Home > With great Diligence, in Iraq
By Zvi Bar’el
Big money is being made in Iraq by American and British security firms, some of them headed by former senior officials, among them George Bush senior. Among those who sign up as security personnel are drug and arms dealers, as well as former servants of dark regimes of the past.
George Bush senior showed his mettle this week by skydiving on his 80th birthday. Older people, he declared, were still not "out of the game." He, for one, is certainly still in the game. For the last seven years he has been with the Washington D.C.-based Carlyle Group, earning handsomely not only on the lecture circuit but mainly from his connections with world leaders.
Carlyle is an interesting, almost covert entity. Information on the salaries of its senior officials is impossible to obtain. The list of these officials includes, along with Bush, former U.S. Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, former British prime minister John Major, former secretary of state James Baker, and a host of ambassadors, former senior CIA officials and business people.
According to media reports, Carlyle operates as a shadow government. For example, James Baker is working to have Iraq’s debts to various countries forgiven, Bush senior is "in charge" of relations with Saudi Arabia, and others, who are designated not "directors" but rather "team members" liaise between the U.S. defense industry and the administration. Carlyle is also involved in Iraq. An investigation by David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the British American Security Information Council (BASIC), a Washington, D.C. think tank, revealed that a Carlyle consultant, Richard Burt, former U.S. Ambassador to Germany, also heads another company, Diligence, a firm that provides private security services in Iraq.
Diligence was founded by William Webster, a former director of the CIA and the FBI. Former senior CIA officials are now at its helm, among them Whitley Bruner, formerly head of the agency’s Baghdad station, is now director of the Iraq branch of Diligence. The deputy chairman of Diligence, Joe Allbaugh, was the current President Bush’s presidential campaign manager in 2000. In 2003, 40 percent of the stock in a Diligence subsidiary, Diligence Middle East (DME), was sold to a Kuwati businessman, Muhammad al-Saqer, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Kuwaiti parliament. This year, Diligence signed a contract with New Bridge Strategies, a firm headed by Allbaugh, to supply business information about postwar Iraq.
The British firm ArmorGroup, which manufactures security equipment and provides security consultant services, maintains hundreds of workers in Iraq, whose job it is to protect British administration officials. ArmorGroup’s director is former British foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind.
DME and New Bridge Strategies are also said to provide security services and intelligence information to private companies seeking to do business in Iraq. According to one U.S. diplomat recently back from Iraq, these companies are a kind of private army. They have their own security personnel and their own intelligence corps. They even make agreements with heads of local tribes to supply defense and information, a major source of their income, according to the diplomat.
Risk and reward
There are no accurate figures on the number of individuals employed by private security firms in Iraq, but it is estimated at between 40,000 to 51,000 people, mainly foreign nationals and Iraqi minority groups. A security person’s salary can run from $500 a day to as much as $1,000 a day for a complex security operation involving private helicopters and armored cars. It is dangerous work - several dozen security personnel from various countries have already been killed. But the attraction of big money seems to outweigh the risk; the recruiting offices for these firms in the U.S., Great Britain and even the Middle East are working around the clock.
Frequent terror attacks, photos of murdered foreign nationals, threats of abduction and actual abductions have taken their toll even on this industry. A few months ago, security firms were still able to take their time selecting new employees, weed out those they considered unsuitable and bargain over salary. Today it is different: The firms are willing to wait a long time for a suitable candidate to leave a previous place of employment, the selection process is less rigorous, and according to reports from Iraq, a "Western underworld" is developing on the streets of its cities under the guise of security firms.
Checkered careers
One British citizen involved with the Irish underground was accepted for security work in Iraq. An American driver who was a drug dealer became a security guard, and another American security guard became a private arms dealer in Iraq. Security personnel from Chile operating in Iraq served in the private army of General Pinochet, security personnel from South Africa swagger down the streets of Baghdad and Basra like cowboys, in fact breaking the laws of their own country designed to limit the phenomenon of mercenaries. One South African security contractor, Gray Branfield, who was killed in Iraq in April, had admitted to having been part of the death squad that killed a senior official of the South African ANC party in 1981. Still, the mainstay of the private security forces are people looking to save up enough money to buy a house or pay off a mortgage.
Hiring private security firms to assist in civilian security assignments has become necessary in Iraq because it became obvious that the coalition forces were inadequate even for essential military operations. Want ads for security work published by employment agencies list jobs in police work and training for the Iraqi government. The salary: $75,000 a year, almost three times the annual salary of a police officer in the U.S. - with all expenses paid by the employer. One employment agency does warn of the expected risks in Iraq and describes the difficult lifestyle and the terrible weather, but states that even so, it’s a place for "adventurers."
Private security personnel have replaced soldiers as bodyguards; they work for prominent Americans in the civilian command and for the officials of the temporary governing council that will end its term of office on June 30. The new Iraqi police force, which is training at bases in Iraq and Jordan, does assist the coalition force, and in some cities, like Faluja and Najf, they have taken over full responsibility. But they lack military experience and a sense of esprit de corps. Kurdish sources say that the police units operating in Kirkuk are having trouble communicating with each other - some speak Turkoman, others Kurdish or Arabic. No one knows from the babble of languages crackling over police radios whether they are transmitting the orders for a mission, a terrorist attack, or a private conversation.
Even worse is the sense of fear among the new Iraqi police. Over 850 Iraqi police and security personnel are believed to have been killed since last April, and they are still easy prey for terrorists. Iraqi police and officials became targets of choice after the appointment of the temporary Iraqi government. At least three Iraqi government officials were killed this week alone, along with 20 police officers.
The need for foreign security personnel is making itself felt in the budget for the rebuilding of Iraq. Every contract involving development work must take into consideration that security will hike up the cost of the project by about 20 percent. This rate includes not only the cost of salaries for security personnel, but their life insurance as well. A rough calculation shows that of the $70-80 billion cost of rebuilding Iraq, $51 billion will line the pockets of security firms; from there, some will flow to the senior management of parent companies like Carlyle. And so, while President George W. Bush hopes to turn Iraq into a democracy, or at least to allow it to exist in relative security, his father and his associates will continue to enjoy the fruits of Iraq’s security bonanza.
In less than two weeks, the temporary Iraqi governing council is expected to end its work and transfer the management of day-to-day civilian and military matters in Iraq to a temporary government. Since the announcement of the appointment of the temporary government, it has become clear that its security mission will be beyond the capability of the Iraqi military to fulfill. Not only will they be unable to even partially forgo the services of the coalition forces, they will have to continue using private security personnel. American firms that have won contracts to develop infrastructure in Iraq will continue to operate, and they are unlikely to replace their private security personnel with Iraqi soldiers, whose level of skills and loyalty is uncertain.
The mother lode of Iraqi security gold has only just begun to be mined.