Iraq's Mercenary King
As a former C.I.A. agent, the author knows how mercenaries work:
in the shadows. But how did a notorious former British officer,
Tim Spicer, come to coordinate the second-largest army in
Iraq—the tens of thousands of private security contractors?
By Robert Baer
03/15/07 "Vanity
Fair" -- April 2007 -- Last spring, in Los
Angeles, I met with a producer and a screenwriter who were
trolling for a good story to turn into a movie—specifically, a
story about a pair of colorful adventurers, maybe mercenaries,
who get into serious trouble seeking a fortune in Africa. I
wasn't much help. I had spent little time in Africa—only a
couple of brief trips to Nigeria and Liberia during my time in
the C.I.A. But I promised them I'd ask around when I got to
London, a city with more colorful adventurers per block than
anywhere else in the world.
I knew my share of them: rogue oil traders, art forgers, exiled
presidents, disgraced journalists, arms dealers. There was also
the Jordanian prince who had once offered to smuggle me into
Ramadi, in Iraq's anarchic Anbar Province, in exchange for 100
sheep. People like these are pretty much the currency of C.I.A.
agents.
In London, the consensus was that if I wanted a good African
yarn I needed to talk to Tim Spicer. He knew or could get to
every mercenary, adventurer, or promoter who had ever cast a
shadow on that continent.
I knew who Spicer was. He'd popped up on the C.I.A.'s radar
after he retired from the British Army and went to work, in
1996, as the C.E.O. of Sandline International, a private
military company offering "operational support" to "legitimate
governments." A year later Spicer was in Papua New Guinea, where
he fielded a mercenary army for the government in order to
protect a multi-national copper-mining company. After Spicer was
expelled, he moved on to Sierra Leone, this time helping to ship
arms to coup plotters. Spicer's name resurfaced in 2004 in
connection with a putsch aimed at Equatorial Guinea, allegedly
led by Simon Mann, his friend, former army colleague, and
onetime business associate. Though questioned by British
officials, Spicer was not implicated in the incident.
But then, somehow, two months later, Spicer's company, known as
Aegis Defence Services, landed a $293 million Pentagon contract
to coordinate security for reconstruction projects, as well as
support for other private military companies, in Iraq. This
effectively put him in command of the second-largest foreign
armed force in the country—behind America's but ahead of
Britain's. These men aren't officially part of the Coalition of
the Willing, because they're all paid contractors—the Coalition
of the Billing, you might call it—but they're a crucial part of
the coalition's forces nonetheless.
The atrium of Spicer's slick, modern building, near Victoria
Station, drinks light. The polished floors, smoked glass, silent
elevators, and polite, efficient receptionist put you in mind
more of an A-list Hollywood production company than of the lair
of a mercenary and arms dealer. I thought I knew what Spicer was
after: to clean up his past, achieve respectability.
Still fit and agile at 54, Spicer stood up behind his desk and
walked across the office to shake my hand. The lime cardigan
sweater, a desk piled with files and books, the French bulldog
asleep in the corner—it all proclaimed that Spicer hadn't quite
settled into his new role as a C.E.O. He's a field man at heart,
more comfortable on the front lines of some war—at the "sharp
end," as he puts it.
Spicer liked the idea of a movie about Africa. He mentioned the
names of a couple of friends, old Africa hands, whose stories
might contribute the spine of a plot. Most of them lived in
South Africa. He proposed half a dozen locations where a pair of
adventurers could get into particularly serious trouble, from
the Congo to Mali. I suspected that talking about Hollywood was
a welcome diversion for Spicer, given how badly things were
going in Iraq.
Spicer and I had a lot in common. We had both spent much of our
lives in the back of beyond, serving governments that preferred
not to have to acknowledge us. We both left government service
at a relatively young age and were tempted back into the same
shadowy world we had come from, trying to sell a set of skills
that weren't especially useful anywhere else.
We talked a little about spy fiction, agreeing that other than
le Carré the genre was thin. I happened to have with me a copy
of John Banville's The Untouchable, a fine novel loosely based
on the Cambridge Five spy ring. Spicer copied down the title. He
spent his life on planes these days and had a lot of time to
read.
As I walked back to Victoria Station, I couldn't help wondering
how Spicer had ascended so quickly from notorious mercenary to
corporate titan. What had he done to wangle that fat Iraq
contract from the Pentagon? Serving 20 years with the British
military in the toughest parts of the world was certainly one
qualification. So was being smart, connected, and personable.
But how had he overcome the taint of Sierra Leone and Papua New
Guinea, two scandals indelibly attached to his name? Apparently
the Pentagon had decided that an Africa hand could do in Iraq
what the American military couldn't: subdue the most xenophobic
and violent people in the Middle East. But that was the problem.
Iraq isn't Africa. Iraqis shoot back.
Black Death
Frankly, I have always had my doubts about private military
contractors. A few days after Baghdad fell, in 2003, I was in
Iraq working as an adviser to ABC News. It was a time when Iraq
was still wide open and you could pretty much go where you
wanted to. I persuaded ABC to send me to Awjah, Saddam Hussein's
natal village, a few miles south of Tikrit. Awjah was where
Saddam drew his inner circle from (and it is where he is
buried). It was his refuge when things were going badly. I
thought Awjah's reaction to Saddam's fall would be a good story.
ABC arranged for a Suburban and a driver. Although I didn't see
the need—I speak Arabic and had worked in Iraq before—ABC also
insisted that a security escort go with me. The escort turned
out to be a former British military officer. He was a pleasant
enough fellow, but he didn't speak Arabic and had been in the
country only a week.
Except for the occasional armor column moving north, there was
almost no traffic on the main Baghdad-Tikrit road. Every once in
a while, a low-flying F-16 shook the car. At the intersection
with the road to Awjah we stopped and asked an army patrol if it
was safe to drive into the village. The soldier didn't know; the
army had bypassed Awjah. We would be on our own.
By the time we came around a bend and saw the roadblock manned
by half a dozen armed men in kaffiyehs, it was too late to turn
back. The driver, a Shiite, was in a cold sweat. Just the name
Awjah struck fear in him—it was the heart of Sunni country, the
monster's lair.
One of the men stuck a shotgun in the driver's face and asked
who the hell we were. You could see these people wanted blood.
It wasn't a surprise. They probably were all related to Saddam.
The U.S. had just deposed the man who had kept them safe and
prosperous for the last 35 years. Our British security escort
wondered if it wouldn't be a good idea to show them our
Jordanian press cards. No: that would actually be a very bad
idea. The cards would identify us as Americans.
Instead, I stuck my head out the window and yelled in Arabic,
"We're French. It's not our damned war." The man lowered his
shotgun and let us pass.
That benign little ruse would do no good at all today; the
situation is too far gone. Now anyone with the misfortune to
have business outside the Green Zone travels in an armored car
with heavily armed private military escorts. One of their
tactics has been to shoot first and ask questions later, and
Iraqis have referred to some of these contractors as "black
death." Some of them have been accused of shooting Iraqis for
sport.
In November of 2005 a disgruntled Aegis ex-employee posted a
so-called "trophy video" on the Internet depicting Aegis
contractors—Tim Spicer's men—shooting at Iraqis in civilian
cars. In one sequence, the Aegis team opens fire with an
automatic weapon at an approaching silver Mercedes. The Mercedes
rams a taxi, sending the taxi's occupants running. In another
sequence, an Aegis employee fires at a white sedan, running it
off the road. Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train" provides the
soundtrack. Aegis subsequently conducted an investigation and
concluded that the actions represented "legitimate operations"
undertaken in compliance with the rules of engagement. Aegis
argued further that the video was "taken out of context" and
noted that there was no evidence that civilians had been killed.
The Pentagon looked into the video and declined to take further
steps.
According to a February 2006 Government Accountability Office
report, there were approximately 48,000 private military
contractors in Iraq, employed by 181 different companies. There
may now be many more. These are the kinds of people Tim Spicer
and Aegis are supposed to coordinate. The bulk of the military
contractors are American and British, with a sprinkling of other
nationalities. Formal oversight is lax, to put it mildly. Many
are retired from elite units such as the British Special Air
Service or the U.S. Special Forces. According to a report in The
Economist, a former British official who now heads a trade
association for private military companies estimates that
mercenaries are Britain's largest export to Iraq. Not food,
medicine, or construction material—mercenaries.
No one planned for a private army of this size. Like most things
in the Iraq war, it just happened. After the Iraq National
Museum was looted, in April of 2003, and even four months later,
after the U.N. headquarters was destroyed by a car bomb, the
Pentagon assumed it was dealing with garden-variety crime and
terrorism—nothing a good whiff of grapeshot couldn't quell. With
U.S. forces stretched thin, why not let private military
contractors deal with routine security? They could protect the
coalition offices, the supply shipments, the embassies, and also
the reconstruction teams, the journalists, the U.N. workers, and
the aid organizations. After all, guns for hire in Afghanistan
had been keeping Hamid Karzai alive.
As the security situation deteriorated and the insurgency became
more sophisticated, the contractors were forced to adapt,
operating as small military units, carrying automatic weapons
and rocket launchers, and traveling in convoys of heavily
armored S.U.V.'s. Their tactics included driving at 90 miles an
hour or more and shooting at any vehicle that appeared to be a
threat. In some cases, military contractors fought pitched
battles. Today, when they get in trouble, contractors can call
on help in the form of military air support or a quick-reaction
force.
Who are these contractors? Watch the passengers in Dubai waiting
for flights to Kabul and Baghdad and you'll get an idea. Half of
them are fortysomething, a little paunchy, their hair thinning.
They haven't done a pull-up or run an obstacle course in 20
years. You have to suspect that many are divorced and paying
alimony, child support, and mortgages on houses they don't live
in. The other half, in their late 20s and early 30s, have been
enticed into leaving the military early, quadrupling their
salaries by entering the private sector. They bulge out of their
T-shirts, bang knuckles, shoulder-bump. They can't wait to get
into the action.
The mercenaries crowd the duty-free counters buying boxes of
Cuban Cohiba cigars and bottles of Jack Daniel's—nights on
mortar watch can be very long. There's no doubt they can afford
it. Men with service in an elite military unit have been known
to make up to $1,500 a day. More typically a Western military
contractor will earn $180,000 a year. Depending on the contract,
benefits can include a hundred days of leave, kidnapping
insurance, health insurance, and life insurance.
Iraq is not exactly a place you'd want to call home, but after a
tough day on Baghdad's bloody streets there's always the Green
Zone, an air-conditioned trailer, a Whopper, and an iced latte.
Other than the very real threat of getting killed, the only
cloud on the horizon is having your job outsourced. As private
security companies have learned how to do business in Iraq, they
also have figured out how to reduce costs, often by hiring less
expensive help. Chileans, Filipinos, Nepalese, and Bosnians come
a lot cheaper. Almost three dozen former Colombian soldiers are
suing Blackwater USA, one of the largest private military
companies in Iraq, for breach of contract. According to the
Colombians, Blackwater at the last minute reduced their rate of
pay to $34 a day. It's virtually slave labor compared with what
a Brit or an American gets.
Spicer of Arabia
If you look at Tim Spicer's military career and his subsequent
years as a mercenary, you won't be surprised that he has thrived
in Iraq's Mad Max world of military contractors and easy money.
Born in 1952 in Aldershot, England, Spicer followed his father
into the army, attending Sandhurst and then joining the Scots
Guards. He applied to the S.A.S., Britain's elite commando
force, but failed the selection course. Spicer saw his first
combat in 1982, when he was pulled off guard duty at the Tower
of London and sent to the Falkland Islands. He took part in the
Battle of Mount Tumbledown, which led to the capture of Stanley,
the capital; he likes to play up his sangfroid, recounting how
before the battle he had hoped to enjoy a good cigar
(unfortunately the cigar had been damaged). Spicer would serve
in two other foreign wars, with British forces in the 1991 Gulf
War and with the U.N. in Bosnia.
During a posting in Northern Ireland in 1992, Spicer experienced
his first taste of public controversy when two soldiers under
his command shot an unarmed teenage father of two in the back,
killing him. The soldiers were tried, convicted of murder, and
imprisoned for life. However, as part of a murky deal at the
time of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the soldiers were
released. Spicer successfully argued for their return to their
unit. In November 2006 the mother of the murdered teenager
threatened to explore legal action against the British
government unless Spicer's company was barred from other
British-government contracts in war zones.
Spicer retired from the army in 1995, soon enough hanging out
his shingle as a gun for hire, continuing a long tradition of
British military officers who return to the colonies to make
their fortune, or at least to compensate for a lean retirement.
His friend Simon Mann introduced Spicer to Tony Buckingham,
another former British military officer, with whom Mann had
founded a security consultancy firm called Executive Outcomes in
the early 1990s. According to Spicer's autobiography, upon
meeting, Buckingham asked Spicer if he had any interest in
setting up what would later become known as a private military
company.
A year later, in 1996, with Buckingham's backing, Spicer started
Sandline International, advertising its services as "special
forces rapid reaction." The exact relationship between Sandline
and Executive Outcomes has been unclear in press accounts, but
Spicer has reportedly admitted that they were "closely linked."
Sandline's first contract, in 1997, was with the government of
Papua New Guinea, which wanted a mercenary force to protect a
copper mine in Bougainville, in a rebellious part of the
country. The deal fell apart when the P.N.G. Army found out that
Sandline was being paid $36 million for a job the army thought
it should be doing. The government was overthrown in a coup, and
Spicer was arrested and brought before a military inquiry. He
was eventually released and successfully sued Papua New Guinea
for moneys owed.
With notoriety apparently not an impediment, in 1998 Spicer
landed another contract involving Sierra Leone, this time
helping ship 30 tons of Bulgarian arms to forces backing Ahmed
Tejan Kabbah, the president in exile. At the time, Sierra Leone
was under a U.N. embargo. When Spicer's activities became
public, the "Arms-to-Africa" scandal reverberated through
British politics, implicating Tony Blair's government. Spicer
claimed to have told certain British officials all along the way
about the arms shipment, allowing him to make the case later
that there had been implicit British-government approval.
One thing you notice from his career is that Spicer has a flair
for self-promotion, a skill he says he started to pick up by
observing the press during the Vietnam War. After the Gulf War,
Spicer served as military aide to the former British commander
General Sir Peter de la Billière. Spicer reportedly persuaded
British Airways to comp tickets on the Concorde for de la
Billière, himself, and their wives to attend the postwar parade
in New York. In Bosnia he served as the press attaché to General
Sir Michael Rose, the commander of U.N. forces. Spicer is openly
fascinated by Lawrence of Arabia, once pausing with an
interviewer in front of Lawrence's motorcycle, in the Imperial
War Museum.
In an attempt to burnish his reputation, Spicer paid a
publicist, Sara Pearson, to arrange for his autobiography to be
ghostwritten. Though largely ignored, An Unorthodox Soldier
(1999) gave Spicer a platform to make the case that in Papua New
Guinea and Sierra Leone he was working for legitimate
governments. Companies like his, he argued, do have a place in
the modern comity of nations. Spicer also made clear what he
thinks of people who disparage men like himself but have never
seen a shot fired in anger: "the gutless, the boring and the
useless who pontificate and cower.… I feel sorry for
them—they've never been to the edge and looked over. They'd be
better off if they did."
Spicer doesn't like the term "mercenary" or "gun for hire,"
picturing himself rather as a 19th-century British adventurer,
fighting on the side of civilization. There's more than a little
of Flashman in Spicer. He cultivates a playboy image, driving an
Aston Martin, dating beautiful women, and living in a mansion in
South London. His annual compensation at Aegis has been
estimated to be as high as $20 million. At the inquiry in Papua
New Guinea, he was seen carrying what appeared to be a biography
of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. But Spicer has said
that in fact under the dust jacket was a biography of General Vo
Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese Communist who masterminded the siege
of Dien Bien Phu. One of Aegis's investors is Spicer's friend
the novelist Frederick Forsyth, who wrote the classic mercenary
novel The Dogs of War. You pick it up, read a few pages, and
know exactly where it's going. The mercenaries are all
intelligent and reserved, with square jaws and chiseled
features. They've won the hard-earned respect of the natives and
are prepared to give up their lives for African rebels who seek
only to restore democracy and obtain a fair price for their
countries' mineral wealth.
By 2000, the military-security business was in the doldrums. An
unsettling amount of peace had broken out around the world, and
the demand for mercenaries fell off sharply. For the next few
years, Spicer's business activities seem to have been in some
flux. A rough chronology can be ascertained from press accounts.
(Spicer's company would not comment.) Spicer left Sandline in
late 1999, and the next year launched Crisis and Risk
Management. In 2001 he changed the company's name to Strategic
Consulting International, and also set up a partner firm
specializing in anti-piracy consulting, called Trident Maritime.
In 2002, Spicer established Aegis Defence Services, which around
the beginning of the Iraq war was consulting for the Disney
Cruise Line. As Aegis grew, Spicer brought on a number of
retired British generals, including Major General Jeremy Phipps,
who had led the S.A.S. rescue of the Iranian Embassy hostages in
London, in 1980, and Field Marshal Lord Inge, a former chief of
the Defence Staff. He also brought on Ronald Reagan's former
national-security adviser Robert McFarlane, best known for his
involvement in the Iran-contra controversy.
After U.S. forces took Baghdad, in April of 2003, Aegis, like
every other private military company in the world, set out to
elbow its way in. The pot of gold was the $18.4 billion
reconstruction fund. And that money was in all likelihood just
the beginning. If Iraq could be stabilized, there was the
prospect of an oil boom such as the world had rarely seen.
Two things happened which, together, led to Spicer's big break.
The first occurred in March of 2004, when four Blackwater
contractors were ambushed and murdered in Fallujah. The Pentagon
knew it couldn't dispense with military contractors, but it now
had leverage to make them play by the military's rules.
Henceforward, contractors would keep the military informed of
their movements. They would also carry transponders, allowing
the military to locate them in an emergency. What the Pentagon
needed was a single military contractor to manage the new
regime.
Spicer saw an opportunity after former colleague and British
Army brigadier general Tony Hunter-Choat became the head of
security for the Coalition Provisional Authority's Program
Management Office—the office that set out the terms for what
would become the Aegis contract. Hunter-Choat and Spicer had
served together in Bosnia. And, like Spicer, Hunter-Choat had
had a colorful military career, including fighting with the
French Foreign Legion in Algeria in bygone days. Leading up to
the Iraq war, Hunter-Choat provided personal security for the
Aga Khan. Hunter-Choat's deputy, James Ellery, another former
British general, now sits on the Aegis board.
In May of 2004 the contract for coordinating private military
companies in Iraq was awarded to Aegis, which managed to beat
out five other corporate bidders. One of the competitors,
DynCorp International, protested, arguing that Aegis's bid had
been more than $80 million higher than DynCorp's. The protest
went nowhere.
Tim Spicer was now a big fish in a big pond. Aside from running
a new Reconstruction Operations Center—a war room that tracks
and coordinates security contractors moving around Iraq—and six
satellite offices, Aegis also set up 75 security teams, and it
serves as an information clearinghouse for security contractors.
Aegis decides who can go where in Iraq. If a security detail is
ambushed, Aegis coordinates with the military to call in air
attacks and ground support. Apparently to cement his new status
as the primus inter pares of Iraqi security companies, Spicer
set up the Aegis Foundation, to deliver "low-cost, high-impact
community development projects to people who live in, or have
suffered from, global conflict areas"—a private
humanitarian-relief fund. The message, one supposes, is that
Aegis is not in Iraq just for the money.
Typically, Spicer also reached out to the press, making the case
that Aegis was not really a mercenary army. In October of 2005
he led Jon Swain, of the London Sunday Times, on a tour of Aegis
operations in Iraq. "We are not trying to fight a war," he told
Swain. "There are others equipped and paid to do that. We can
fight if necessary, but our whole ethos if we are attacked is to
return fire and back off. We are not war-fighting people. If we
are escorting a client, our job is to run."
"Those Were the Days"
The scramble into Iraq has led to the recruiting of hired guns
who definitely shouldn't be there. Last December a small caravan
of what looked to be Western mercenaries pulled up to a jail
inside the Green Zone and sprang one of the prisoners, a former
Cabinet minister accused of misusing about $2 billion. The Iraqi
ex-minister also happened to be an American citizen.
Finding the right personnel can pose a problem. Hart Security, a
private military company with roots in South Africa, recruited
many of its contractors from the ranks of the apartheid-era
South African army, among the most ruthless counter-insurgency
forces ever known. One of Hart's men was Gray Branfield, a
former covert South African operative who spent years
assassinating leaders of the African National Congress. After
Branfield was killed, in Kut during the 2004 uprising of the
Mahdi Army, and his history became public, Hart Security said it
had been unaware of his past. When I queried the company about
Branfield recently, a spokesperson explained that he had been
hired "through a subcontractor."
The private military company Erinys also had a South Africa
problem. In 2004 an Erinys subcontractor, François Strydom, was
killed by Iraqi insurgents. It turned out that Strydom was a
former member of the notorious Koevoet, an arm of apartheid
South Africa's counter-insurgency campaign in what is now
Namibia. There have been press reports of a link between Erinys
Iraq and Ahmad Chalabi (the onetime head of the Iraqi National
Congress, which was a conduit for the fabricated intelligence
used to justify the Iraq war), which both Erinys Iraq and
Chalabi deny. After securing an $80 million contract to guard
Iraq's oil infrastructure in 2003, Erinys did hire many of the
soldiers from Chalabi's U.S.-trained Free Iraqi Forces as
guards. Chalabi himself eventually became acting oil minister.
He was probably not the best custodian of Iraq's national
treasure. (Among other things, in 1992 he had been convicted in
Jordan of defrauding the country's Petra Bank of at least $30
million.) His foot soldiers were not all that trustworthy,
either. When I was in Iraq with Chalabi in the mid-1990s, he was
trying to sell his army to Washington as an insurgent force
that, properly equipped, could one day march on Baghdad. It was
nonsense. When the Kurds took on Saddam's V Corps north of
Kirkuk in March of 1995, overrunning three Iraqi divisions,
Chalabi's men sat out the fighting.
I wasn't surprised that Chalabi's army never morphed into Delta
Force. An F.B.I. official recently back from Iraq told me that
agents billeted next to Chalabi's mercenaries (now no longer
employed by Erinys Iraq) had had a real problem with them. They
were stealing everything, from F.B.I. computers to batteries for
helicopters.
In an odd but lethal twist, it came out last November that the
rogue K.G.B. agent Alexander V. Litvinenko had visited the
London office of Erinys shortly before his death, by means of
radiation poisoning, leaving behind traces of polonium 210.
Step anywhere inside the world of private military companies and
you're suddenly in a demimonde where everything seems connected
to everything else. When retired general Jay Garner arrived in
Iraq in April of 2003 to become the country's civilian
administrator, he hired two former South African commandos as
part of his security detail. They were known to Garner only as
Lion and Louwtjie, and they worked for a company called Meteoric
Tactical Solutions. (Where do they get these names?) After
Garner was replaced by Paul Bremer, the two commandos went to
work for Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner,
whom Bremer had brought in to create an Iraqi police force.
Under a $600,000 contract, Meteoric agreed to provide Kerik's
protection and to help train the police.
So it came as something of a surprise when, in March of 2004,
Lion and Louwtjie were arrested in Harare, Zimbabwe, along with
Tim Spicer's friend and associate Simon Mann. They had been
preparing to collect 61 Kalashnikov rifles, 45,000 rounds of
ammunition, and 150 grenades, and then to fly it all, together
with 65 mercenaries, into Equatorial Guinea and overthrow the
government.
Equatorial Guinea, on the Bight of Biafra, is run by Teodoro
Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, one of the most corrupt and bizarre
leaders in the world. He has been accused of eating his
opponents. To be sure, his predecessor and uncle, Francisco
Macias Nguema, was no better. In 1975, after a failed coup
attempt, the elder Nguema had his Moroccan palace guards shoot
150 accused conspirators in a soccer stadium, while the palace
band played "Those Were the Days." The country's location in the
armpit of Africa is all too apt. But among a certain stratum of
operatives, Equatorial Guinea has long represented a kind of
unholy grail—the subject of wistful, late-night "What if?"
conversations. The idea of overthrowing the government there is
tempting for two reasons. First, on a per capita basis
Equatorial Guinea produces more oil than Saudi Arabia. Second,
Equatorial Guinea has no military to speak of—nothing a lightly
armed mercenary force couldn't take care of. Unfortunately for
Lion and Louwtjie, the coup plans were an open secret, and South
Africa tipped off Nguema just as the coup got under way.
When Garner was asked in an NPR interview about Lion and
Louwtjie's arrest, he said he didn't see the significance. "Did
it surprise me? No, because the guys are in that kind of work,
and they're tough guys." Garner went on to compare fighting the
Iraq war to playing football. "It was a game of audibles," he
said. "And every day you walked up to the line of scrimmage
there and you looked down to see what was across the line of
scrimmage. You called a few audibles and changed it."
Whose Side Are They On?
It's easy to imagine how a young man in Fallujah, where the
unemployment rate is now perhaps 70 percent, views private
military contractors. They arrive in the form of an armored GMC
Suburban, with smoked windows, bearing down at high speed. The
closest thing to a visible human being is the turret gunner. But
in his Kevlar helmet and blue-mirrored wraparound Oakleys, the
gunner doesn't seem all that human. The young Iraqi knows that
the gunner makes more money in a year than he will in a
lifetime, that he is effectively immune from prosecution, and
that he won't hesitate to shoot if people don't get out of the
way fast enough.
One of the first things on the new Democratic agenda in Congress
will be to get a grip on military contractors. The question is:
How tight will that grip be? A five-word change in a federal
provision, slipped into recent Pentagon legislation, has the
effect of bringing contractors for the first time under the
Uniform Code of Military Justice. (Up to now, as one industry
newsletter has noted, "not one contractor of the entire military
industry in Iraq has been charged with any crime.") We'll see
what happens. Private military companies—companies providing
security in the field—make up a $30-billion-a-year industry
globally, and with all the lobbying clout that comes from that
kind of money, getting any kind of grip won't be easy. And the
mercenaries have many friends, who move in and out of
government. The current deputy director of the C.I.A., Steve
Kappes, came from ArmorGroup, a private military company that
has security contracts in Iraq. Before Kappes was at ArmorGroup,
he was at the C.I.A. Cofer Black, a former counterterrorism
chief at the C.I.A. and then the coordinator for
counterterrorism at the State Department, with ambassadorial
rank, left to become the vice-chairman of Blackwater, which does
much of its business in Iraq. The pieces all fit a little too
snugly.
Iraq will wind down one day, and America and Britain will pull
out. Tim Spicer talks bravely about how private military
contractors will stay and finish the job, but Aegis and the
other companies won't in fact be running the show. Some will be
racing the troops to the Kuwaiti or Jordanian border. Others,
especially in the relatively stable North and South, will stay
on, living off the oil industry and worming their way into local
business opportunities, not all of them on the sunny side of the
street. Spicer and his caste of ex-soldiers turned mercenaries
will never be out of work. There will always be wars in obscure
places, where we won't or can't send our own soldiers, either
because the military is too small or the political fallout is
too large. You really want to do something about places like
Rwanda and Darfur? Who are you going to call?
Last year Cofer Black addressed a convention of mercenaries in
Jordan, and he floated a plan to create a full-size Blackwater
brigade, ready to be deployed virtually anywhere, for a price.
"It's an intriguing, good idea from a practical standpoint
because we're low-cost and fast," Black explained. "The issue
is: Who's going to let us play on their team?"
Robert Baer is a former C.I.A. officer. His most recent book
is Blow the House Down, a novel.Click here
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