Privatised violence

A fascinating account of the use of mercenaries in the war on terror.

Iraq has been to the private security industry what the development of the first user-friendly web browser was to the dot-com boom," writes Robert Young Pelton in Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror, his rollicking book on the murky world of for-profit warfare. In other words, the world of mercenaries.

The difference between this book and some others on the subject is that Pelton lives the tale. From the dark corners of Africa to the badlands of Afghanistan, from Blackwater's training facility in North Carolina to the blood-soaked streets of Iraq, he stays with the characters that star in his book and experiences their day-to-day activities firsthand.

He is feasted by warlords, shot at by insurgents, sits down with a CIA "contractor" who has killed "countless people" and does the Baghdad Airport run with a Blackwater Mambo team for a month. He also visits a South African mercenary rotting in an awful west African jail after a failed coup attempt and explores the life of an American bounty hunter who has set up his own private prison-cum-torture centre in Kabul.

Overall, Pelton has tried neither to romaticise nor demonise his subject. But at times, reading between the lines, one suspects a latent sympathy with some of the "contractors".

He describes in detail the well-documented case of the four Blackwater mercenaries brutally killed in Fallujah in 2004 and a firefight involving the company in Najaf the same year. Alas, he fails to give an equally detailed account of the estimated 1,000-2,000 Iraqis mowed down by US troops in Fallujah in revenge, and of the scale of Iraqi deaths in the Najaf incident.

The book reads as well as it does mainly because Pelton has tried to get into the minds of his characters. He has tried to understand this odd culture of private security and the men behind it. He gives interesting details such as how much the mercenaries are paid (up to $600 a day in Iraq), the weapons they use, the "uniform" of Royal Robbins 5.11 vests and tactical trousers that they have adopted.

In the chapter The Praetorian Guard, Pelton explores the role of private American contractors in protecting a foreign head of state. He manages to get unprecedented access to a DynCorp team paid by the US State Department to guard Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and gives an illuminating account of a day in the life of a private security detail.

Pelton loosely divides the world of private security into the pre- and post-9/11 stages and visits both. The main idea is apparently to put into context how much George W. Bush's unending "war on terror" has transformed the private military business.

The private military companies — PMCs — first came into prominence in the early 1990s, especially with the creation of firms like Executive Outcomes and Sandline, which carried out military operations in countries like Angola, Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea. (EO's Sierra Leone gig is documented in 2006 blockbuster Blood Diamond.) While both companies are now defunct, most of the men behind them are still in business.

Not Simon Mann, though. He is cooling his heels in a Zimbabwean jail after being convicted in a bizarre March 2004 plot to overthrow Obiang Nguema, the dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, and replace him with a pliant dictator who would grant the coup conspirators control over the country's natural wealth. Pelton gives a fascinating account of the plot and the plotters.

When the story broke, the media drew parallels between the plot and Frederick Forsyth's 1974 mercenary thriller The Dogs of War. (Interestingly, Forsyth was himself implicated as a backer of the original 1972 failed plot to overthrow Equatorial Guinea's previous despot, but that's another story.)

Pelton manages to secure an interview with Neik du Toit, a South African mercenary, sentenced to 34 years in jail for the same plot in Equatorial Guinea. "I feel bitter more than anything," du Toit tells Pelton.

The chapter An Army of One, arguably the best in the book, deals with the disturbing case of Jonathan Keith Idema, an ex-soldier in the US army and a convicted felon from North Carolina.

On September 12, 2001, Idema even managed to appear on Fox News affiliate KTTV, billing himself as a counter-terrorism "expert". After 9/11, Idema apparently found his true calling, and ended up in Afghanistan on a mission to hunt down Osama Bin Laden (and claim the multi-million dollar bounty on his head).

Once in Kabul, Idema hired a car, a large house and a few Afghans and set up his mini-mercenary group, called "Task Force Saber 7".

He even passed himself off as a US Defence Department contractor. And started arresting and brutally torturing Afghans for information on "terrorists". He was finally arrested and jailed in July 2004. As Pelton notes, "That such a transparent criminal could so easily label himself a contractor to act out his own covert paramilitary fantasy is a warning about the growing ubiquity of independent contractors."