As Blackwater details emerge, Xe looks for clean start

Newly released documents show Blackwater workers and their supervisors in Afghanistan running amok - drinking heavily, using weapons without permission and ignoring Army protocol, all adding to an environment that may have contributed to the killings of unarmed civilians.

After two workers, including a Virginia Beach man, shot and killed two Afghan civilians last year, the Moyock, N.C.-based Blackwater was thrown off its $25 million subcontract, but not without a fight, the documents reveal.

The supervisor of the two men was specifically identified in e-mails and letters as fostering such an environment. And even after the killings last May, Blackwater - which now calls itself Xe Services - tried to keep him on the job and distance itself from the shootings.

The company now says it has changed its ways. It wants to be awarded a new $1 billion contract to perform the same training in Afghanistan, but mounting criticism of the company's actions before and after the killings may block its bid.

In the days after Blackwater workers shot three unarmed civilians in Kabul last May, their supervisor, Johnnie Walker, made a drunken phone call to his superiors and threatened to pull the entire security team out of the country if he were fired.

Walker's supervisor pushed to keep him on the job another month, despite Walker's show of disrespect for his superiors and his repeated violations of the no-alcohol policy and firearms regulations, according to internal Blackwater documents released Feb. 24 by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

A senior Blackwater executive would later write that Walker's management at Camp Alamo in Kabul "cultivated an environment that indirectly" led to the May 5 shootings by former Blackwater workers Christopher Drotleff of Virginia Beach and Justin Cannon of Texas. Two Afghan civilians died and a third was wounded.

Raytheon, which held the prime contract from the Department of Defense, eventually fired Blackwater last summer. Walker was fired and forced to leave the country, and Drotleff and Cannon are now charged, in Norfolk federal court, with murder. The incident, and other Blackwater issues in Afghanistan and Iraq, led to a U.S. Senate investigation. The Justice Department has already been investigating Blackwater.

Walker's actions are indicative of the way Blackwater operated with little oversight in Afghanistan, where it was training the Afghan National Police force, the records show.

In one example, Blackwater workers had free access to a weapons storage facility called 22 Bunkers. The weapons were intended only for use by the Afghan National Police and the U.S. Army, but records show that Blackwater workers sometimes took weapons without even signing for them.

Brian McCracken, a former Blackwater vice president who testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 24, admitted Blackwater workers did not have the authority to carry weapons whenever they felt they needed them. But the logic, at the time, was that the security situation in Kabul was so tenuous that not arming Blackwater workers seemed preposterous, McCracken and others said.

Even after one Blackwater worker accidentally shot another worker in the head during vehicle maintenance training, with weapons obtained without authorization, the Army and Blackwater supervisors continued to look the other way, records show.

Drotleff, Cannon and two other workers took weapons without authorization on May 5. They jumped into vehicles and left the camp, again without authorization, Blackwater maintains.

After the shootings, Blackwater insisted it had returned all weapons, including 71 AK-47s, but in a Feb. 20 letter to Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., the company acknowledged it still had weapons it needed to return to the Army.

The events on the day of the shootings highlight the anarchy that seemed to reign among contractors at Camp Alamo. The Defense Department's subsequent investigation "raised serious issues concerning an apparent lack of contractor oversight," Major Gen. Richard P. Formica wrote in a memo to Camp Alamo's commander, demanding enforcement of existing policies on alcohol and weapons use.

That day in May, Walker, the supervisor, attended a going-away party at the camp where alcohol flowed freely. And McCracken, Walker's supervisor, told a vice president in Moyock, by phone, just days earlier that he had a case of Corona beer in his room.

Drotleff and Cannon were at the party, too, but whether they were drinking, or drunk, remains in dispute.

The Justice Department says they were. Formica, in his memo, said, "It appears that the contractors violated alcohol consumption policies." But Blackwater says in an internal memo that an Army investigation concluded that "alcohol was not a contributing factor" in the shootings.

Walker was already on thin ice by then, chiefly because of the December 2008 accidental shooting between two workers; one suffered a brain injury and is partially paralyzed.

After the May shootings, when McCracken tried to keep Walker on the job, Hugh Middleton, a Blackwater program director, balked, citing Walker's repeated alcohol use and cultivation of "an environment that indirectly" led to the shootings.

In his May 20 internal memo, Middleton wrote that Walker was "an exceptionally ineffective" manager, failing to attend required meetings with Department of Defense and NATO officials, and was "consistently late" in filing reports to Blackwater.

Following the killings, Walker also failed to properly follow the chain of command and tried to circumvent required notifications, Middleton wrote in another internal e-mail that month. Middleton's e-mail accused Walker of having "no regard for policies, rules or adherence to regulations in country."

But even after that, Blackwater tried to limit the damage to its reputation in an effort to keep the contract. In a 10-page letter to Raytheon, the prime contractor, Middleton said the May 5 events, "while tragic and unfortunate," did not constitute a breach of the contract. The four were off duty, he said, and their actions were outside the scope of their employment. (Drotleff's lawyer said in court in Norfolk that his client was driving local interpreters home that night.)

In a blistering reply, a Raytheon executive called the response by Blackwater subsidiary Paravant "especially troubling." Paravant is a company Blackwater admitted was set up to hide the Blackwater name.

Raytheon "rejects Paravant's attempt to disclaim its contractual responsibility for its trainers," the letter says. "Paravant's responsibilities cannot and do not end when its trainers clock out."

Walker and McCracken, who were grilled by Levin and other committee members at the Feb. 24 hearing, admitted to sloppy vetting of workers, including Drotleff and Cannon, whose military records weren't even on file with Blackwater despite a contractual requirement not only that the documents be kept but that they be reviewed before hiring.

Those records showed Drotleff had a long list of Marine Corps infractions, including AWOLs, stealing and disobeying orders, that ultimately led to an other-than-honorable discharge in 2001. Cannon also was forced to leave the Army after going AWOL and testing positive for cocaine.

Blackwater has tried to reverse itself.

Fred Roitz, a vice president for Xe Services, told the committee that the company replaced nine vice presidents and 16 directors with a new management team and has instituted new policies.

"These changes in personnel, attitude, focus, policy and practice, ownership and governance, represent a break from the past," Roitz told the committee.

This isn't the first time Blackwater has tried to remake its image. Following the killings of 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians in late summer 2007, Blackwater said it had infused itself with new personnel and was "making steady progress in restoring confidence," according to a 2008 State Department performance evaluation.

The next "performance evaluation will be substantially improved," Blackwater insisted.

Tim McGlone, (757) 446-2343, tim.mcglone@pilotonline.com