Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

In what would turn out to be the most comprehensive statement Blackwater would provide at the time on the incident, Bertelli told the Chronicle :

While our internal investigation continues, we are not aware of any specific warnings by anyone, including other private security contractors, that the route being traveled the day of March 31 was not the safest route to the convoy’s destination. The two men leading the convoy had extensive experience in Iraq prior to the trip that resulted in the ambush and were well aware of the areas that are considered to be highly dangerous. They were all highly trained former U.S. Navy SEAL and Special Forces troops. The ambush took place in such a way that it would not have made a difference if there had been additional personnel protecting the convoy. 30

In the meantime, local reporters in North Carolina started digging for answers in Blackwater’s backyard. A few months after Blackwater’s alibi was published in the New York Times , Joseph Neff and Jay Price of the Raleigh News and Observer cast further doubt on Blackwater’s narrative. “[C]ontractors who have worked with Blackwater in Iraq were skeptical that the team had arranged for an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps escort,” the paper reported on August 1, 2004. “The Iraqi security force simply wasn’t trusted, said the contractors, who asked not to be named to protect their jobs.” 31More important, the News and Observer had sources inside the company who were raising serious questions about the conditions under which the four men were sent into Fallujah:

The contractors also said security teams on the ESS contract had insufficient firepower. And the team ambushed in Fallujah should have been the standard Blackwater team of three men in each car, not two, the contractors said. Days after the ambush, Helvenston’s family got a copy of an April 13 [2004] e-mail message by someone who identified herself as Kathy Potter, an Alaska woman who had helped run Blackwater’s Kuwait City office while Helvenston was there. Most of the lengthy message consisted of condolences. Potter, however, also said Helvenston’s normal team, operating in relatively safe southern Iraq, had six members—not four like the group that entered Fallujah. Potter also wrote that Helvenston helped acquire “the backup vehicles and critical supplies for these vehicles… when the original plan for armored vehicles fell through.” Company officials declined to say why there were no armored vehicles for the ESS contract. 32

In Florida, Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, Scott’s mom, had all sorts of questions running through her head. Finally, she decided to call Erik Prince directly. She said it was surprisingly easy to get him on the phone. “I said, ‘I want an incident report on Scotty.’ And I said, ‘I want a copy of his contract that he signed with you,’” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘I just want to know what happened.’ He said he would get it to me in the next few weeks. And I said, ‘Well, you’ve already written a report. Why can’t I have it tomorrow?’ And I said, ‘Are you going to rewrite it for my eyes only?’” She said she “never did get that report. I did get a call a few days later, and [Blackwater] all of a sudden [was] going to have this grand memorial.”

Indeed, a memorial was scheduled for mid-October 2004 at the Blackwater compound in North Carolina. But a week before the memorial, Blackwater held a different kind of ceremony—to inaugurate a new plant to manufacture military practice targets. Company president Gary Jackson beamed with pride as he discussed Blackwater’s rapid expansion. “The numbers are actually staggering. In the last eighteen months we’ve had over 600 percent growth,” Jackson said, adding that Blackwater’s workforce in North Carolina would soon double. 33The company, he said, had also opened offices in Baghdad and Jordan. “This is a billion-dollar industry,” Jackson said of the target business. “And Blackwater has only scratched the surface of it.” 34The Associated Press noted, “Gov. Mike Easley said having the global security company headquartered in North Carolina is fitting for what he called the most military-friendly state in the country.” 35

A few days later, on October 17, the company flew most of the families of the Fallujah contractors to North Carolina, where Prince was to dedicate the company’s memorial to the men killed in action. 36In addition to the relatives of those men, there were three other families of Blackwater contractors who also had died in the line of duty. 37The company put the families up in a hotel, and gift baskets of cheese and crackers were waiting in the rooms when they arrived. Danica Zovko said that from the moment they got to North Carolina, “It just felt uncomfortable. It’s like sometimes somebody is watching you and you feel it but you don’t know who it is. That’s what it felt like. Stiff. You couldn’t relax.” She said that each family member was assigned a Blackwater minder that escorted them everywhere and was present for all conversations, sometimes changing the subject if the conversation moved onto one topic in particular: Both Zovko and Katy Helvenston-Wettengel said they had the distinct feeling that the company was trying to keep the families from talking with one another about the details of the Fallujah incident.

The memorial was held, trees were planted, small headstones with the men’s names on them were laid in the ground around a pond on the company property. On October 18, the Zovkos said they were told there would be a meeting where they could ask questions about the Fallujah incident. “We assumed that everyone else was going to go to the meeting,” Danica Zovko said. In the end, only she, her husband, Jozo, and their son, Tom, attended. “There was alcohol served at the luncheon [for the families] beforehand, so maybe people were too tired or they were taken for sight-seeing,” she recalled. “Blackwater was very keen on showing everyone the compound, their training center.” The Zovkos were escorted to a company building, and when they walked in, they saw two large flags, one of which bore the names of Jerry and his three colleagues. A company representative, they said, told them the flag was made by Blackwater staffers in Iraq.

The Zovkos said they were taken to a meeting room on the second floor, where they were seated at a large twenty-person conference table. Erik Prince was not in the room. At the head of the table, remembered Danica, was a young blonde-haired woman named Anne. A Blackwater executive, Mike Rush, was there, too, as was a gray-haired man introduced to the family as “the fastest gun in Iraq”—a man who they were told had just returned to the United States to “get divorced and sell his house” before heading back to Iraq. None of them, she recalled, said they knew Jerry. “The only person from Blackwater that admitted knowing my Jerry was Erik Prince,” she said.

Danica said she began by asking for her son’s missing belongings. She was told that he had taken them all with him to Fallujah that day and that they were destroyed. Eventually, the Zovkos began asking questions about the incident itself. “Annie [the Blackwater representative] did not even sit down at that point because I was asking for the contracts, asking at exactly what time my son had died. I was asking how he died. I was asking for his personal things,” Danica said. “The tempers were not calm anymore. I mean, it’s civilized, but it’s not nice. You know, it’s to where you see that they’re not telling you what you want to know and they’re not happy with what you’re asking. So Annie actually stood up from her chair—she was at the head of the table, sitting all by herself. These other people were all sitting across from us. She was on the right-hand side of me at the head of the table. She stood up and said that was confidential and if we wanted to know those things, we’d need to sue them.” Danica Zovko said, “I told them that’s what we would do.” At the time, Zovko did not know what that even meant, but she was now convinced that Blackwater was hiding something—something serious about her son’s death.