Privatizing War
How affairs of state are outsourced to corporations beyond public control.By Ken Silverstein
The Nation, July 28, 1997
The history of American foreign and military policy abounds with deception and scandal, with shadowy actors, monied interests and efforts to keep the public out of what are properly public decisions. Now those efforts have taken an unprecedented turn in scale and degree. Privatization, the process by which the responsibilities of government are transferred to unaccountable corporate hands, now occupies the halls of warmaking.
With little public knowledge or debate, the government has been dispatching private companies -- most of them with tight links to the Pentagon and staffed by retired armed forces personnel -- to provide military and police training to America's foreign allies. The government has also vastly expanded the use of private firms to support its own overseas military operations, including top-secret antidrug actions in Latin America, intelligence gathering and military assistance programs for U.S. clients.
The firms themselves are not eager to discuss their activities. Nor is the State Department's Office of Defense Trade Controls, which oversees much of the emerging field and which rejected my request for an on-the-record interview. A State Department official told me he could provide very little information even on background because of the need to protect the "proprietary information" of the companies involved (a loophole that makes the Freedom of Information Act in effect useless in this area). As a result, much information remains hidden behind government claims of secrecy or locked in the companies' accounting books.
But based on the testimony of those who will speak -- and most agreed to talk only on background or not for attribution -- it is clear that dozens of companies, ranging from a $1 billion high-tech giant like SAIC to small-scale operations run by retired Green Berets, are offering military training and related assistance to foreign governments at the bidding of the United States. "The [private training] programs are designed to further our foreign policy objectives," says a former high-level official at the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.). "If the government doesn't sanction it, the companies don't do it."
Among the big-league players are Military Professional Resources Inc. (M.P.R.I.), which is training two Balkan armies and seeks to expand into Africa; Vinnell, which trains the Saudi Arabian National Guard; and Betac, which works closely with the Pentagon's secretive Special Operations Command, which engages in covert activities in the Third World.
The corporate-government connection in such activities was given fine illustration on June 24, when the D.I.A. sponsored a closed-door symposium, "The Privatization of National Security Functions in Sub-Saharan Africa." On hand were M.P.R.I. and other U.S. private contractors, as well as Eeben Barlow, head of South Africa's notorious Executive Outcomes, which in the past few years has provided mercenaries to the governments of Angola and Sierra Leone, and Timothy Spicer of Sandline International, a British company whose hiring in January by the government of Papua New Guinea angered its army and sparked a coup. Spicer was accompanied by Sandline's U.S. representative, Bernie McCabe, a former Army Special Forces officer. The D.I.A. slapped a nonattribution policy on the event, but one participant told me, "There was a consensus among government officials and the companies that this sort of activity is going to greatly increase during the next few years."
The government defends its use of private firms, and says it would never allow them to dispatch mercenaries in support of a foreign government, as do Executive Outcomes and Sandline. "Training a military is a lot more than teaching guys how to shoot guns straight," says a State Department official, who spoke on condition that he not be identified. "The companies offer instruction in how to run a military in a democracy, subordination to civilian control and respect for human rights."
That explanation sounds suspiciously similar to the Pentagon's rationale for the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, where thousands of Latin American soldiers were supposedly trained to respect human rights only to launch vigorous careers as war criminals once they returned home. An alternative explanation is that the use of private military contractors allows the United States to pursue its geopolitical interests without deploying its own army, this being especially useful in cases where training is provided to regimes with ghastly records on human rights. "It's foreign policy by proxy," says Dan Nelson, formerly a top foreign policy adviser to Representative Richard Gephardt and now a professor at Old Dominion University. "Corporate entities are used to perform tasks that the government, for budgetary reasons or political sensitivities, cannot carry out."
The current situation differs in both scope and size from past practice, most famously revealed in the Iran/contra scandal. Here, the firms most heavily involved are not C.I.A. cutouts chiefly engaged in covert operations but multimillion-dollar corporations with diverse interests. Their work is sanctioned in the course of the ordinary business of government agencies and implemented not by foreign locals trained by the C.I.A. but by high-ranking U.S. military officers fresh out of the armed forces. Before offering military assistance to foreign governments, corporations must first apply for a license from the State Department's Office of Defense Trade Controls. "License requests are very carefully reviewed," an official at SAIC told me. "Even when you're just at the talking stage, there is a very high level of scrutiny."
The shrinking of the cold war military bureaucracy -- troop levels are down about 30 percent since the end of the cold war -- has pushed huge numbers of military veterans, from top brass to foot soldiers, into the private sector. The only marketable skill many of these people have is military and paramilitary expertise.
James Woods, who retired as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs in 1994 and now works as a Washington lobbyist at Cohen & Woods International, told me that numerous outfits headed by former Special Forces personnel seek to market military training to foreign governments. These firms, many of which are set up near domestic military bases, "basically consist of a retired military guy sitting in a spare bedroom with a fax machine and a Rolodex," he explains. "They serve as a gateway to the large pool of retired military personnel. When they are in between jobs there's not much to do."
But while this soldier-of-fortune element occupies a niche, it has had more and more difficulty landing anything beyond small-scale consulting contracts on counterterrorism or deals to provide protection for visiting V.I.P.s. For projects of scale, the freelance warriors have lost out badly to well-connected corporations stocked with elite government and military retired officials. As one Pentagon staffer told me, "Privatization is another way to reward the alumni." It's the revolving door all over again:
§ At M.P.R.I., twenty-two corporate officers are former high-ranking military figures. These include Gen. Carl Vuono, U.S. Army Chief of Staff during the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War; Gen. Ed Soyster, former head of the D.I.A.; and Gen. Frederick Kroesen, former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe.
§ Vinnell is owned by B.D.M., a Beltway megacompany controlled by the Carlyle Group, an investment firm headed by former Secretary of State James Baker, former White House budget chief Richard Darman and former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. B.D.M.'s president, Philip Odeen, headed the Pentagon task force on reshaping the military for the twenty-first century.
§ Board members at SAIC have included two former defense secretaries, William Perry and Melvin Laird, and two former C.I.A. chiefs, John Deutch and Robert Gates.
For the government, privatization offers a number of advantages. In addition to providing plausible deniability about overseas entanglements, it allows Washington to shed military personnel while simultaneously retaining the capacity to influence and direct huge missions. Firms on contract can train an entire foreign army. By contrast, the Pentagon's International Military and Education Training Program (IMET) generally provides instruction to no more than a few dozen soldiers. The largest current IMET effort is in Honduras, where 266 soldiers and officers are being trained. "Private companies augment our ability to provide foreign training," says retired Lieut. Gen. Larry Skibbie, now at the American Defense Preparedness Association. "We'll see more and more of this as we continue to cut back on our uniformed forces."
When it comes to military training, the biggest player is M.P.R.I. Based in Alexandria, Virginia, the company was founded in 1987 by retired Army Gen. Vernon Lewis. A brochure boasts that M.P.R.I. -- which maintains a computer database with the names of 2,000 retired armed forces personnel -- houses "The World's Greatest Corporate Military Expertise" and has "business cells and/or field representatives at military installations across the U.S. and in overseas locations."
Last year the Bosnian government picked M.P.R.I. -- over competing bids from SAIC and B.D.M. -- to train its armed forces. The $400 million program is being paid for largely by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Brunei and Malaysia. The stated aim of the training effort, which is being supplemented with large-scale shipments of U.S. weapons to the Bosnian Army, is to deter Serbia's better-armed military. But with Serbia's army in disarray, many observers of the region increasingly worry that a newly trained and equipped Bosnian Army will be emboldened to attack Serbian forces after international forces withdraw, as they are scheduled to do next year.
M.P.R.I. also offers advice and training to the Croatian military, a relationship that began in April 1995 at one of the most intense periods of fighting in the Balkan war. M.P.R.I. dispatched a team to Croatia, headed by a number of retired officers, including General Vuono, Gen. Richard Griffitts and Gen. Crosbie Saint, who from 1988 to 1992 commanded the U.S. Army in Europe. A State Department spokesman, John Dinger, has said that M.P.R.I. helped the Croatians "avoid excesses or atrocities in military operations." M.P.R.I.'s spokesman, the retired D.I.A. chief Ed Soyster, told me that the company merely "offered advice about the role of the army in a democratic society."
"The Croatians hope to join NATO," he added, "and if you want to join the club you have to look like the members."
Just months after M.P.R.I. went into Croatia, that nation's army -- until then bumbling and inept -- launched a series of bloody offensives against Serbian forces. Most important was Operation Lightning Storm, the assault on the Krajina region during which Serbian villages were sacked and burned, hundreds of civilians were killed and some 170,000 people were driven from their homes.
Roger Charles, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and military researcher who has been honored for his work by the Investigative Reporters and Editors Association, is convinced that M.P.R.I. played an important role in the Krajina campaign. "No country moves from having a ragtag militia to carrying out a professional military offensive without some help," says Charles, who has closely monitored M.P.R.I.'s activities. "The Croatians did a good job of coordinating armor, artillery and infantry. That's not something you learn while being instructed about democratic values."
A Croatian liaison officer told the local press that just weeks before the offensive General Vuono held a secret top-level meeting at Brioni Island, off the coast of Croatia, with Gen. Varimar Cervenko, the architect of the Krajina campaign. In the five days preceding the attack, at least ten meetings were held between General Vuono and officers involved in the campaign.
In a sense, whether M.P.R.I. directed the Krajina campaign is secondary. "Once you provide training there's no way to control the way that the skills you've taught are used," says Loren Thompson, a military specialist at the conservative Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Given Croatia's record in the twentieth century, he says -- chiefly its collaboration with the Nazis -- "I'm not sure you want that country to have a professional army."
M.P.R.I. denies that it has helped arm the Croatians, but it was positioned to play at least an indirect role here as well. According to a retired government official who brokers military equipment deals, Zagreb was buying weapons from a German arms dealer, Ernst Werner Glatt, until at least late last year. In the 1980s, Glatt was the favorite arms merchant of the C.I.A., which chose him to move arms to the contras in Nicaragua and the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, among others. At one point Glatt was shipping $200 million worth of weapons per year, money that allowed him to purchase a country estate in Virginia, which he named the Black Eagle, a symbol of Nazi Germany.
During this same period Soyster, now of M.P.R.I., was working at the D.I.A., which was also doling out contracts to Glatt. The latter was paid lavish sums by the D.I.A. in the 1980s to procure Soviet weapons and have them shipped to the United States, from whence they would be sent to America's proxy troops in Latin America, Asia and Africa. After Soyster retired, he and Glatt became business partners on at least one weapons deal.
M.P.R.I.'s involvement in the Balkans is a telling case of "rewarding the alumni." Lieut. Gen. James Chambers served for thirty-six years in the Air Force, including a stint as director of contingency operations in Bosnia. Following his retirement, he took a vice presidency at M.P.R.I. Gen. John Sewall, now with the company in Croatia, before his retirement had served as the Pentagon's special adviser to the Muslim-Croat federation, created in 1994 with U.S. backing. The following year, Sewall and another officer made several trips to Bosnia and Croatia. European observers believed that their mission was to offer military advice, an activity then banned under a United Nations embargo. "If they are not involved in military planning, then what are they doing there?" a French commander complained at the time. "Are we supposed to believe Sewall and his people are tourists?"
None of this inspires confidence about M.P.R.I.'s expansion into Africa. The company has worked in Liberia, training the military to use U.S.-supplied arms and equipment. In 1995 it made a bid to the State Department to come to the aid of Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko, an overture that was rejected, given Washington's decision to abandon its longtime man in Africa. Most recently, State issued M.P.R.I. a license to train the army of Angola.
Beginning in the 1970s, the C.I.A. backed Jonas Savimbi's UNITA in its terror war in Angola to overthrow President Eduardo dos Santos, then supported by the Soviet Union. Now that, officially at least, a peace agreement has been signed and dos Santos has embraced free-market reforms, the Clinton Administration views Angola as a potentially important ally in Africa. Bringing it squarely into the American camp has, however, necessitated a little strong-arming. In 1993 the Angolan government retained the South African firm Executive Outcomes -- dominated by former soldiers of the apartheid regime -- to help it inflict a series of crippling military defeats on UNITA in exchange for oil and diamond concessions. In 1995, Clinton threatened to block U.N. aid to Angola unless dos Santos terminated his country's business with Executive Outcomes. Dos Santos duly complied (though many E.O. mercenaries continue to work for private security companies owned by Angolan officials) and then moved to engage M.P.R.I. at the Clinton Administration's urging, according to three separate sources familiar with the arrangement.
The deal, said to be worth millions, calls for M.P.R.I. to implement a full-scale training program with the army and police, including, one Beltway Angolan specialist tells me, the notorious Rapid Intervention Police. Known as the Ninjas, the R.I.P. -- equipped with helicopter gunships, mortars and armored personnel carriers -- has attacked the unarmed opposition and committed other serious human rights abuses. UNITA's troops, no pikers when it comes to murdering and terrorizing civilians, are to be incorporated into the army under the terms of the peace agreement and are also to receive the benefit of M.P.R.I.'s expertise. Currently, renewed fighting between UNITA and the government has delayed the dispatch of M.P.R.I.'s trainers.
Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia a clutch of U.S. companies are training every branch of the armed forces, so much so that they have in effect turned the Saudi security apparatus, infamous for its use of torture, into a private subsidiary of the Pentagon. The trail for such activity was blazed by B.D.M.'s Vinnell, which came into the country in 1975. Prior to that, Vinnell had been in Vietnam, where its work prompted a Pentagon official to describe it to The Village Voice as "our own little mercenary army." Following U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia, Vinnell received a contract to train the Saudi Arabian National Guard. The SANG, which protects the royal family and strategic facilities such as oil installations, is deemed to be more reliable than the army. During the past decade it has more than doubled in size, growing to 75,000 men. Now Vinnell has 1,000 employees in Saudi Arabia, many of them U.S. Army Special Forces veterans. They are based at five National Guard sites and, according to a person who once applied to work for the company, they "instruct Saudi troops in using new weapons, supervise supply operations and offer tactical training to mechanized units."
The Saudi marine corps, created after the Gulf War, is overseen by another firm, Booz-Allen & Hamilton, in conjunction with the U.S. Navy and the Marine Corps. Booz-Allen, better known as one of the Beltway's biggest consulting firms, also runs the Saudi Armed Forces Staff College. "It's a very sizable contract," says a person familiar with the agreement. "They have about 200 people there, but that number could grow to 1,000. They're teaching senior-level military skills, including tactical training."
A company called O'Gara Protective Services -- this one in the private security business and staffed by former C.I.A. and Secret Service agents -- has been directly hired by Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan to protect members of the royal family (and their property), as well as to provide Saudi forces with security training. "The Saudis are beset by internal problems, so O'Gara's role is an important one," says a person who has worked with the firm.
SAIC assists the Saudi navy, officially with no more than systems analysis. However, a person familiar with the deal says the company develops software that controls Saudi air defenses, and plays an important role in running those operations. SAIC also brings Saudi military personnel to its headquarters in San Diego, where they are trained to run and maintain the navy's systems.
The State Department official who spoke to me was clear about the relationship of all this corporate activity to U.S. policy objectives: "Our troops are over there to protect vital U.S. interests. Are we really going to put our people at risk because a host country's forces aren't sufficiently prepared to fight with us?"
All this is just a piece of a vast private warfare industry that deserves closer scrutiny. Although my attempts to get detailed answers frequently elicited denials, "no comment"s and government claims of secrecy, I have pieced together substantial additional information about the growing field.
One company that merits examination is DynCorp of Reston, Virginia. It does contract work for the C.I.A., and, before it went private, its stockholders included former agency boss James Woolsey. DynCorp is one of several firms contracted by the State Department to train and deploy the Haitian National Police (H.N.P.), which has replaced the army as Haiti's leading security force. After U.N. troops withdraw from Haiti, the Clinton Administration wants DynCorp's trainers to stay on as technical advisers to the police.
Although an improvement over the infamous Tonton Macoutes, the record of the H.N.P., in which 130 former Haitian military officers have assumed command positions, includes "extrajudicial executions, the unjustified or disproportionate use of lethal force, and beatings," according to Human Rights Watch. A confidential memorandum from the U.S. Embassy in Haiti dated January 1997 and addressed to the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department states: "Over 300 HNP agents have received specialized training in crowd control.... Embassy expects crowd control to be a major HNP task in 1997 as the stagnant economy engenders greater frustration among the populace."
The precise role of DynCorp in preparing this "crowd control" force is difficult to gauge, particularly as company officials refused to return repeated phone calls seeking explanations. However, DynCorp's previous record should set off alarm bells.
In the early 1990s the company was hired by the State Department for the ostensible purpose of maintaining helicopters then on loan to Peruvian antidrug police. In 1992 one of those helicopters was shot down over a major coca-growing region, and three DynCorp employees died in the crash. Among them was Robert Hitchman, and he was not in Peru to repair helicopters.
A onetime Marine Corps fighter pilot and covert-ops specialist, Hitchman worked for Air America, the C.I.A.'s airline, in the 1960s. Two decades later he turned up in Libya, where he helped run former C.I.A. agent Ed Wilson's military support and training operations for Muammar el-Qaddafi. (Wilson is currently serving a fifty-two-year term in federal prison for selling explosives to Libya and plotting to kill federal prosecutors and witnesses.) In Joe Goulden's The Death Merchant, a biography of Wilson, one former colleague of Hitchman described him as a brilliant helicopter pilot and "a son of a bitch who could look death in the face and chuck it under the chin; absolute ice water."
An official U.S. investigation never determined the cause of the crash, but suggested that crew fatigue was to blame. Meanwhile, Shining Path claimed responsibility. I reached Hitchman's son, Robert 3d, who confirmed that his father was shot down by the guerrillas, a fact, he says, that U.S. government officials including then-Secretary of State Jim Baker asked him to keep quiet. "They didn't want the public to know the full extent of American involvement in drug wars in Latin America," he says.
According to Hitchman 3d, the real mission of his father and other DynCorp employees -- who included another Air America veteran, James Sweeney, and operated out of a base run by Peruvian police and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration -- was to ferry in D.E.A. agents to blow up cocaine labs, burn coca fields and coordinate aerial eradication programs. Hitchman was also training Peruvian pilots to fly helicopters in combat operations. He told his son that DynCorp was working with the D.E.A. in Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia, as well. Indeed, DynCorp is now under contract to fly crop-dusters in Colombia to eradicate coca plants. One of its planes was shot down in January, under circumstances that have never been fully explained.
Involved in equally murky activity is Betac, a company that, like DynCorp, does contract work for the C.I.A. Betac also works closely with the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. The command, which was created following the bungled rescue of fifty U.S. hostages in Iran in 1980, oversees Navy Seals, Army Rangers and Delta Force. These elite units specialize in covert operations in the Third World, train antidrug police in Latin America and assist U.S. clients with "internal security."
A former special operations officer now in the private sector tells me that SOCOM has hired Betac to assist it in a range of activities, including overseas military training. Betac's work with the Command has been facilitated by the past two chiefs of SOCOM, retired four-star generals Carl Stiner and Wayne Downing, whom it has retained as consultants. SOCOM spokesman George Grimes told Jeff Moag of the National Security News Service, who assisted me with some research for this story, that he'd never heard of Betac and denied that any such firm worked with the command. Meanwhile, Betac's Web site announces that the company maintains offices with a staff of four at SOCOM headquarters.
Clearly, the use of private firms provides the Pentagon with perfect cover to run sensitive overseas operations. Sometimes these are further obscured by the routine or even "humanitarian" nature of the duties for which the firms are contracted. In 1995 a company called Ronco was authorized to do de-mining work in Rwanda, which has become a close U.S. military ally. At the time, Rwanda was barred by U.N. embargo from receiving any military supplies. Kathi Austin, an Africa specialist and consultant to Human Rights Watch, was then in the region and learned that Ronco was actually importing small-scale military equipment, including explosives and armored vehicles. With the Pentagon's approval, she says, this equipment was turned over to the Rwandan military.
From postwar C.I.A. operations in Iran and Guatemala, through the Reagan Administration's wars in Central America, and on to recent C.I.A. support for a botched coup against Saddam Hussein, the U.S. government has consistently sought to keep the public in the dark about its overseas adventures. By adding a new layer of secrecy and unaccountability, the use of private contractors offers the government even greater opportunities to conduct covert foreign policy.
Congress reviews and can restrict the dispatch of Pentagon military trainers abroad. It has no authority over private trainers, who need only get a license from the State Department, a process that happens far from public view. The Pentagon is obliged to respond to inquiries, if not always forthrightly, when U.S. troops are deployed abroad. Retired generals and private companies have far more leeway in evading questions from the press or Congress. A former Congressional staffer who is familiar with the use of private military contractors described the system as a "nonsexy but far bigger Oliver North-style enterprise."
"If the D.O.D. was directly involved you'd have a whole network of Congressional offices providing oversight, even if it's not always sufficient," he says. "When you turn these tasks over to a contractor, the only oversight comes from an overworked civil servant in the federal bureaucracy."
"Privatization" is the name for this trend in foreign and military policy, but it is a rather bland word for what it signifies. Loren Thompson of the de Tocqueville Institution put the case more vividly: "The only difference between what these firms do and what mercenaries do is that the companies have gained the imprimatur of government for their actions."
Ken Silverstein is co-editor of "CounterPunch," an investigative newsletter published in Washington, D.C.