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
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
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.
Κανένας
από όλους όσοι βρέθηκαν κάποια στιγμή στο τιμόνι αυτής της χώρας μέσα
σε όλη τη μακραίωνη ιστορία της, κανένας, μα απολύτως κανένας, δεν είχε
ποτέ την τόση ανείπωτη αυθάδεια, ώστε να ισχυρισθεί επί των ημερών του
ότι «τώρα ξεκινάει η Ελλάδα!» Ούτε ένας! Ούτε καν αυτός ο Ιωάννης
Καποδίστριας ο οποίος ως πρώτος κυβερνήτης του Νεώτερου Ελληνικού
Κράτους θα μπορούσε να το αποτολμήσει, ασκώντας με μια ανάλογη δήλωση εν
τέλει ένα κάποιο εύλογο τέτοιο δίκαιωμα· και ωστόσο, δεν το έπραξε.
Διότι συναισθανόταν, ως φαίνεται, εκείνο που συνεπάγεται το αξίωμα: να
βαραίνει πάντα ασήκωτη στους ώμους η ευθύνη, που απορρέει από την έννοια
της συνέχειας στην Ιστορία.