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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Fri Jun 10 2011 - 09:04:06 EDT
Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater’s Founder
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Adam Ferguson/VII Network
Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, has a new project.
By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/mark_mazzetti/
index.html?inline=nyt-per> MARK MAZZETTI and
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/emily_b_hager/
index.html?inline=nyt-per> EMILY B. HAGER
Published: May 14, 2011
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Late one night last November, a plane
carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside
capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the
group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept
military complex in the desert sand.
The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction
workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary
army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/blackwater_usa/index.
html?inline=nyt-org> Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the
oil-soaked sheikdom.
Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced
mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince
of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for
the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials
and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.
The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and
outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist
attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could
be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or
were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world
this year.
The U.A.E.’s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope
that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s
biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a
sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete
walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow
temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool,
which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South
African and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers
and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the
French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American
officials.
In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers
of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African
dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime
contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on
a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile
element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely
viewed with suspicion.
The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive,
modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American
officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in
Washington.
“The gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don’t have a lot of
military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their
borders for help,” said one Obama administration official who knew of the
operation. “They might want to show that they are not to be messed with.”
Still, it is not clear whether the project has the United States’ official
blessing. Legal experts and government officials said some of those involved
with the battalion might be breaking federal laws that prohibit American
citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from
the State Department.
Mark C. Toner, a spokesman for the department, would not confirm whether Mr.
Prince’s company had obtained such a license, but he said the department was
investigating to see if the training effort was in violation of American
laws. Mr. Toner pointed out that Blackwater (which renamed itself Xe
Services ) paid $42 million in fines last year for training foreign troops
in Jordan and other countries over the years.
The U.A.E.’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, declined to comment
for this article. A spokesman for Mr. Prince also did not comment.
For Mr. Prince, the foreign battalion is a bold attempt at reinvention. He
is hoping to build an empire in the desert, far from the trial lawyers,
Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials he is convinced
worked in league to portray Blackwater as reckless. He sold the company last
year, but in April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four
Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.
To help fulfill his ambitions, Mr. Prince’s new company, Reflex Responses,
obtained another multimillion-dollar contract to protect a string of planned
nuclear power plants and to provide cybersecurity. He hopes to earn billions
more, the former employees said, by assembling additional battalions of
Latin American troops for the Emiratis and opening a giant complex where his
company can train troops for other governments.
Knowing that his ventures are magnets for controversy, Mr. Prince has masked
his involvement with the mercenary battalion. His name is not included on
contracts and most other corporate documents, and company insiders have at
times tried to hide his identity by referring to him by the code name
“Kingfish.” But three former employees, speaking on the condition of
anonymity because of confidentiality agreements, and two people involved in
security contracting described Mr. Prince’s central role.
The former employees said that in recruiting the Colombians and others from
halfway around the world, Mr. Prince’s subordinates were following his
strict rule: hire no Muslims.
Muslim soldiers, Mr. Prince warned, could not be counted on to kill fellow
Muslims.
A Lucrative Deal
Last spring, as waiters in the lobby of the Park Arjaan by Rotana Hotel
passed by carrying cups of Turkish coffee, a small team of Blackwater and
American military veterans huddled over plans for the foreign battalion.
Armed with a black suitcase stuffed with several hundred thousand dollars’
worth of dirhams, the local currency, they began paying the first bills.
The company, often called R2, was licensed last March with 51 percent local
ownership, a typical arrangement in the Emirates. It received about $21
million in start-up capital from the U.A.E., the former employees said.
Mr. Prince made the deal with Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown
prince of Abu Dhabi and the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. The
two men had known each other for several years, and it was the prince’s idea
to build a foreign commando force for his country.
Savvy and pro-Western, the prince was educated at the Sandhurst military
academy in Britain and formed close ties with American military officials.
He is also one of the region’s staunchest hawks on Iran and is skeptical
that his giant neighbor across the Strait of Hormuz will give up its nuclear
program.
“He sees the logic of war dominating the region, and this thinking explains
his near-obsessive efforts to build up his armed forces,” said a November
2009 cable from the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi that was obtained by the
anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
For Mr. Prince, a 41-year-old former member of the Navy Seals, the battalion
was an opportunity to turn vision into reality. At Blackwater, which had
collected billions of dollars in security contracts from the United States
government, he had hoped to build an army for hire that could be deployed to
crisis zones in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He even had proposed that
the Central Intelligence Agency use his company for special operations
missions around the globe, but to no avail. In Abu Dhabi, which he praised
in an Emirati newspaper interview last year for its “pro-business” climate,
he got another chance.
Mr. Prince’s exploits, both real and rumored, are the subject of fevered
discussions in the private security world. He has worked with the Emirati
government on various ventures in the past year, including an operation
using South African mercenaries to train Somalis to fight pirates. There was
talk, too, that he was hatching a scheme last year to cap the Icelandic
volcano then spewing ash across Northern Europe.
The team in the hotel lobby was led by Ricky Chambers, known as C. T., a
former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had worked for Mr.
Prince for years; most recently, he had run a program training Afghan troops
for a Blackwater subsidiary called Paravant.
He was among the half-dozen or so Americans who would serve as top managers
of the project, receiving nearly $300,000 in annual compensation. Mr.
Chambers and Mr. Prince soon began quietly luring American contractors from
Afghanistan, Iraq and other danger spots with pay packages that topped out
at more than $200,000 a year, according to a budget document. Many of those
who signed on as trainers — which eventually included more than 40 veteran
American, European and South African commandos — did not know of Mr.
Prince’s involvement, the former employees said.
Mr. Chambers did not respond to requests for comment.
He and Mr. Prince also began looking for soldiers. They lined up Thor Global
Enterprises, a company on the Caribbean island of Tortola specializing in
“placing foreign servicemen in private security positions overseas,”
according to a contract signed last May. The recruits would be paid about
$150 a day.
Within months, large tracts of desert were bulldozed and barracks
constructed. The Emirates were to provide weapons and equipment for the
mercenary force, supplying everything from M-16 rifles to mortars,
Leatherman knives to Land Rovers. They agreed to buy parachutes,
motorcycles, rucksacks — and 24,000 pairs of socks.
To keep a low profile, Mr. Prince rarely visited the camp or a cluster of
luxury villas near the Abu Dhabi airport, where R2 executives and Emirati
military officers fine-tune the training schedules and arrange weapons
deliveries for the battalion, former employees said. He would show up, they
said, in an office suite at the DAS Tower — a skyscraper just steps from Abu
Dhabi’s Corniche beach, where sunbathers lounge as cigarette boats and water
scooters whiz by. Staff members there manage a number of companies that the
former employees say are carrying out secret work for the Emirati
government.
Emirati law prohibits disclosure of incorporation records for businesses,
which typically list company officers, but it does require them to post
company names on offices and storefronts. Over the past year, the sign
outside the suite has changed at least twice — it now says Assurance
Management Consulting.
While the documents — including contracts, budget sheets and blueprints —
obtained by The Times do not mention Mr. Prince, the former employees said
he negotiated the U.A.E. deal. Corporate documents describe the battalion’s
possible tasks: intelligence gathering, urban combat, the securing of
nuclear and radioactive materials, humanitarian missions and special
operations “to destroy enemy personnel and equipment.”
One document describes “crowd-control operations” where the crowd “is not
armed with firearms but does pose a risk using improvised weapons (clubs and
stones).”
People involved in the project and American officials said that the Emiratis
were interested in deploying the battalion to respond to terrorist attacks
and put down uprisings inside the country’s sprawling labor camps, which
house the Pakistanis, Filipinos and other foreigners who make up the bulk of
the country’s work force. The foreign military force was planned months
before the so-called Arab Spring revolts that many experts believe are
unlikely to spread to the U.A.E. Iran was a particular concern.
An Eye on Iran
Although there was no expectation that the mercenary troops would be used
for a stealth attack on Iran, Emirati officials talked of using them for a
possible maritime and air assault to reclaim a chain of islands, mostly
uninhabited, in the Persian Gulf that are the subject of a dispute between
Iran and the U.A.E., the former employees said. Iran has sent military
forces to at least one of the islands, Abu Musa, and Emirati officials have
long been eager to retake the islands and tap their potential oil reserves.
The Emirates have a small military that includes army, air force and naval
units as well as a small special operations contingent, which served in
Afghanistan, but over all, their forces are considered inexperienced.
In recent years, the Emirati government has showered American defense
companies with billions of dollars to help strengthen the country’s
security. A company run by Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism
adviser during the Clinton and Bush administrations, has won several
lucrative contracts to advise the U.A.E. on how to protect its
infrastructure.
Some security consultants believe that Mr. Prince’s efforts to bolster the
Emirates’ defenses against an Iranian threat might yield some benefits for
the American government, which shares the U.A.E.’s concern about creeping
Iranian influence in the region.
“As much as Erik Prince is a pariah in the United States, he may be just
what the doctor ordered in the U.A.E.,” said an American security consultant
with knowledge of R2’s work.
The contract includes a one-paragraph legal and ethics policy noting that R2
should institute accountability and disciplinary procedures. “The overall
goal,” the contract states, “is to ensure that the team members supporting
this effort continuously cast the program in a professional and moral light
that will hold up to a level of media scrutiny.”
But former employees said that R2’s leaders never directly grappled with
some fundamental questions about the operation. International laws governing
private armies and mercenaries are murky, but would the Americans overseeing
the training of a foreign army on foreign soil be breaking United States
law?
Susan Kovarovics, an international trade lawyer who advises companies about
export controls, said that because Reflex Responses was an Emirati company
it might not need State Department authorization for its activities.
But she said that any Americans working on the project might run legal risks
if they did not get government approval to participate in training the
foreign troops.
Basic operational issues, too, were not addressed, the former employees
said. What were the battalion’s rules of engagement? What if civilians were
killed during an operation? And could a Latin American commando force
deployed in the Middle East really be kept a secret?
Imported Soldiers
The first waves of mercenaries began arriving last summer. Among them was a
13-year veteran of Colombia’s National Police force named Calixto Rincón,
42, who joined the operation with hopes of providing for his family and
seeing a new part of the world.
“We were practically an army for the Emirates,” Mr. Rincón, now back in
Bogotá, Colombia, said in an interview. “They wanted people who had a lot of
experience in countries with conflicts, like Colombia.”
Mr. Rincón’s visa carried a special stamp from the U.A.E. military
intelligence branch, which is overseeing the entire project, that allowed
him to move through customs and
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_
and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> immigration without being
questioned.
He soon found himself in the midst of the camp’s daily routines, which
mirrored those of American military training. “We would get up at 5 a.m. and
we would start physical exercises,” Mr. Rincón said. His assignment included
manual labor at the expanding complex, he said. Other former employees said
the troops — outfitted in Emirati military uniforms — were split into
companies to work on basic infantry maneuvers, learn navigation skills and
practice sniper training.
R2 spends roughly $9 million per month maintaining the battalion, which
includes expenditures for employee salaries, ammunition and wages for dozens
of domestic workers who cook meals, wash clothes and clean the camp, a
former employee said. Mr. Rincón said that he and his companions never
wanted for anything, and that their American leaders even arranged to have a
chef travel from Colombia to make traditional soups.
But the secrecy of the project has sometimes created a prisonlike
environment. “We didn’t have permission to even look through the door,” Mr.
Rincón said. “We were only allowed outside for our morning jog, and all we
could see was sand everywhere.”
The Emirates wanted the troops to be ready to deploy just weeks after
stepping off the plane, but it quickly became clear that the Colombians’
military skills fell far below expectations. “Some of these kids couldn’t
hit the broad side of a barn,” said a former employee. Other recruits
admitted to never having fired a weapon.
Rethinking Roles
As a result, the veteran American and foreign commandos training the
battalion have had to rethink their roles. They had planned to act only as
“advisers” during missions — meaning they would not fire weapons — but over
time, they realized that they would have to fight side by side with their
troops, former officials said.
Making matters worse, the recruitment pipeline began drying up. Former
employees said that Thor struggled to sign up, and keep, enough men on the
ground. Mr. Rincón developed a hernia and was forced to return to Colombia,
while others were dismissed from the program for drug use or poor conduct.
And R2’s own corporate leadership has also been in flux. Mr. Chambers, who
helped develop the project, left after several months. A handful of other
top executives, some of them former Blackwater employees, have been hired,
then fired within weeks.
To bolster the force, R2 recruited a platoon of South African mercenaries,
including some veterans of Executive Outcomes, a South African company
notorious for suppressing rebellions against African strongmen in the 1990s.
The platoon was to function as a quick-reaction force, American officials
and former employees said, and began training for a practice mission: a
terrorist attack on the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, the world’s
tallest building. They would secure the situation before quietly handing
over control to Emirati troops.
But by last November, the battalion was officially behind schedule. The
original goal was for the 800-man force to be ready by March 31; recently,
former employees said, the battalion’s size was reduced to about 580 men.
Emirati military officials had promised that if this first battalion was a
success, they would pay for an entire brigade of several thousand men. The
new contracts would be worth billions, and would help with Mr. Prince’s next
big project: a desert training complex for foreign troops patterned after
Blackwater’s compound in Moyock, N.C. But before moving ahead, U.A.E.
military officials have insisted that the battalion prove itself in a “real
world mission.”
That has yet to happen. So far, the Latin American troops have been taken
off the base only to shop and for occasional entertainment.
On a recent spring night though, after months stationed in the desert, they
boarded an unmarked bus and were driven to hotels in central Dubai, a former
employee said. There, some R2 executives had arranged for them to spend the
evening with prostitutes.
Mark Mazzetti reported from Abu Dhabi and Washington, and Emily B. Hager
from New York. Jenny Carolina González and Simon Romero contributed
reporting from Bogotá, Colombia. Kitty Bennett contributed research from
Washington.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 19, 2011
An article on Sunday about the creation of a mercenary battalion in the
United Arab Emirates misstated the past work of Executive Outcomes, a former
South African mercenary firm whose veterans have been recruited for the new
battalion. Executive Outcomes was hired by several African governments
during the 1990s to put down rebellions and protect oil and diamond
reserves; it did not stage coup attempts. (Some former Executive Outcomes
employees participated in a 2004 coup attempt against the government of
Equatorial Guinea, several years after the company itself shut down.)
Correction: June 7, 2011
An article on May 15 about efforts to build a battalion of foreign mercenary
troops in the United Arab Emirates referred imprecisely to the role played
by Erik Prince, the founder of the security firm Blackwater Worldwide. He
worked to oversee the effort and recruit troops. But Mr. Prince does not run
or own the company Reflex Responses, which has a contract with the
government of the U.A.E. to train and deliver the troops, according to the
company president, Michael Roumi. An article on May 16 repeated the error.
Multimedia
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Doug Mills/The New York Times
Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi hired Erik Prince to build a
fighting force.
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IN THE SAND The training camp for the foreign force, located on an Emirati
military base, includes barracks for the soldiers.
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THE PAPER TRAIL A collection of documents about the secret army includes
recruits’ permits. Some details have been obscured.
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GeoEye, via Google Earth
A satellite image of the camp in the United Arab Emirates built to train an
800-member military unit.
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The army is based in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, but
will serve all the emirates.
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