We were shocked and saddened to hear about the attacks in Saudi
Arabia and the deaths of at least 91 people there, including ten Americans.
But the fact that one of the targets was a U.S. private military
corporation called Vinnell raises serious questions about the role
of "executive mercenaries," and corporations who profit from war and
instability. This is the second time in eight years that Vinnell's
operations in Saudi Arabia have been the target of a terrorist attack.
In 1995 a car bomb blasted through an Army training program Vinnell
was involved with. The following year, Bill Hartung, a Senior Fellow
at the World Policy Institute wrote this article for the Progressive
magazine.
The sanitized version of American foreign policy asserts that the
United States is hard at work promoting democratic values around the
world in the face of attacks from totalitarian ideologies ranging
from communism during the Cold War to Islamic fundamentalism today.
Every once in a while an incident occurs that contradicts this reassuring
rhetoric by revealing the secret underside of American policy, which
is far more concerned with propping up pliable regimes that serve
the interests of U.S. multinational corporations than it is with any
meaningful notion of democracy. The November 13, 1995 bombing of the
Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG) headquarters and an adjacent building
housing a U.S. military training mission is one such incident.
President Clinton tried to paint the bombing as just another senseless
act of terrorism perpetrated by armed Islamic extremists, but the
target was chosen much too carefully to support that simple explanation.
The Saudi National Guard is a 55,000 man military force whose main
job is to protect the Saudi monarchy from its own people, using arms
from the United States and training supplied by roughly 750 retired
U.S. military and intelligence personnel employed by the Vinnell Corporation
of Fairfax, Virginia. A January 1996 article in Jane's Defence Weekly
describes the SANG as "a kind of Praetorian Guard for the House of
Saud, the royal family's defence of last resort against internal opposition."
The November bombing -- which killed five Americans and wounded thirty
more -- was certainly brutal, but it was far from senseless. As a
retired American military officer familiar with Vinnell's operations
put it,
"I don't think it was an accident that it was that office that got
bombed. If you wanted to make a political statement about the Saudi
regime you'd single out the National Guard, and if you wanted to make
a statement about American involvement you'd pick the only American
contractor involved in training the guard: Vinnell."
The story of how an obscure American company ended up becoming the
Saudi monarchy's personal protection service is a case study in how
the United States government has come to rely on unaccountable private
companies and unrepresentative foreign governments to do its dirty
work on the world stage, short-circuiting democracy at home and abroad
in the process. In the wake of the Iran/contra scandal and the end
of the Cold War, many observers of U.S. foreign policy have assumed
that this penchant for covert policymaking has been put aside, but
Vinnell's role in Saudi Arabia puts the lie to that comforting assumption.
To borrow a phrase from one of Vinnell's former presidents, the
company didn't start out as a "spook outfit" when it was founded in
1931 as a small Los Angeles area construction company. The firm's
early growth was tied to contracts for the LA freeway system. Indeed,
some of Vinnell's best known projects are decidedly civilian in character,
including work on the Grand Coulee Dam and the construction of LA's
Dodger Stadium (Brooklyn Dodger fans take note). But by the end of
World War II, the company was already dabbling in military and intelligence
work. Vinnell's first overseas contract involved shipping supplies
to Chinese Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek as part of his futile attempt
to beat back the revolutionary forces of Mao Tse-Tung. The company
soon embarked on a booming military construction business in Asia,
building military airfields in Okinawa, Taiwan, Thailand, South Vietnam,
and Pakistan.
Vinnell's Asian adventures served as a springboard for its emergence
as a global company that was more than willing to do a little intelligence
work on the side if the opportunity presented itself. In his memoir
Ropes of Sand, former CIA operative Wilbur Crane Eveland describes
how he used his Vinnell connection as a cover during his tours of
duty in Africa and the Middle East in the early 1960s, noting that
company founder Albert Vinnell expressed his willingness to help the
agency do whatever it needed to do (for a fee, of course). Eveland
returned the favor by negotiating contracts for Vinnell to do construction
services on oil fields in Iran and Libya, bribing the appropriate
officials along the way.
Vinnell's big break in the military/intelligence field came during
the American intervention in Vietnam, when the company won hundreds
of millions of dollars of business doing everything from building
military bases to repairing armored personnel carriers to running
military warehouses. At the peak of its involvement Vinnell had 5,000
employees in Vietnam, but not all of them were engaged in straightforward
military operations. Several retired Army and Marine officers familiar
with Vinnell's work in Vietnam have indicated that the company ran
several "black" (secret) programs. In a March 1975 interview with
the Village Voice, a Pentagon official described Vinnell as "our own
little mercenary army in Vietnam" and asserted that "we used them
to do things we either didn't have the manpower to do ourselves, or
because of legal problems." The official indicated that one of Vinnell's
jobs was as "rear security forces," assigned to "clean up" U.S. military
bases in Vietnam during the U.S. withdrawal: "how they 'cleaned up'
was pretty much up to them.... If we figured an area was certain to
be overrun by the VC [Viet Cong].... they were to demolish everything
and anything."
The last thing that Vinnell nearly demolished in Vietnam was its
own financial viability. The company had apparently poured all of
its resources into the war effort, and it had very little to fall
back on when the war ended. Vinnell posted losses every year from
1970 through 1974, and in January 1975 the company filed a reorganization
plan with the California Department of Corporations in which it proposed
to sell voting control in the company to a Lebanese investor for the
modest sum of $500,000. With these dismal financial figures looming
in the background, the firm's February 1975 contract for $77 million
to train the Saudi National Guard brought Vinnell back from the brink
of bankruptcy.
The Vinnell/Saudi training deal drew considerable fire, both in
the press and on Capitol Hill. On February 9, 1975 Peter Arnett filed
a piece for the Associated Press that raised questions about the propriety
of a private U.S. company serving as a hired protection service for
an undemocratic regime. When Maas asked one of Vinnell's men in Riyadh
whether he viewed himself as a mercenary, the question drew a classic
bureaucratic response: "We are not mercenaries because we are not
pulling the triggers. We train people to pull the triggers. Maybe
that makes us executive mercenaries."
This setup was a bit too blatant even for the more hawkish members
of Congress. Senators Henry ("the Senator from Boeing") Jackson and
Armed Services Committee Chairman John Stennis of Mississippi demanded
hearings on the contract, which Jackson purported to find "completely
baffling." Meanwhile, a reform-minded young Congressman from Wisconsin
named Les Aspin aired charges that the $77 million Saudi contract
may have been greased with a $4.5 million payment to middleman Ghassn
Shaker, the very same Lebanese businessman that Vinnell was trying
to give a controlling interest in the company at a cut rate price.
The hearings were held and Shaker was dissuaded from buying a controlling
interest in Vinnell, but the contract to train the Saudi National
Guard was allowed to stand.
By 1979, when a rebellion rocked the Saudi regime and opposition
forces occupied the Grand Mosque at Mecca, Vinnell's "executive mercenaries"
were called out from behind the scenes onto the front lines. The Washington
Post reported at the time that in the final stages of the storming
of the mosque, the Saudi princes who were running the military operation
relied on "advice from the large U.S. military training mission" (including
Vinnell contract employees) and were "in frequent telephone contact
with U.S. officials." Counterspy magazine further reported that when
the initial National Guard assault failed, Vinnell personnel were
brought to Mecca to "provide the tactical support needed to capture
the Mosque."
During the 1980s, things returned to "normal" in Saudi Arabia, with
strict controls on freedom of expression, harsh repression of the
rights of women, public beheadings of common criminals, and the maintenance
of a fiercely anti-communist, pro-U.S. foreign policy. (These same
practices continue to this day). Vinnell's role as the regime's principal
security "prop" was barely discussed in the U.S. media, but the company
did figure indirectly in the biggest intelligence scandal of the decade,
Iran/contra. Lt. Col. Richard Gadd, who went on to become the chief
operations officer for Ollie North and Richard Secord's private weapons
air drop service for the contras, was hired by Vinnell for his first
job out of the Air Force. According to Steven Emerson's 1988 book
Secret Warriors, Gadd's work at Vinnell involved setting up a private,
"black" air transport service called Sumairco which was to be dedicated
solely to secret U.S. army operations. Gadd left Vinnell after a few
months, taking Sumairco with him. He also used his brief stopover
at Vinnell to get started on two other "special services" companies,
American National Management and Eagle Aviation Services, which were
secretly involved in such major operations as the 1983 U.S. invasion
of Grenada.
That someone like Gadd would use Vinnell as his transition from
serving in the armed forces to joining the netherworld of private
companies involved in covert operations on behalf of the U.S. government
is not surprising. Although Vinnell is one of literally hundreds of
companies that do work for the CIA and military intelligence agencies,
its strong ties to Saudi Arabia and its experience in military training
and logistics make it a central players in this still burgeoning field.
Today, the biggest question regarding Vinnell's ongoing operations
is the same one that was posed twenty years ago: why is a U.S. company
using retired U.S. military and intelligence personnel to defend a
corrupt monarchy in Saudi Arabia? It's obvious what's in it for the
monarchy: protection from rebels and democrats who might want to change
the kingdom's form of government. On this front, Vinnell must be busier
than ever: Human Rights Watch reported that in 1994, "Saudi Arabia
witnessed the largest roundup in recent history of opposition activists
and a new low in the dismal human rights record of the Kingdom." The
organization's report for 1995 cited "further deterioration in human
rights observance," including a harsh crackdown on peaceful Islamist
organizations. Political parties and demonstrations are outlawed,
there is no independent free press, and there has been a systematic
crackdown on peaceful Islamic dissenters.
The lengths to which the Saudi regime will go to prevent critical
information from reaching its subjects were underscored in January
of 1996 when Saudi officials tried to get Britain to deport Mohammed
al-Mas'ari, whose Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights has
been faxing critical reports about the Riyadh government to contacts
within Saudi Arabia from its offices in London. The none to subtle
message conveyed to Conservative Prime Minister John Major's government
was that if Mas'ari was allowed to continue operating from Britain,
Britain's future arms sales and other commercial contracts with Saudi
Arabia might suffer. While Mas'ari's democratic credentials have been
questioned in some U.S. media assessments of the case, his message
is clear enough -- he told the New York Times in late January that
"The Saudi regime is a mafia that has enormous wealth under its control
and doesn't want to give it up. We want to have an elected, accountable
government with a real rule of law and an independent judiciary."
The Saudi government obviously feels threatened enough by statements
of this sort to make Mr. Mas'ari's presence in London into an international
incident. Supporters of Mr. Mas'ari's organization operating within
Saudi Arabia are treated even more harshly. On August 11, 1995, the
Saudi government beheaded Abdalla al-Hudhaif, a supporter of CDLR
who was convicted by a secret tribunal of offenses ranging from firearms
possession to distributing critical leaflets to allegedly throwing
acid at a security officer. Human Rights Watch notes that this last
allegation against Mr. al-Haif is the only violent incident alleged
against the peaceful Islamist opposition in Saudi Arabia during the
government's ongoing crackdown on their activities. With peaceful
means of expressing disagreement with the current Saudi ruling circle
so systematically blocked, violent outbursts like the bombing of the
Saudi National Guard headquarters are more likely to occur, and to
be met in turn by violent repression by Saudi Arabia's Vinnell-trained
internal security forces.
As for Vinnell and its employees, their main interest in Saudi Arabia
is undoubtedly the money. A retired Marine officer who did five years
with Vinnell in Saudi Arabia reports that he was able to save up several
hundred thousand dollars to buy a retirement home in cash. An official
familiar with the work of another U.S. firm that recently got a contract
to train the Saudi Navy says that employees at the firm "feel like
they've died and gone to heaven, because the Saudis will never run
out of money." The myth of Saudi Arabia as a bottomless source of
cash has worn thin lately as tens of billions of weapons purchases
from the United States plus the cost of the 1991 Gulf War have driven
the Saudi budget into deficit for the first time ever, but Vinnell's
contract is safe as long as the current Saudi ruling clique stays
in power (it was recently renewed through 1998). If anything, Vinnell's
fortunes may improve in the short-term, now that King Fahd has stepped
aside for health reasons, leaving the reins of government in the hands
of his brother, Crown Prince Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz, who also happens
to run the National Guard. Jane's Defense Weekly has speculated that
the guard may be built up even faster now as a way of enhancing Crown
Prince Abdullah's personal power base, which will no doubt mean bigger
contracts for Vinnell as well.
But is what's good for the Saudi monarchy and its chosen protection
service good for the people of the United States or Saudi Arabia?
The short answer is no, but the U.S. government has exerted considerable
energy trying to convince us that we're all in this mess together
and that Americans have no choice but to support the Saudi monarchy.
It's true that the Saudi regime provides a wide array of economic
and political services to the U.S. government and U.S. corporations,
but most of these services have little to do with promoting either
democracy or prosperity for the citizens of the United States or Saudi
Arabia. The Saudis provide access to their oil resources to U.S. firms
on extremely favorable terms, and adjust their pricing policies within
OPEC in ways that support U.S. interests. For years, a significant
portion of Saudi "petrodollar" revenues have been invested in U.S.
government bonds, helping ease the burden of the growing U.S. budget
deficit (the tradeoff is that taxpayers have been asked to spend hundreds
of billions of dollars to build a U.S. military force that can get
to the Middle East on short notice to defend regimes such as the Saudi
monarchy from threats from without or within).
In the realm of secret wheeling and dealing, the Saudis have not
shied from putting up money for joint covert operations with the U.S.,
from arming the Afghan rebels to providing funds to Oliver North's
Iran/contra "enterprise." According to the Washington Post, the latest
U.S.-Saudi joint venture has been a secret initiative to provide over
$300 million for covert weapons supplies to the Bosnian government
during the period of the UN embargo on that nation. Although Clinton
Administration officials have denied involvement in this scheme, it
would be consistent with other U.S. actions of the past several years,
such as looking the other way as planeloads of weapons were dropped
in the area. What is certain is that Saudi Arabia will be approached
about providing funds to train Bosnian Muslim forces in the context
of the current NATO intervention to police the Dayton accords. A source
with contacts within the Vinnell Corporation has indicated that the
State Department has encouraged Vinnell to bid on the contract to
train the Bosnian forces. Vinnell's parent company, BDM, which bought
the firm in 1993 to expand its market niche in military training services,
already has a contract to provide 500 translators for NATO peacekeeping
forces in Bosnia.
The Cold War is over, and the culture of deception and covert dealing
represented by the Vinnell Corporation's role in Saudi Arabia should
be brought to and end with it. Nothing of value can come from sustaining
the secretive network of companies and relationships that has fueled
scandal after scandal and cost thousands of innocent lives. Even advocates
of a U.S. military role in Bosnia have to take pause at the recent
revelations of covert activities on the part of the U.S. and its ally,
Saudi Arabia, in arming Bosnian forces. If true, the secret violation
of the arms embargo on Bosnia will take its place alongside a long
line of examples of U.S. government hypocrisy, from the secret arming
of Iran and Iraq in the 1980s to the cover-up of the U.S. role in
the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans by Pentagon
backed military forces and CIA-backed death squads from the 1960s
through the 1990s. The common thread uniting these operations is the
use of private companies and shadowy intelligence operatives to subvert
the publicly stated objectives of U.S. policy, undermining democratic
accountability in the process.
The policy of using Vinnell trainers and U.S. arms supplies to keep
the Saudi monarchy in power can not be sustained indefinitely. For
one thing, the money's running out. The lavish social programs that
have been used to buy off dissent are being cut sharply to make room
for continuing expenditures on advanced American, French, and British
weaponry. A number of security analysts are beginning the speak of
Saudi Arabia as the "next Iran," -- a top-heavy, corrupt monarchy
that is in danger of being overthrown by its own people if it fails
to implement major reforms soon. And as one confidential financial
advisor to the Saudis told the New York Times, the U.S. policy of
pushing weapons and military solutions over democratization and social
reform may be the greatest single threat to the survival of the House
of Saud:
"People think we have this great gold mine in Saudi Arabia . . .
I don't think the U.S. government realizes what it is doing by shoving
weapons down the Saudi's throats. They're forgetting that what they're
doing is creating instability in Saudi Arabia. That could be the greatest
risk to Saudi security."
The people of Saudi Arabia will eventually demand and receive a
measure of input into how their government is run and how their resources
are utilized. Whether that change comes about through a revolution
led by Islamic fundamentalists or an evolution towards democracy will
depend in significant part on whether U.S. policy continues to back
the monarchy to the hilt or press for a political opening that allows
for peaceful change.
If the Saudi monarchy is overthrown, will Vinnell be put in charge
of "cleaning up" all the sensitive U.S.-built military and intelligence
facilities in Saudi Arabia as it was during the U.S. withdrawal from
Vietnam? Or will the American public head off that day by demanding
that our government get out of the dictator protection racket and
allow the possibility of genuine democratic development in Saudi Arabia?
William
D. Hartung is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute
at the New School for Social Research in New York City and the author
of And Weapons for All (HarperCollins, 1995). The author would like
to thank his colleague Jennifer Washburn for providing research
assistance in the preparation of this article.
RESOURCES ON "PMCS" AND VINNELL
I. PRIVATIZING MILITARY TRAINING Foreign Policy
in Focus brief by Deborah Avant, George Washington University http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol7/v7n06miltrain_body.html
II. PRIVATIZING COMBAT: The New World Order Part
of the Center for Public Integrity's "Making a Killing: Business of
War." http://www.icij.org/dtaweb/icij_bow.asp?Section=Chapter&ChapNum=2
III. "U.S. Ties to Saudi Elite May Be Hurting War on Terrorism"
Two Part series in the Boston Herald, December 2001, Jonathan
Wells http://www.mapcruzin.com/news/bush121601a.htm
