The Spy Who Billed Me

Will Infamous Merc Tim Spicer Monitor Blackwater's CIA Missions?

The New York Times  is reporting today that all State Department security convoys  will now be subject to Department of Defense coordination.  Department of Defense security contractors are already coordinated through a single, DoD entity, the Regional Operations Centers  which track movement of security convoys to make sure they and the military don't trip over one another.  Most likely this existing mechanism will be expanded to monitor Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp convoys for the Department of State and this would raise some interesting questions since its known that BW and TC also provide security services to the CIA under this contract.

The US Regional Cooperation Offices are outsourced through a recently renewed $475 million contract to the British firm Aegis.  Aegis is run by the infamous old-school mercenary, Tim Spicer. 

In order to make this work, the Agency will obviously require some form of firewall between Spicer and Agency operations, perhaps best achieved through special space set aside at the Regional Cooperation Offices to which cleared Americans, including CIA liaison elements have access.

It is, however, quite ironic that Department of State and Defense's idea of bringing greater accountability and oversight to Blackwater could end up being in the hands of a man who is arguably the world's most famous living mercenary.

Heckuva job, Condi!

Update:  Both reader Tom Griffin and Noah Schachtman from Wired's blog The Danger Room remind me that Aegis was the company whose workers filmed the infamous trophy video of themselves shooting civilian vehicles to the tune of Elvis' "Runaway Train."

UPDATED: Outsourcing Friday

(For those of you who've already read this,  pls. see the update added as the last section.  Happy Father's Day weekend everyone!)

 

Since it's Friday, rather than finishing up a heavier post I'm working on that takes a closer look at that infamous PowerPoint, reading between the lines (and it is actually a very telling document) I decided to give OUTSOURCED a proper introduction.  I've included snippets for the past few days, but they were chosen due to topicality, not to do the book justice.  So here's a short passage, followed by a discussion of the backstory behind the book.  Have a great weekend!

 

 

OUTSOURCED

PART ONE
PRIVATE WARS

The worrisome thing isn’t what Halliburton and other big contractors are supposedly doing behind the scenes. It’s what they’re doing in plain sight. National defense, the blood-and-iron burden of government, is increasingly becoming a province of the private sector.
--THE NEW YORKER, January 12, 2004

 

CAMP TORNADO POINT, ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ

Her nose burned as she inhaled the dry air, heavy with diesel fumes that barely masked the stench of the burn pit and the overpowering fragrance of night-blooming jasmine. To Camille Black it was the sweet scent of life on the edge, the smell of money, the perfume of Iraq. She coughed dust and smiled as she circled her new mine-protected personnel carrier, a six-hundred-thousand-dollar Cougar, admiring it as if it were a Ferrari. In this part of Iraq, it was her Ferrari. Its V-shaped underbelly made it look more like a boxy boat than a small troop transport, but it could channel away blasts that would rip open an armored Humvee. As she watched several troops saying short prayers and kissing pictures of loved ones, she ran her hand along the vehicle’s side and sent off her own lonely prayer. She felt a blister in the desert-tan paint and she pretended to care.

Without warning, Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” blared over the Cougar’s sound system, heavy metal shifting the mood. All at once, the men put away their photos and got in each other’s faces, shouting the song’s angry words about letting bodies hit the floor. “Three! Four!” They counted with the lyrics, laughing and smiling, pumping themselves up for the night’s combat mission, a mission that she, too, was supposed to be part of, even though at the moment it didn’t feel that way to her. When the song was over, the operators slapped each other on the back in a bravado of brotherhood—a brotherhood that Camille had grown up with.

She admired the men. Some of the operators wore the short beards and moustaches favored by Force Zulu and Delta Force and others sported shaved heads typical of Navy SEALs. All but one had more wrinkles than their active-duty counterparts and they all had fatter paychecks, Black Management paychecks that she signed. They were the rock stars of the Iraq War. And they were hers.

The men’s bodies moved with the heavy metal rhythm of combat as they groomed one another, inspecting each other’s equipment, cinching their buddies’ gear and slapping duct tape over loose straps. None of them seemed to notice as she walked into the shadows on the other side of the Cougar, smiling. There she quietly sang “Bodies” to herself as she felt for her extra magazines of ammo to make sure everything was there and accessible. She touched her USP Tactical pistol, then her knife to confirm positions and she tightened her webbing. After she checked her XM8 assault rifle, she was geared up, ready for action. And she was amped.

She circled back around the vehicle. By then the men had already crammed themselves and their war gear into the back of the Cougar, ready for a preemptive raid on what Black Management intelligence suspected was an insurgent safe house. As Camille approached the crew door, one by one each man stopped inspecting his weapon and stared.

But no one spoke to her.

She grabbed a rung and started to climb aboard. Her body armor and gear weighed her down, but she was determined to board without assistance—not that any was offered to her. It stung. All of her life she had trained with Special Forces operators and she knew what they thought about women accompanying them into combat. No matter how many times she had proven herself in battle, they never quite trusted her. She remained an interloper in their shadowy male world, the very one that she was raised to inhabit. She hoisted herself up, barely able to get her center of gravity far enough inside.

The men were tightly packed on benches along the side walls and they seemed to spread out a little more as she searched for space.

“Like it or not, boys, you need to make room for me.”

“Put yourself down right here, sweetie.” An operator grinned at her as he patted his thigh.

“You really want a lap dance from a woman with a Ka-bar knife strapped to her ankle?” Camille smiled as she pointed to the Marine combat knife her father had given her for her sixteenth birthday. “I’m game if you are.”

He elbowed his buddy and they scooted aside. Camille Black took her place among the operators, pleased with herself.

***

 

 

OUTSOURCED:  The back story

Over two years ago I heard the first reports of contract soldiers--mercs or whatever you want to call them--in Anbar province in Iraq, claiming to be working for "State" even though it was obvious there were no diplomats in Anbar.  These tier-one operators--former SEALs and their ilk--reportedly sometimes disappeared for days at a time.  It didn't exactly seem they were part of a VIP protective security detail.  Fire in my belly told me I had a novel to write.

I scrapped the book I had sold to my publisher and began work on OUTSOURCED.  At that point in history, it appeared to be a very foolish thing to do, to write about a war that seemed to be over and a country where troop withdraws were expected soon.  In Iraq purple fingers were pointing into the air, fresh from polling booths, and the White House, media and Beltway pundits believed it pointed to the future, a smooth transition to democracy.  At that time the only ones familiar with that lawless part of Iraq were the Marines trying to keep it from further devolving into chaos, but the general sentiment was one of optimism and excitement at the progression of Iraqi democracy. 

A wise author never writes about actual politics and current events because they're such a fast moving target.  The publishing process is so slow, the novel is likely to be dated well before it goes into the galley stage, let alone hits the bookstores.  I don't do well with conventions and I'm a risk taker by nature, so I delved into the shadows of the War on Terror to learn everything I could about what was really going on.

As fiction author, I was able to get people to talk to me who would have shunned a reporter or nonfiction writer. From frontline players to boardroom executives, I’ve worked with SEALs, Marines, mercenaries and other creatures of the night.  I've talked to countless veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  This book is the product of the generosity of strangers who have taught me everything from how to hotwire a Black Hawk to how to handle road rage in Iraq.

I’ve also been threatened and at times have been afraid, but for the most part I've been warmly welcomed.   I've been on a mission, fueled by passion, to reflect the reality of the War on Terror with all of its nuances and shades of gray and portray it in ways that cause the reader to reexamine his beliefs.  For this reason, I was so personally touched when I read in the first online reviewers wrote:

Hillhouse has accomplished something very few have: she has forced me to reexamine my own relationship with the government, including who I support and why. Who in charge is really looking out for our interests? And even if they are, is it moral for me to bask in our safety and prosperity when it comes at such a tremendous cost? Whatever answers I eventually settle out in my own head, the process of answering them will have proven extremely valuable.

It's said that a good mystery novel is one where the cop doesn't just work on the case, the case works on him.  With OUTSOURCED, I didn't just work on the novel, the novel worked on me.  I came out of it with a much deeper understanding of the immorality we throw our troops and intelligence officers into and expect them to behave morally.  I'm slower to judge, quicker to listen and perhaps lost some of my own morality along the way as I've been forced to live the moral and emotional hell of Iraq along with them.  To write a character well, I have to become that person, see the world through his or her eyes and when writing about the War on Terror, it's a particularly emotionally draining, albeit schizophrenic experience.  When a bad-ass Marine friend who has done two Iraq tours told me there were places he had to put the book down and walk away because it was too real, I knew I had done my job.

As the project progressed,the Iraq War quickly developed  in the directions I was already writing about:  Private corporations began taking on a a larger and larger war effort and CIA outsourcing trends continued unabated.  And the turf wars between the Agency and the Pentagon continue, despite claims on both sides that they've finally learned how to play together.  Through rigorous analysis, I've tried to stay one step ahead of the headlines, but early into the project, the headlines did catch up with me.  I was writing about fictional secret CIA prisons when Dana Priest broke the story of the black sites.  I've sweated it out on other headlines, hoping to get the novel out before someone broke some other major stories structured into the novel I have little doubt are true.

The War on Terror has revolutionized covert and overt warfare and OUTSOURCED is the first novel about this transformation.  It's the first book--fiction or nonfiction--about the outsourcing of intelligence and it's the first novel about private military corporations.  And this week, exactly two years after the first sentences were written, OUTSOURCED is in bookstores.  Two years later, we still don't know what those contract soldiers are doing, working for "State" in the wilds of Anbar...

 

INTRODUCING CAMILLE BLACK

CAMILLE BLACK, President and CEO, Black Management

Camille Black is the only female to ever run a private military corporation. Camille was raised by a single father, a recon Marine and her childhood was a Marine boot camp. By the time she was in her teens, she was competing against Secret Service and Marine snipers at long distance marksmanship competitions where she caught the attention of CIA case officer Joe Chronister. Chronister recruited her to join the Agency, convincing her that the paramilitary Special Activities Division (SAD) offered her something the Marines never would: the opportunity to become a real tier-one operator like the SEALs and Delta Force soldiers. On her eighteenth birthday, she broke her father’s heart and left the Marine recruiter’s office with Chronister.

Years later, on the eve of the Iraq War, Camille learned that it was old mentor Joe Chronister who was blocking her transfer to the CIA’s paramilitary SAD. She left the Agency, mortgaged everything she had to start her own private military corporation and realize her dream of going into combat with tier-one operators as one of them. She landed some Pentagon and Agency contracts, but couldn’t attract the top professionals because they didn’t trust a company run by a woman, even though she was a legend due to her counterterrorism work for the CIA.  After recruiting the highly respected operator from the SAD to join her, top players flocked to Black Management.  Black Management's growing  intelligence division holds multiple personal services contracts for "green badgers" with the CIA.

Camille was engaged to her high school sweetheart USMC Master Sergeant Hunter Stone, but two weeks before their marriage she learned that he had been killed in action in Iraq. Two years later she discovers that he was still alive and had faked his death to get out of the wedding. This, along with evidence that he really staged his death so he could marry another woman, helped Joe Chronister convince Camille to accept a CIA contract to kill Stone, who was also suspected of collaborating with terrorists. Camille Black divides her time between Black Management forward operating bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and her corporate headquarters in McLean, Virginia.

 

UPDATE:

First, a housekeeping note.  WTOP radio in DC just confirmed for this Monday at 7:35 a.m. EDT.  See the previous post for details.

This is an unusual post to update, I realize, but this is best way to respond to a comment Tyler posted this in the comments section:

Ms. Hillhouse- please keep up the good work; your blog is one of a kind and never ceases to impress or educate me. I picked up a copy of Outsourced yesterday and look forward to diving in. 

I do have to say though...an XM8? For a woman who wants to be respected, she might as well have gotten into that Cougar wearing makeup and high heels! ;p

Thanks, Tyler.   I was only going to put the short except here as I didn't want to over to it, but since you caught that, read on...

 

OUTSOURCED (continued)

 

In the twenty minutes since they’d left the base, no one had spoken to Camille. The Cougar’s air conditioning was fighting the summer heat, but it was a losing battle. The air was warm and stale and the ride hard. A man with a scar the entire length of his right forearm sat across from her, staring at her, calculating something. She looked him in the eyes and he wouldn’t look away or even blink.

His dark eyes looked intelligent, the wrinkles around them, experienced. He was bald and most of his face was clean-shaven, but taunting the Black Management dress code by several inches was a long narrow moustache and a thin veil of a beard that outlined his jawbone and came to a point well below his chin. As she studied him, she realized he could only be the operator known as Genghis.

Genghis studied her weapon. The lightweight assault rifle was a next generation kinetic energy system that the Army had hoped would replace the Vietnam-era M4 and M16 carbines until Pentagon politics killed the program. Camille loved its sleek design, molded polymer casing and clear plastic magazine. To her the XM8 seemed more like something used to blast space aliens rather than Iraqi insurgents. It had outperformed her expectations on the firing range and she couldn’t wait to field test it, but more importantly, it was cool, jock-cool and it made her feel that way, too.

Genghis cleared his throat. “That’s one sexy kit. Haven’t seen that before here in the sandbox.” 

The men stopped talking among themselves and watched. Camille handed him the rifle. He weighed it in his right hand.

“Light enough for a girl, I see. So what’s a little lady doing all dolled up with an XM8?”

“Accessorizing.” 

“I know who you are.” His teeth were stained from chewing tobacco. He tossed her the carbine. “There’s never been a finer warrior than your daddy. Everyone agrees the Malacca incident never would’ve happened if Charlie had still been with his team where he belonged. It was a helluva blow to the unit when your mommy died and he chose to leave the Corps to raise his little princess.”

“He raised a warrior, not a princess.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?” Genghis reached for an empty plastic water bottle and spat tobacco juice into it. Brown sludge oozed down the side of the container and she turned away.

The Spy Who Briefed Me: Fmr Blackwater Columbian Recruiter Gunned Down

Former Colombian Recruiter Killed.  On Thursday, a controversial former recruiter of Colombian soldiers for ID Systems, which provided Colombian soldiers to Blackwater (or probably more accurately, its affiliate Greystone) for work in Iraq was gunned down on a Bogota street on Tuesday.   The former Colombian Army Captain Gonzalo Adolfo Guevara recruited for Colombian-owned ID Systems.  Late last summer an exposé in a Colombian newsweekly Semana named him as the recruiter who 35 BW/Greystone contractors accused of improper recruiting practices, promising large sums that never materialized.  The same group described near-captive conditions after they complained about the discrepancies, with threats to throw them out on the streets of Baghdad and to withhold potable water. (A partial English translation of the Semana article can be found here.) The murder is under investigation and its relation to his recruitment practices work is unknown.

TRO Against the Army.  In a bizarre chain of events, the Army is under a sealed temporary restraining order to prevent it from awarding a $475 million security and intelligence contract, Steve Fainaru and Alec Klein of the Washington Post report.  It seems a anti-war activist who makes a hobby of applying for government contracts and filing protests when he doesn't get them, hit it lucky and the GAO got spooked.  The net effect is that Enrisys, the current contract holder, filed a TRO to force the Army to hold back making the award and will undoubtedly receive several million more dollars to through the contract extension--a clever business move even if they expect to lose the appeal. 

New Chief for the Secret Squirrels. US Army Maj. Gen Richard Zhaner has been nominated for the position of deputy secretary of defense for intelligence and warfighting support.  In simpler terms, he will replace General Boykin in command of the Secret Squirrels, the Strategic Support Branch which houses the Pentagon's new spy unit.  It seems the Secret Squirrels are keeping their three stars, a good sign for squirrel fans.

The Spy Who Billed Me on LA Radio this Sunday.  I'll talking about the outsourcing of intelligence on KPFK Pacific Radio for SoCal at 90.7 FM in LA and 98.7 in Santa Barbara tomorrow morning, Sunday, June 3 sometime between 11:00 and 12:00 Pacific Daylight Time.  The program is "Background Briefing with Ian Masters."  It appears to also be available live via the internet.

The Truthiness about Blackwater

We live in a time of polemics, of polarized politics and of truthiness. Named “Word of the Year” by Merriam-Webster in 2006, for anyone who hasn’t heard of it, truthiness is a concept devised by comedian Stephen Colbert to characterize something claimed as truth, based on gut feelings and not facts, distorting facts for emotional appeal and political gain. Truthiness.

BLACKWATER by Jeremy Scahill is the truthiness about Blackwater USA. BLACKWATER (the book) is to Blackwater USA (the company) what the aluminum tubes were to WMDs in Iraq. Whereas underlying facts may be correct, the conclusions based on pre-conceived political agendas are wildly off.

Because I believe the underlying research was solid and the topic of Jeremy Scahill’s book BLACKWATER needed to be discussed, I’ve waited until it had good traction on The New York Times bestseller list to write candidly about it and its truthiness.

Now truthiness by its very nature is difficult to debate and dispel, as Stephen Colbert demonstrates so brilliantly night after night. That’s why it’s so damn useful as a political tool. I’ve rolled my eyes every time I’ve heard Mr. Scahill call Blackwater Bush’s Praetorian Guard. The analogy is so far from historical fact, it barely passes as truthiness and it pains the historian in me. So rather than give it the gravitas of a more serious analysis, I decided it was better to respond to this truthiness with more truthiness:

Top Ten Ways Blackwater Shooters aren’t the Praetorian Guards

10. The bulging muscles of the Praetorian Guards weren’t from steroids. 

9. Praetorian Guards watched real gladiators; BW shooters watch 300—over and over.

8. Praetorian Guards really were tier-one.

7. Praetorian Guards wore togas only in Rome; BW shooters wear Speedos only at the Liberty Pool.

6. Praetorian Guards didn’t have their own ProShop.

5. Praetorian Guards never Googled, “What Color is the Boat House at Hereford?”

4. Praetorian Guards were loyal to death; BW shooters always want to know how much Triple Canopy is paying.

3. Praetorian Guards were immortalized in marble statutes; BW shooters get bear paw tattoos.

2. Praetorian Guards assassinated emperors; BW shooters never really get to do the cool offensive stuff.

1. Praetorian Guards knew what the Praetorian Guards were.

I’ll spare you a top ten list about the inferences that Blackwater is a crusading army of God. Suffice it to say they’re not choirboys.

***

I’m in an unusual position. I am the only blogger who focuses upon the nexus of the current transformation in national security, the outsourcing of the War on Terror.  I am also a novelist, a thriller author, who, in less than two months, has the first novel coming out about this outsourcing revolution.

Although I’m writing fiction, I do so with a strong commitment to the truth, to reality of the War on Terror industry and to a fair portrayal of its players.  These men and some women put their lives on the line with the belief that they are keeping the rest of us safe and free.  At the same time they’re also working for personal and corporate profit.  Patriotism and profit.  It makes a lot of us uncomfortable and it's hard to understand how they can coexist without corrupting one another.  Such contradictions are what makes fiction interesting and this industry so hard to understand.

And I've tried.  I’ve done my damnedest to get to know the private military and intelligence industries and the people working in it so I could understand it on its terms and write real characters, not caricatures bases on preconceived ideas.  I’ve slipped into the shadows and at times I’ve been afraid. It’s a rough crowd.

I’ve also studied the larger political issues and have combined these with my best understanding of the private military and intelligence industries in order to present the subtleties, mixed morals and contradictions that characterize the age we live in.  There is no more important issue to our society than the War on Terror, how we're fighting it and who we are becoming because of it.

It’s ironic that something that was pivotal in my decision to venture into this territory was an essay in The New York Times Book Review that chided thriller authors for their failure in helping the public make sense of the post- 9/11 landscape, particularly in regard to intelligence. It concluded with the damning words, ‘To understand what’s going on in the world…we readers need to turn to non-fiction.”

Sadly, that nonfiction is now betraying us.

My forthcoming novel is the truthiness about the War on Terror and about a company not unlike Blackwater USA. My fictional private military company, Black Management, is not evil. At the same time, it’s hard to call it good. OUTSOURCED is fact warped into fiction so far it again resembles fact, maybe more fact than in today’s nonfiction.

Truthiness.

Like Mr. Scahill, I, too, have a book to pimp. And this is where things become even more twisted.  Although his is nonfiction and mine is fiction, they’re both on the same subject, more or less. Mr. Scahill is a journalist and I’m a novelist, but we’re both part of the publishing industry. I’ve had strong pressure to market my book similar to his--with truthiness and hyperbole. Fear mongering sells. So does sensationalism.

(Regular readers of The Spy Who Billed Me will already know which route I chose because of how I run this blog. I call things as I see them with humor and irony but also with a commitment to fairness and truth--all the while doing my best to avoid truthiness, today’s Top Ten excepted.  I'm sure I fail at times, but I try.  And for those of you who just popped by, please don't mistake me for an industry pundit and start blasting.  Read the blog.) 

Whether an author is selling fiction or nonfiction about this subject, it’s too important for us as a nation to understand the War on Terror industry to portray it or one of its main players as a one-dimensional character out of a cheap pulp thriller. The real world is more textured than that, most of it in shades of gray and perhaps in this case, shades of black.

There’s an unprecedented amount of force as well as military and intelligence expertise concentrated in private corporations such as Blackwater USA. That alone is reason that we as a society need to understand the industry and keep a close eye on it. It’s an industry that is not going to go away, so we also have to figure out how to live with it. And to do that, we have to put the histrionics aside. Mr. Scahill’s book really isn’t a bad place to start to learn about it, as long as you understand the truthiness in it and filter it out.  Remember, juxtaposing facts does not make them related.  Read his book critically and you'll be rewarded.

My personal concern is more with the private intelligence industry than the private military one. The manipulation of intelligence regarding Iraq’s alleged WMDs had to be very artfully done to  short-circuit a formidable bureaucracy designed to prevent just such warping of intelligence.   We all know now that's possible, truthiness in 16 words or less.   

Today, unlike during the run-up to the Iraq War, the key pieces of that intelligence apparatus are now in private hands. Substituting truthiness for intelligence to misdirect US foreign policy for corporate gain has never been easier.  It's an industry of the shadows, with a deep culture of secrecy, one that's necessary for national security.  It also makes it impossible for the public to monitor.  If there were ever an industry for close Congressional oversight, this is it.

 

It is a very unusual time that we live in, when patriotism and profit; comedy and news, fiction and nonfiction converge. To truthiness and the darker truths it tells about all of us. May we learn to live with those very uncomfortable truths—or are they fiction?

No Contractor Left Behind? Could Private Military Fight the Iraq War After a US Withdrawal?

In an interview on the Daily Show Thursday night, BLACKWATER author Jeremy Scahill seemed to be implying that even after a troop withdrawal, the Iraq War could continue to be fought with a limited number of 40,000 regular troops and an unlimited number of contract soldiers or mercenaries as he prefers to call them.  Given how little is generally known by the public about the private military industry and given that Scahill just wrote a book on the industry leader, I thought it was an idea worth exploring.  So could private military corporations be used to continue the Iraq War After a US Troop Withdrawal?

I'm sure some of my regular readers in Herndon and Moyock are laughing hard right now.  Really hard.  To those who know the strengths, capacitates and limitations of the private military industry as it is today, the idea is absurd.  The industry, as it has developed, is overwhelmingly defensive, not offensive.  That means they're protecting diplomats, Iraqi government officials, guarding the perimeter of the Green Zone which keeps these diplomats and government officials safe from Iraq.  They also guard Baghdad International Airport and various infrastructures, such as oil pipelines and they also provide route security to supply convoys.  They're trained and equipped to work in small units to fend off small attacks, not to hunt down and eliminate the enemy.  The functions that the Army and particularly the Marines are doing are offensive combat and not comparable to the work we see private military corporations performing.  Just because regular and contract soldiers carry assault rifles and regularly use them does not make them interchangeable.

The small fleet of Blackwater Little Bird helicopters is impressive air power for a private corporation, but It's a kid with an air gun in comparison the USAF C-130 gunships that regularly circle Baghdad, not to mention the Apaches, Cobras, F-18s, etc. that the regular military operates in the theater.   A guy in the back of an armored SUV with a heavy gun, a "trunk monkey" as it's known in the business,  is a heck of a lot more fierce than a Wackenhut rent-a-cop in a golf cart, but he's hardly a substitute for the weapons of a Stryker.

If the big military disappeared overnight, poof, contractors could possibly make it to Kuwait or Jordan with only moderate casualties, but that would only be because they'd be smart enough to haul ass before the insurgents woke up to what was going on.  And this would be a nightmare, but marginally better than reenacting the Battle of the Alamo behind the Green Zone's blast walls.   

Obviously the big military isn't going to disappear from Iraq overnight, but a planned withdrawal that left contractors to fight the war would leave the enemy plenty of time to prepare their assaults and block the escape routes.  There's a reason to remember the Alamo.  You don't want to reenact it.

Now to move to a slightly less over-the-top scenario, Scahill stated that analysts had told him, "Bush could have 40,000 active troops and an unlimited number of mercenaries," implying this would allow the Administration to continue the war after troop withdrawals.  Now let's try to make this one work.   

If I'm the general and I only get 40,000 troops, there would no question that I want most of these guys to be Marines, as in bad-ass Marines who would readily live under conditions that would make your average airman faint.  I'd keep every C-130 gunship I could and beg to be allowed more aggressive tactics and consolidate in large bases, countering the current trend.  Black units never count in troop numbers, so I'd count on them as well as Agency guys to stick around.   I'm going to need them.

The 48,000 contract soldiers, as they are now, are not trained or armed to deal with such a situation.  I'd pluck every SEAL and Delta guy I could from the private military, and that's a very small number of the protective security guys in Iraq at the moment.  Then I'd kick out the rest of the civilian, except the most essential, so I didn't have to worry about protecting them and having them trip all over my troops.   

The party at Liberty Pool is canceled until further notice.  Steroids are banned.

If there were enough lead time, as in many years, and if the Pentagon funded the industry at necessary levels to raise, train and equip the private forces, and it granted them the licenses for the serious hardware they would need, then, in theory, it could be done. But even then it would be a major logistical effort to get private equipment to the theater, further adding to the timeline.

Even though he's a comedian and not an expert on private military, Jon Stewart nailed it when he closed the show by asking in reference to Bush, "You know he's only got another year and a half, right?" 

That's not nearly enough time to remake an industry.

The Spy Who Briefed Me: Score One for the Agency in the Turf Wars

Air Force Flip-Flops on Blackwater Road Rage Incident.  Several months ago a USAF investigative officer investigating a road rage incident between some Blackwater security personnel and Air Force officers in Afghanistan found that the two USAF officers had correctly followed the rules of engagement.  Now, some allege as the result of pressure and intimidation from Blackwater's parent, the Prince Group, the Air Force is formally reprimanding one of the officers, despite that the official report cleared him of wrongdoing.  The incident was detailed in a News-Observer article in February:

According to the documents, Brown pushed Bergeron, tried to trip him and threatened to kill him. Brown poked Bergeron in the chest with a loaded gun and pointed it at Bergeron's head.

"I don't care if you are a U.S. citizen, get on the ground," he said, according to the documents, and "You're about to be a dead U.S. citizen."

Gittins said the Air Force officers had no way to tell that Bergeron -- who has dark skin and was wearing an Afghan-style long beard and civilian clothes -- was American. He said they were worried because just days earlier another officer had been involved in an attack by a suicide bomber while driving through Kabul.

"They did exactly what they were supposed to do, which is use the normal 'shout, shove, shoot' escalation of force to get the man under control," Gittins said.

It's unlikely, he said, that two men who in civilian life are airline pilots -- a profession built around calm, rational behavior -- would behave as Brown and Hall are accused.

The subsequent investigation cleared the two officers:

“Given the security situation in Kabul at the time and the facts and circumstances of their encounter with Mr. Bergeron on the road, and then at the gate, I believe that they truly felt threatened and reacted exactly as they were trained to do,” Pickle wrote.

Pickle included a very interesting report from the head of the Afghan guards who witnessed the incident:

[S]he was approached by the commander of the Afghan guards stationed at the gate of Camp Eggers, the U.S. base where the confrontation occurred.  The commander "wanted to report an attempt to bribe his guards," Pickle wrote. "He reported that he was contacted numerous times in an effort to convince him to have the Afghan guards testify falsely."

Anne Tyrrell, a Blackwater spokeswoman, said in an e-mail statement that "the allegations of bribery involve someone other than a Blackwater-affiliated person attempting to bribe Afghan guards to change their testimony and falsely claim that a Blackwater contractor was at fault."

The Virginia-Pilot story adds, "Pickle did not say who made the alleged bribery attempts or what testimony was being sought.

Whoops.  Funny how BW could know what testimony was sought and who wasn't doing the bribery...

See also the Air Force Times story.

 

UN Workgroup criticizes Blackwater and Triple Canopy's Hiring Practices.  Manila Times reports that a UN work group is presenting a study next month to the UN Commission on Human Rights on the use of Third World mercenaries by Western firms that is critical of Blackwater and Triple Canopy's recruiting and hiring practices.  The head of the UN workgroup was critical of their poor training and worried that they could violate others' human rights because they carry guns.  Then he worried about the mercenaries' rights as well, pointing out that they sign contracts in English that they often don't understand.  If this is the best the workgroup could dig up, private military critics will be disappointed.

 

State Dept. passes over US firms for Embassy Contract.  The US State Department passed over the American private military companies, Triple Canopy and DynCorp to award a $189 million contract to guard the US embassy in Kabul to the American subsidiary of ArnorGroup, a British private military corporation.  It's not unusual for a British company to receive such a substantial security contract from the US government.  In fact, the current contractor is also British--Global Strategies which holds the current contract to guard the Baghdad airport, having done an excellent job straightening up the mess that Custler Battles left behind. 

 

Don't Ask.  Don't Tell.  USAF Gen (ret) James Clapper, SecDef Gate's nominee to replace Cambone as the Undersecretary for Intelligence testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee about the future of the Pentagon's intelligence activities and the CIA, "For me, the crucial distinction lies in whether an activity is 'passive' ... or 'active.'   The military is supposed to be passive and the CIA active. 

Score one for the Agency:  The Pentagon wants to be the CIA's bitch.

Offshore Corporations: Not just fun in the surf & sand

Reasons to create an offshore corporation, particularly when you're in the private military or espionage business are very complex.  BillW asked about this in the comments on yesterday's post:   

are we to assume that the only reason for them to go off-shore is to be able to conduct these operation on U.S. soil as well?

I started writing this response in the comments section, but it seemed like something that deserved a post of its own. 

There are a lot of reasons to go offshore, taxes, liability and oversight--(think of Halliburton's recently announced move to Dubai).  For a private military corporation and possibility a private intel corporation, there's the  dimension of avoiding their services falling under ITAR  (the US laws governing the export of military services) which would complicate and delay sales and very likely preclude some business all together. It's tough to make good on your promises to rapidly deploy to meet the security needs of a client anywhere in the world at the moment they need you when you have to wait on State Department paper-pushers to grant you an export license, assuming one would be granted 

With the restrictions upon a domestic corporation, offshore entities would be free to conduct the kind of activities that Special Forces and spies do:  destabilize governments, sabotage facilities, identify and train insurgents, etc.   

To further answer BillW's question, an offshore entity has nothing to do with ability to operate on US soil.  If an offshore corporation operates in the US it has to register as a foreign entity, a classification Greystone has, and its US operations have to abide by US law and I'm sure they do. The two other corporations discussed in yesterday's piece, Blackwater USA and Total Intelligence are US-based firms, legally operating in this country. Their operations have to conform to US law and there's absolutely no reason to believe they don't and that that intent of the management is anything other than to abide by US laws, though the interpretation of certain laws might at times get a little loose, that happens with most companies and it is just business, nothing sinister, (unless of course you're from the camp that believes all business is sinister.)

Now there was the issue of Blackwater boys running around the French Quarter with their M4s immediately after Katrina, but BW did quickly cobble together Department of Homeland Security and local state contracts.  (And several new ones, including one from California.)  And some of the guys I know who were in New Orleans did at least have licenses to bear arms in neighboring Texas...

Back to the topic, the export of military services, equipment and technology is highly regulated. The question is: do intelligence services, which have generally been considered civilian in this country, fall under the military services category and require State Department licensing?  My read is they don't and it's clear that this Administration is not going to try to broadly interpret the law and include  them.  I doubt this is even intentional--it's such a new issue, it's probably not on anyone's radar at the moment.  And it's a very gray area. 

Now if I were Total Intel, I'd be positioning myself for the future for a possibly of a change in administrations and a more zealous State that might try to expand the definition to include their services. I'd create an offshore shell to route contracts through as needed and I'd want to make damn sure it couldn't be punctured by the US government-- as in disallowed as a foreign entity and suddenly finding its behavior subject to scrutiny under a host of US regs (and tax laws).   The TI guys are very smart and I'm sure they're already taking these steps.

I'm not so sure Greystone, Ltd. has done this judiciously enough, although BW does seem to have excellent legal teams, but they really need an ex-Agency guy skilled at the creation of proprietary and devised facilities. Things like the use of the Moyock NC PO Box as Greystone's address on promo materials are potential red flags, depending upon how they've set things up.  Personally, I'd be nervous and would consider setting up a new Greystone "affiliate" that never sees these shores.   What happens offshore, should stay offshore.  Or is that Vegas?

How do you best make sure you've set up an offshore companies correctly and you have done nothing to compromise it?   Setting these things up  used to be a specialty in the Agency and tough to find on the open market.  (Granted, there are plenty of sleazy lawyers willing to help set up shells for tax evaders, but we're talking a very different level here.)

The solution is go pro.  Rent a spy.  These services are now available in the private sector.  (Note to my Abraxas Corp friends: consulting opportunity--standard referral fee due.)  And while we're talking referral fees, it seems ExxonMobil was very interested in yesterday's post about the "1001 Uses of a Mini CIA and Offshore SEAL Unit."  So Total Intel and Greystone, any business arising from that, just send my usual fees to my Barbados affiliate, The Spy Who Referred Me, complete with its own Barbados bricks, mortar & steel drum address (Mail Boxes are Us, Man, pictured here)  Or you can wire the fee to my Barbados checking account or work out an other arrangement with my  local manager who wouldn't think of using my American address on promotional materials...

1001 Uses for a mini-CIA and offshore Rent-A-SEALs

So what can really be done with a mini-CIA and an offshore SEAL unit?  I've been asking myself that question since the late January announcement of the creation of the private intel firm, Total Intel, particularly because it is marketing itself to Fortune 500 companies.  The questions becomes more interesting in light of the private spy shop's two strategic affiliates, Blackwater USA and Blackwater's Barbados-registered affiliate, Greystone, Ltd. Total Intel represents some of the best and brightest the CIA has produced and Blackwater commands a formidable group of tier-one Special Forces operators.  Simply put, these together these companies rival and possibly surpass the capabilities of intelligence services of most nations--and I'm not talking Third World.  Such capacity for covert operations has never before been in private hands--and for rent. 

Uses for a company such as Greystone are obvious and barely obscured by the company:  protective security details, training in raids, sabotage missions, "large scale event support" (read: traditional mercenary work).    The offerings of a private intel company are not so obvious, but services would most likely include risk analysis, competitor analysis, hostile takeover assistance, labor relations assistance including the incitement of labor unrest for competitors, product/brand sabotage, assistance in dealing with hostile non-governmental organizations (i.e. environmental organizations), support in dealing with unfriendly governments, etc.  Now when we combine the two services, the possibilities become, well, pretty much like those of the CIA.  Well within the reach are services such as:

• de-stabilization of governments hostile to a firm's business;
• identification, training and support of an armed insurgency, including separatist movements claiming sovereignty over a mineral-rich region; and
• planning and execution of sabotage of a competitor's foreign facilities.

In no way am I saying that Total Intel, Greystone and Blackwater are offering these services, but rather I am exploring the potential synergy of the CIA's former top case officers and Special Activities Division operators combined with the best in Special Forces.  They've done this type of work for their former US government employers, so why not for their corporate ones?

Let's take a hypothetical scenario and examine the potential a little closer.  When I think about good uses for such brains and brawn, oil and Venezuela come to mind.  In late 2005 the Venezuelan government gave Exxon an ultimatum that it had to form a joint venture with the national oil company (it eventually did.)  The state petroleum company has been very uncooperative, to put it mildly, and has caused the shut down of Exxon fields.  Let's just say it's not a comfortable place for Exxon to do business. 

If I were sitting in the Houston boardroom of a company that has seen governments come and go, I know what I'd be thinking:  get rid of Chavez or at least make his life hell.   And with over $100 million profits daily, I'd have the cash to buy the expertise that I needed.  And that expertise that is now on the open market.

I'd hire spies to identify potential insurgency groups to support and to create the needed cutouts to conceal my involvement.  (Which is what Chiquita should have done instead of using its own guys to pay the terrorists and ship them the arms.  Amateurs.  Supporting insurgencies are best left to the pros.) 

Once my spies have identified insurgent group(s) and potential leaders, I'd work with a private military organization that could:

assist in training indigenous resources in developing a capability to conduct defensive and offensive small group operations, including firearm training requirements. Off-the-shelf standard field operations packages consist of 30 days of training to support raid, reconnaissance, and small unit tactics.

I wouldn't stop at an insurgency.  I'd also use the spies for various psyops against the leadership and hire an espionage firm to identify potential targets within the military leadership and Chavez inner circles that could be compromised and used to seed suspicions and distrust among the inner circle.  If my spies got lucky, they might even make Chavez believe a coup was imminent and his paranoia could spark a leadership purge.  Then there's always economic sabotage, inciting union unrest..the possibilities go on and on.

Would a Fortune 500 company do something like this? 

We saw a few weeks ago that Chiquita was willing to give millions to terrorist organizations to further their business interests.  The Organization of American States report has alleged that Banadex, the former Chiquita subsidiary that funded the terrorists, also trafficked in arms on terrorists' behalf. 

Funding the de-stabilization of a declared enemy of the US is far less a sin than funding right-wing terrorists.  In fact, some might see it as a service to the country.  It wouldn't be out of line with US interests.

In the old days, a corporation had to spend millions lobbying select Senators and Congressman and the White House to move the US intelligence apparatus to support such activities in line with its corporate interests.  Now they can cut out the middle man. 

 

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Note:  My Total Intel readers can correct me if I'm wrong, but in studying US State Department regulations, services from a private espionage firm, such as TI, do not seem to be covered under International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), the US laws restricting the export of military equipment, technology and services.  Private spy shops are such a relatively new phenomenon, the export of intelligence services seems to have fallen between the bureaucratic cracks.  If this is correct, the such spy corporations have no need to create offshore entities to freely sell their services globally.

Response from Greystone, Ltd.

The Director of Greystone, Ltd., Chris Burgess, contacted me regarding the previous post,  "101 Uses of an Offshore Special Forces Unit."  He wrote to clarify and made no requests for changes.  In the interest of fairness, I'm publishing his comments and an apology and I did make some changes to the post in question.  He writes: 

[Y]ou assert that Greystone will market services "U.S. interests be damned."  Beyond the fact that our compliance with U.S. export regulations precludes this possibility, Greystone is firmly committed to supporting U.S. interests and only provides support to friendly foreign-nation clients.

I"ll fall on my Ka-Bar on this one.  I was wrong to have written "U.S. interests be damned" and I have deleted it from the post.  This was too flippant.  The parent company, Blackwater, has been very careful to act only within US interests.  Those who I know who have worked for it are very patriotic and that aside, the firm has over a half-billion dollars of USG contracts riding on not crossing this line.  That's Blackwater.  Now with Greystone, I have every reason to believe that what their Director writes is true.  The finer point, which I was thinking when I wrote the quip, was about how easy it is to stumble over US interests in grey areas where it is not so clearly defined and it is evolving.  This is a much more complex issue that deserves more serious treatment.  My apologies to Greystone.

Mr. Burgess also writes:

Your March 6, 2007 blog entry asserts that Greystone is not subject to U.S. export and sanctions restrictions.  To the contrary, Greystone is subject to DDTC jurisdiction and regulation, pursuant to Part 120 of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), by virtue of the fact that it employs U.S. citizens.  In point of fact, the relevant management entity is a U.S.-registered exporter, and required licensing is sought prior to performance of any regulated contract.

This is very interesting.  My question is what contracts are regulated. I was aware of Greystone employing Third Country Nationals, but not US citizens.  It is not clear to me if the employ of citizens reclassifies an organization under CFR Part 120.15 and 120.16.  I welcome emails or comments from readers with specialized expertise.  I am researching:

(1.) under what conditions are contracts of a foreign person, as defined by the DDTC, subject to DDTC?
(2.) how does the employment of US citizens affect the classification of a corporation that is otherwise classified as a foreign person under the DDTC?

What I have been able to determine conclusively, is that  Blackwater needs to raise its minimum job requirements for its open position for an export compliance officer.  This stuff is dense.  A high school diploma and less than a year's experience is not adequate preparation to sift through the regs I'm slogging through right now and to perform the duties listed in the current job posting. 

High school and less than a year's experience would be the educational and experience level I would look for in someone I had to have around to point to at RFP time, but wanted to be able to steamroll as needed.  It's the background level in a paraprofessional that you want when you want to be able to control those PITA positions that can drive you nuts like QA and safety.  However, to be done correctly, IMHO, such a position requires a professional with a law degree.

101 Uses of an Offshore Special Forces Unit

The world's largest private army, Blackwater USA, has quietly created an affiliate that the press has largely ignored and I've been content to forget about it as well--until last week's post on the use of offshore corporations by private spy companies started me thinking about how the industry could use offshore shell corporations.  So when I was reading Jeremy Scahill's interesting new book, BLACKWATER, a fact that Scahill uncovered jumped out at me:  Greystone is an offshore corporation incorporated in Barbados.

As an offshore corporation, Greystone offers Blackwater multiple advantages and the largest could be a workaround for US restrictions upon the export of military services. [To be fair, please see comments by the Greystone, Ltd.'s Director in a separate post.]  Through its Greystone shell, Blackwater could offer its Special Forces and Special Operations services to any individual, country or corporation that can afford it. Or as they put it:

Greystone is an international security services company that offers your country or organization a complete solution to your most pressing security needs.

According to the shell company's initial website:

Greystone is prepared to deploy assets and materials forward to assist in training indigenous resources in developing a capability to conduct defensive and offensive small group operations, including firearm training requirements. Off-the-shelf standard field operations packages consist of 30 days of training to support raid, reconnaissance, and small unit tactics.

Translation: not only can we train your country's Special Forces, we can train groups for raids and sabotage missions, should your company or country decide to create an insurgency to destabilize an unfriendly government.

In addition to its training services, its mobile security teams are prepared to provide:

Physical static and mobile security operations including static compound security, large-scale event support, and sensitive facilities protection,

<snip>
Maritime training, security, and ride-along services in high-threat environments

Translation:  we'll go to war for you or with you.

Blackwater has reportedly developed a gunship variant of a CASA-212 for use by Greystone.  Its new 767s are most likely intended to fly for Greystone missions. And the purpose of its new training facility in the Philippines is becoming much clearer:  it's not a jungle training facility for US troops, but an offshore training facility for troops that could not get visas to enter the US.  It seems that Blackwater is using Greystone to hire Third Country Nationals who are much cheaper than US former military personnel:

We believe in and specialize in creating layered security packages that use personnel from numerous nationalities...The synergistic advantages of combining locals, third country nationals and Expats far outweigh any additional required effort.

Translation:  Cheap, Third World grunts, working under American officers.  American BW trigger-pullers, your jobs are being outsourced.

Greystone was launched with strong international interest and limited corporate interest.  Representatives from over two dozen countries attended its inauguration, along with executives from ExxonMobil, Morgan Stanley and UBS Investment Bank.

As a major US defense contractor, Blackwater more or less abides by US export licensing requirements.  At the moment Blackwater is searching for a new export compliance officer, although their standards of a high school degree with less than a year's experience for the 91k-142,000 job dealing with some of the government's most complex export requirements does raise questions about just how seriously they take the position.  (It took about three sentences of the State Department guidelines for my eyes to cross and keep in mind I spent years in grad school reading commie propaganda in the original Russian and German.)  Nonetheless, Blackwater USA plays by US law or at least its American entities do.

If it is indeed recognized as a foreign person under ITAR, Part 120, Greystone doesn't have to worry about State Department export licenses, sanctions or taxes for that matter.  It's free to openly market its services and it can respond quickly, without the long delays for the State Department to determine if the deployment was within US interests.

Greystone, Ltd. is officially an affiliate of Blackwater, not a subsidiary.  Its real ownership is obscured, but obviously Erik Prince and the Prince Group are behind it and its true relationship with Blackwater was not as hidden in its earliest days.  Its early promotional literature gave its address as a PO Box in Moyock, NC, home of Blackwater USA and on its first website, the "employment" button was even hyperlinked to Blackwater's website.  The"affiliate status" most likely means that an arrangement exists whereby Greystone pays Blackwater a percentage of gross profits as some form of "management fee" for various consulting services and most likely pays Blackwater other fees for leasing equipment, aircraft, facilities, etc.  This would allow them to bring the revenues back into the US, revenues from activities that would be prohibited for an US registered firm.

Blackwater has long proclaimed itself a security company, denying that it was a mercenary firm, with its founder Erik Prince wrapping himself in the American flag.  One things is clear:  Like its predecessors--Sandline, Executive Outcomes and the White Company, Greystone is an army without a flag.   

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Coming soon, Part II:  1001 Uses of a Mini-CIA Combined with an Offshore Special Forces Unit

And FYI, you can also find out more about Jeremy Scahill's book, BLACKWATER, at www.Blackwaterbook.com.