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Secret services: U.S. supporting firms targeted by terrorists

By A. Craig Copetas
Bloomberg News

	BALKIS PRESS / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS The expatriate-housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, lies in ruins after Monday night's suicide car bombings. Nine employees of the sutling firm Vinnell were among the 34 victims. Eleven Boeing employees were among the injured.
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"They are in the terrorist cross-hairs and being targeted," said P.W. Singer, an analyst at the Brookings Institution and author of the recently published "Corporate Warriors: The Rise and Ramifications of the Privatized Military Industry."

Added former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey, "These companies need to be concerned."

There's nothing new in companies capitalizing from combat, or having to pay the ultimate price in lives. Singer estimates military-consulting firms with names such as Executive Outcomes, Armor Holdings, Dyncorp and MPRI rake in an industrywide total of $100 billion annually and that their employees abroad for years have been the object of fatal "lone-wolf" attacks that often go unreported.

"A lot of people in the military aren't comfortable with soldiers selling their training to outside companies and foreign powers," Singer suggested. "It's a completely unregulated industry offering services to nations like Saudi Arabia, places where the local government doesn't want the population to know it's entirely dependent on Americans to maintain their internal security."

Singer described the sutling industry as "closed-mouth," an enterprise that political necessity demands be kept curtained in confidentiality.

"If the bombs go off where we are, then we're in bad shape," reckons retired Lt. Gen. Ed Soyster, spokesman for MPRI in Virginia. Still, Soyster, whose company has operated in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Nigeria, said the U.S. military has been forced to outsource its work to conflict-management corporations.

"We had over 700,000 troops when I left the Army," Soyster said. "Now we have 480,000 troops and the missions continue. We compete for this work — military training, education, doctrine development."

That competition for clients can be traced back to the Roman legions, when the state awarded merchants rich contracts to provide soldiers on the march with everything from honey to bawdy houses. The East India Trading Co. maintained its own army and navy to protect its cargo from brigands. During the American Revolution, sutlers licensed by the Continental Army hawked tents, whiskey and coffins.

Sutling is a word of Old Dutch origin that originally meant "to befoul; perform mean duties," according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Singer said the modern roots of sutling can be found in the Vietnam War, when private contractors funded by the Defense Department trained South Vietnamese forces and assisted U.S. troops in the construction of camps, airfields and other essential facilities.

Vinnell, since 2002 a unit of Northrop Grumman, first entered Saudi Arabia in 1975 with a $77 million contract to prepare the kingdom's army to defend oil fields. It was the first time the U.S. government had allowed an American company to sell military training on its own to a foreign power, according to congressional testimony at the time.

The company today has agreements to provide U.S. installations there with firefighters and a three-year contract to train the Saudi National Guard, Northrop Grumman spokesman Jay McCaffrey said. Witnesses to this week's assault said at least some of the attackers, who shot their way past sentries to drive their vehicles into the Vinnell Arabia Compound, wore Saudi National Guard uniforms.

"The terrorist attack on Vinnell was substantial," Singer said. "It's shined a light on an industry that doesn't want to be seen."

McCaffrey said the company didn't consider Saudi Arabia to be a front line in the war on terrorism. As a result of the bombing, he said, the company realizes "even the best security network can be breached."

Northrop Grumman said Wednesday it plans to evacuate about 25 dependents of Vinnell employees and is taking other measures to beef up security at its Riyadh facility.

But like many of the approximately 500 other American companies with operations in Saudi Arabia, the United States' largest trading partner in the Arab world, Northrop Grumman said it will continue doing business in the Mideast kingdom.

"We're committed to fulfilling our contract," said McCaffrey. "Our people are focusing on this."

Since the mid-1980s, Boeing has sold five AWACs aircraft to the Saudis. The company has "several dozen" employees in Saudi Arabia to help train Saudi air crews on AWACs equipment.

On Monday night, 11 Boeing employees were injured in the bomb blasts, struck by flying glass. They are being evacuated but are to be replaced, joining several dozen other Boeing workers in Saudi Arabia, said Boeing spokesman Bob Jorgensen.

Boeing also has no intention of leaving the kingdom. "We have multiple contracts we will be maintaining," he said.

But Boeing too is thinking about security in Saudi Arabia more than ever. Boeing declines to disclose even the exact number of workers it has in the country.

"Modern sutlers like Vinnell are no longer one guy with a wagon," Singer said. "They provide a broad array of services from feeding troops to maintaining communication and weapons systems. You pull these companies out of the picture, and the planes don't fly and the computers won't work."

In 1997, during the height of the Bosnian conflict, retired U.S. Army Maj. Thomas J. Milton, a member of the Foreign Area Officer Association, a group of military officers with senior-level command experience outside the U.S., published a paper on the growth of the sutling industry entitled "The New Mercenaries — Corporate Armies for Hire."

Milton described a "changing trade" geared to finding client nations that "cannot provide enough government security to meet the needs of the nation." Private contractors are the best way for a nation to fill that void, he concluded, saying those contractors would be placed in harm's way because of the "increasingly complex nature of defining what is a country's national interest."

One U.S. sutling company still wrestling with the political impact of working in the Balkans and the Middle East is Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), a division of the Houston, Texas-based oil-industry-services firm Halliburton.

"We do not detail our assessments and precautions in support of our efforts," said Halliburton public-relations manager Wendy Hall. Since 1987 KBR has maintained a joint venture with Vinnell to maintain three U.S. military bases in Turkey.

"All of these firms are targets for attacks," Singer explains. "The original rationale for the Defense Department contracting them was to lower the U.S. military presence and profile abroad. That logic may play in Washington, but it doesn't play on the ground. Adversaries make absolutely no distinction between uniformed U.S. soldiers and ex-military men working for a private company."

As a profession, sutling is a world mostly inhabited by former soldiers, complete with all the pomp and flourish of the armed forces. KBR, for instance, for years has minted limited-edition, silver-dollar-sized medals to honor its employees who work in hostile regions.

During the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, KBR issued bronze medallions for its Operation Joint Guard Sustainment in Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia. On the back of each medal reads the inscription: "Always Do Your Duty. You Cannot Do More. Never Attempt Less."

Information from Newsday is included in this report.