New York Times Magazine
August 14, 2005
The Other Army
There are dozens of private security companies operating in Iraq,
and Triple Canopy is one of the largest. How was it formed, who are
its men ÷ and what is the line between 'security' and warfare?
By Daniel Bergner
When Matt Mann needed to buy armored vehicles, he phoned his
brother-in-law, Ken Rooke. Rooke didn't know the first thing about
bullet-resistant windows or grenade-resistant floors, but he wasn't
100 percent unqualified to do the buying. At least he knew something
about cars. At a speedway in North Carolina, he once called races
for a local radio station. He was the closest Mann could come to an
expert.
Mann, a retired U.S. Army Special Operations master sergeant in his
late 40's, needed the vehicles quickly. And he needed guns. It was
early last year, and the company he and two partners created, Triple
Canopy, had just won government contracts to guard 13 Coalition
Provisional Authority headquarters throughout Iraq. (The renewable
six-month deals were worth, in all, about $90 million.) The C.P.A.
was the governing body of the American-led military occupation.
Triple Canopy -- not the American military -- would be protecting
it. So would other companies. With the insurgency spiking, the job
of keeping C.P.A. compounds from being overrun, and of keeping the
architects of the occupation from being killed, had been privatized.
Yet when Triple Canopy was hired, it scarcely existed. Mann and one
of his partners, Tom Katis, an old friend from Special Forces,
talked after 9/11 about starting a business that might somehow
address the threat of terrorism. They thought they might use their
military backgrounds to train government agencies in anti-terrorism
techniques. On a Special Forces exercise in Central America (both
men were, at that point, in the National Guard, Mann having moved on
from the regular Army to work as a civil engineer and Katis having
graduated from Yale and begun a career in banking), they dreamed of
their unborn enterprise under the jungle foliage -- the layered
jungle canopy from which they took their name.
They didn't have much else. They were a name, a notion, when
heard about the C.P.A. security work and started bidding for
contracts. With money borrowed from family and friends, they
hiring former Army colleagues on the chance that the company
they
the
began
might
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somehow succeed. They had little but résumés to give them hope. The
résumés, though, were impressive. Mann spent six years with the
Army's Delta Force, its most selective, most keenly trained and most
secretive unit, and he recruited retired Delta operators. He is an
irrepressible man with full, close-cropped gray hair, blue eyes and
a radiant smile, and as he told me about Triple Canopy's early days,
he recalled his disbelief at the men who were drawn to the company.
''He wants to work for me?'' he said he thought, over and over. But
his modesty went only so far. ''Rock stars like to work with rock
stars,'' he said. The ex-Delta soldiers, heavily decorated and with
all kinds of combat and clandestine experience, kept signing on.
''We were the squirrel trying to get a nut,'' Al Buford, an early
employee and Delta veteran, remembered about the company's initial
prospects for work. And when they were hired to protect well over
half of the C.P.A.'s sites in Iraq, and to escort C.P.A. officials
along the country's lethal roads, ''we had a whole truckload of nuts
dumped down on us.''
So the call went out to Mann's brother-in-law, Ken Rooke. ''I'm a
gearhead,'' Rooke told me. ''But we were shooting from the hip on
this thing. I never felt competent in what I was doing.''
''With the war going,'' he continued, there were no new armored
vehicles to be had. He searched the Internet, made countless calls
and bought a set of armored Mercedes sedans that once belonged to
the sultan of Brunei before they were rented out to rappers. He
replaced the stylish spoke wheels, and he put on run-flat tires, so
the vehicles could be driven out of ambushes even after the tires
had been blasted by gunfire. He learned how to ship his makeshift
fleet to Iraq.
For guns, too, Triple Canopy had to make do. Transporting firearms
from the United States required legal documents that the company
couldn't wait for; instead, in Iraq, it got Department of Defense
permission to visit the dumping grounds of captured enemy munitions.
The company took mounds of AK-47's and culled all that were
operable.
So Triple Canopy had vehicles and it had assault rifles, and when it
needed cash in Iraq, to pay employees or buy equipment or build
camps, it dispatched someone from Chicago, the company's home, with
a rucksack filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. ''All the
people in Iraq had to say is, 'We need a backpack,''' Mann said.
''Or, 'We need two backpacks.''' Each pack held half a million
dollars.
And in this way, one of the largest private security companies in
Iraq was born. In this way, Triple Canopy went off to war. Plenty of
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other companies have done the same, some that were more established
before the American invasion, some less. The firms employ, in Iraq,
a great number of armed men. No one knows the number exactly. In
Baghdad in June, in a privately guarded coalition compound in the
Green Zone, I talked with Lawrence Peter, a paid advocate for the
industry and -- in what he called a ''private-public partnership'' - a consultant to the Department of Defense on outsourced security.
He put the number of armed men around 25,000. (This figure is in
addition to some 50,000 to 70,000 unarmed civilians working for
American interests in Iraq, the largest percentage by way of
Halliburton and its subsidiaries, doing everything from servicing
warplanes to driving food trucks to washing dishes.) But the
estimates, from industry representatives and the tiny sector of
academics who study the issues of privatized war, are so vague that
they serve only to confirm the chaos of Iraq and the fact that -despite an attempt at licensing the firms by the fledgling Iraqi
Interior Ministry -- no one is really keeping track of all the
businesses that provide squads of soldiers equipped with assault
rifles and belt-fed light machine guns. Peter's best guess was that
there are 60 companies in all. ''Maybe 80,'' he added quickly,
mentioning that there were any number of miniature start-ups. He
continued: ''Is it a hundred? Possibly.''
Triple Canopy now has about 1,000 men in Iraq, about 200 of them
American and almost all the rest from Chile and Fiji. Its rivals
include British firms that draw from the elite units of the U.K.
military and outfits that draw from South African veterans of the
wars to save apartheid. Australians and Ukrainians and Romanians and
Iraqis are all making their livings in the business. Many have
experience as soldiers; some have been in law enforcement. The firms
guard the huge American corporations struggling to carry out Iraq's
reconstruction. The private gunmen try to hold the insurgents at bay
so that supplies can be delivered and power stations can be built.
And companies like Triple Canopy shield American government
compounds from attack. With guns poking out from sport utility
vehicles, they usher American officials from meeting to meeting.
They defend the buildings and people whom the insurgency would most
like to reach.
Throughout his time as head of the C.P.A., L. Paul Bremer III, whom
the insurgency may well have viewed as its highest-value target, was
protected by a Triple Canopy competitor, Blackwater USA. Private
gunmen, according to Lawrence Peter, are now guarding four U.S.
generals. Triple Canopy protects a large military base. And
throughout Iraq, the defense of essential military sites like depots
of captured munitions has been informally shared by private soldiers
and U.S. troops. If the 25,000 figure is accurate, the businesses
add about 16 percent to the coalition's total forces.
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Yet it is hard to discern who authorized this particular outsourcing
as military policy. No open policy debate took place; no executive
order was publicly issued. And who is in charge of overseeing these
armed men? One thing is sure: they are crucial to the war effort. In
April 2004, within a few months of Triple Canopy's arrival in Iraq,
its men were waging a desperate firefight to defend a C.P.A.
headquarters in the city of Kut. The Mahdi Army had launched an
onslaught.
In the world of companies like Triple Canopy, a great deal of
importance is attached to a very few words. The word ''mercenaries''
is despised. The phrase ''private military company'' is heatedly
dismissed as inaccurate. ''Private security company'' (or P.S.C.) is
the term of art.
Semantics aside, private soldiers have been on the battlefield for
thousands of years. As P.W. Singer, a scholar of privatized warfare
at the Brookings Institution, recounts in his book ''Corporate
Warriors,'' mercenaries served in the army of the King of Ur two
millennia before Christ; the ancient Greeks supplemented their
forces by contracting out for cavalry and for specialists in the
slingshot; and private bands of Swiss pikemen, infantry with 18foot-long weapons, proved themselves superior to cavalry in the late
13th century and made themselves a necessary expense to the warring
rulers of Europe for hundreds of years.
But mercenaries began to fade from the battlefield around the Age of
Enlightenment. Partly this was because of breakthroughs in the
science of warfare. Better weapons demanded less skill from the
fighter. The experience of the mercenary was needed less. With a
decently designed musket, a fresh soldier could be trained fairly
swiftly and dispatched to the front. And then, too, the 18th and
19th centuries brought new ideas about the sanctity of the nation
and the honor of the citizen in soldiering for it. ''Those who
fought for profit, rather than patriotism,'' Singer writes, ''were
completely delegitimated.'' Still, the British hired 30,000 German
Hessians to help them battle the revolutionaries in the American War
of Independence. Yet gradually the work of the mercenary grew more
and more marginalized and disdained, and in the Geneva Conventions
of 1949 it was essentially outlawed, at least in wars between
nations.
Mercenaries carried on in the ignored and anarchic places of the
world; through much of the second half of the 20th century, they
played notorious roles in the insurrections of Africa. But then, in
1995, in the tiny West African country of Sierra Leone, private
soldiering made a morality-twisting appearance. A rebel army was
burning villagers alive and starting to develop its signature
atrocity: hacking off the hands of civilians and letting them live
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as reminders of rebel power. Desperate, the country's ruler hired a
South African firm, Executive Outcomes, that was run by a former
apartheid-era military commander. It presented itself as something
other than a violent, shadowy employment agency for apartheid-era
veterans. It had glossy brochures outlining its military services.
Its leader called himself a chairman. Its work wasn't that of
''mercenaries'' or ''dogs of war''; it would soon adopt the term
''private military company.''
In Sierra Leone, using a few aircraft and about 200 men, Executive
Outcomes rapidly drove the rebel army of perhaps 10,000 back to the
country's hinterlands. Brutality erupted again as soon as Executive
Outcomes left, but the world had seen that a small, well-trained
private force could accomplish immeasurable good.
Not long afterward, a London company led by a former British
lieutenant colonel, Tim Spicer -- whose latest firm now has a nearly
$300 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense in Iraq -tried again to rescue the West African country. Spicer failed but
emerged as a kind of spokesman for the moral value of private
military companies. ''The word 'mercenary,' '' he told The Daily
Telegraph of London in 1999, ''conjures up a picture in people's
minds of a rather ruthless, unaligned individual, who may have
criminal, psychotic tendencies. We are not like that at all. All we
really do is help friendly, reasonable governments solve military
problems.'' (No matter that Spicer had once considered providing his
help to Mobutu Sese Seko, the tyrannical dictator of Zaire, for a
price.) Britain's foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and a former United
Nations under secretary general, Brian Urquhart, were soon talking
about the possible use of private military companies to aid the U.N.
in stabilizing the world's conflict zones. The U.N. wasn't remotely
ready to hire private armies to end civil wars, but a subtle shift
in perception had started to take place.
In 2002, the U.S. government hired about 40 private gunmen, from the
American company DynCorp, to keep President Hamid Karzai alive in
Afghanistan. And in the spring of 2003, as Gen. Jay Garner, retired,
established the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian
Assistance, the short-lived precursor to the C.P.A., as the
occupation's governing body in Iraq, the Pentagon put a small
contingent of South Africans and Nepalese Gurkhas from the British
firm Global Risk Strategies in charge of protecting him and his
staff. ''That,'' Garner told me when we spoke last month, ''was the
genesis'' of the rise of private security companies in Iraq.
The numbers, at the start of the occupation, were not large. Then,
in the second half of 2003, as the C.P.A. expanded its presence
across the country in its attempt to rule and rebuild, and as the
insurgency mounted, the C.P.A. turned away from the coalition
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forces, which had been providing a measure of protection, and looked
to the companies for safety. Andrew Bearpark, the C.P.A.'s director
of operations during that period, explained to me that he was
closely and strongly advised by the U.S. military in Iraq -- and
financed by the Department of Defense -- to make this move.
Major contracts were put out for bidding. Triple Canopy was awarded
its work in January 2004. Other companies received, or already had,
their portions. (Meanwhile, the corporations actually doing the
rebuilding, the hearts-and-minds element of the American
occupation's campaign, were spending up to 25 percent of their U.S.
government money on hired protection.) The deployment of private
gunmen grew and grew into a profusion that may be explained partly
by the subtle shift in perception that had removed some of the old
mercenary stigma, and partly by the emphasis on outsourcing that had
been gathering momentum in the U.S. military since the early 1990's
(but that had been focused on logistical, unarmed support). Most
immediately, though, the explosive growth may be explained by the
strength of the insurgency in Iraq and by the apparent fact that
there weren't enough troops on the ground to fight it.
''Sure, they are performing a military role,'' Garner said of the
companies. Then, while noting that he wasn't criticizing the
Department of Defense, he added, ''The gut problem is the force'' -that is, the U.S. fighting force -''is too small.'' And Bearpark,
who has lately become a consultant to a large security firm,
maintained that private protection might sometimes be better than
what a regular army could offer. The private teams are more
streamlined and flexible, he argued; they are often better trained
for the job; and they may be willing to take more risks, allowing
officials to move more freely. But about the fundamental reason for
the C.P.A.'s hiring of the companies, he said: ''The military just
hadn't provided enough numbers. It was stretched to the limit.''
The Department of Defense is reluctant to discuss the role of
security companies in Iraq and precisely how it got so big. Over
several weeks I called the Pentagon repeatedly, asking whether the
secretary of defense or one of his under secretaries had, at any
point, deliberated about the presence of some 25,000 armed men or
perhaps authorized it in one way or another, piecemeal or in its
entirety. These questions -- which no one I spoke to was able to
answer -- elicited from departmental press officers a series of
unfulfilled promises to help me get an answer. In the end, they sent
an officially approved written statement, which detoured fully
around the questions but included the key line, ''P.S.C.'s are not
being used to perform inherently military functions.''
The Pentagon's reticence on the issue may be due to uneasiness over
the now-common accusation that it didn't adequately plan for
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battling an insurgency. (It may view questions about private gunmen
as leading inevitably to questions about troop numbers.) But there
is most likely an additional discomfort, a lingering problem with
the companies' public image. For the shift in perception hasn't been
complete; the hated word ''mercenaries'' still hovers near. With
this problem, the firms are doing their best to help. Many of them
have tried to rechristen themselves again, to further separate
themselves from the past, from the old infamy of ruthless,
insurrection-stirring white freelancers in Africa, to make their
work palatable to all.
When I met with Lawrence Peter, a short man with a fiery voice, he
raged that the press refused to accept the companies' newly chosen
term: ''We are not private military companies! We are private
security companies! Private security!'' He justified the distinction
by saying: ''The work is defensive. We protect.'' Sometimes, though,
the distinction seems secondary. No matter what you want to call
Triple Canopy and its men, when the Mahdi Army -- a radical Shiite
force loyal to the militant cleric Moktada al-Sadr -- attacked at
Kut, the primary truth was that the company was fighting a war.
A current training adviser for Triple Canopy was, in early April
2004, in charge of defending the occupation's Kut headquarters. (For
security reasons, it is Triple Canopy policy that employees now in
Iraq or likely to return not be identified by their full names.)
John, a tall spike of a man of 50, with a graying brush mustache,
spent 26 years in the U.S. Army, much of that time with Delta. He
was on the first invading helicopter into Grenada in 1983; his
helicopter and the others behind him were riddled and ravaged by
bullets, and three soldiers sitting near him were shot. ''I've never
taken so much fire again till Kut,'' he told me in May. ''Kut was
like stepping out into the air -- you know you might not exist any
longer.''
Facing a river and enwrapped on three sides by the small, mostly
Shiite city, the C.P.A. compound in Kut consisted of several oneand two-story concrete structures. The buildings had been Baathist
offices and a hotel. There the coalition's regional ruler, known as
the governorate coordinator, worked and lived with a crew of
reconstruction officials and contractors, surrounded by 12-foot-high
blast walls at the compound's perimeter -- except along the river,
where, John told me, the governorate coordinator, a Brit, preferred
that nothing obstruct the view. The city had been fairly peaceful.
It was a ''sleepy hollow,'' John recalled his Triple Canopy boss
telling him, joking that it was a suitable post for an old, graying
man to guard.
The first sign of siege was the massing of more than a thousand
demonstrators in a few clusters around the city and around the
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compound, demanding that the C.P.A. leave Kut. Many in the crowds
carried assault rifles and grenade launchers. John sensed, he said,
that the protest at the compound might be a ruse, a cover for casing
the site. Word came that the coalition-trained Iraqi police had
abandoned their stations and checkpoints throughout the town, that
the Mahdi fighters had claimed their weapons and uniforms. John had
a core team of three Triple Canopy gunmen. There were about 40
Ukrainian coalition troops posted at the compound. The Iraqi guards
employed by Triple Canopy were already starting to quit and to flee.
John declared ''lockdown'' and waited for whatever would come.
Civilians strapped on their flak jackets and bulletproof vests. They
prepared to retreat to a central spot within the hotel, a last point
of defense, if the compound's perimeter was overrun. Warnings
filtered in of car bombs set to strike. Through the night, two cars
seemed to be casing the gates. Morning brought the sound of gunshots
around the town -- and the ominous realization that the area just
outside the compound was now desolate. Gunfire and rocket-propelled
grenades started to hit around noon. The assault came from nearby,
as close as the buildings across the street. It came from all sides.
Mortars crashed in. A grenade exploded into a C.P.A. Suburban; the
vehicle was consumed in flames. ''1740: Mortar fire has increased
from across the river,'' reads a minute-by-minute account kept by a
civilian contractor. Windows shattered; large fragments cracked from
building walls; vehicles were ripped apart.
The enemy barrage of artillery and small arms surged and slackened
and surged again. ''Throughout the battle, the commander of compound
perimeter defense by de facto is John,'' states another contractor's
hour-by-hour report. John climbed to the hotel roof to direct return
fire. The three Triple Canopy gunmen manned the towers. Successive
shifts of Iraqi guards had by now flooded out the gates after one
was slightly wounded and a translator spread the rumor that the
Americans planned to abandon them all to their deaths. Just two
local soldiers remained; John put them on a machine gun. For hours
the Ukrainians battled relentlessly; when they ran low on
ammunition, John resupplied them with Triple Canopy rounds, the
minute-by-minute account relates. He sent a fourth Triple Canopy
soldier, a young dog handler who'd never seen a moment of combat, to
race from tower to tower, taking bullets and water to the other T.C.
fighters, who, John said, ''slung lead like you wouldn't believe,''
2,500 rounds, he guessed. Triple Canopy's bomb-sniffing dog was left
tied in the hotel and howled every time a mortar exploded.
On the roof and rushing through the compound between blasts, John
juggled three radios and a satellite phone between his hands and
combat vest pockets. None of the contingents he needed to speak with
-- Triple Canopy; the separate company that handled the governorate
coordinator's personal security (and that had pulled back to protect
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him within the compound); the civilian contractors; the U.S.
military liaison in another town -- used the same communication
system. He implored the military to send attack aircraft to scatter
al-Sadr's men, who probably numbered 200 to 400.
The battle flared through the night. Heavy machine guns opened up
from across the river. ''2200: There is an air-lift evacuation plan
being put together.'' Two hours later: ''We were advised by T.C.
that the air evacuation was scrubbed'' -- the odds of a helicopter
being shot down while landing or lifting off were too high. An
American plane at last arrived, its canons spewing shells. The
militia went quiet, but then: ''0100: The hotel is hit several times
and the building shakes from the impact. This fire seems to be the
worst yet of the engagement.''
There appeared to be no escape; John figured the defense might be
finished; on his radios and satellite phone he tried to keep his
voice controlled, to keep his words, as he recounted, ''on the level
of an information exchange.'' U.S. helicopter gunships then flew
overhead. They held fire, but the enemy took cover again. And near
dawn, in the lull, John and the Ukrainians carried out an order from
the main C.P.A. headquarters in Baghdad that everyone should drive
out of the compound, no matter what the risk in exposing themselves.
They went in a mix of armored cars and open-sided trucks. ''Every
turn you made, you didn't know,'' John said. He waited for mortars
and R.P.G.'s to annihilate them. But the gunships tracked their
route. No enemy fire came; they reached the closest coalition base;
the civilians and soldiers of the compound had survived the battle
without a serious wound.
The same week, a hundred miles to the west in the town of Najaf,
eight private soldiers from the Blackwater company fought al-Sadr's
Mahdi Army, stopping them from overrunning the C.P.A. headquarters
there. The Blackwater men went unscathed. But just across town from
John during the Kut fighting, the Mahdi Army attacked a building
that housed five gunmen from the Hart Group, a British firm
protecting the reconstruction of Iraq's electrical grid. The five
were wounded, and one, pinned down on the building's roof in a
firefight, bled to death.
A week earlier, four Blackwater soldiers, escorting a kitchen-supply
truck to a U.S. military base, were ambushed and shot by insurgents
in Fallujah -- their bodies roped to the back of a car and dragged
through the streets, set on fire, torn apart and put on display,
dangling from a Fallujah bridge. At the time, the Fallujah killings
seemed notable not only for their brutality but also for the fact
that private security men had been the victims.
Yet private security men in Iraq are embattled constantly. Between
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January and August 2004 (the last period for which the company has
compiled figures), Triple Canopy teams came under attack 40 times,
in incidents ranging from incoming rounds of rocket-propelled
grenades to assaults lasting at least 24 hours. And the count of 40,
I was told by the company's director of operations, represented only
attacks in which Triple Canopy fired back. Six to eight times that
number of assaults -- from sprays of enemy bullets to mortar fire -had gone unrecorded, a company spokesman estimated. The frequency of
attacks remains about the same now. The style has shifted away from
assaults like the one at Kut, but guerrilla ambushes are on the
rise.
It is impossible to say exactly how many private security men have
been killed in Iraq. Deaths go unreported. But the figure, according
to Lawrence Peter, is probably between 160 and 200. That's more
deaths than any one of America's coalition partners have suffered.
"Some people will tell you they're here for Mom and apple pie,'' a
private security man with another company told me. (He didn't want
his or his company's name printed, he said, because neither his
colleagues nor the industry in general think kindly of conversations
with the media.) ''That's bull. It's the money.''
We sat between low concrete buildings at Triple Canopy's Baghdad
base. The roofs are four feet thick and specially layered to absorb
major blasts. The base sits within the Green Zone, behind high walls
that divide the coalition's vast self-delineated borough from the
severe danger of the rest of Baghdad. But the zone, as the people
living and working there like to say, is these days less green than
almost red: mortars rain in.
The man's company put him up at Triple Canopy's freshly built
complex, with its pristine dining hall and ramshackle gym, its guard
towers and long shipping container full of ammunition. The base is
large enough that other outfits can rent rooms. Triple Canopy has
come a long way from its haphazard beginnings. Its current contracts
in Iraq, mostly with the U.S. Department of Defense and the State
Department, are worth almost $250 million yearly. And having
succeeded in Iraq -- Triple Canopy hasn't had a single worker or
client killed -- it has just been named one of three companies that
will divide up $1 billion annually in newly created protection work
with the State Department in high-risk countries around the world.
But the private security man I sat with wasn't talking about
windfalls on that level. He was talking about his own income. ''I'm
richer than I've ever been,'' he said. ''I'm not in debt to
nobody.''
He had jowls and loose swells of flesh beneath his T-shirt. ''Don't
10
let the package fool you,'' the ex-Delta colonel who introduced us
had told me. ''He's a commando from way back.'' After a career in
Special Forces, the man said, he hadn't seemed able to survive in
the civilian world. Work in construction fell apart. He drank
heavily. He took a job as a cashier in a convenience store -- ''till
I found out I had to smile at the customers.'' He laughed ruefully
at his inability to adapt. But now, when his 16-year-old son sent
him an e-mail message from back home in South Carolina, with a
picture to prove that he'd mowed the lawn the way his mother had
asked, he could buy the boy some tech equipment as a gift. ''I'll
stay until this is over,'' he said. ''The money's too good.''
He didn't specify his salary, but Americans and other Westerners in
the business tend to make between $400 and $700 a day, sometimes a
good deal more. (The non-Westerners earn far less. Triple Canopy's
Fijians and Chileans make between $40 and $150 dollars each week and
sleep in crowded barracks at the Baghdad base, while the Americans
sleep in their own dorm rooms. The company explained the difference
in salaries in terms of the Americans' far superior military
backgrounds and their higher-risk assignments.) Americans with
Triple Canopy stay in Iraq for three-month rotations, working
straight through. Then they're sent on leave for a month, returning
if they wish. Depending on how much time they spend in the States
over the course of a year, most of their income can be tax-free.
Yet it wasn't all about the pay, not for everyone. ''The money,
sure,'' Al, a Triple Canopy manager in Baghdad, said. Like plenty of
others with the company, he was middle-aged and had retired from the
rarefied world of Delta. ''But it's the excitement, the
camaraderie.''
And back in the Chicago suburb where I visited the company in May,
in its new, sprawling offices (which Triple Canopy would soon be
exchanging for a similar setup outside Washington, in order to be
closer to its main source of income, the U.S. government), I heard
Matt Mann talk exuberantly about ''creating a national asset.'' It
would have been easy to be exuberant merely because of the profits
he was taking in; it would have been easy to be downright giddy.
But his enthusiasm seemed to come, as well, from other things. He
spoke about the waste of Special Operations stars, ''men whose
intelligence is equal to the best attorneys, the best doctors,'' men
who had survived the harshest training, who had learned to operate
on their own in alien cultures, who ''don't know how to fail.''
Their talents, he said, were going unrecognized and unused when they
left the military and entered civilian society. A long window beside
him looked out on a perfectly manicured office park, its pond
rippling delicately. Wearing jeans and a short-sleeved sport shirt
with a summery print, he leaned back behind his blond wood desk,
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hands behind his head, strong, tanned arms on display. In a sense,
he might have been any renegade businessman who had conjured a new
product and found himself in a spot of corporate comfort. But a map
of Iraq, its yellow tones in quiet contrast to the blond of the
wood, was posted on the wall. He didn't care to talk about his
personal thoughts on the war but saw himself as creating a
collection of talent that was driven less by the '' 'me' mind
frame,'' he said, than by patriotism.
In an office near Mann's sat Al Buford, the company's manager of
recruiting, wearing sharply pressed khakis and a pale blue dress
shirt. On a bookshelf behind him, a framed photograph showed him in
jungle camouflage, on an Army Special Operations mission in Panama.
Facing him on his desk, his computer was loaded with scores from the
psychometric exam Triple Canopy gives its potential employees. The
company's three-week training and selection course includes
multiple-choice word analogy and number pattern questions between
the high-speed driving drills and target tests at the firing range.
And there are hundreds of questions designed to catch personality
problems before the company gives a candidate a gun and sends him
off to Iraq.
Other firms take a different approach. One morning, at a military
base near the Baghdad airport, a Triple Canopy soldier I was with
ran into a friend who had just been fired by the company. The friend
had been drunk repeatedly; he'd been caught drinking right up to the
hour he was slated for armed escort of a client. The previous day,
the friend told us, he went to talk with another American company.
Today he was signing a contract.
There is no effective regulation in Iraq of whom the firms hire or
how the men are trained or how they conduct themselves. ''At best
you've got professionals doing their best in a chaotic and
aggressive environment,'' Lyle Hendrick said in an e-mail from Iraq
in July, describing his colleagues in private security there. He had
spent six months with one company in the country's north and is now
with another down in Basra. ''At worst you've got cowboys running
almost unchecked, shooting at will and just plain O.T.F. (Out There
Flappin').''
I had come to know Hendrick, a tall, soft-spoken, part Blackfoot
Native American from South Carolina, while he was on leave in the
States. He had been a Special Forces captain, then a private
detective; he eventually ran out of money as he let work slip to
care for his stepfather, who had had a severe stroke. When he signed
on with his first company and, in June of last year, flew into
Mosul, a hotbed of the insurgency, a convoy of pickup trucks arrived
at the airport to meet the new hires. To his uninitiated eyes, the
men in the vehicles ''looked like extras in Mel Gibson's Road
12
Warriors,'' he said. They told him to climb in and to stay ready to
shoot while they drove, to watch his sector. ''There was no
instruction, no sit-down, no here's how we operate; it was, throw
your stuff on the truck and let's go.''
A few months later, he was riding in a convoy, in the back seat of a
pickup's cab, escorting an Army Corps of Engineers team to a spot
out in the desert, where they would blow up captured munitions.
Across the desolate terrain, according to Hendrick and a colleague
who was present that day, a white S.U.V. appeared from behind a
berm. It was on Hendrick's side, 200 yards away. Hendrick wore a
black helmet, tinted goggles and a black shirt, with a kaffiyeh
wrapped around his neck and taupe-colored shooting gloves. He leaned
out his window clutching a belt-fed light machine gun. The distance
kept closing. ''He's coming in! He's coming at us!'' he heard
someone on his team call out. He thought, Idiot farmer. He had the
best angle; he fired warning shots. He could see the driver dressed
all in white. The distance shrank to less than 30 yards. He aimed
into the wheels. ''Idiot farmer turned to No, this isn't happening
in a fraction of a second,'' he said. All was instinct. He riddled
the driver's door and shot into the driver's window. The S.U.V.
jerked to the side -- it exploded, ''went from white to a ball of
bright orange,'' so close that the blast demolished a vehicle in the
convoy, though the men inside weren't hurt. The S.U.V. all but
vaporized. It had been packed with explosives -- a suicide bomber.
The largest trace left was a scrap of tire. A bit of the bomber's
scalp clung to one of the vehicles in the convoy.
Hendrick showed me photographs of the smoky aftermath. He wanted to
be sure I understood the kind of circumstances he and his colleagues
were dealing with. But he also said, ''This whole thing has brought
out some pretty scary characters.'' He mentioned a newspaper article
about one of the men he'd worked alongside. The man was arrested
when he went on leave back to the States. Apparently the security
company hadn't done much of a background check, if it had done one
at all; it turned out the man was a fugitive in Massachusetts. He
had been charged with embezzlement. He had also violated the terms
of a suspended sentence in a separate case, a local paper in Lowell,
Mass., explained: he'd been convicted of assault ''for nearly
blowing a friend's jaw off during a game of Russian Roulette.''
Mark raised his strong forearms and performed a pantomime of washing
his hands and flicking off the water. A manager with Triple Canopy
in Baghdad, Mark was sitting behind his desk at T.C.'s base,
demonstrating the Department of Defense's attitude about overseeing
and policing the private security companies. ''D.O.D. doesn't want
anything to do with it,'' he said. ''They don't have time. They
don't have the numbers. And State can't investigate incidents. They
don't have the investigators. So there's Iraqi law. Not that Iraqi
13
law really exists. Am I going to give up my weapons to Iraqi police?
I don't think so. That could get me killed.''
No one knows how many times gunfire from a private security team has
wounded a bystander or killed an innocent driver who ventured too
close to a convoy, not realizing that mere proximity would be taken
for a threat. When they fire their weapons in defense or warning,
the teams rarely concern themselves with checking for casualties -it would be too dangerous; they are in the middle of a war. Besides,
no one in power is watching too closely.
And what rules exist seem to be ignored. A C.P.A. decree, which has
now evolved into Iraqi law, limits the caliber and type of weapons
that private security personnel employ. But I was told by several
people in the business that, especially outside Baghdad, weapons
like heavy machine guns and grenades are -- perhaps by necessity -sometimes part of the arsenal.
A few of the major American and British firms, Triple Canopy among
them, advocate careful supervision of their business by their
governments and possibly, in the future, by the United Nations.
They'd like checks on everything from adequate training to human
rights violations. They'd like to see their more rash competitors
lose their contracts. They'd like to legitimize the work, to remove
the remaining stigma that their own men are rogues, mercenaries.
Back in October of last year, a Congressional bill demanded that the
Department of Defense come up with a plan to manage the security
companies -- to investigate individual backgrounds and inculcate
rules of engagement and enforce compliance. Until then, according to
a Pentagon official with knowledge of the process who asked not to
be named because the Pentagon plan is still being finalized, the
department had been at work, for many months, on doctrine dealing in
a general way with all types of private contractors in Iraq but not
specifically addressing the huge sector of gunmen. It seems that
only the October bill drove the Pentagon to formally account for the
most vital, and potentially most troubling, part of its outsourcing.
Congress gave the department six months to produce its plan. Nine
months have passed. The Pentagon has now promised the document any
day; there's no telling whether it will change anything -- what
guidelines it will give, what level of commitment will be behind
them. When I asked the Pentagon official about who would enforce the
rules in Iraq, I was told that the country's new sovereignty would
be ''the context.'' It was hard not to think that the infant
government of Iraq would be left mostly on its own to control the
thousands of private gunmen that the American-led occupation has
introduced to the country. It was hard not to think that the
companies would be left to govern themselves.
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Fourteen armed security men, traveling in a convoy through Fallujah
in May, were detained by U.S. Marines, the first and only time, it
appears, that the military has made such a detention. A Marine memo,
quoted in The Washington Post, accused the men, who worked for a
company called Zapata Engineering, of ''repeatedly firing weapons at
civilians and marines, erratic driving and possession of illegal
weapons'' -- six anti-tank weapons, the Zapata men later explained,
kept for defense and condoned, they claimed, by the U.S. military.
The security men (eight of them former marines) said they had fired
only typical warning shots at civilians. They insisted that their
bullets had never struck close to any servicemen. They suggested
that their detention -- which lasted three days before they were
released, without charges so far -- was driven by jealousy over
their pay. They told of being roughed up and taunted, of being
asked, ''How does it feel to be a rich contractor now?''
This kind of resentment may be deepening. What Matt Mann called a
''national asset'' may be corrosive. And the private security
companies are, almost surely, eroding elite sectors of the military;
the best-qualified troops, the men most desirable to the companies,
are lured by private salaries that can be well more than twice their
own. The Special Forces have lately responded with re-enlistment
bonuses of up to $150,000. It's not enough. One Triple Canopy man in
his mid-30's, with about 15 years of Special Operations experience,
told me that his commander had begged him to stay in the service.
''But there was no way,'' he said. ''Here I get to be with the best
and make so much more money.'' Triple Canopy, Mann had said to me,
has a policy of never recruiting directly from the military. But
when this man quit the Army, he knew exactly where he wanted to go.
And plenty of his old friends from ''the unit'' -- a Delta soldier's
oblique way of referring to his exclusive caste -- were poised to
follow.
There may be a danger that something else could erode eventually, if
there is a drift toward using more private gunmen -- in yet more
military ways -- to compensate for the inevitable reduction of
troops in Iraq or to wage other wars. There may be the loss of a
particular understanding, a sense of ourselves as a society, that we
hold almost sacred. Soldiering for profit was taken for granted for
thousands of years, but the United States has thrived in an age when
soldiering for the state -- serving your country -- has taken on an
exalted status. We often question the reasons for making war, but we
tend to revere the soldiers who are sent off to fight. We honor
their sacrifice, we raise it up and in it we see the value of our
society reflected back to us. In it we feel our special worth. We
may not know what to think of ourselves if service and sacrifice are
increasingly mixed with the wish for profit. We may know less and
less how to feel about a state that is no longer defended by men and
women we can perceive as pure.
15
But that is an abstract and perhaps a distant worry. To wonder what
will happen when the private work in Iraq finally winds down is a
more concrete concern. What will happen to these companies, these
men, without these thousands of jobs? Some will get contracts
protecting U.S. departments and agencies around the world. Some will
do the same for other governments. Doug Brooks, whose Washington
industry organization, the International Peace Operations
Association, represents several of the largest firms, says he
believes the United Nations will soon hire the companies to guard
refugee camps in war zones. But some of the firms and some of the
men will no doubt be offered work by dictators or terrible
insurgencies -- or by the kind of oil speculators who reportedly
backed a recent mercenary-led coup plot in Equatorial Guinea (a plot
involving former members of Executive Outcomes), in an attempt to
install a ruler to facilitate their enterprise. And with so many
newly created private soldiers unemployed when the market of Iraq
finally crashes, aren't some of them likely to accept such jobs -the work of mercenaries in the chaotic territories of the earth?
At their Baghdad base, eight Triple Canopy gunmen and I got into an
S.U.V. and a sedan, the armored doors heavy enough that opening them
felt like pulling them against water. The men, in T-shirts and
bulletproof vests stuffed with ammunition clips, were ready to make
the morning's run. I was the person they would be escorting. They
figured that would be a decent way to give me a sense of how they
work. I had to get to the airport, anyway.
At a pre-run meeting, their team leader told them that the loud
blasts we all heard a few hours earlier had been a series of
V.B.I.E.D.'s -- vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices -- in a
neighborhood adjacent to the Green Zone. He told them that optimal
speed for the run would be 100 miles per hour. They didn't need to
be told that the five-mile strip of highway between the Green Zone
and the airport is known as the most dangerous road in the world.
The insurgents plant remote-controlled bombs on the shoulders or sit
on the access roads in cars packed with explosives, and they wait.
They look for sets of vehicles that appear to belong to security
teams -- teams that are their enemy and that shield enemy officials.
The armor on the S.U.V. and the sedan wasn't going to do enough
against bombs; it might not do enough against rocket-propelled
grenades. Each vehicle held a rucksack full of ammunition in case an
attack crippled the cars and left the men in a long firefight. A
medic goes on every run. Sitting on my left in the back seat of the
S.U.V., twisted to the side to peer through his window with rifle in
hand, the medic pointed out to me an extra transfusion kit. ''You'll
need to try and use that if I'm bleeding to death,'' he said.
16
We didn't get far from the Green Zone gate. Traffic was thick on the
highway, and slow speeds allow the insurgents to better strike their
targets, timing the detonations of their roadside bombs or driving
close with their suicide cars. A white fuel truck appeared alongside
us, its tank ready to erupt with the launching of a grenade. We
veered onto the dirt median and fled back to base. ''We're a boring
company,'' Al, one of the managers, had told me. ''We mitigate
risk.''
An hour later the team leader decided to give it one more try. We
sped away from the Green Zone, accelerating hard onto the highway.
''White van tracking us!'' a gunman called. On the access road, the
suspicious van kept pace.
Then, suddenly, we were braking. Traffic crawled and doors were
''cracked.'' That is the company term: doors are opened as little as
possible, and rifles are pointed out -- the response when other
vehicles get too near. The windows on armored vehicles are so heavy
that they don't reliably roll up once they're rolled down, so Triple
Canopy's men don't use the windows to point their guns. The doorcracking is rehearsed procedure; they can ride this way at top
speed, leaning out to aim their guns in warning, or to put bullets
into the engine of an oncoming car. They did it now at almost no
speed at all. Traffic was barely creeping. ''Watch this guy on the
right!''
To the right and behind, the threat edged closer. I couldn't help
thinking of Lyle Hendrick, of the suicide bomber he'd shot at the
last instant. But now, instead of firing, the gunman to my right
lifted a hand off his barrel and raised bunched fingers in the air,
an Iraqi signal, telling the driver to stop, to back off. Whether by
luck or instinct, it was a good call. The driver quit inching
forward, his attention caught by the fingers or the muzzle.
We steered onto the shoulder, passing a dozen cars to reach the head
of the stalled traffic. ''Big Army'' was there -- the companies'
name for the regular forces. The troops waved us down. They told us
they'd found a bomb on the road a few hundred yards ahead, and we
waited for their explosives crew to set it off. A concussive wave
surged through our chests; smoke billowed over the pavement.
Then the way to the airport was clear. The military gate grew
visible. Just outside it, another company's convoy was ambushed
earlier in the week. But already, around me in the S.U.V., the men
relaxed slightly as we approached the checkpoint. And once we were
through it, muscles -- around eyes, across backs -- slackened
perceptibly. For the moment, risk seemed all behind us.
17
Daniel Bergner, a contributing writer, is the author of ''In the
Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa.''
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