In retrospect, if one stepped back from the various substories playing out on the ground in Iraq in 2005, the big-picture reality was that the country was quickly becoming the global epicenter of privatized warfare with scores of heavily armed groups of various loyalties and agendas roaming Iraq. In addition to the U.S.-backed death squads, operating with some claim to legitimacy within the U.S.-installed system in Baghdad, there were the private antioccupation militias of various Shiite leaders, such as Muqtada al-Sadr, and the resistance movements of Sunni factions, largely comprised of ex-military officials and soldiers, as well as Al Qaeda-backed militias. The Bush administration made it a policy to denounce
certain
militias. “In a free Iraq, former militia members must shift their loyalty to the national government, and learn to operate under the rule of law,” Bush declared.
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Yet at the top of this militia pyramid were the official mercenaries Washington had imported to Iraq—the private military companies, of which Blackwater was the industry leader. While calling for the dismantling of some
Iraqi
militias, the United States openly permitted its own pro-occupation mercenaries to operate above the law in Iraq.
“There Continues to Be the Need for This Kind of Security”
At the end of Negroponte’s time in Baghdad, with militia violence on the rise, Blackwater’s forces once again grabbed headlines in what would be—at the time—the deadliest incident the company acknowledged publicly in Iraq. On April 21, 2005, the day Negroponte was confirmed to his new position as Director of National Intelligence in Washington, some of his former bodyguards were dying in Iraq.
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That day, a Bulgarian-operated Mi-8 helicopter on contract with Blackwater was flying from the Green Zone to Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.
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On board were six American Blackwater troops on contract with the U.S. government’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
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With them were three Bulgarian crew members and two Fijian mercenaries.
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A day before they left, one of the Blackwater men, twenty-nine-year-old Jason Obert of Colorado, had called his wife, Jessica. He “told me that he was going to be sent on a mission. He had a bad feeling about it,” she recalled. “I begged him not to go. I just told him just to come home. But he would never quit; that’s not him.”
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Jessica Obert said her husband did not tell her the nature of the mission. Like many who signed up for work with Blackwater in Iraq, Jason Obert viewed it as a chance to build a nest egg for his wife and their two young sons.
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In February 2005, he quit his job as a police officer and signed up with Blackwater. “The financial gain was incredible,” said Lt. Robert King, Obert’s former boss at the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department. “He had communicated to me and several other people that he would do one year, and his children and his wife would be taken care of. Their college education would be funded, houses paid off.”
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The day after he told his wife about his “bad feelings,” he boarded the Mi-8 helicopter with his Blackwater colleagues, the Fijians, and the Bulgarian crew.
At about 1:45 in the afternoon, as the helicopter buzzed toward Tikrit, it passed near the Tigris River town of Tarmiya, a small community of Sunni Muslims twelve miles north of Baghdad.
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The pilots were flying the craft low to the ground, a common military tactic to thwart potential attackers. On an elevated plain nearby stood an Iraqi who reportedly had been waiting three days for an occupation aircraft to come close enough so that he could carry out his mission.
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When the chopper whizzed within range, the Iraqi fired off a Soviet-made Strela heat-seeking missile and directly hit the helicopter, setting it ablaze as it crashed into the flat desert.
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The attacker and his comrades filmed the attack and kept the cameras rolling as they jogged toward the crash site. On their video, they can be heard out of breath repeating the chant “Allah-u-Akbar! Allah-u-Akbar!” When they arrive at the site, helicopter parts are spread across the open field and several small fires continue to burn. A badly charred body of one of the dead men lies on the ground with one arm raised in an L shape as though cowering from some form of attack.
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“Look at this filth,” says one of the attackers. “See if there are any Americans left.”
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The attackers continue to explore the remains of the helicopter when they come across the Bulgarian pilot, Lyubomir Kostov, in a dark blue flight suit lying in a patch of tall grass. One of the men, realizing Kostov is still alive, shouts in Arabic and English, “Any weapons?” The camera pans to the pilot as he winces in pain. “Stand up! Stand up!” one of the attackers shouts in accented English. “I can’t,” replies the pilot. Motioning to his right leg, Kostov tells them, “I can’t, it’s broken. Give me a hand.” One of the attackers replies, “Come here, come here,” as he helps Kostov to his feet. “Go! Go!” someone shouts at the pilot. Kostov turns around and begins to limp away with his back to the camera. As he hobbles forward, Kostov turns his head around and puts his hand up as though to say, “Stop!” when someone suddenly yells, “Carry out God’s judgment.” The attackers, shouting “Allah-u-Akbar,” open fire on Kostov, filming the execution as they pump eighteen bullets into his body, continuing to shoot the pilot even after he has fallen.
Within two hours, a group identifying itself as the Islamic Army in Iraq provided the video to Al Jazeera, which broadcast it. “Heroes of the Islamic Army downed a transport aircraft belonging to the army of the infidels and killed its crew and those on board,” the group said in a written statement that accompanied the video. “One of the crew members was captured and killed.”
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The group said it had executed the surviving pilot “in revenge for the Muslims who have been killed in cold blood in the mosques of tireless Fallujah before the eyes of the world and on television screens, without anyone condemning them.”
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The statement was interpreted as a reference to the apparent execution by a U.S. soldier of a wounded Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque in November 2004 (which was caught on tape) during the second U.S. assault on the city.
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In a statement released shortly after the helicopter was shot down, Blackwater said the “Six were passengers in a commercial helicopter operated by Sky Link under contract to Blackwater in support of a Department of Defense contract.”
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Despite its obvious military use, media reports overwhelmingly referred to the helicopter as a “civilian” or “commercial” aircraft. Reporters at the Pentagon, meanwhile, began reporting that “these commercial aircraft fly without the type of air protective measures that military aircraft fly with.”
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Shortly after the helicopter was downed, retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd, who once headed the Air National Guard, told CNN, “All of the airplanes over there, if possible, should have infrared countermeasures and flares to protect themselves against shoulder-fired missiles, which are the biggest threat to low-flying helicopters. . . . Once an infrared shoulder-fired missile is fired at you, you can confuse it and divert either with flares or with sophisticated maneuvers.”
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Shepperd added, “All those protect you.”
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At the Pentagon press briefing after the shoot-down, a reporter asked spokesman Larry Di Rita about the apparent lack of these “countermeasures” on the Blackwater-contracted helicopter:
REPORTER: The Department of Defense is contracting these folks. Are there any sort of restrictions that you have to force these contractors to make sure that the private individuals who are doing work on behalf of DOD have the same sort of protections that uniformed service members are getting? And shouldn’t somebody who is doing the work of the Department of Defense, same mission, just because they’re getting their paycheck from somewhere else, have the same—enjoy the same protections that somebody in a uniform would be?
DI RITA: I’m not sure that that premise is the basis on which people operate over there. In other words, there are contractors who assume a certain amount of risk. Everybody over there is—no, I don’t say everybody—there are a number of contractors to the U.S. military, to the Department of Defense, some to the Department of State, and they assume a certain risk by being over there. And I wouldn’t want to characterize exactly what status this particular—obviously we mourn the loss of life, and I’m sure that the contractor would have taken all of the appropriate precautions. I mean, I think that’s what—they have the same regard for their employees as we do for our forces. But I can’t say that that necessarily means they’re going to be on the same status. I just don’t think that’s the case.
REPORTER: They have the same countermeasures. Shouldn’t they have the same protective gear, shouldn’t they have the same kind of ballistic gear, shouldn’t they have the same—
DI RITA: As I said, I think contractors recognize the environment that they’re operating in. It’s like they’re around the world, and they make appropriate adjustments on their own determination.
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Unlike the Pentagon—which was limited by budget constraints—Blackwater was limited in its ability to defend its personnel only by its own spending decisions and by how much it was willing to shell out for defensive countermeasures. “I have concerns for many of the contractors who are still over there,” said Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, who already was suing Blackwater for her son’s death in Fallujah. “Our government seems to be subcontracting out this war, and these companies have no accountability.”
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The same day the helicopter was shot down, forty-two-year-old Curtis Hundley was working a Blackwater security detail outside the city of Ramadi, not far from the site of the helicopter shoot-down. He was just a few days away from a return trip home to his wife in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
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“When the war in Iraq started, he wanted to fight for our country,” according to his father, Steve Hundley, a former helicopter pilot who fought in Vietnam. “Too old to rejoin the Army, he joined Blackwater Security. That put him on the roads in Iraq almost daily, the most dangerous place to be. I’ve never seen him more proud. He enjoyed throwing candy to kids along the road. Like me in Vietnam, at first, he thought progress was pretty good. But civilian miscalculations—such as not sending over enough troops to secure ammo dumps and borders, and then deactivating the entire Iraq army, which instantly created thousands of potential terrorists—began to take effect. I saw my happy-go-lucky son start to harden. His eyes, which always had had a twinkle, were different in the pictures he sent. When I could get him to talk about his job, he began to sound disgusted at the worsening situation. The last several weeks of his life, disgust had turned to anger.”
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Curtis Hundley died in Ramadi on April 21, when a bomb exploded near a company armored personnel carrier.
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Hundley’s death meant that with the helicopter crash, Blackwater had lost seven men in Iraq that day, its deadliest to date in the war. “Blackwater’s Black Day,” proclaimed one news headline.
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Back in Moyock, company executives quickly mobilized their response. “This is a very sad day for the Blackwater family,” said president Gary Jackson. “We lost seven of our friends to attacks by terrorists in Iraq and our thoughts and prayers go out to their family members.”
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A company press release said, “Blackwater has a 15-member team of crisis counselors working with those family members to assist them in coping with the loss of their loved ones.”
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At the State Department, meanwhile, the seven men were eulogized as heroes. “These Blackwater contractors were supporting the State Department mission in Iraq, and were critical to our efforts to protect American diplomats there,” said Assistant Secretary of State Joe Morton. “These brave men gave their lives so that Iraqis may someday enjoy the freedom and democracy we enjoy here in America.”
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Once again, the killing of Blackwater forces in Iraq had cast the spotlight back on the secretive world of mercenary companies. “The fact of the matter is that private security firms have been involved in Iraq from the very beginning, so this is nothing new,” said State Department spokesperson Adam Ereli, responding to questions from the press. “There’s a need for security that goes beyond what employees of the U.S. Government can provide, and we go to private companies to offer that. That’s a common practice. It’s not unique to Iraq. We do it around the world.”
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In Iraq, Ereli said, “I think it’s a statement of the obvious to say that the conditions . . . are such that it’s not completely safe to go throughout the country at all parts, at all times, so there continues to be the need for security—for this kind of security protection.”
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Those words must have been music to Blackwater’s ears:
There continues to be the need for this kind of security.
Once again, the death of Blackwater contractors translated into more support for the mercenary cause. The day after the seven Blackwater mercenaries died in Iraq, the U.S. Senate approved a controversial $81 billion spending bill for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, pushing the total cost of the wars to more than $300 billion.
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More money was being allocated for “security” in Iraq. Some 1,564 U.S. soldiers had died since the invasion,
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along with an uncounted number of mercenaries. It was a year after the Blackwater ambush in Fallujah, and business had never been better for Erik Prince and his colleagues, despite the confirmed deaths of eighteen Blackwater contractors in Iraq.
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Back in the U.S., the Blackwater Empire was about to add another powerful former Bush administration official to its roster.