Licensed to Kill (17 page)

November One had made it to Taji for their rendezvous with the ESS trucks but had become lost as they tried to find their way down to Camp Ridgeway. According to the lawsuit brought against Blackwater by the families, the convoy stopped at Camp Fallujah, a military base five miles east of Fallujah, to spend the night, though other unconfirmed accounts have them checking in to a hotel. What is known with certainty is that they set out on the morning of the thirty-first heading west on the road that would take them directly through the heart of hostile Fallujah. Batalona and Zovko took point in the blue Mitsubishi Pajero, while Helvenston and Teague brought up the rear of the five-vehicle convoy in a red Pajero. If they had been aware of the extreme level of threat they faced in central Fallujah, they may have chosen to take a couple more hours of drive time to do the normal indirect loop around the city. However, they either did not know of the dangers, or believed they could handle it.

Whenever possible, convoys try to bypass heavily populated areas, especially dangerous ones like Fallujah, since buildings lining city streets offer perfect cover for snipers, and it is far too easy to block off escape routes for an ambush. According to one theory, the convoy intended to link up with an American-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) team on the eastern entrance to town, which would guide them through the city center, providing more firepower if anything happened. However, this would have required coordination the evening before, and there is no evidence that the marines at Camp Fallujah, or the Blackwater contractors themselves, had made this contact. A confidential internal investigation conducted by Blackwater after the attack suggested that the contractors left Camp Fallujah driving along Highway 10 until they came in sight of the ugly eastern industrial end of Fallujah, where they ran into an ICDC checkpoint at about 9:00
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. According to a senior Blackwater executive, a phone call from the contractors back to headquarters and eyewitness accounts support this theory.

Two trucks loaded with tan uniformed ICDC apparently offered to guide them to their destination and headed on a detour through the heavy traffic of Fallajuh. According to an Iraqi policeman who had been working the main intersection into town that morning, the men stopped and asked him for directions, which suggests they may have been concerned about the motives of the men in uniform they were following. They pushed on into the city and got about three hundred yards past the intersection when they were stopped by the traffic for about ten minutes. At about 9:30
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., traffic started moving again, and the convoy of three red Mercedes-Benz trucks, two Blackwater Pajeros, and two Iraqi civil defense trucks continued on at a slow pace. Batalona and Zovko took lead directly behind the Iraqi trucks, followed by the three ESS trucks, with Teague and Helvenston bringing up the rear.

About a mile and a half into Fallujah, as they crawled along Highway 10 through town, the lead Iraqi vehicle suddenly stopped. In a car-to-car chain reaction, the entire convoy ground to a halt. Immediately, a small group of young men carrying AK-47s and wearing
kefiyas
to cover their faces emerged from the nearby shops and began firing at the contractors from behind. At that close range, the 7.62 bullets punched through the glass and thin steel and into the bodies of the contractors in the rear vehicle. Helvenston and Teague never even had time to react.

Terrified by the gunfire, the drivers of two of the ESS trucks pulled around the lead Pajero and the Iraqi police trucks and sped away. Zovko and Batalona heard the shooting and immediately started to pull a U-turn into the other lane to provide backup. A wall of insurgent gunfire riddled them with bullets before they could even get in position to respond. Hit multiple times at close range, the car accelerated, rear-ended a white Toyota at high speed, and came to a stop almost wedged under the bumper. The two men had been shot through the head and lower extremities. A Iraqi cameraman began filming as soon as the ambush had achieved its objective, creating a permanent record of one of the most publicly gruesome displays of the Iraq war, parts of which would seem to play for days on a seemingly permanent loop in news broadcasts around the world.

As the jolting handheld video opens on the scene of carnage, Zovko can be seen in the passenger seat, mouth agape, head back, and dead. Batalona is slumping lifelessly forward into his friend's lap, his white and red Hawaiian-print shirt stained even more red by his own blood. A chorus of triumphant shouting and tributes of
“Allahu Akbar”
run in the background, as the insurgents somewhat tentatively begin to strip weapons from the contractors' still-warm bodies. The cameraman films a carefully staged display of DoD identity cards as “proof” that the mujahideen had just killed “CIA agents.”

As the shooting and shouting could be heard for many blocks, and word of the attack spread quickly through the streets of Fallujah, locals begin to swarm the scene and set the vehicles on fire. Chanting, dancing, and yelling, the crowd continues to grow, all celebrating the glorious victory against the great American invader. As the gasoline finally burns out, the mob tugs at the charred bodies, pulling them from the still-smoldering shells of the Pajeros. Men with shovels hack at the blackened bodies, children stomp them with the soles of their sandals, one man continually kicks at the head of one until it severs from the burnt body, and another ties a burnt leg to a rock and throws it up to snag a power line. The crowd plays to the camera, shouting anti-American slogans and praises to the mujahideen, as they dance on top of the destroyed vehicles.

Someone ties two of the bodies to the bumper of a car and begins to drag them down the main thoroughfare, named Sheik Ahmed Yassin Street in honor of the Hamas spiritual leader assassinated by the Israelis. The route takes them right past the police station, though the officers do not appear much interested in getting in the way of the raging mob. One cameraman interviews the police as the bodies are being desecrated, and an officer makes it clear that they don't think the incident is any of their business. They obviously recognize the swift and brutal penalty for assisting Americans.

The car dragging the bodies stops as it reaches the Euphrates River, where the crowd then hoists up the contractors' remains to dangle from the joists of the bridge. Someone posts a sign on the bridge reading that Fallujah is the graveyard for Americans. For hours, the bodies dangle in a macabre spectacle as an everyday flow of traffic passes over the bridge.

The insurgents quickly put together a video of the event and posted it on the Internet. In claiming responsibility, they edited together film of captured documents and the dead bodies and provided a testimonial from one of the insurgents. He appears in front of a black backdrop, his lower face covered with a black scarf, with only his steely black eyes visible as he intones in Arabic the insurgents' version of events. The man begins with a typical Koranic tribute:

“Thanks to Allah and praise to the messenger who is Mohammed. We do not kill them, they kill themselves. If you do not do it, Allah will do it for you.

“On the morning of Wednesday March 31st, after prayer, a mujahideen spy arrived with information. He told our commander that a group of CIA will pass through Fallujah on the main road to Habbaniya [the town to the west of Fallujah] because they have a special meeting. The commander ordered for us to be ready to kill these people. After we had prepared our weapons and ourselves we left at 6
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. We scouted the main street from the bridge to Habbaniya. We did that three times.

“After that our commander selected the intersection for attack. He chose this intersection because it was busy with traffic so they could not escape. Our commander then identified all of our positions. Myself, the commander, and one mujahideen stayed at the position together.

“Later on, I went to the teahouse to have my tea. I sat and drank my tea. It was 9:15
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. After I finished my tea, my commander and his assistant arrived and sat with us. As final instructions from the commander, we were told to verify the vehicle, since they would be in civilian cars. They would not have bodyguards with them and they would wear civilian clothes—this is all to avoid being captured by the mujahideen, because every American that passes through Fallujah will be killed.

“I talked to the commander's assistant, who told me we would need to scout the street again at 11
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. to see if they were still coming. We then checked once more with our spies to verify they were still coming. They told us they would be there in one or two hours. We were told originally 10
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., but when we checked it was 8
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. to noon. They actually arrived at 9:45
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. The owner of the coffee shop saw them and said, ‘Why are those people in our land? They will be killed by the mujahideen!'

“Then the commander ordered all of us to take our positions because the time had arrived. We were told to move the cars into position. We should be ready to use our weapons and to capture the people. We started and everybody moved to their positions. The commander decided to attack the last car and capture the first one. We attacked the last car and the first car tried to escape by turning around. They could not escape and we captured them. We then killed the people in the first car. Thanks to Allah we were victorious and we captured the weapons and supplies.

“The commander then told us to leave some of the weapons behind. Our families in Fallujah went and set fire to the cars. We then withdrew in the way our commander told us to and we waited for news.

“Our family in Fallujah came and told us Allah had given us victory. They told us they burned everything in the cars. You saw the results in the news. Allah has given a great victory to the people of Fallujah. Allah gave us the victory and gave the victory to the mujahideen.

“We will continue to fight the jihad.”

The marines at Camp Fallujah learned of the attack from Fox News. Hours later, the marines still did not dare enter Fallujah, but instead contacted the Iraqi police to cut down the bodies from the bridge. The Iraqi police also hesitated to get near the scene, so it was ten hours later before the marines and the Iraqi police went together to retrieve the bodies so they could be shipped to Dover Air Force Base for autopsies. Though rumors circulated that the men had been pulled from the SUVs and burned alive, the autopsies proved conclusively that they had been killed first by the barrage of bullets. Another rumor circulated, charging that two of the bodies had been chopped up and fed to dogs, but that, too, proved false.

After video snippets of the violent deaths and celebratory desecration hit the news, Americans could have believed any depths of depravity by the crazed Fallujans. To the Iraqis involved, this had been a traditional lynching and a great victory against the infidel invader. To Americans, it represented a grave offense against any standards of human decency—in wartime or otherwise—and looked like a new cast of players reenacting the 1993 Somali tragedy. One has to wonder if the Fallujans performed for the cameras with the Blackhawk Down episode in mind, since that incident has been lauded on insurgent and Islamist websites as proof that, as bin Laden phrases it, “the United States is a paper tiger.” After video of dead Army Rangers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu hit the evening news, a public outcry of shock and revulsion had pushed Clinton to call for the withdrawal of all American troops from Somalia. The Fallujans may have thought they could achieve the same with a very public display of the same brutality. There is little proof that the event was anything other than a murderous lynch mob taking out frustration on what they thought were CIA paramilitaries, but the visual connection to Somalia was clear to an American public squeamish at the sight of death.

By Wednesday evening, riveted and horrified, unable to watch but unable to look away, the American public was transfixed by edited clips of the jubilant aftermath of the contractors' deaths as they played over and over on the cable and network channels. After the initial shock of the footage wore off, the media moved on to its typical phase two—the self-obsessed introspective debate about whether they were broadcasting scenes too gruesome for public consumption, giving too much coverage to the story, or lending aid and comfort to the enemy by showing video that had been filmed for the primary purpose of propaganda. Whatever the conclusion of these debates, two things became clear: The footage made for good ratings, and the viewing public was demanding more information. People wanted to know what function armed civilians were serving in the Iraqi theater of war. Though the U.S. government had been relying on independent contractors for some time, the issue seemed a new one to the American public. They demanded to know why men described as “civilian” contractors would be escorting trucks through a hostile war zone without the protection of the military.

So ingrained in the American psyche are the tenets of the 1949 Geneva Conventions that accidental deaths of civilians in war are abhorred, and intentional murder of civilians is condemned absolutely. But these contractors appeared to occupy a shady zone between civilian and military. While not active members of the military per se, they were armed and ready to shoot if necessary, were providing critical support for the U.S. military's core mission, and their paychecks—once the multiple levels of subcontracting is stripped away—were ultimately financed by the Pentagon. Even though those facts tilt the assessment essentially in a military, though nontraditional, direction, some analysts continued to argue that the contractors were essentially playing a civilian role because they were not engaging in combat operations. However, if Teague, Batalona, Helvenston, and Zovko had been given even a moment to respond to incoming fire, they would have been deeply engaged in combat.