Private armies, private fortunes, public shame

Bob Briton

Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman was a regular visitor to 
Australia in the 1980s. The guru of supply side economics and 
"monetarism" was riding the wave of the right-wing ideological 
offensive that is still with us today. His "Chicago Boys" 
followers had just been put to work on the Chilean economy by the 
fascist dictator General Augusto Pinochet. The need to assist the 
privatising and deregulating efforts of the Hawke Government and 
various state governments brought him to our shores.

During one of his visits, the iconoclastic promoter of "small 
government" and private enterprise was charming a lunchtime 
gathering at the National Press Club in Canberra. A journalist 
had just asked a question that he, no doubt, thought had found a 
chink in the professor's armour. "Would you advocate the 
privatisation of our nation's armed forces?" There was some 
hearty laughter in the audience based on the belief — still 
widespread at the time — that it would be ludicrous to entrust 
something so basic and sensitive as national defence and the 
pursuit of foreign policy to bodies driven, above all, by the 
need to turn the biggest buck possible.

"Certainly!" came the reply. Friedman proceeded to advocate the 
contracting out of these functions as soon as possible. The 
professor lost the confidence of much of his audience that day 
with the outrageous suggestion that the state should trust 
corporations to run private armies. To any reasonable person, the 
possibility that such corporations would begin to act in their 
own interests and against the public interest was too obvious to 
be ignored.

Fast forward to Iraq

Today in Iraq, there are several dozen groups with more than 
20,000 employees providing "security" to both the military and 
the private sector. The recruits to these companies receive many 
times their usual salary in their home countries and the 
companies that hire them are making profits not seen since the 
early days of the dot-com era.

Iraq is a corporate El Dorado. Companies favoured by the Bush 
Administration, such as Bechtel and Halliburton, are going about 
their job of rebuilding Iraq's oil, transport and other 
infrastructure in the most wasteful (and profitable) way 
imaginable. They are awarded contracts on a "costs plus" basis, 
i.e. they are reimbursed for their expenses and paid an 
additional percentage of whatever they spend. Such a contract is 
a licence to overcharge.

This system has led to a situation where, on the one hand, US 
soldiers do not have sufficient bullet-proof vests to go around 
and sleep in tents at a cost to the tax payer of US$1.39 a day. 
On the other hand, Halliburton subsidiary KBR will abandon brand 
new trucks valued at US$85,000 rather than change the oil or 
repair a tyre and will put its staff up at the five-star 
Kempinski Hotel at a cost of US$10,000 per employee per month.

Military contractors are in the top ranks of those growing fat on 
the "War on Terrorism". CACI, one of the contractors implicated 
in the sickening abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, 
reported a 37 percent surge in net income last April. For the 
first 12 months of the occupation, all contracts were evaluated 
by a group of six men and women in their 20s who were selected on 
the basis of risumis they posted on the website of a right wing 
"think tank" called The Heritage Foundation.

While the staff of the Defence Contract Audit Agency are supposed 
to maintain an oversight on these contracts, it is widely 
recognised that they have no hope — if, indeed, they were ever 
intended to have such a hope — of overseeing the many contracts 
being issued. And while the Military Extraterritorial 
Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) was supposed to keep the behaviour of 
mercenaries in check, the whole world now knows that the private 
military is pretty much a law unto itself.

Blurring the lines

"Guns for hire", "soldiers of fortune", mercenaries — call them 
what you will — date back to ancient times. However, in Iraq we 
are seeing rapid advances toward the fulfilment of Milton 
Friedman's dream of a modern, private military.

The Abu Ghraib scandal lifted the lid on the fact that private 
companies are now doing some of the most sensitive work 
previously carried on exclusively by the official US Armed 
Forces. The previously mentioned CACI and fellow defence 
contractor Titan were supposed to be providing staff support and 
translation services respectively at the jail. It turns out that 
their staff were involved in the interrogation of prisoners and 
implicated in the torture, rape and in some instances summary 
execution of detainees.

Eyebrows in the traditional US military were raised last year 
when the "security" contractor Erinys started recruiting large 
numbers of "guards" from the Free Iraqi Forces, the army group 
formed by the now out-of-favour Ahmed Chalabi. Erinys now has 
15,000 employees and is officially charged with protecting Iraq's 
oil infrastructure.

Another contractor, Aegis, has 75 "close protection teams" of 
eight men each offering security to the personnel of a host of 
other private corporations. It will link up with the services of 
50 other private "security" firms. A spokesman for the US Army, 
Major Gary Tallman, told Corpwatch, "Their job is to disseminate 
information and provide guidance and coordination throughout the 
four regions of Iraq."

With a brief as broad as that, it is small wonder that some of 
the military top brass are starting to worry about the rise of 
the private military. They know that the "security" firms now 
infesting Iraq are not made up of out-of-work nightclub bouncers 
providing services akin to those offered by Chubb or Wormalds.

Who are these people?

Liberal commentators in the US regularly write about the "screw 
ups" of those in charge of handing out defence contracts. The 
waste and outrageous behaviour of the "security" companies never 
cease to surprise these scribes. Doubtful outfits keep getting 
awarded fat, juicy contracts despite the notoriety of the people 
at the top of them. "Didn't anyone do a Google* on these guys?" 
is apparently a common refrain.

If these people are sincere, it is about time that they faced up 
to the possibility that very disreputable people are put in 
charge of important military tasks because of their gruesome 
track record and not in spite of it. The "security" firms in 
question are top heavy with former intelligence officers from the 
armed forces of Western countries and former soldiers of "elite" 
fighting forces like the UK's Special Air Services (SAS).

Jude McCulloch had the following to say in her book Blue Army 
about the glue that binds this type of unit together:

"The all-male SAS is considered 'elite' amongst army units, and 
ordinary soldiers tend to view SAS soldiers as 'super-grunts' or 
'super-soldiers'. Soldiers generally find killing difficult 
because of the strong inhibitions most people have against taking 
human life. The rare 'natural soldiers', the 2 per cent of the 
population predisposed towards psychopathic tendencies, are found 
'mostly congregating in the commando-type special force 
[units]'."**

Members of this precious two percent have been defecting from 
their prestigious special forces units after receiving their 
expensive training (valued at US$3 million in the case of the 
UK's SAS). They are signing up with one or other of the many 
private contractors willing to pay them as much as US$250,000 per 
annum.

They have come from the discontinued repressive apparatus of 
South Africa's apartheid regime — from the Koevoet, a 
notoriously brutal counterinsurgency arm of the military and the 
Vlakplaas secret police. They are from the Civil Co-operation 
Bureaux that assisted Savimbi's UNITA forces in Angola, fed false 
information to the press and carried out assassinations of 
leading figures of the African National Congress.

They have also come from the CIA and the US Special Forces. Many 
of these people are rumoured to keep in touch about new 
adventures at the Special Forces Club at 8 Herbert Crescent in 
Central London. They can even check in to the Donovan Room, named 
after "Wild Bill" Donovan, the founder of the CIA's predecessor 
the Office of Strategic Services.

Typical mercenary leader

Typical of this latest generation of mercenary leader is Tim 
Spicer, head of the previously mentioned Aegis Defence Services. 
Aegis has just been awarded a US $293 million Pentagon contract 
to coordinate "security" in Iraq. However "Aegis" is only the 
latest mercenary venture of the irrepressible Brit.

The former Lieutenant Colonel of the Scots Guards saw service in 
the Falklands and was the commander in Belfast of two soldiers 
convicted in 1992 of the murder of an unarmed 18-year-old 
Catholic youth named Peter McBride. To this day, Spicer defends 
the reputations of the convicted killers and of the unit, which 
had a name for torture in Northern Ireland. He saw service 
briefly in Gulf War I and was a spokesman for the UN Forces in 
Bosnia.

Spicer left the forces to set up a mercenary outfit called 
Sandline. Army buddies like Richard "Tarzan" Bethel and Alistair 
Morrison followed a similar path with their Defence Systems 
Limited. Morrison subsequently joined forces with Sean Cleary, an 
apartheid-era official linked to UNITA, to form the huge Erinys 
concern.

Sandline came to the attention of people in our region in 1997 
when Papua New Guinea's Defence Forces chief General Jerry 
Singarok led the protests that brought down Prime Minister Julius 
Chan. The disgraced PM had given Sandline a $36 million contract 
to put down the independence struggle on Bougainville.

Spicer sized up the Bougainville job when he visited the troubled 
territory as part of an AusAid delegation. He landed an estimated 
170 "security" personnel with their equipment (including attack 
helicopters!) aboard Antonov 12 and 124 aircraft.

Working alongside "peacemakers" from the Pretoria-based Executive 
Outcomes, the Sandline mercenaries proceeded to attack the people 
of Bougainville with everything they had. They used chemical 
weapons and were set to use devastating fuel air bombs and 
conduct psychological warfare [Operation Oyster] when the PNG 
General called a halt to the privatisation of his war. Spicer was 
arrested and detained.

The British Embassy intervened to save Spicer's hide on that 
occasion. It seems the "unorthodox soldier" had walked into a 
situation he had underestimated in terms of complexity. Not only 
were the PNG Defence Forces not yet ready to allow the 
outsourcing of their functions, it seems that future private 
"peacekeeping" action in the region had already been promised to 
a US company called Military Professional Resources Inc.

Sandline bobbed up next in 1998 in Africa, where around 90 other 
private armies were busy providing "security". The company was 
contracted to sell 30 tons of arms to the forces of Ahmad Tejan 
Kabbah, the former leader of Sierra Leone. This activity was in 
contravention of a UN embargo on the sale of arms to both sides 
of the conflict. Spicer denies having done anything illegal and 
boasts that he had the co-operation of Craig Murray, a junior 
staffer at the British Foreign Office, for his exploits.

It turns out Spicer had been contracted by an Indian-born Thai 
national hiding out in Canada who wanted to have his diamond and 
bauxite mining concessions in Sierra Leone returned to him. This 
would involve the restoration of the corrupt former President. 
Spicer carried out his services while the anxious Rakesh Saxena 
was in detention and awaiting extradition to Thailand to face 
charges of embezzlement. As well as delivering the arms via the 
Boeing 727 aircraft of Ibis Air (the air arm of Executive 
Outcomes), he trained 40,000 of Kabbah's militia fighters.

With the collaboration of the Nigerian military, Spicer's side of 
the war eventually prevailed in 1998. Doug Brooks, head of the 
mercenary peak council, the International Peace Operations 
Association, summed things up this way: "Sandline was remarkably 
effective. Their goal of restoring the democratically elected 
government was achieved. They maintained a low profile but played 
a critical role in the success."

Spicer, however, was not happy. Other mercenary outfits were 
doing much better for themselves out of the latter-day scramble 
for the territory and resources of Africa. Some were getting part 
of the oil, diamond and other resource wealth that they captured 
as payment for their services. In 2000, he quit Sandline and left 
the following note on the company website:

"Sandline International wishes to announce that the company is 
closing down its operations forthwith. The general lack of 
government support for Private Military Companies willing to help 
end armed conflicts in places like Africa, in the absence of 
effective international intervention, is the principal reason 
behind Sandline's decision. Without such support the ability of 
Sandline (and other PMCs) to make a positive difference in 
countries where there is widespread brutality and even genocidal 
behaviour is irretrievably diminished."

After a number of lower key engagements, the "can do" Spicer now 
has his men on the ground in Iraq, ready for more philanthropic 
work, thanks to a US$293 million contract from the Pentagon.

Unaccountable by design

In his autobiography, Spicer set out this sanitised version of 
his credo:

"Sandline has five basic principles: we only work for legitimate 
governments, we will do nothing illegal, even for those 
governments; we will do nothing against key Western nations' 
foreign policies; we apply First World standards to all our 
military work, including respect for human rights; and we ensure 
client confidentiality."

It is hard to take much of this seriously in the case of 
Sandline, its successor or the other PMCs so highly regarded by 
Tim Spicer. In 2000, US legislators were obliged to pass the 
Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act in response to 
revelations about the behaviour of Dyncorp in Bosnia. The 
Virginia-based company was found to have established prostitution 
rings in the former Yugoslav republic. Employees of the company 
avoided rape charges because of the jurisdiction conflicts of the 
case. Incidentally, Dyncorp is now in charge of training the 
Iraqi police.

Last week a private contractor hired by the CIA was indicted by a 
federal grand jury in North Carolina for the two-day beating of a 
prisoner who had surrendered in Afghanistan. The prisoner 
subsequently died. Unfortunately, this example is an exception 
that proves the rule of immunity for private contractors. In the 
infamous Abu Ghraib case, while two Marines and one Army 
reservist have been given prison sentences and six other services 
members are facing trial, not one of the contractors has been 
charged.

This shielding of the mercenaries is no accident. If the gravy 
train that is private "security" and other military services is 
to continue to roll, if more and more of the shameful detail of 
US and allied foreign policy is to be kept "commercial in 
confidence", if the vision of giant private corporate armies 
protecting other giant corporations is to reach its potential, 
that is how it is how it has got to be.

* * *

*For readers who are not familiar with the internet, "Google" 
is the name of a popular search engine for finding information on 
the internet.
b
**McCulloch, Jude Blue Army — paramilitary policing in 
Australia, Melbourne University Press, 2001

Acknowledgements: http://www.warprofiteers.com www.corpwatch.org