DOGS OF WAR REMAIN FAITHFUL SERVANTS

Cold War Dregs Sell Themselves in Colombia

          Every war produces a pool of people who find there’s nothing they do better than soldiering. They have become addicted to the comraderie of the male paramilitary environment, the terrifying elation of life or death struggles, or the coherent world-view that comes with fighting for a cause. Or maybe its just the steady paycheck, and the offer of a job more interesting than most. Regardless, war-making becomes their profession of choice.

          The Vietnam war sent a spray of such men–combat-experienced American assholes–into places such as white-rule Rhodesia (now black-run Zambia and Zimbabwe) and Central and South America. In the employ of besieged settlers and challenged dictators, these troops merc’d as military trainers and commanders. In Colombia, these footsoldiers of the Cold War–including veterans from the Vietnam War to the Gulf War, and some old CIA hands from the ‘80s’ dirty wars in Central America–are still active today.

A Private Army For A Private War

          Members of the massive Reston, Virginia-based firm DynCorp, as well as the U.S. Special Forces, are reportedly engaged in battle with the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FARC) and Peruvian Communist Party (PCP, or Sendero Luminoso) guerrillas in southern Colombia and Peru. The DynCorp personnel, many of them pilots, are employeed to run defoliation missions. The target is ostensibly coca plants, though all crops in a designated area are killed or rendered carcinogenic. (The Vietnam veterans, an estimated 20-30 of whom are employed in Colombia by DynCorp, must find the war against the land reassuringly familiar.). Beyond chemical air raids, the word in national security circles is that both DynCorp and active Green Berets are engaged in waging an outright counterinsurgency war. The Americans–both private and public servants–are stationed at the San Jose del Guaviare base in southern Colombia.

          Outsourcing war is a ruse the Clinton administration has used to good effect to lessen scrutiny of some of its lower-key military adventures. Privatizing this dirty function has also allowed the administration stay within the letter of the laws regarding martial foreign deployments.

          Not surprisingly, the activities of DynCorp and Special Forces in southern Colombia have earned very little scrutiny. Tod Robberson, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, is the only person to have written about the conflict in the United States (Seymour Hersch, The New Yorker’s national security specialist, expressed some interest in the story, but, as Hersch is “not in the habit of helping other journalists,” we were unable to ascertain what stage, if any, his article is in.). Robberson shed light onto why the story is getting so little attention: he recounted that an American reporter who attempted to contact the DynCorp men stationed at Guaviare was threatened with explusion from the country by an official at the U.S. embassy if he exhibited such impertenance again.

          For their part, DynCorp personnel in Colombia are instructed not to speak to the press. In the U.S. company officials participate in a firewall of silence. When we asked Frank Henderson, the Director of International Logistics Support at DynCorp, about his company’s activities in Colombia, he responded: “You’re getting into an area I wouldn’t want to see in print.”

          Some news has trickled out in the Latin American press. The Americans have a reputation for being rude and arrogant. “They refuse to subordinnate themselves ot Colombians officials,” writes the Bogotá daily El Espectador. The men are said to ignore safety regulations and flight plans.

          This demeanor has perhaps contributed to a relatively high death rate among DynCorp employees. The company has lost at least two pilots already, their Vietnam-era Huey planes crashing in late July of 1998, just before an offensive by guerrillas in early August of 1998. The plane was found July 28th, near the Guayabero River in Guaviare province, near the Guaviare military base. The accident was officially blamed on technical failure, though investigators never made a definative report on what went wrong. Another pilot has been lost by a shadier firm, East Co., under similar circumstances.

          Andy Messing, Jr., a 17-year Special Forces veteran who heads a small right-wing think shop called the National Defense Council Foundation, finds the scenario of DynCorp being involved in counterinsurgency work plausible. “If they’re not involved in counterinsurgency work already they will be, from what my understanding is,” Messing told us in his Fairfax, Va., headquarters.

          Messing, who has close ties with the Colombian National Police and was instrumental in getting them additional military aide last fall, thinks that the DynCorp men shouldn’t be doing what their doing in Colombia. “You can’t control ‘em as well as you can American military,” he stated. He soon added: “And when they wind up gettin’ wacked, it only adds to the confusion.”

          The Special Forces presence in the area is less ambiguous, if still underreported. The Special Forces men are in Colombia under the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, an elite training and counterinsurgency force exempt from many standard forms of official scrutiny, including the State Department’s prohibition on military aid to human rights abusing countries. Under IMET, Special Forces are allowed to fire if fired upon.

Serving the Crown and the Crown’s Petroleum

          Like the American vets working for DynCorp, a number of retirees from Britian’s elite intelligence service, the SAS, have proclaimed a new corporate allegiance. And they are, like the DynCorp personnel, up to no good in Colombia. Officers of the predominantly ex-SAS staffed security service corporation, Defense Systems Ltd. (DSL), are guarding oil rigs on behalf of British Petroleum in the oil-rich northeastern region of Casanare. They are also training the Colombian military in lethal special warfare techniques.

          DSL’s corporate services include hostage rescue, kindnap and ransom negotiation, intelligence operations, and the training of military personnel. They also teach counter-insurgency techniques; their portfolio in this regard includes Sri Lanka, Papa New Guinea, and Mozambique. While most of the staff is English, several years ago DSL was purchased for $26 million by an American security company. The high-level staff boasts transatlantic experience, touting their role, as SAS officers, in “all the major UK and US counter-terrorist incidents since the early Seventies.”

          The BP contract, with DSL’s Colombian subsidiary, Defense Systems Colombia,  Ltd (DSC), is for the protection of BP oil rigs, staff, and pipeline from the National Liberation Army (ELN), which has had a strong presence in Casanare for decades.

          In April of 1996, BP hired the Colombian National Police to protect their rigs, offering an estimated $5 million a year. Michael Gillard and Melissa Jones of London’s The Guardian explain a few of the drawbacks of this choice of employees: “...the army brings to Casanare a U.S.-designed counter-insurgency strategy of dirty war, known locally as ‘quitarle agua al pez,’ or draining the [sea to kill the fish]. Instead of fighting the guerrillas, the army and pro-government paramilitary death squads target people they consider sympathisers.”

          BP’s employment of the military brought military activity to a region that was previously relatively unmolested. An ex-DSC worker named “Rod” recalled for The Guardian: “The people are scared to death. You can see it on their faces.” The army has been investigated for the death of six peasant leaders who opposed BP (a subsequent report by the public prosecutor who looked into these and other charges was not able to “discard or confirm” them). BP hired extra help from DSC in May of 1996–not out of any fear of stain because of the Colombian army’s violence, but because an ELN attack exposed the relative incompetence of the government troops.

          To bolster their in-country police force, BP has brought in former SAS officers to train the Colombians in such intimate counter-insurgency tactics as sniping and close quarters combat. The BP-DSC contract is for $2 million dollars a year. Overlapping work for DSC has come from BP: a contract with the oil consortium Ocensa, of which BP is a 15% partner, to provide weapons for the particularly murderous 14th Brigade of the Colombian Army. (In Britian, where some people care about what their former state killers are up to, the news of DSL’s activities in Colombia caused a bit of a scandal.)

          As a historical note, DSL is not the first company of mercenary ex-SAS men. The first such company, Watchguard, was founded by a Colonel David Sterling in 1967. Sterling help founded the SAS, which was orginally conceived of as an elite paratroop unit (Special Air Services) in World War II. But, when the elite men turned out to not be very good at parachuting, they took on other special warfare duties. The took a braggard stance–their motto: “Who Dares Wins”–and cultivated a reputation for sleek efficiency. Sterling cashed in on the reputation, hiring out former SAS men as the bodyguards of status-hunry prime ministers and presidents in newly independent black Africa, and the sultans and emires of Gulf States the British had, until recently, protected. Like DSL, Watchguard acted on the imperial interests of the home country.

This article originally appeared in the May 1999 issue of win: a newsletter on activism at the extremes.