Licensed to Kill (5 page)

Smith has a background in the CIA and had been working as a role player and trainer at Blackwater off and on to make some extra money for law school, but he had quit to start his career as a tax lawyer after graduating in 2001. Prince wanted to retain him as an employee, but Smith had a bigger vision. Jamie saw a market in hiring out men skilled in State Department–style personal protection skills and wanted to create a division that had potential as a growth industry. It wasn't until after 9/11 that Prince became fully committed to the idea. He called Smith in November 2001 to offer him a position as vice president of Blackwater, and by January 2002, Smith had relocated to headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina.

Having no reason to train a force of security contractors before they had any work to do, Smith suggested they begin by trying to work all of his and Erik's contacts to find an opportunity. Erik told Smith that a friend of his had recently joined the CIA and that he could be in a good position to help move the business plan forward. Buzzy Krongard had been appointed to the position of executive director of the CIA in March 2001. He had quite a few years of experience as advisor to the DCI (Director of Central Intelligence), but further back in his career he had been an investment banker, and it was in that capacity that he had first become acquainted with Erik and the Prince family fortune.

Erik's timing was either fortuitous or calculated, since CIA security resources were soon spread thin. Six months after 9/11, the Global Response Staff, the CIA's security division, was overstretched, and they needed protection for their newly established Kabul station. The CIA had hired corporations for collection and other covert needs before, but they had rarely contracted out their field officers' security to private industry. After Prince called seeking opportunities for his new business venture, Blackwater obtained a $5.4-million six-month contract that specified that it was for an “urgent and compelling” necessity. “Urgent and compelling” contracts eliminate all the competitive bidding requirements, so the contract went straight to Blackwater.

The “black” contract awarded by the CIA to Blackwater required eighteen contractors plus a C1 and C2—the first and second commanders. Although the work would be dangerous, both Blackwater and the independent security contractors Prince hired would be offered enough of a financial incentive to take the calculated risk. Jamie based what to charge the CIA on what DynCorp was charging the State Department for similar work. The contractors would be paid $550 per day—just a slight bump over what Jamie was paying the instructors at Moyock—but Blackwater would bill out at a rate of $1,500 per man per day. That tripled figure not only factors in costs of training, transport, and other overhead, but also includes a fairly healthy profit margin. The individual contractors would earn about $18,500 in a month, but Blackwater would gross $30,000 per day, which would add up to $900,000 a month. Although this was a relatively small contract, it showed that the private sector could bolster capacity in time of need. Within just three years, Blackwater would grow from this tiny ad hoc job to being the second largest provider of private security services, with three quarters of a billion dollars in annual billings.

At the time he won his first contract from the CIA, though, Erik had one problem: His security empire consisted of only himself and Jamie Smith. Smith advertised in the
Washington Post
jobs section and both started working their contacts to put together their first team. The basic requirements were a Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) security clearance, experience working in hostile environments, and knowledge of the rigorous requirements of State Department personal security detail (PSD) training. Within weeks, Blackwater had hired, vetted, and trained enough men for the contract.

The team headed over to Afghanistan in May 2002, flying in to Bagram Airbase. Erik Prince, owner, president, and CEO, went over himself for two weeks, ostensibly to work as a contractor, though Smith described Erik's short trip as being closer to “playing CIA paramilitary.”

The majority of the team would stay in the capital for the duration of the contract, providing security for the CIA end of Kabul Airport and the “Annex,” the CIA's Kabul station based at the Ariana Hotel. The contractors' job as part of the Global Response Staff—the CIA term for extra security help required to operate in a hostile environment—was to guard the compound and to ensure intel officers made it to and from meetings safely. One contractor was briefly dispatched to assist with a specific task in Herat, and the CIA requested two to be stationed at a tiny border post in Shkin to provide security for officers holding clandestine meetings with local leaders. Jamie Smith and Erik flew south from Kabul to begin the contract in Shkin. Jamie would stay for two months, but Erik would leave the mud fort after one week and return to Kabul to “schmooze” the Agency chiefs, as Jamie describes it.

The helo flight to Shkin heads due south of Kabul, ascends to ten thousand feet to clear the mountain pass made famous by Operation Anaconda, descends past an old bin Laden compound and into what some call Fort Apache, a large mud fort complex set in the town of Shkin on a bleak dust-covered landscape just three miles from the Pakistan border. The CIA considered this “Indian territory” and chose the location because it was the farthest their Pegasus Air Mi-17 could fly to and from Bagram without a refueling stop. Shkin's other claim to fame was that it was the first U.S. firebase built since the Vietnam War. A platoon of Rangers provided the firepower and ran night patrols. A Special Forces ODA, a Ranger Force, a British SAS team, and even Delta operated from the base as the secretive joint endeavor, Task Force 11—the group charged with finding bin Laden, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Mullah Omar, and other high-value targets. Since rumors persisted that bin Laden roamed freely right across the border in Pakistan's tribal areas, tensions ran high at the base.

Although Fort Apache was the most remote firebase, subject to regular attacks from enemies who would strike and flee back across the border into Pakistan, much of the day was spent exercising, housekeeping, and tanning on the dirt walls. When a call came in from a local informant, the contractors would scramble to set up a safe meeting place—typically a dead-end dry creek bed where one man could watch from the ridge while the other blocked the entrance. The case officer and a translator would then drive out to make the connection and the payoff. When the informant approached, the contractor guarding the entrance would step out to stop him, search him, and then send him on to the meeting.

Most of the work would turn out to be blissfully routine, but the underlying sense of being always surrounded or watched by an unconventional, unpredictable, unseen, amorphous enemy made the job more difficult for the mental endurance it required. Erik and Jamie learned immediately that the locals were not to be trusted, nothing was to be taken for granted, and they were never to let their guard down, since events could turn in a second. Shortly before they had arrived at Shkin, a convoy of SF had been been ambushed and one communications officer killed. The group had obviously been sold out by their duplicitous Afghan guide, since the lead vehicle in the convoy—the one in which the guide was riding—escaped unscathed while the rest were peppered with AK fire.

This environment of suspicion and paranoia kept them constantly on edge and may have played tricks on their minds. As Jamie recalls, one day while out doing recon for a meeting spot, “We drove up the dustiest road on the earth. It was like talcum powder and was so thick that I had to stop at times because I simply could not see the road in front of the truck. As we drove on the older road, I spotted three Toyotas filled with armed men gaining on us and using a new road that paralleled ours. We rounded a corner covered by a building and they were nowhere to be found.” They weren't phantoms, and they couldn't have just disappeared, but it made no sense that they didn't attack. Nothing in Afghanistan made sense.

Smith served out the term of the six-month contract, with two months at Shkin and the rest in Kabul. Though Erik's stay had been brief, the experience energized him. He loved the intrigue and excitement so much that the thirtysomething head of the Prince family empire decided he wanted to join the CIA's Special Activities Division and enter the world of covert operations as a paramilitary.

Joining the CIA can take months, but the normally arduous and lengthy interview process must have been expedited for Prince's benefit. By July he was asking Smith for advice on how to pass the polygraph—the last hurdle required before a CIA recruit can accept a job offer. Erik's first test had been “inconclusive,” so he had to take it again. Smith advised him that any number of factors could have led to that result and suggested it may have just been nerves. Though Prince had already effectively worked for the CIA in a covert capacity as a contractor, he would be ultimately barred from becoming a “Blue Badger” because he lacked certain hard skills. Erik just had to refocus himself on growing the Blackwater empire.

Prince's first contract was not renewed after the initial six months. The official reason given was that Blackwater had never managed to stay fully staffed up to the required terms of the contract, though rumors have circulated throughout the security industry that the CIA had discovered a conflict of interest relating to Buzzy Krongard. That loss didn't seem to have any long-term impact on the business, though, since according to current president Gary Jackson, Blackwater has settled in to a pattern of doing about 15 percent “black” contracts—assumedly CIA—which these days would add up to nearly $100 million in annual revenue for the company.

That first CIA/Blackwater contract could be considered one of the early watershed events indicating where the private security business was heading, or perhaps it would be more correct to say where the War on Terror was leading the industry. The abrupt state of war that began on 9/11 had stretched the U.S. government's resources beyond what could have been realistically anticipated on September 10, 2001, creating an opportunity for private industry to supplement the government's security resources. In another example of how the industry is exploding, Jamie Smith has since left Blackwater to try and ride the current wave of opportunity by founding his own successful security start-up, SCG International Risk in Virginia Beach.

The two most important long-term government-related sources of employment for security contractors in Afghanistan have been in the hunt for bin Laden and the guarding of President Hamid Karzai. In my quest to traverse the world of the private security contractor, I made arrangements to visit a former Special Forces friend working on the job protecting the life of Hamid Karzai. While in Afghanistan, I also hoped to find out how the hunt for bin Laden was progressing.

Two years to the day after the beginning of the war, I journeyed to Afghanistan to see how the War on Terror had changed.

CHAPTER 2

         

Edge of the Empire

“I have no fucking idea who we are fighting.”

—T
ASK
F
ORCE 11 MEMBER

Somewhere on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a thunderous whup, whup, whup provides the soundtrack for a graceful, intertwining aerial ballet above my head. It's a cold December morning, and two Huey helicopters are circling a hilltop five hundred yards to the east. They zoom in close enough to my perch that I can smell their turbine exhaust and clearly make out a bug-helmeted door gunner gripping his minigun. The flat, deep sound echoes off the mountains as one Huey prepares to land, feeling for the ground as if hesitant to touch down in this hostile place. The other helicopter dives and swoops behind the hills like an angry hawk, looking for attackers.

From my own redoubt atop a steep cliff, I overlook a wide valley across the barrel of a battered antiaircraft gun aimed at Pakistan. Since the end of the active combat phase of the war in Afghanistan, private security contractors have been combing this area with CIA and military operators involved in the hunt for bin Laden. I am sitting on the ramparts of an unnamed American firebase, unmarked on any official map, and manned by what look like Special Operations troops and Afghan mercenaries. Its loaded weapons are pointed toward the border of an ally nation, and its vehicles are left packed for a hasty departure. Similar outposts of hastily constructed Hescoes—five-foot-tall gray cardboard and wire mesh containers filled with gravel—crown a few of the surrounding hilltops. On top of the Hescoes, sloppily stacked sandbags, a clutter of ammunition tins, and silver loops of concertina wire add a touch of paranoid sparkle. At a distance, these makeshift citadels have the look of medieval crusader castles, but up close they appear haphazardly stacked protection against attacks.

As I scan the area through my binoculars, I can see rolling foothills, steep valleys, and widely spaced pine trees. Far below us on the dusty road, colorful and overloaded “jinga” trucks clank and groan as they bring goods from Pakistan into Afghanistan. Off to the left, in the direction of Pakistan, my Afghan hosts point out a mountain from where they say the frequent incoming rocket attacks are launched. Officially, the Pakistani Tribal Police has jurisdiction over the tribal areas on their side of the mountains, while the U.S. military handles things on the Afghan side. Unless my GPS is wrong, however, this American outpost, armed by Afghans, is technically about five miles inside Pakistan.

“Your Americans!” shouts the smiling Afghan soldier manning the “tower” alongside me, pointing to the arriving choppers. Outfitted in U.S. Army–style fatigues and mirrored blue wraparound sunglasses, he is one of about forty hired guns—or “campaigns” as the U.S. military terms them—guarding this firebase, each of whom makes a healthy $150 a month. They live simply in an ancient-looking mud fort slightly down the hill—their only decoration Pakistani advertising calendars, their only furniture ammunition cases and cheap plastic lawn chairs. But this is their home, and they are doing their best to make me welcome.

According to the U.S. military, the main bases in Khost, Gardez, Oruzgan, and Asadabad are the frontlines in the War on Terror. However, the CIA and the U.S. military jointly operate a number of smaller, more remote bases like this one. This base must remain nameless, but from the look of the Afghan guard, it wouldn't last long, anyway. Most media attention in this region focuses on the disturbingly Russian-sounding town of Shkin to the south; this isn't surprising since the picturesque mud fort has just played host to one of the biggest processions of journo junkets in Afghanistan. The tours come with premade clichés and cinematic blurbs to spare. “The most evil place,” the military press officers chirp happily back at Bagram. “Something out of
Mad Max,
” the base commander tells visiting TV talking heads with a straight face. Even the three hundred or so rank-and-file soldiers at Shkin will trot out “Fort Apache” or “the Alamo” to eager journo junkets. Some journos will tell you privately that the soldiers at Shkin have been ordered in writing by their commander not to mention the cross-border operations or the amount of U.S. artillery, smart bombs, or bullets that are fired toward and into Pakistan. The U.S. military has done the ultimate hat trick: running a covert operation right under the noses of visiting journalists.

Despite the official statistic that nine out of ten U.S. casualties occur here, the mud fort at Shkin may be one of the safer spots along the border with Pakistan. Most of the attacks that have killed or wounded the Americans in the area have been ambushes outside the base. The Americans insist that they are drawing the fire of the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but it may be the other way around. Remote detonated mines wound one soldier, and the easily downed helicopters called for rescue become targets. Forcing Americans to patrol vulnerable routes, and short-burst contacts designed to lure out larger patrols into bigger ambushes, are all textbook examples of eighties-era mujahideen tactics. Though extensively documented and studied in war colleges, the muj strategy seems to have been forgotten by fresh-faced recruits fighting out on the fringes.

The outpost I have arrived at overlooks a well-known mountain pass between the Pakistani city of Miram Shah and its Afghan neighbor, Khost. Miram Shah was a famous supply and R & R base for mujahideen rebels who fought against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, and it remains a major smuggling center. The U.S. military, the Pakistan government, and others believe Osama bin Laden remains secreted in the mountainous Pashtun tribal areas somewhere between Khost and the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar. Bin Laden worked and fought here with the muj in the eighties, and eventually moved back to the area after leaving the Sudan in the late 1990s. Coordinated attacks against Afghan and American forces not surprisingly continue at their highest rates in this region.

I am back in Afghanistan almost exactly two years after the start of the war in late 2001. At the time of my current visit, the U.S. military has just kicked off Operation Avalanche, which will send some two thousand troops and hundreds of helicopter sorties into the border area around Khost in a futile attempt to eliminate remnants of the Taliban and the al-Qaeda network. A classic low-level insurgency has persisted since the end of major combat operations, with significant swaths of support for the Taliban, smuggling groups, and regional warlords making stability a particularly fleeting prospect in this part of the country. With the post-9/11 focus on bin Laden, current events have superseded the historical memory of nearly unceasing warfare in Afghanistan. This was the edge of the empire for Alexander, for the British, and then the Russians. Like a moving wave that eventually sinks into the sand and disappears, grand ideas and great campaigns have met the reality of resilience in the people, place, and idea of Afghanistan. Now Americans find themselves on the ragged edge looking east, on the opposite side of the Durand Line from where they began peddling money and influence to fight the Russians almost two decades ago.

During the Soviet war against Afghanistan, the Pakistani ISI, or Inter-Services Intelligence bureau, specifically endorsed secretly supporting the Afghan side with money, arms, ammunition, training, operational advice, and safe haven, while maintaining a policy of plausible deniability. A war by proxy or even “a thousand cuts” was the preferred form of aggression. Direct attacks by the Pakistanis, the Americans, or others would have provoked worldwide outrage and possible Soviet retribution, but blaming violence on locally based jihadi groups bolstered the idea that a grassroots movement was fighting back against injustice or persecution.

The Pakistanis created a paramilitary army under a variety of religious-sounding names, supported seven political groups in Peshawar, and laid the tracks for the CIA and Saudi funding train to turn Afghanistan into one of the most expensive covert proxy wars in America's history. The Americans and Saudis funneled an estimated $6 billion in weapons and aid to the jihadi groups in their efforts to bleed the Soviets in Afghanistan. To do this, the ISI created an internal Afghan bureau charged with setting up secret training camps, moving weapons and supplies through Pakistan to the border, and making sure the thousands of volunteers were fed, housed, clothed, trained, and bundled off to jihad with nary a ripple in the pond of international relations.

The Islamic world sent their angry and idealistic young men, who quickly absorbed the cultlike desire to find purpose through martyrdom and self-sacrifice. Paramount in the cult of jihad was not only the concept of death as the ultimate sacrifice, but also the idea that great princes would serve alongside simple peasants. If one could not actually fight, then supporting these almost saintly men was considered a sufficient fulfillment of doctrinally required jihad. Saudi Arabia had pledged to match U.S. contributions to the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad dollar for dollar, and numerous private Gulf businessmen independently supported the efforts of well-traveled and convincing middle men like Abdullah Azzam and his eager young cohort, Osama bin Laden.

Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian-born radical Islamist firebrand, worked tirelessly to encourage Muslims to travel from around the world to fight jihad in Afghanistan. Bin Laden, Azzam's protégé and former student from Saudi Arabia's King Abdul Aziz University, came to Peshawar to assist in managing the Arab-speaking volunteers and funneling Saudi money toward radical groups. Together they established the “Services Bureau,” Maktab al-Khadamat, to coordinate the recruitment and training of the non-Afghan fighters for jihad against the Soviets, an organization viewed as the forerunner to al-Qaeda. During this period, bin Laden made the contacts and won the supporters he uses today as sanctuary and support.

Bin Laden was reputed to be a pious, intelligent, and generous man who supported the Wahhabist, or more orthodox, groups by arranging funding, transport, and training for thousands of Saudis and Arab-speaking volunteers. Bin Laden had no association with, nor did he have any need of, the CIA to run his organization out of its little guesthouse in Peshawar. Azzam and bin Laden had ample funding from Muslim individuals and charities, so they had no use of income tainted by the infidels' touch.

In order to keep track of the hundreds of fighters who came to train and fight, and in order to notify relatives of their martyrdom, the group kept a close accounting of the volunteer jihadis who came and went. This bookkeeping, with its copious list of dedicated Islamist fighters from around the world, soon became a great resource for what is now referred to as al-Qaeda—an old-boys network that has disturbing echoes of the lists used by the CIA to recruit former Special Forces as contractors.

The ISI military strategy against the Soviets relied on the assumption that they planned to create and defend a series of major military bases or strategic towns and the routes between them. As expected, the Soviets stayed out of the countryside, keeping their central redoubt at Bagram, north of Kabul. They set up fortified firebases and sent out patrols to choke off supplies and interdict fighters entering from Pakistan. Surveilling the base and estimating troop strength, patrols, resupplies, and time for emergency air support, the muj would regularly besiege and overrun these garrisons. The mujahideen were careful to never expose themselves to traditional battles in which they might lose, only striking long enough for a deadly surprising initial blow, and then disappearing in a safe retreat. They used the lessons of General Giap in French Indochina as their model—the same tactics that defeated the Americans in Vietnam simply by embroiling them in a bloody and expensive guerrilla war. No one battle defeated the Russians, but it was the long, costly, unpopular war that ultimately forced a Soviet retreat.

The mujahideen used these tactics against the Russians as they now use them against the Americans. In this war, the few modern developments on the ground are the Thuraya satellite phone and the remote-control detonator (usually a car key remote or radio transmitter). The funding of the anti-Soviet jihad created much of the system, the funding conduits, the training, the players, and the tactics that are being used to repel and harass the U.S. troops today. The parallels are striking: today, U.S. policy supports a friendly government and trains an indigenous army (like the Russians), and shies away from intensive ground involvement (as did the Russians), preferring to fly from central bases and to stay in fortified compounds (as the Russians did). The major differences currently are the massive number of NGOs operating with Western agendas, the lack of attention to the educational system, the use of security contractors, the absence of an immense influx of covert funds to support the foreign “invader” of Afghanistan, and the deliberate lack of names for the groups that attack Westerners and their proxies. The Americans view their mere presence in Afghanistan as a victory. The insurgents, however, see tying down the Americans and bleeding their resources as winning. After all, every Afghan will tell you, How long did it take for us to defeat the British? How long did it take us to send the Russians packing? Similarly, the war against the perceived American occupation of Afghanistan could become one of generations and timeless revenge.

The basic propaganda elements of jihad were fixed during the war against the Soviet Union. The mujahideen viewed America, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia as allies but claim full credit for the power of religion and conviction in defeating the Russians and their puppet government. To the Afghans, the war provided one more example of how their country acts as a graveyard for foreign aggressors, even though foreign aggressors supplied the money and weapons to defeat another foreign aggressor. Most Afghan men between thirty and sixty can relate dramatic tales of dead Russians, crashed helicopters, burning convoys, and violent counterattacks. Every Afghan speaks of the jihad with pride, and the experience has provided a wellspring of nationalism. They conveniently forget that in the mid-1990s, after the Russians had left, the same holy warriors destroyed Kabul and massacred its people. Many of these fundamentalist factions provide sustenance for the jihad against the Americans today in Afghanistan, and few locals have forgotten bin Laden's contributions as a mujahideen during the war.