Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

In early 2004, with the United States ratcheting up its rhetoric against “axis of evil” member Iran, Blackwater USA was hired by the Pentagon under Caspian Guard to deploy in Azerbaijan, where Blackwater would be tasked with establishing and training an elite Azeri force modeled after the U.S. Navy SEALs that would ultimately protect the interests of the United States and its allies in a hostile region. The $2.5 million Army contract for a one-year project indicated that it was open for competition but that Blackwater was the only company to bid on it. 17On Pentagon documents, the nature of Blackwater’s work in Azerbaijan was kept vague—only mentioning “training aids” and “armament training devices.” Despite the secrecy, one thing was clear: Blackwater had once again found itself at the forefront of a pet Bush administration project. “We’ve been asked to help create, for lack of a more educated term, a SEAL team for Azerbaijan, both to help them with their oil interests in the Caspian but also to kind of monitor what goes on in the Caspian during the wee hours of the night,” said Blackwater’s Taylor. “These are very, very politically… sensitive issues.” 18Blackwater joined a U.S. corporate landscape in Baku that included other Bush administration-linked corporations such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Chevron-Texaco, Unocal, and ExxonMobil.

Some analysts viewed Caspian Guard and the Blackwater contract as a backdoor U.S. military deployment. “We were hired to come in and build by the U.S. government, to build a maritime special operations capability in Azerbaijan,” said Blackwater founder Erik Prince at a U.S. military conference in 2006. “We took over an old Spetsnaz (Soviet special forces) base and built about a ninety-man Azeri high-end unit.” 19Prince called Blackwater’s Azerbaijan work “a great small footprint way to do it.” Instead of sending in battalions of active U.S. military to Azerbaijan, the Pentagon deployed “civilian contractors” from Blackwater and other firms to set up an operation that would serve a dual purpose: protecting the West’s new profitable oil and gas exploitation in a region historically dominated by Russia and Iran, and possibly laying the groundwork for an important forward operating base for an attack against Iran. “Compared with the U.S. efforts to train and equip troops in neighboring Georgia, training Azerbaijan’s commandos was a relatively low-profile program,” observed Central Asia correspondent Nathan Hodge. “It’s understandable: The country is sandwiched between Russia and Iran, and sending a contingent of uniformed U.S. military trainers would be a provocative move. A private contractor helps keep things under the radar.” 20

One indication of the strategic importance of Azerbaijan comes from the list of names associated with the U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, an organization formed in 1995 to “facilitate and encourage trade and investment in Azerbaijan” and to “serve as a liaison between foreign companies and Azerbaijani businesses and officials.” 21Its “Council of Advisors” reads like a who’s who of the hawks of the Reagan-Bush era: James Baker III, Henry Kissinger, John Sununu, and Brent Scowcroft. 22The board of directors includes senior executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, and Coca-Cola, while the trustees include Azerbaijan’s dictator, Ilham Aliyev, and top neoconservative Richard Perle. Listed as “former” officials of the organization are none other than Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage. 23“These men are the power behind the throne in Azerbaijan,” observed investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, adding that Blackwater’s deployment would be “impossible to imagine… without a nod from one of these principals.” 24

A March 2004 Blackwater recruitment ad sought a manager to oversee the contract “to train, equip, and permanently establish a Naval Special Operations Unit in the Azerbaijan Armed Forces.” 25The announced salary was $130,000 to $150,000 annually. Blackwater referred to the project as part of a “Maritime Commando Enhancement” program. “The Caspian Sea is a region of interest for many, many reasons,” said Blackwater vice president Chris Taylor at a conference on contracting in 2005, where he held up Blackwater’s Azerbaijan work as evidence of successful U.S. government contracting to help allied governments build up their forces. “This is not a zero-sum game. We’re not trying to take as much of the pie and leave the government with nothing so we can get as much money as we possibly can. It just doesn’t work out that way. And if you want quote unquote repeat business, if you want to have a solid reputation, it’s actually affecting the strategic balance in an area for the government or assisting in doing that, then you’ve got to be part of that give and take. And we like to think that we do that on a daily basis.” 26

Caspian Guard appeared to be part of a strategy Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had articulated publicly in a visit to the region in early 2004. At a press conference in Uzbekistan on February 24 of that year, Rumsfeld revealed that he and other senior U.S. officials had been discussing the establishment of “operating sites” in the area, which he described as facilities “that would not be permanent as a base would be permanent but would be a place where the United States and coalition countries could periodically and intermittently have access and support…. What’s important to us is to be arranged in a way and in places that are hospitable, where we have the flexibility of using those facilities.” 27In Georgia, where the Pentagon has also deployed private military contractors, a Western diplomat told the Guardian that the United States was considering “creating a ‘forward operational area’ where equipment and fuel could be stored, similar to support structures in the Gulf.” 28“The two moves would combine to give Washington a ‘virtual base’—stored equipment and a loyal Georgian military—without the diplomatic inconvenience of setting up a permanent base,” according to the paper. 29

That appeared to be the strategy with Blackwater in Azerbaijan as well. In strategically important Baku, Blackwater renovated a Soviet-era maritime special operations training facility that Pentagon planners envisioned as a command center modeled on those used by the Department of Homeland Security. 30As part of Caspian Guard, the United States also contracted defense giant and Iraq War contractor Washington Group International to construct a radar surveillance facility in Astara, just north of the Iranian border, one of two such facilities built under the program. 31The other was positioned atop a mountain south of Russia’s North Caucasus region, not far from Chechnya. 32Washington also renovated the nearby Nakhchewan airport to accommodate military aircraft, including from NATO. 33In the meantime, encouraged by its cozy relationship with Washington, Azerbaijan dramatically increased its military spending by 70 percent in 2005 to $300 million. 34By the end of 2006, it had reached a whopping $700 million, with the country’s president pledging it would soon grow to $1 billion annually. 35

In the event of a U.S. war against Iran, Azerbaijan would play a central role; to Tehran, the U.S.-orchestrated buildup along the Caspian was an ominous threat. Iran actually responded to word of Blackwater’s involvement in the region by announcing the creation of its own special naval police force that would patrol the Caspian. 36As an exclamation point to Iran’s concerns, Ariel Cohen of the right-wing Heritage Foundation wrote in the Washington Times in 2005 that Caspian Guard was “significant… for any future conflict with Iran.” 37As Jane’s Defence Weekly reported, the U.S. presence near the Caspian allowed Washington to “gain a foothold in a region that is rich in oil and natural gas, and which also borders Iran. ‘It’s good old US interests, it’s rather selfish,’ said US Army Colonel Mike Anderson, chief of the Europe Plans and Policies Division at US European Command (EUCOM). ‘Certainly we’ve chosen to help two littoral states, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, but always underlying that is our own self interest.’” 38