The Boys from Baghdad: Iraqi Commandos Trained by U.S. Contractor

"Starting the month with a bang, the boys from Baghdad executed two baited ambushes ... and further confirmed the [Emergency Response Unit's] ability to conduct operations with stealth and violence of action," writes an unofficial historian for the ERU, in Unit History of 1st Battalion, a report obtained by CorpWatch.(1)

The "boys" that the report praises are members of one of dozens of elite Iraqi commandos units that function as a "third force" to augment the Iraqi police and army, both of which are widely considered to be failures. On this mission in early July 2005, the Emergency Response Unit, backed by the First Battalion of the Fifth Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army, had detained "anti-Iraqi forces" and intercepted roadside bombs.

Their tactics owed much to a secretive U.S. private contractor, U.S. Investigations Services (USIS), which conducted ERU trainings on U.S. military bases in Iraq -- including at Camp Dublin and Camp Solidarity. The trainings began under General David Petreaus as an effort to bolster security in Iraq, and soon evolved into a system for providing support to the deeply sectarian Ministry of the Interior.

Beginning in May 2004, U.S. authorities contracted with USIS to create the first ERU. The non-sectarian force is supposed "to respond to national-level law enforcement emergencies. The four-week training runs recruits through SWAT-type emergency response training focusing on terrorist incidents, kidnappings, hostage negotiations, explosive ordnance, high-risk searches, high-risk assets, weapons of mass destruction, and other national-level law enforcement emergencies" according to the Pentagon.

By April 2006, the ERUs had conducted 117 "Close Target Reconnaissance" missions in Baghdad alone, completing 104 of them, and capturing 236 "suspects," according to estimates by Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Voss, military advisor in charge of the ERU program.

The ERUs are now officially controlled and paid by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and are accompanied by U.S. trainers or soldiers throughout their training. But a high-level State Department report issued in 2005 explains that the Iraqi commandos were initially rejected by the very Ministry of the Interior that they were intended to support when they were created more than three years ago. Instead, U.S. officials and contractors controlled the ERUs, which became an unofficial Iraqi face to provide local cover for U.S. operations. With no support from the Iraqi government at the time, the ERU had to rely on USIS for salaries, thereby becoming a privately financed militia.

Michael John, a spokesperson for USIS, told CorpWatch that the company is still under contract with the Pentagon for ERU training, but says that the support is provided strictly as part of training. "We are in a training and not in an operational capacity. The National Police Support Team (NPST) operates under the jurisdiction of Iraq's Ministry of Interior and the U.S. Department of Defense."

Dozens of interviews conducted by CorpWatch with high-ranking military and government officials over the past 12 months suggest that even at the level of Petreaus's staff, few appeared to know the specific role and scope of ERU activity. What is clear is that the ERU is just one of at least six different U.S. "security" training programs worth over $20 billion that a variety of U.S. agencies have provided to the many factions in Iraq. (See accompanying boxes for examples of other programs.)

It is becoming increasingly clear that such training programs may be causing or at least exacerbating civil war. Part of the blame lies within the complex failures of the U.S. occupation and part with the loyalties and skills of the forces recruited into the myriad security training programs that are associated with different ministries and thus with different, and often rival, political factions.

"Of course, they are fucking things up," Robert Young Pelton, author of "Licensed to Kill, Hired Guns in the War on Terror" told CorpWatch. "Because the U.S. is arbitrarily putting weapons and power in the hands of those who choose to fight, rather than those who are in the moral right,"(2) explaining that few who sign up have any previous law enforcement credentials.

The Third Force

The fact that neither the Iraqi army nor the police were able to tackle the growing insurgency became glaringly obvious in April 2004 when violent uprisings exploded across the country. Iraqi soldiers assigned to fight in Fallujah fled the field.(3) A group of Baghdad police, sent to assist U.S. soldiers battling the Mahdi army in Najaf at the same time, also refused to fight.(4)

U.S. planners in Iraq were suddenly forced to admit that the country
was on the verge of spreading insurrections and looming civil war.
Officials at the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), headed by Paul
Bremer, began earnest discussions about creating a "third force" (5) of
highly trained commando units that would be able to deal with hostage
situations and unforeseen criminal or political violence. (In a
monograph on the evolution of Iraq's security forces, Andrew Rathmell
of the Rand Corporation, a think-tank closely affiliated with the
Pentagon, defined the third force as "constabulary forces that lie
somewhere between civilian police and armed forces.")

Senior U.S. advisors at the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, notably State
Department official Steve Casteel, supported the creation of this third
force. A former senior U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration official,
Casteel previously helped train government forces in Peru, Bolivia and
Colombia, where he was involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, head of
the Medellin cocaine cartel.(6)

Ministry of Interior advisors drew up plans for an Emergency Response Unit consisting of three companies of 60 men each, plus a headquarters unit to do high-risk search, arrest, hostage rescue, and crisis response operations. Once trained, these units were to be integrated into the regular Iraqi Police Service. The advisors also planned similar elite units, Bureau of Dignitary Protection (BDP), to protect high-ranking Iraqi officials who were under threat of kidnapping. A total of 370 ERU and 395 BDU personnel were trained in the initial phase and deployed in counter-insurgency operations in Baghdad.(7)

This early ERU training was conducted under a $64.5 million no-bid contract issued in May 2004(10) to U.S. Investigations Services (USIS), a former federal agency that  started out conducting background investigations for civil service personnel.(11) At first, the CPA officials who controlled the purse strings of the Iraqi Ministry of Finance, used oil revenues to finance the contract. Today, the USIS contract, which has been renewed twice, is paid for with Pentagon (and thus U.S. taxpayer) funds.(12) Most of the trainers are retired military personnel plus a few police officers and federal agents.

U.S. control was further enhanced by conducting the trainings at U.S. military bases. At Camp Dublin, near the Baghdad International Airport, new ERU recruits were expected to live alongside their USIS trainers. The four- to eight-week trainings took place at a special facility inside Dublin that was built on a bare plot of land by First Kuwaiti, a contractor that later won the bid to build the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.(13)

USIS also trains ERUs at Camp Solidarity (originally dubbed Camp Gunslinger) in the Sunni neighborhood of Aadhamiya.(14)

Greg (not his real name) worked in a team of 45 USIS trainers based at Camp Dublin  to teach ERU recruits skills such as weapons use, close-quarter battle tactics, and forced entry into buildings through doors and windows. "We want to develop a unit of the Iraqi military that can take care of their own problems internally. It's not publicized a lot for whatever reason, but it is true that we are doing that," he told the Detroit Metro Times newspaper.(15)

Once trained, the ERUs were quickly dispatched to "lead" counter-insurgency operations beside U.S. forces, often in combat zones. "They conduct their missions with us on the sidelines," Lieutenant Voss, the ERU program head, told The Advisor, a newspaper published by the U.S. military security training program in Baghdad.(16)

USIS

U.S. Investigations Services traces its origins back to 1883 as a part of the federal government's Civil Service Commission (CSC). (8) Tasked with checking backgrounds of prospective government employees, CSC evolved into the Investigations Service arm of the Office of Personnel Management. In 1996, the Clinton administration privatized this office, purportedly to save money, and sold it for $545 million to the Carlyle Group and the New York investment firm of Welsh, Carson, Anderson, and Stowe.(37) Ten years after the sale, USIS, a private company, has a near monopoly on "screening transactions," conducting some 20 million a year, roughly 90 percent of the total.(38)

The contract to provide commando training in Iraq was a departure for USIS, which had no previous involvement in security training. And it was just the first of several government projects that USIS took over from federal agencies. In September 2006, USIS won a contract to provide the staffing for around-the-clock watch operations at towers erected by Boeing in the Arizona desert to monitor the Mexican border for the U.S. government. Its task is "to detect, identify, classify, and respond to and resolve illegal entry attempts at our land borders with Mexico and Canada."(39) Although USIS will not take the place of the Border Patrol agents, who are federal employees, the Virginia-based company plays a role in the selection of agents through its contract to do background checks on them.

(see "Fencing the Border: Boeing's High-Tech Plan Falters")

A year later, in July 2007, USIS won a contract to provide the data, software and analysts to track the estimated 550,000 "fugitive aliens" in the U.S.(40)

Disowned and Criticized

USIS's ERU training program ran into problems from its first days in Iraq during the caretaker government of Ayad Allawi, who took charge in July 2004. Iraqi government officials refused to recognize the ERU graduates or to pay them salaries on a regular basis. This stance led to conflicts with U.S. government officials, who believed ERU trainees should be integrated into the police force, according to a critical July 2005 report from the Inspector General of the U.S. State Department.(17)

Rejected by Baghdad, the ERU became an adjunct of the U.S. military, relying on the U.S. Special Forces for operational intelligence. At one point, when the ERU salaries were five months in arrears, USIS started to pay its recruits a $75 monthly salary.(18)

Another source of conflict between Baghdad and Washington centered
around how to define the pool of potential trainees. The State
Department report recommended that trainers should draw recruits from
within the existing police force, in order to make the ERUs more
palatable to the Iraqi government. When the first elected government
took over in May 2005, al-Jafaari's administration agreed to integrate
the ERU and BDP units into the Ministry of the Interior.(19) However
the training continued to be conducted separately from the regular
police program contracted to Virginia-based DynCorp (see box).

The ERU initial training also came under fire for alleged human rights
abuses. In the spring of 2005, Colonel Ted Westhusing, a military
ethics expert from Oklahoma who was in charge of the USIS contract,
received an anonymous four-page letter accusing USIS of deliberately
reducing the number of trainers to increase its profit margin.
Westhusing was supervising the ERU program at the time. The letter,
which was eventually released to Texas journalist Robert Bryce earlier
this year under the Freedom of Information Act, detailed two incidents
in which USIS contractors allegedly witnessed or participated in
killing Iraqis during the assault on Fallujah in 2004. "ERU Mentors
[USIS contractors] are conducting real world ops [operations]. They
shot their weapons and killed Iraqis," wrote the whistle-blower. "(Name
deleted) was telling me how many Iraqis he had killed until I told him
to shut the hell up. I was appalled by this. I have talked to the
Mentors and am told that if they don't go with the Iraqis the Iraqis
won't fight."

Worried that "it would put his contract at risk," an unnamed USIS
manager did not report the accusations to the U.S. military supervisors
according to a November 2005 investigative article by T. Christian
Miller in the Los Angeles Times.(20)

On receipt of the letter, Westhusing reported the
allegations to his superiors, but told them that he believed USIS was
complying with the terms of its contract. U.S. officials investigated
and found "no contractual violations," and "these allegations to be
unfounded."

But over the next few months Westhusing became increasingly
dissatisfied with the company. In June 2005, he attended a meeting in
Iraq in which he angrily complained of "his dislike of the contractors,
[who] were paid too much money by the government," according to
Miller's sources.

Shortly after Westhusing had left the meeting, a
USIS employee discovered the colonel lying on the floor in a trailer in
a pool of blood, a single gunshot wound to the head. A note discovered
by the body, in Westhusing's handwriting, pointed to suicide: "I cannot
support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse
and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel
dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more."

"Equipping Iraqis for Civil War"

USIS
training continues today under a new contract issued earlier this year,
although few details have been made public. Occasionally the Pentagon's
public affairs office publishes short descriptions of ERU missions. A
July 21, 2007 press release, for example, describes one group,
accompanied the previous day by U.S. military advisors, that "detained
three suspected members of a rogue Jaysh al-Mahdi militia group." Also
known as the Mahdi Army, the militia is led by the powerful and popular
Shia leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, and is based in Sadr City, the poor Shia
neighborhood in northwestern Baghdad.(30)

Such raids are fraught with problems: The perception
that the U.S. or the Iraqi government is backing raids on groups with
popular support and parliamentary representation, such as the Mahdi
Army, could fuel civil war.

Indeed some fear that U.S.-trained militias, rather than adding security, are already exacerbating sectarian strife. "We have been going about pumping out so many individuals with weapons, with uniforms, that my greatest fear is that in our effort to train and equip the Iraqi security forces, what we have been doing is equipping Iraqis for civil war," Matt Sherman, a civilian advisor to Iraq's Interior ministry, told Frontline.(35)

"It is like raising a crocodile," Saad Yousef al-Muttalibi, told the Washington Times when asked about the various "third force" training schemes. The Al-Maliki cabinet member, who is in charge of negotiating reconciliation agreements, continued: "It is fine when it is a baby, but when it is big, you can't keep it in the house."(36)

Others point out that these trainings are a throwback to colonial divide-and-conquer techniques. "The ERUs represent a return to not only the old Special Forces/CIA counterinsurgency model [fighting fire with fire], but the older British model of sepoys or local fighters paid strictly to bolster foreign forces with little if any concern about the local power balance. The same recipe was used in Afghanistan, Latin America and other proxy wars," Robert Young Pelton told CorpWatch.

This article was made possible by a generous grant from the Hurd
Foundation. It is the third in a series on the failure of
reconstruction in Iraq. The first article, on healthcare in Iraq, may
be read here: http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14290, and the second, on oil metering, may be read at http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14427. To contact the author, e-mail pratap@corpwatch.org 

 ENDNOTES:

1. Unit History of 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment, Task Force BobCat, 1 July 2005, Battalion Commander: LTC Todd McCaffrey

2.  Author interview, July 2007

3. Andrew Rathmell, "Developing Iraq's Security Sector," RAND Corporation, December 2005

4. Author interview with police trainer who worked at the Ministry of the Interior at the time. (Name withheld)

5. Rathmell, op. cit.

6. Peter Maass, "The Way of the Commandos," New York Times, May 1, 2005

7.  "Interagency Assessment of Iraq Police Training," Report # ISP-IQO-05-72 U.S. Department of State, Report # IE-2005-002, U.S. Department of Defense, " July 15, 2005)

8. "Privatization of Federal Investigations," Kennedy School of Government
case study, http://www.innovations.harvard.edu/awards.html?id=49041

9. "North Babil's ERU Graduates, Ready to Train," July 28, 2007,
Press Release from 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division
Public Affairs

10. The original contract issued for training and life support was # DABV01-04-C-0083

11. See USIS history, http://www.usis.com/history_USIS.htm

12. The training and support contract #s obtained from FedBizOpps, were: W914NS-04-R-9025, W91GY0-06-R-0001, and W91GY0-07-R-0008 See also "Specialized police training work in Iraq commended by Department of Defense," USIS Press Release, September 20, 2006

13. Contract # W916QW-04-D-0012-0003. Recorded in Appendix H, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Report to the U.S. Congress, July 2006

14. History of Camp Solidarity obtained from Global Security.org website

15. Sandra Svoboda, "Soldiers of Fortune," Detroit Metro Times, May 9, 2007

16 John J. Pistone, "Emergency Response Unit proves mentorship work," The Advisor, April 1, 2006

17.  "Interagency Assessment of Iraq Police Training," op. cit.

18. "Interagency Assessment of Iraq Police Training," op. cit.

19.  U.S. Department of Defense, Section 9010 Report, October 2005

20.  T. Christian Miller, "A Journey That Ended in Anguish," Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2005

21.  Maass, op. cit.

22.  Maass, op. cit.

23. Michael Moss and David Rohde, "How Iraq Police Reform Became Casualty of War," New York Times, May 22, 2006

24. "Iraq Country Report on Human Rights Practices  - 2005" State department, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

March 8, 2006

25. Ibid. Catherine Philp, "State Denial Adds Insult to Torture Victims' Injuries," Times (UK) November 18, 2005

26.  "Gangs of Iraq," Frontline documentary, PBS television. Original interview recorded by Martin Smith on October 11, 2006

27. "Stand Up and Be Counted: The Continuing Challenge of Building the Iraqi Security Forces" Report prepared by the staff of the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Sub-Committee on Oversight and Investigations for a hearing held on May 24, 2007

28. Sabrina Tavernise, "Iraq Removes Leaders of Special Police," The New York Times, October 18, 2006

29.  Ned Parker, "Interior Ministry mirrors chaos of a fractured Iraq," Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2007

30. Coalition Forces, Iraqi Emergency Response Unit detain three rogue
JAM," Multi-National Corps - Iraq Press Release, Public Affairs Office,
Camp Victory, July 21, 2007

31. Todd Pitman, "Sunni sheiks join troops to fight insurgency," The Associated Press, March 26, 2007

32.  Monte Morin, "Iraqi's promise highlights ambition of Ramadi Emergency Response Unit," Stars and Stripes, March 3, 2007

33.  Joshua Partlow and John Ward Anderson, "Tribal Coalition in Anbar
Said to Be Crumbling, "Washington Post, June 11, 200735  Frontline, Op.
Cit.

34.  Ibid.

35. "Gangs of Iraq," Frontline documentary, PBS television. Original interview recorded by Martin Smith on October 4, 2006

36. David Enders, "Iraqi tribes reach security accord," Washington Times, July 23, 2007

37. Shane Harris, "Former federal employees benefit from buyout,"
Government Executive, April 21, 2003 See USIS website:
http://www.usis.com/ourinvestors.htm, and
http://www.usis.com/history_USIS.htm

38.  See http://www.usis.com/commercialservices/overview.htm, Shane Harris, Op. Cit.

39. "USIS to provide staffing for operation centers," USIS Press Release, September 21, 2006

40. 
"USIS Investigative Services wins contract from U.S. Customs and Border
Protection," USIS Press Release, May 9, 2007. USIS awarded $21 million
Department of Homeland Security contract," USIS Press Release, July 23,
2007

41.  "USIS Announces Agreement to be Acquired by Providence Equity
Partners," USIS Press Release, May 11, 2007, by Providence Equity
Partners website lists the management team at
http://www.provequity.com/team/index.asp?Employee_Type_ID=All&Section=0…;,
"Clear Channel Agrees to Sell Television Station Group to Providence
Equity Partners," Clear Channel Press Release, April 20, 2007

42. Michael Powell biography on Providence Equity Partners
website, By Robert Kuttner, "Deregulation: Why Michael Powell Is
Wrong," April 14, 2003

43. Renae Merle , "Coming Under Fire: DynCorp Defends Its Work in Training Foreign Police Forces, " Washington Post, March 19, 2007

44. James Glanz and David Rohde, "Report Faults Training of Afghan Police," New York Times, December 4, 2006. "Interagency Assessment of Afghanistan Police Training and Readiness," State department and Defense Inspector Generals, November 2006

45.  Glanz and Rohde, Op. Cit.

46. Andrew Higgins, "As It Wields Power Abroad, U.S. Outsources Law and Order Work," Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2004. Tod Robberson, "Contractor with Texas ties operates with secrecy, arouses suspicion," Dallas Morning News, December 24, 2006

47.  "Review of DynCorp International, LLC, Contract Number S LMAQM-04-C-0030, Task Order 0338, for the Iraqi Police Training Program Support," Special Inspector Gneral for Iraq Reconstruction, #06-029, January 30, 2007

48.  Interagency Assessment, Op. Cit.

49.  Glanz and Rohde, Op. Cit.

50. Testimony of Gerald Burke, before the U.S. Congress House of Representatives Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on April 25, 2007

• 23 Private Security
• 176 War Profiteers Site
• 187 Privatization