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps escort,” the paper reported on August 1, 2004. “The Iraqi security force simply wasn’t trusted, said the contractors, who asked not to be named to protect their jobs.”
31
More important, the
News and Observer
had sources inside the company who were raising serious questions about the conditions under which the four men were sent into Fallujah:
The contractors also said security teams on the ESS contract had insufficient firepower. And the team ambushed in Fallujah should have been the standard Blackwater team of three men in each car, not two, the contractors said. Days after the ambush, Helvenston’s family got a copy of an April 13 [2004] e-mail message by someone who identified herself as Kathy Potter, an Alaska woman who had helped run Blackwater’s Kuwait City office while Helvenston was there. Most of the lengthy message consisted of condolences. Potter, however, also said Helvenston’s normal team, operating in relatively safe southern Iraq, had six members—not four like the group that entered Fallujah. Potter also wrote that Helvenston helped acquire “the backup vehicles and critical supplies for these vehicles . . . when the original plan for armored vehicles fell through.” Company officials declined to say why there were no armored vehicles for the ESS contract.
32
In Florida, Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, Scott’s mom, had all sorts of questions running through her head. Finally, she decided to call Erik Prince directly. She said it was surprisingly easy to get him on the phone. “I said, ‘I want an incident report on Scotty.’ And I said, ‘I want a copy of his contract that he signed with you,’” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘I just want to know what happened.’ He said he would get it to me in the next few weeks. And I said, ‘Well, you’ve already written a report. Why can’t I have it tomorrow?’ And I said, ‘Are you going to rewrite it for my eyes only?’” She said she “never did get that report. I did get a call a few days later, and [Blackwater] all of a sudden [was] going to have this grand memorial.”
Indeed, a memorial was scheduled for mid-October 2004 at the Blackwater compound in North Carolina. But a week before the memorial, Blackwater held a different kind of ceremony—to inaugurate a new plant to manufacture military practice targets. Company president Gary Jackson beamed with pride as he discussed Blackwater’s rapid expansion. “The numbers are actually staggering. In the last eighteen months we’ve had over 600 percent growth,” Jackson said, adding that Blackwater’s workforce in North Carolina would soon double.
33
The company, he said, had also opened offices in Baghdad and Jordan. “This is a billion-dollar industry,” Jackson said of the target business. “And Blackwater has only scratched the surface of it.”
34
The Associated Press noted, “Gov. Mike Easley said having the global security company headquartered in North Carolina is fitting for what he called the most military-friendly state in the country.”
35
A few days later, on October 17, the company flew most of the families of the Fallujah contractors to North Carolina, where Prince was to dedicate the company’s memorial to the men killed in action.
36
In addition to the relatives of those men, there were three other families of Blackwater contractors who also had died in the line of duty.
37
The company put the families up in a hotel, and gift baskets of cheese and crackers were waiting in the rooms when they arrived. Danica Zovko said that from the moment they got to North Carolina, “It just felt uncomfortable. It’s like sometimes somebody is watching you and you feel it but you don’t know who it is. That’s what it felt like. Stiff. You couldn’t relax.” She said that each family member was assigned a Blackwater minder that escorted them everywhere and was present for all conversations, sometimes changing the subject if the conversation moved onto one topic in particular: Both Zovko and Katy Helvenston-Wettengel said they had the distinct feeling that the company was trying to keep the families from talking with one another about the details of the Fallujah incident.
The memorial was held, trees were planted, small headstones with the men’s names on them were laid in the ground around a pond on the company property. On October 18, the Zovkos said they were told there would be a meeting where they could ask questions about the Fallujah incident. “We assumed that everyone else was going to go to the meeting,” Danica Zovko said. In the end, only she, her husband, Jozo, and their son, Tom, attended. “There was alcohol served at the luncheon [for the families] beforehand, so maybe people were too tired or they were taken for sight-seeing,” she recalled. “Blackwater was very keen on showing everyone the compound, their training center.” The Zovkos were escorted to a company building, and when they walked in, they saw two large flags, one of which bore the names of Jerry and his three colleagues. A company representative, they said, told them the flag was made by Blackwater staffers in Iraq.
The Zovkos said they were taken to a meeting room on the second floor, where they were seated at a large twenty-person conference table. Erik Prince was not in the room. At the head of the table, remembered Danica, was a young blonde-haired woman named Anne. A Blackwater executive, Mike Rush, was there, too, as was a gray-haired man introduced to the family as “the fastest gun in Iraq”—a man who they were told had just returned to the United States to “get divorced and sell his house” before heading back to Iraq. None of them, she recalled, said they knew Jerry. “The only person from Blackwater that admitted knowing my Jerry was Erik Prince,” she said.
Danica said she began by asking for her son’s missing belongings. She was told that he had taken them all with him to Fallujah that day and that they were destroyed. Eventually, the Zovkos began asking questions about the incident itself. “Annie [the Blackwater representative] did not even sit down at that point because I was asking for the contracts, asking at exactly what time my son had died. I was asking how he died. I was asking for his personal things,” Danica said. “The tempers were not calm anymore. I mean, it’s civilized, but it’s not nice. You know, it’s to where you see that they’re not telling you what you want to know and they’re not happy with what you’re asking. So Annie actually stood up from her chair—she was at the head of the table, sitting all by herself. These other people were all sitting across from us. She was on the right-hand side of me at the head of the table. She stood up and said that was confidential and if we wanted to know those things, we’d need to sue them.” Danica Zovko said, “I told them that’s what we would do.” At the time, Zovko did not know what that even meant, but she was now convinced that Blackwater was hiding something—something serious about her son’s death.
Two weeks later, George W. Bush claimed victory in the 2004 presidential election. Blackwater executives, led by Prince, had poured money into Bush and Republican Party coffers and clearly viewed the reelection as great for business and necessary for the unprecedented expansion of the mercenary industry. On November 8, Gary Jackson sent out a celebratory mass e-mail with a screaming banner headline: “BUSH WINS FOUR MORE YEARS!! HOOYAH!!”
38
The U.S. military had just launched the second major siege of Fallujah, bombing the city and engaging in violent house-to-house combat. Hundreds more Iraqis were killed, thousands more forced from their homes, as the national resistance against the occupation grew stronger and wider. Despite the fierce attacks on the city, the killers of the Blackwater men were not apprehended.
39
On November 14, the Marines symbolically reopened the infamous bridge running over the Euphrates in Fallujah. It was then that the Marines wrote in black bold letters: “This is for the Americans of Blackwater that were murdered here in 2004, Semper Fidelis P.S. Fuck You.”
40
Gary Jackson posted a link to the photo on Blackwater’s Web site, saying, “OOHRAH . . . this picture is worth more than they know.”
41
The families of the dead men, though, found little solace in revenge attacks or sloganeering.
When Katy Helvenston-Wettengel started complaining about Blackwater’s conduct and lack of transparency about the Fallujah ambush, Scott’s godfather, Circuit Judge William Levens, put her in touch with a lawyer who, he said, would help her seek answers. Eventually, a friend of Scott’s, another Blackwater contractor who had been overseas with him, brought the case to the attention of the successful Santa Ana, California, law firm Callahan & Blaine, whose owner, Daniel Callahan, was fresh off a record-setting $934 million jury decision in a corporate fraud case.
42
Callahan jumped at the case. In North Carolina, Callahan enlisted the local help of another well-known lawyer, David Kirby—the former law partner of 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards. The new legal team began compiling evidence, talking to other Blackwater contractors, scouring news reports for every detail about the ambush, watching the precious few moments of the scene captured by insurgent video and news cameras. They got a hold of the Blackwater contracts the men were working under and also some contracts between Blackwater and its business partners in the Middle East. It took only a matter of weeks before they felt they had enough of a case to take action.
On January 5, 2005, the families of Scott Helvenston, Jerry Zovko, Wes Batalona, and Mike Teague filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater in Superior Court in Wake County, North Carolina. “What we have right now is something worse than the wild, wild west going on in Iraq,” said Dan Callahan. “Blackwater is able to operate over there in Iraq free from any oversight that would typically exist in a civilized society. As we expose Blackwater in this case, it will also expose the inefficient and corrupt system that exists over there.”
43
The suit alleged that the men “would be alive today” had Blackwater not sent them unprepared on that fateful mission.
44
“The fact that these four Americans found themselves located in the high-risk, war-torn City of Fallujah without armored vehicles, automatic weapons, and fewer than the minimum number of team members was no accident,” the suit alleged. “Instead, this team was sent out without the required equipment and personnel by those in charge at Blackwater.”
45