Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

A major reason Pizarro said he believed this is that he had been speaking regularly with Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, the private military trade group of which Blackwater would become a prominent member. “[Brooks] doesn’t strike me as an illegal, evil bastard,” recalled Pizarro. “He strikes me as a professional young man. And he told me this is perfectly legal. I mean, I spent countless meetings with his friends at his office. I mean, we both live in Washington, and after I was convinced that I was doing what’s legal, what’s right, what’s correct, then I made up my mind. Nothing will stop me.” In an e-mail, Brooks admitted he met with Pizarro “a few times” but said he didn’t “recall discussion [of the] legality” of Pizarro’s plan. Eventually, after “hundreds of meetings,” Pizarro said he found people from Chile’s military community who believed in his idea of supplying Chilean forces to U.S. companies: “I met the right colonel, the right lieutenant colonel, the right admiral, the right retired personnel.” Pizarro and his comrades hired a private Chilean human resources firm to help recruit men for their plan. When Pizarro felt it was a go, he returned to the United States to make his pitch to Blackwater in October 2003. He said he spoke to Blackwater president Gary Jackson. “Gary didn’t like the project,” Pizarro recalled. “He kicked me out of his office, like, ‘Hey, no way. We’re not going to do this. It’s just, it’s too crazy. Get out of here.’” Then, Pizarro said, he landed a meeting with Erik Prince at Prince’s office in Virginia. As Pizarro told it, he walked into the office and Prince said, “Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Mike Pizarro. Do we have five minutes, sir?”

“You got three,” Prince shot back.

Pizarro said he presented Prince with a PowerPoint presentation on the Chilean forces he wanted to provide Blackwater. Within moments, Pizarro recalled, Prince warmed to the idea. “Guess what?” Pizarro recalled with excitement. “When [Prince] was a U.S. Navy SEAL, he was in Chile.” Prince, he said, had a high regard for Chilean forces. “So he knew the Chilean Navy SEALs. He got friends over there. He knew our professionalism, the orientation of our training, how bilingual are our enlisted personnel, and the quality of our officers.” Pizarro recalled that Prince said, “Mike, listen, you convinced me. If you can get one, just one Chilean Navy SEAL to work for me, this is worth it. Go ahead and impress me.” Pizarro said as he was leaving the Virginia office, Prince told him, “Once you’re ready for a demo, give us a call. I will send a few evaluators” to Chile. The next morning, Pizarro was on a plane back to Santiago.

Back in Chile, Pizarro moved quickly. He and his business partners established a company, Grupo Táctico, and rented a ranch in Calera de Tango, south of Santiago, where they could review prospective soldiers. Pizarro’s commercial manager was Herman Brady Maquiavello, son of Herman Brady Roche, Pinochet’s former defense minister. 18On October 12, 2003, they placed an ad in the leading daily newspaper, El Mercurio : “International company is looking for former military officers to work abroad. Officers, deputy officers, former members of the Special Forces, preferably. Good health and physical condition. Basic command of English. Retirement documents (mandatory). October 20 to 24, from 8:45 am to 5 pm.” 19As applicants began showing up for interviews with Pizarro and his colleagues, word spread that salaries as high as $3,000 a month were being offered, 20far greater than the $400 monthly pay for soldiers in Chile. 21A former soldier who applied for the job told the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, “We were informed that a foreign security company needs around 200 former military officers to work as security guards in Iraq.” 22Another said, “I would like to get that job. They pay $2,500 and they told me at the fort that the job entailed going to Iraq to watch several facilities and oil wells.” 23It didn’t take long for Pizarro to get flooded with applications from retired Chilean officers and those wishing to retire so that they could join this new private force. 24

Before he knew it, Pizarro had more than a thousand applications to sort through. 25But just as he was beginning to make progress, the Chilean press began to report on his activities. Reports emerged that a Chilean naval commander had allegedly violated military procedure and announced the job offer to soldiers, while some Socialist lawmakers accused Pizarro’s colleagues of headhunting soldiers. 26Within days of the ad’s appearance in the paper, Chilean parliamentarians began calling for Pizarro to be investigated. “Lawmakers recalled that the Defense Ministry—not a private corporation—is the only body that, at the request of the UN, may select active military members to support the peacekeeping forces in that country. So any other method would be illegal,” reported La Tercera shortly after Pizarro’s project became public. 27Pizarro responded at the time that his activities were “absolutely legal and transparent.” 28The Chilean press also recalled a controversy in July 2002 when Pizarro was quoted by a Brazilian paper, Jornal do Brasil, claiming that Chile’s war academy was reviewing a plan for twenty-six hundred troops from the United States, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Peru to intervene in Colombia’s battle against FARC rebels, under the auspices of the United Nations. 29The Chilean Defense Ministry was forced to issue a public denial, creating an awkward situation between Chile and Colombia. 30There were also rumblings in Chile that Pizarro was working with the CIA. “Obviously, Mike Pizarro is a CIA agent, supported by the FBI and the Imperial Forces of the United States, and obviously, he’s working for President Bush,” Pizarro recalled with sarcasm. “There is a gossip that he also goes to the ranch of President Bush in Texas. I mean, the stories are absolutely flat-out ignorance.”

In the midst of all of this, Pizarro forged ahead. He and his colleagues worked feverishly at their ranch to whittle down the number of men they would present to the Blackwater evaluators from one thousand to three hundred. 31They purchased dozens of rubber and ceramic “dummy” rifles for training and painted them black. 32By late October, Pizarro had his three hundred men, and he called Erik Prince. “We’re ready,” he told Prince. “Send your people.” He said Prince told him that he was leaving for Switzerland but gave him Gary Jackson’s cell phone number. Aware of Jackson’s attitude about the project, Prince told Pizarro to wait a few minutes to call Jackson so that Prince could brief the Blackwater president, according to Pizarro. “Then I called Gary, and Gary was obviously not happy,” Pizarro recalled. He said Jackson told him, “OK, I just talked to Erik. This is a fucking waste of time. I’ll send my three evaluators there, but Mike, you better deliver on your promise because this is a complete waste of time,’ blah, blah, blah. He was very negative. But that’s just the way Gary is.”

Back at the ranch in Chile, Pizarro addressed the three hundred men he and his colleagues had chosen for evaluation by Blackwater. “You will be interviewed by American evaluators. They will ask you basic questions,” Pizarro told the Chilean soldiers. “They will test the level of your leadership skills, how smart you are, how well trained you are, etc., your physical ability.” Pizarro said they would be divided into three groups—one for each of the three U.S. evaluators. “It will be a hundred guys per American. It will take basically the entire day. So you need to be patient. I can make no promises. If we can impress these guys, maybe, maybe we’ll be hired to work in Iraq protecting U.S. Consulates and Embassy,” Pizarro said. In the last week of November 2003, Pizarro said, the Blackwater evaluators arrived in Chile. “The three of them, former U.S. Navy SEALs, impressive guys, six foot tall, gigantic, excellent shape, very professional,” Pizarro recalled. “The three of them bilingual. I mean super-impressive. They evaluated 300 guys” in three days. “They went back to the States, and those were the longest fourteen days of my life because for fourteen days there was no news from Blackwater whatsoever.”