In the years since Blackwater began in 1997 as a firing range and lodge near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, it has grown to become one of the most powerful private military actors on the international scene. Blackwater in 2006 had some twenty-three hundred private soldiers deployed in nine countries around the world and boasted of a database of another twenty-one thousand additional contractors on whom it could call should the need arise. In 2006, one U.S. Congressperson observed that, in terms of military might, the company could single-handedly take down many of the world’s governments. Its seven-thousand-acre facility in Moyock, North Carolina, has now become the most sophisticated private military center on the planet, while the company possesses one of the world’s largest privately held stockpiles of heavy-duty weaponry. It is a major training center for federal and local security and military forces in the United States, as well as foreign forces and private individuals. It sells its own line of target systems and armored vehicles. Blackwater’s state-of-the-art sixty-thousand-square-foot corporate headquarters welcomes visitors with door handles made from the muzzles of automatic weapons. It is developing surveillance blimps and private airstrips for its fleet of aircraft, which include helicopter gunships.
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Blackwater opened a facility, called “Blackwater North” in Illinois, but was forced to abandon projects in California and the Philippines after resistance from local communities. The company holds more than a billion dollars in U.S. government contracts, among them “black” contracts kept from public oversight, and has begun marketing aggressively to corporations. It has deep connections to the U.S. intelligence and defense apparatus and has become nothing short of the administration’s Praetorian Guard in the war on terror. While Blackwater executives may have initially set their sights high in aiming to be a wing of the military—like the Marines or the Army—now, reeling from its successes, the company is no longer content to be subordinate to the United States. While it still maintains its pledge of loyalty and patriotism, Blackwater strives to be an independent army, deploying to conflict zones as an alternative to a NATO or UN force.
Darfur Dreams
In late March 2006, Cofer Black flew to Amman, Jordan, where he represented Blackwater at one of the world’s premier war bazaars, the Special Operations Forces Exhibition and Conference (SOFEX). More than 220 companies ranging from weapons manufacturers and arms dealers to military consultants and trainers to full-blown mercenary outfits were on hand to peddle their goods and services to wealthy governments from across the Middle East, North Africa, and the world. The organizers boasted that SOFEX is “the world’s leading special operations forces, homeland security, counter terrorism and security forces exhibition and conference serving the global defense market.”
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After the Cold War, the Middle East quickly became one of the world’s hungriest markets for military equipment and training services, and the biennial conference was a valued chance for military commanders and planners to examine and purchase the latest wares international war contractors and military merchants had to offer. In attendance were military delegations from forty-two countries and more than seventy-five hundred visitors from across the globe. As the conference’s promotional materials boasted, “In the last decade, the Middle East has emerged as the largest importing region for security and military defence equipment, representing approximately 60% of the global defence expenditure.”
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As though to give the affair an extra air of legitimacy, the managing director of the conference, Amer Tabbah, touted the fact that SOFEX had been “accredited by the US Department of Commerce . . . showing the global trust and belief held by many.”
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The SOFEX conference was sponsored by one of President Bush’s closest Arab allies, King Abdullah of Jordan. Unlike his father, the late King Hussein, who opposed the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S./U.K.-educated Abdullah provided key support to the Bush administration in the build-up and execution of the Iraq invasion. Jordan has also served as a major transit point and staging ground for war-servicing corporations supporting the occupation in neighboring Iraq. Blackwater, like the White House, developed a special relationship with Jordan, opening an office in Amman early on in the Iraq occupation.
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Since King Abdullah took over from his deceased father in 1999, he has worked assiduously to modernize and Westernize Jordan’s military capabilities and to bolster its prominence as a force in the region. When King Abdullah—himself a former Special Operations commander
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—decided in 2004 to create a five-hundred-man special operations counter-terrorism aviation unit, Jordan hired Blackwater to conduct the training for the elite force.
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The contract, however, was held up by the State Department because of export-control regulations governing the sensitive nature of training foreign military forces. In early December 2004, King Abdullah visited Washington and reportedly raised the issue of the stalled Blackwater contract with almost every U.S. official he met.
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Soon thereafter the contract was given the go-ahead by the Bush administration. The Jordanian unit would receive training in operating various militarized assault helicopters, such as Blackhawks and Hughes MD500s, for use in counterterror operations, quick-air assaults, and forward reconnaissance. Jordan said it would pay for the training with part of its approximately $1 billion in annual U.S. military assistance.
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“The Jordanians came to us,” said Erik Prince. “They hired us to help build their squadrons, to teach them how to fly at night on goggles, to mount operations out of a helicopter.”
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As an exclamation point to King Abdullah’s drive to remake the Jordanian military, just ahead of the SOFEX conference, officials of the kingdom confirmed they had completed plans for what they called the King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center in Jordan, a $100 million project also funded by the U.S. government.
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King Abdullah said the training center project was being supervised by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the monarch’s description sounded as though he was constructing a facility modeled after Blackwater’s Moyock training compound. Abdullah said the facility would be used for the “training of both national and regional special operations forces, counter-terrorism forces, security and emergency service units, and to act as the premier live-fire training center for the Middle East.”
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Indeed, members of Jordan’s elite antiterror unit, Battalion 71, had participated in Blackwater’s 2004 SWAT Challenge in Moyock and had seen the company’s vaunted U.S. training facility firsthand.
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Blackwater’s special relationship with Jordan and its king made the company a miniphenomenon at the international war bazaar in Amman in March 2006. Blackwater chose the SOFEX conference to unveil its newly formed parachute team, which performed publicly for the first time at the conference opening at King Abdullah I air base.
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But while Blackwater’s parachute team may have wowed spectators on the ground, it was Cofer Black who stole the show on the opening day. Black “astonished” international Special Forces representatives when he declared that Blackwater was prepared to deploy a private brigade-sized force to conflict or crisis zones worldwide.
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“It’s an intriguing, good idea from a practical standpoint because we’re low-cost and fast,” Black said. “The issue is, who’s going to let us play on their team?”
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As an example, Black suggested that Blackwater could deploy its force in the Darfur region of Sudan, adding that Blackwater had already pitched the idea to unnamed U.S. and NATO officials. “About a year ago, we realized we could do it,” Black said. “There is clear potential to conduct security operations at a fraction of the cost of NATO operations.” Black was mobbed after his remarks by throngs of defense suppliers excited about the prospect of new markets being described by one of the industry’s star players, not to mention one of America’s most legendary spies. Black explained that Blackwater is a self-sustained operation. “We’ve war-gamed this with professionals,” he said. “We can do this.” He was quick to add that the company would not contradict U.S. policy by renting its services to enemies of the government. “We’re an American company,” Black declared. “We would get the approval of the U.S. government for anything we did for our friends overseas.”
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After Black’s remarks in Jordan, Blackwater vice president Chris Taylor expanded on his firm’s vision for a Sudan deployment. “Of course we could provide security at refugee camps, defensive security,” Taylor said. “What we seek to do first is to be the best deterrent that we can possibly be.”
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He boasted that Blackwater could mobilize faster than the UN or NATO. “In the time that it takes to put an internationally recognized body unit on the ground, I can be there in a third of that time and I will be 60 percent cheaper,” Taylor told National Public Radio.
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But independent experts disputed Blackwater’s claims. “It’s comparing real apples with fictional oranges,” said P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution. “NATO or UN operations represent a full array of political commitment and activities, not simply a small set of guys with guns and a CASA 212. That’s why they are expensive and completely different.”
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Blackwater wasn’t just talking about Darfur. Taylor also broadened the private-army-for-hire theme, floating the idea of the Iraqi government hiring Blackwater’s men to quell attacks by resistance groups. “We clearly couldn’t go into the whole country of Iraq,” Taylor told the
Virginian-Pilot
. “But we might be able to go into a region or a city.” Cofer Black and other company officials spun their vision for “peacekeeping,” “stabilization,” and “humanitarian” operations as being born of moralistic outrage over human suffering. The international community, they argued, is slow to respond and ineffective, while, as Black said in Jordan, “Blackwater spends a lot of time thinking, How can we contribute to the common good?” What Blackwater executives rarely, if ever, discuss in public is the tremendous profit to be made in servicing disasters, crises, and wars. In Jordan Blackwater and other mercenary firms aggressively promoted an internationalization of the rapid privatization of military and security the benefits of which they now enjoy in the United States. Under the soft banner of “humanitarianism,” these companies hoped to take “business” away from international governmental bodies like the UN, NATO, and the African and European Unions. For Blackwater, such a transformation would mean permanent profit opportunity, limited only by the number of international crises, disasters, and conflicts. “World stability and peacemaking/-keeping operations have been criminally cost-ineffective and operationally failed,” said Blackwater’s Taylor. “Send 10,000 UN troops to Darfur? A colossal waste of money. You do not create security and peace by throwing more mediocre, uncommitted people into the fray.”
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Singer, who has extensively studied the role of private military firms in international conflicts, observed the following about Blackwater’s Sudan pitch:
The firms go about talking about how they would save kittens in trees if only the big bad international community would let them, but the situation is just far more complex than that. This kind of lobbying often attempts to confuse folks. . . . The issue preventing effective action in Darfur is not simply a matter of financial costs. That is, there is not some imaginary price point that only if such firms could come in under, it would solve things. The real problem is that it is a political mess on the ground, there is no effective UN mandate, no outside political will to engage for real, plus a Sudanese government that is obstructionist and effectively one of the sides (meaning if you go in without a mandate, you gotta be willing to kick the doors down, destroy air bases, etc. which no firm has the capacity to do, and sends the issue back to US/NATO/UN), thus far preventing a useful deployment. So even if you got firms willing, you still have to solve those problems.
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But Sudan’s value to Blackwater stretched beyond a single peacekeeping contract or purported humanitarian concerns for the victims in Darfur. It was Blackwater’s ticket into a whole new world of potential growth—Darfur became the rallying cry for a rebranding operation aimed at winning massive international contracts for mercenary firms. Unlike the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was overwhelmingly opposed by a majority of the world, calls for intervention in Darfur are much more widespread and, therefore, an easier sell for Blackwater and its allies for increasing the use of private soldiers. Indeed, even at antiwar rallies, scores of protesters held signs reading, “Out of Iraq, Into Darfur.”
A quick survey of Sudan’s vast natural resources dispels any notion that U.S./corporate desires to move into Sudan derive from purely humanitarian motives. First off, because of Sudan’s designation by the State Department as a sponsor of terrorism, U.S. corporations are prohibited from investing in Sudan. As a result, China has become the major player in exploiting Sudan’s tremendous oil supplies.
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While Sudan is not a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, it was granted observer status in August 2001, a distinction reserved for significant global oil producers.
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Four years later, its proven oil reserves had expanded sixfold to 1.6 billion barrels, the thirty-fifth-largest in the world
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—all inaccessible to U.S. oil corporations. The China National Petroleum Corporation owns 40 percent—the largest single share—of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, the consortium that dominates Sudan’s oilfields.
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Sudan also has a significant natural gas reserve, one of the three largest deposits of high-purity uranium in the world, and the fourth-largest deposits of copper.
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Regime change in Sudan would open up extremely lucrative investment opportunities to U.S. corporations, potentially capturing them from Chinese companies. It would also mean the end of a strong Islamic government that has continued to modernize, despite tough U.S.-led sanctions. Sending in private U.S. forces, under the guise of an international humanitarian mission, could give Washington a major foothold in Sudan for future action.