If it had been up to Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, her son wouldn’t have gone to Iraq at all. “We had argued about him going over there,” she recalls. “I believe that we should have gone into Afghanistan, but I never believed we should have gone into Iraq. And Scott bought the whole story about Saddam Hussein being involved with Al Qaeda and all that. He believed in what he was doing.” Except guarding the Ambassador—or any other U.S. official, for that matter—is not what Scott Helvenston would be doing in Iraq.
In early March 2004, Helvenston arrived at the Blackwater training center in the wilderness of Moyock, North Carolina, where he would spend two weeks preparing for deployment in Iraq. He was surrounded by ex-SEALs and other Special Ops guys. Also at the compound were some of the first batch of non-U. S. mercenaries Blackwater would hire: Chilean commandos—some of whom had trained under the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet—whom Blackwater had flown to North Carolina a few days earlier.17 Like Helvenston, they, too, were destined for deployment in Iraq as part of the rapidly expanding privatized forces. “We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals,” Blackwater president Gary Jackson said at the time. “The Chilean commandos are very, very professional, and they fit within the Blackwater system.”18
Shortly after Scott Helvenston arrived in North Carolina, trouble started. One of the men heading the training at Blackwater was a man some of the guys called Shrek,19 presumably after the green ogre movie cartoon character. By all accounts Helvenston was excited to be working for Blackwater and heading into action. But shortly after the training, he alleged in an e-mail to Blackwater management that a conflict had developed between him and Shrek. Among other things, Helvenston alleged that Shrek was an “unprofessional” manager, and he portrayed Shrek as becoming defensive when Helvenston would ask questions of him during training. “In my class participation, I truly attempted to serve my comments in a manner that would not imply [Shrek] was wrong but that this was the experience I gained while going through a Department of State Certification course,”20 Helvenston alleged, adding that because of how Shrek reacted to his comments and suggestions, he stopped offering them. After the training session in North Carolina, Helvenston and Shrek ended up deploying to Kuwait together, flying over in mid-March with the team of Chilean commandos recently contracted by Blackwater.21
Despite what Helvenston saw as a conflict with Shrek, the deployment seemed like a decent situation for him, as two of his friends from his days on the reality TV show Combat Missions were helping to run the Blackwater operations: John and Kathy Potter. “I spent a week in Kuwait with Scott right before he went into Iraq,” recalled Kathy Potter, who was running Blackwater’s Kuwait operations while her husband was in Baghdad. “We were able to have some wonderful conversations about his family, life, and lessons learned. Scott was a totally changed man from the last time I saw him.”22 She described Helvenston as “a joy to be around! There wasn’t a day I wasn’t cracking up at him and his comments!”
“His favorite saying (which he used every opportunity he had) was ‘I’m just damn glad to be here!’ This would make me laugh and bring a smile to all of our faces when he said this,” Potter wrote. She described Helvenston as supporting her in the face of other Blackwater “guys coming in with a very negative and disrespectful attitude, and a chauvinistic and challenging demeanor.”23 But it took only a few days before things started to go very wrong for Helvenston.
When he set off for the Middle East, Scott Helvenston’s family thought he was going to be guarding Paul Bremer. As it turned out, he was slated to carry out a far less glamorous task. As part of Blackwater’s power-drive for more business, the company had recently teamed up with a Kuwaiti business called Regency Hotel and Hospital Company, and together the firms had won a security contract with Eurest Support Services (ESS), a Halliburton subcontractor, guarding convoys transporting kitchen equipment to the U.S. military. Blackwater and Regency had essentially wrestled the ESS contract from another security firm, Control Risks Group, and were eager to win more lucrative contracts from ESS, which described itself as “the largest food service company in the world,” in its other division servicing construction projects in Iraq. Blackwater was quickly pulling together teams to begin immediately escorting the convoys, and it was one of these details that Helvenston would ultimately be assigned to in Iraq. In the meantime, unbeknownst to him, there were secret business dealings going on behind the scenes.
Blackwater was paying its men $600 a day but billing Regency $815, according to the contracts and reporting in the Raleigh News and Observer.24 “In addition,” the paper reported, “Blackwater billed Regency separately for all its overhead and costs in Iraq: insurance, room and board, travel, weapons, ammunition, vehicles, office space and equipment, administrative support, taxes and duties.” Regency would then bill ESS an unknown amount for these services. Kathy Potter told the News and Observer that Regency would “quote ESS a price, say $1,500 per man per day, and then tell Blackwater that it had quoted ESS $1,200.”25 In its contract with Blackwater /Regency, ESS made reference to its contract with Halliburton subsidiary KBR, apparently indicating that Blackwater was working under a KBR subcontract with ESS. The News and Observer reported that ESS billed KBR for the Blackwater services and that KBR in turn billed the federal government an unknown amount for these same services.26 KBR/Halliburton, which makes a policy of not disclosing its subcontractors, said they were “unaware of any services” that Blackwater may have provided to ESS.
In February 2007, representatives of ESS, KBR, and Blackwater appeared together before a Congressional committee investigating waste and abuse among Iraq War contractors.27 A representative from Regency was scheduled to appear but did not attend. In sworn testimony during the hearing, Blackwater’s legal counsel, Andrew Howell, stated, “The assumption that anything other than the amount paid in labor costs is pure markup and pure profit is wrong,” saying the difference reflected other costs incurred by Blackwater. The ESS representative made a similar claim. Howell said Blackwater would have made just over $10 in profit per man per day on that contract, which he claimed Blackwater was never paid for. During the hearing, Representative Dennis Kucinich disputed Blackwater’s portrayal of its billing practices, charging that Howell’s statements didn’t “square with some facts.” This would remain a point of contention as Congress continued its investigation.
The original contract between Blackwater/Regency and ESS, signed March 8, 2004, recognized that “the current threat in the Iraqi theater of operations” would remain “consistent and dangerous,” and called for a minimum of three men in each vehicle on security missions “with a minimum of two armored vehicles to support ESS movements.”28 [Emphasis added.] But on March 12, 2004, Blackwater and Regency signed a subcontract that specified security provisions identical to the original except for one word: “armored.” It was deleted from the contract, allegedly saving Blackwater $1.5 million.29
John Potter reportedly brought that omission to the attention of Blackwater management and Regency.30 Further delays could have resulted in Blackwater/Regency losing profits by hindering the start of the ESS job, and they were gung-ho to start to impress ESS and win further contracts. “Regency, all they cared about was money,” Kathy Potter alleged. “They didn’t care about people’s lives.”31 But the call to go ahead with the project without armored vehicles would have been Blackwater’s to make. As the News and Observer reported, “The contract gives Blackwater complete control over how and when the convoys move, based on its judgment and the threat level. Kathy Potter said that Blackwater signed off on the mission.”32 On March 24, Blackwater removed John Potter as program manager, allegedly replacing him with Justin McQuown, who lawyers for Helvenston’s family allege was the man known as “Shrek” whom Helvenston had clashed with at training in North Carolina.33 McQuown, through his lawyer, declined to be interviewed. Word reached Helvenston in Kuwait that both Kathy and John Potter had been removed. “The one thing I do know is that both John and Kathy put their hearts and souls into this job,” Helvenston wrote. “It is my opinion that whatever the severity of their wrongdoing they should not have been fired.”34