|
Mercenaries
Former spook Bob Baer has a tremendous piece in Vanity Fair about
the private military now running amok in Iraq, including Erinys. Just
to remind you, the former Russian KGB agent - Alexander Litvinenko -
murdered with polonium-210 while living in London was an employee of
Erinys. If you remember, Erinys was
also one of the radiation sites investigators picked up on their trail
of the polonium assassins. While Erinys does not figure into the this
piece in any big meaningful way, it still adds an interesting series
of questions in the world of private mercenaries.
|
Bob Baer |
|
The Rise Of Mercenaries
"I knew who [Tim] Spicer was. He'd popped up on the C.I.A.'s radar
after he retired from the British Army and went to work, in 1996, as
the C.E.O. of
Sandline International, a private
military company offering "operational support" to "legitimate
governments."
|
|
|
|
|
Actually The Zionist's Private Armies
A year later
Spicer was in Papua New Guinea, where he fielded a mercenary army
for the government in order to protect a multi-national copper-mining
company. After Spicer was expelled, he moved on to Sierra Leone, this
time helping to ship arms to coup plotters. Spicer's name resurfaced
in 2004 in connection with a putsch aimed at Equatorial Guinea,
allegedly led by Simon Mann, his friend, former army colleague, and
onetime business associate. Though questioned by British officials,
Spicer was not implicated in the incident.
|
Spicer |
|
They Morph Constantly
But then, somehow, two months later, Spicer's company, known as
Aegis Defence Services,
landed a $293 million Pentagon contract to coordinate security for
reconstruction projects, as well as support for other private military
companies, in Iraq. This effectively put him in command of the
second-largest foreign armed force in the country—behind America's but
ahead of Britain's. These men aren't officially part of the Coalition
of the Willing, because they're all paid contractors—the Coalition of
the Billing, you might call it—but they're a crucial part of the
coalition's forces nonetheless."
|
|
|
|
|
The Video That Shows Their Mindset
"In November of 2005 a disgruntled Aegis ex-employee posted a
so-called "trophy
video" on the Internet depicting Aegis contractors—Tim Spicer's
men—shooting at Iraqis in civilian cars. In one sequence, the Aegis
team opens fire with an automatic weapon at an approaching silver
Mercedes. The Mercedes rams a taxi, sending the taxi's occupants
running. In another sequence, an Aegis employee fires at a white
sedan, running it off the road. Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train"
provides the soundtrack. Aegis subsequently conducted an investigation
and concluded that the actions represented "legitimate operations"
undertaken in compliance with the rules of engagement. Aegis argued
further that the video was "taken out of context" and noted that there
was no evidence that civilians had been killed. The Pentagon looked
into the video and declined to take further steps.
|
|
|
Estimated To Be 50,000 In Iraq
According to a February 2006 Government Accountability Office
report, there were approximately 48,000 private military contractors
in Iraq, employed by 181 different companies. There may now be many
more. These are the kinds of people Tim Spicer and Aegis are supposed
to coordinate.
The bulk of the military contractors are American and British, with a
sprinkling of other nationalities. Formal oversight is lax, to put it
mildly. Many are retired from elite units such as the British Special
Air Service or the U.S. Special Forces.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Elliot Goldstein
According to a report in The Economist, a former British official
who now heads a trade association for private military companies
estimates that mercenaries are Britain's largest export to Iraq. Not
food, medicine, or construction material—mercenaries."
|
|
|
Iraq Was Their Goldmine
"After U.S. forces took Baghdad, in April of 2003, Aegis, like
every other private military company in the world, set out to elbow
its way in. The pot of gold was the $18.4 billion reconstruction fund.
And that money was in all likelihood just the beginning. If Iraq could
be stabilized, there was the prospect of an oil boom such as the world
had rarely seen.
|
|
|
|
|
The Blackwater Incident
Two things happened which, together, led to Spicer's big break. The
first occurred in March of 2004, when four Blackwater contractors were
ambushed and
murdered in Fallujah. The Pentagon knew it couldn't dispense with
military contractors, but it now had leverage to make them play by the
military's rules. Henceforward, contractors would keep the military
informed of their movements. They would also carry transponders,
allowing the military to locate them in an emergency. What the
Pentagon needed was a single military contractor to manage the new
regime."
|
|
|
Corporate Warriors Or Private Assassins
"The private military company
Erinys
also had a South Africa problem. In 2004 an Erinys subcontractor,
François Strydom, was killed by Iraqi insurgents. It turned out that
Strydom was a former member of the notorious Koevoet, an arm of
apartheid South Africa's counter-insurgency campaign in what is now
Namibia.
|
|
|
|
|
Ahmad Chalabi The Crypto Arab
There have been press reports of a link between Erinys Iraq and
Ahmad Chalabi (the onetime head of the Iraqi National Congress, which
was a conduit for the fabricated intelligence used to justify the Iraq
war), which both Erinys Iraq and Chalabi deny. After securing an $80
million contract to guard Iraq's oil infrastructure in 2003, Erinys
did hire many of the soldiers from Chalabi's U.S.-trained Free Iraqi
Forces as guards. Chalabi himself eventually became acting oil
minister. He was probably not the best custodian of Iraq's national
treasure. (Among other things, in 1992 he had been convicted in Jordan
of defrauding the country's Petra Bank of at least $30 million.) His
foot soldiers were not all that trustworthy, either. When I was in
Iraq with Chalabi in the mid-1990s, he was trying to sell his army to
Washington as an insurgent force that, properly equipped, could one
day march on Baghdad. It was nonsense. When the Kurds took on Saddam's
V Corps north of Kirkuk in March of 1995, overrunning three Iraqi
divisions, Chalabi's men sat out the fighting.
|
|
|
|
|
Chalabi Wanted His Army To Control Delta Force
I wasn't surprised that Chalabi's army never morphed into Delta
Force. An F.B.I. official recently back from Iraq told me that agents
billeted next to Chalabi's mercenaries (now no longer employed by
Erinys Iraq) had had a real problem with them. They were stealing
everything, from F.B.I. computers to batteries for helicopters.
|
|
|
|
|
Who Poisoned The KGB Agent
In an odd but lethal twist, it came out last November that the
rogue K.G.B. agent Alexander V. Litvinenko had visited the London
office of Erinys shortly before his death, by means of radiation
poisoning, leaving behind traces of polonium 210.
|
|
|
General Jay Garner
Step anywhere inside the world of private military companies and
you're suddenly in a demimonde where everything seems connected to
everything else. When retired general Jay Garner arrived in Iraq in
April of 2003 to become the country's civilian administrator, he hired
two former South African commandos as part of his security detail.
|
|
|
|
|
Paul Bremer
They were known to Garner only as Lion and Louwtjie, and they
worked for a company called Meteoric Tactical Solutions. (Where do
they get these names?) After Garner was replaced by Paul Bremer, the
two commandos went to work for Bernard Kerik, the former New York
police commissioner, whom Bremer had brought in to create an Iraqi
police force. Under a $600,000 contract, Meteoric agreed to provide
Kerik's protection and to help train the police."
|
|
|
|