At first he didn’t want to talk, but after a few beers the Turkish translator and former employee of Titan
– one of the largest American companies providing “human
resources” to the U.S. armed forces in Iraq – loosened up and
started to let me in on his riveting story of life in the field with
American soldiers. The experiences recounted by the young translator,
“Massoud,” proved that low morale and the kind of lurid misconduct that
have plagued the army since last April’s Abu Ghraib scandal were
actually endemic since the war began in March 2003.
Titan’s Travails
Titan,
of course, became infamous partially because of Abu Ghraib. At least
one of its contract workers, Adel Nahkla, was allegedly involved with
chronic torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Other civilian
contractors like the mysterious Stephen Stephanowicz and John Israel of CACI – another “human resources” company with a checkered past and gilded future – were also accused of being involved. These allegations spawned a lawsuit filed in San Diego in June on behalf of the Iraqi victims.
Simultaneously,
Titan’s problems were compounded when aerospace giant Lockheed Martin
dropped plans to buy up the company “because a Justice Dept.
investigation into possible bribery of foreign officials by Titan
subsidiaries or consultants continued past a Lockheed deadline for the
purchase.” The company’s numerous indiscretions led to the hiring of a “vice president for ethics” on Sept. 28.
Most
recently, the San Diego-based firm was hit by the news that one of its
translators, an Iraqi Kurd named Luqman Mohammed Kurdi Hussein, was found beheaded in Iraq
on Oct. 11. The Ansar al-Sunnah Army, which also claimed responsibility
for the beheading of 12 Nepalese workers and three Iraqi Kurds on Aug.
31, took responsibility for the slaying.
Despite its ongoing
problems, NBC reports, the U.S. military on Sept. 17 extended Titan’s
contract to provide 4,500 translators and assistants for Army
operations worldwide “for six months with an option for another six
months, for a potential value of up to $400 million. It is the
contractor’s largest single source of revenue.” Although announced as a
short-term “bridging contract,”
the deal came as sweet relief to a company that has been strung up on
the rack in more ways than one since the Iraq War began in March 2003.
An Opportunity Too Good to Be True?
Massoud,
fortunately, had departed Iraq long before the situation deteriorated,
spending only a few months with the company before deciding to get out.
I spoke with the young man, a Turk of Kurdish origin, in Istanbul. It
took several days to arrange a meeting – partially because he was
considering working again for the U.S. in Iraq, if the situation
someday becomes more stable. However, as he admitted, this looks to be
a long time off.
When we finally met, it was in the bar of one of
this enormous city’s down-and-out hotels, where a clientele of
small-time shuttle traders and other invariably non-English speakers go
to get serviced by prostitutes from Russia and the Ukraine.
By
contrast, Massoud spoke excellent English, a result of both time spent
in the West and his daily dealings with Istanbul’s steady stream of
tourists buying carpets and other goods. Like many other young men in
this line of work, Massoud was impeccably dressed, hair well-oiled and
flashing a gaudy gold watch. Nevertheless, I imagined that he was not
in fact so wealthy as all that – one of the reasons why he was
anxious not to be identified. “Maybe someday I will need to get work
again with the U.S. Army,” he disclosed with a bemused grin.
Massoud
had been hired in the months leading up to war by a Turkish
subcontractor, Ankara-based Core Resources Management (CRM). To
alleviate any doubts about the veracity of his story, he laid out for
me a Pentagon-issued ID card as well as the lengthy original contract
from Titan. He also named several of his then superiors, but asked that
their names not be mentioned.
Why had Massoud considered working
for the U.S. Army in the first place? “Well, I considered that it would
be an easy way to make money fast, and not be so dangerous.” He tried,
unsuccessfully, to convince other Turkish friends to sign up as well.
In the beginning, there hardly seemed reason for worry. Originally,
Massoud and other Kurdish-speaking translators had been slated to work
with the American troops that were to have been operating from remote
bases in the mountainous Kurdish-inhabited region of southern Turkey,
bordering on Iraq. Far away from the fighting, in the vicinity of
friends and family, the job seemed like a maximum gain, minimum
investment situation.
However, when Turkish parliamentarians
astonished the Bush administration by refusing to allow American troops
to use their country as a launching pad for war in late February 2003,
everything changed. The translators would instead be shipped straight
to Iraq – with or without Turkish support.
A Rocky Start
And so on the 2nd or 3rd
of April 2003, Massoud recounts, he and 30 or so other translators were
flown from Ramstein Air Base in Germany (another country that allegedly
refused to go along with U.S. plans, by the way) to northern Iraq,
under cover of darkness. “The flight was terrible,” he recounts.
“Turbulence, and we couldn’t use any lights. When we finally got there,
to a place called Bashut near Kirkuk, they told us that a Major Sanchez
was waiting for us. “‘Where?’ we asked. Nobody knew.”
The Turkish
translators were hastily processed that night, and shown to their
large, 30-man tent – which had apparently been constructed even
more hastily, as it promptly proceeded to collapse once the new
arrivals had gone to bed. “It was a little chaotic,” recounts Massoud.
“Fortunately, we all had done our military service, so we knew how to
handle the situation. Still, it wasn’t a very good introduction to Iraq
… and then we had to wake up at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning.”
According
to Massoud, Titan’s vice-president had issued an urgent call to get the
translators sent to Iraq immediately, because they “didn’t have anyone
else there.” However, daylight revealed “hundreds of Kurdish, Turkish
and Arabic translators. They had gotten there well before us,” Massoud
explained. According to him, most were over 40 years old and had
allegedly been trained in translation after the first Gulf War –
in faraway Guantanamo Bay, no less. “Since many of these older people
had become American citizens, the soldiers trusted them more than us,”
Massoud attested. “And they were paid much better than us, at $5,000 a
month. However, I don’t think their level of translating was any
better.”
From the beginning, the mission was plagued with problems for both the translators and the U.S. forces.
“The
local Iraqi Kurds were not so nice to us, kind of mistrustful,” said
Massoud. “They didn’t think that we were supportive enough of the PKK
[the militant Kurdistan Worker’s Party, long active in the southeast of
Turkey]. Because of their experiences under Saddam, and the much worse
living conditions in Iraq compared to Turkey, they were fairly
radicalized.”
Despite being Kurdish, Massoud had little sympathy
for the Kurdish militant cause. “Even if my roots are from the south of
Turkey, the reality is I live in Istanbul and I am happy to be
Turkish,” he said.
The Americans, on the other hand, were greeted
with suspicion from ethnic groups of all nationalities. “They [the
soldiers] did not understand the local cultures … and with only
limited chance for communicating, it was easy to understand why they
remained outsiders.”
Despite the apparent mistrust between the
Turkish and Iraqi Kurds, everyone realized that there was business to
be done. “In Istanbul,” Massoud disclosed, “we all know other ways to
make a little money on the side. It was the same in Iraq. For some
reason, all the soldiers had to have souvenirs, like old Iraqi flags.
So I would ask the locals, who of course don’t speak any English, how
much they cost. They’d tell me, say, $5. Then the soldiers I was
translating for would ask, ‘Well, so how much did he say?’ To which I
would answer something like, ‘sir, it’ll be $45.’ And they gladly paid
out the money.”
Loneliness, Poverty and Sex
If
it seemed like money was no object to the Americans at the beginning,
this began to change as the weeks wore on. “After two months in Iraq,”
said Massoud, “the base commanders had still failed to get a proper
bank set up. The first thing on every base has to be a bank. The
soldiers were depressed, trapped on the base, and had by that time
started to run out of money – meaning they couldn’t buy anything
in the PX [army store], and had to eat only the MREs,
meals-read-to-eat, which are pretty terrible, whereas we could use our
local connections to buy whole chickens for $5. So, with this situation
dragging on, the weather starting to warm up and the war continuing in
the south, it started to affect the troop morale.”
Having to cope
with loneliness, malnutrition and basically captive status inside a
heavily-fortified base took its toll. The lack of a bank to dispense
funds, in particular, facilitated some of the most lurid events to have
transpired at the base – illicit sex and prostitution.
“On
the base, there was a big gymnasium,” Massoud explained. “It could fit
about 2,000 people and had many little side rooms on the second level,
like for weight rooms or showers, for example. And a lot of the
soldiers would use these rooms for sex, with each other or sometimes
with translators, of course all against the rules. The shower room was
the most popular.”
In fact, he continued, the soldiers’ steadily
dwindling stock of cash led some female soldiers even to prostitute
themselves. “There was this beautiful, 30-year-old woman soldier who I
was friends with,” Massoud recalled. “And she would sell herself
regularly to the other soldiers – for only $20. I couldn’t
believe it.” When asked if he had ever solicited the woman, the suave,
dark-eyed Turk just laughed and said, “Come on, you think that I had to pay?”
Intrigue and Incompetence
When
asked about other types of scandalous behavior, Massoud alluded to
incidents of procurement fraud, but didn’t provide details. He did not
recall any instances of torture having taken place on base: “Because of
my job position, I was not in a position to know yes or no about that,
anyway.”
Aside from being lonely and slightly depraved, Army life
was dangerous. “We were fired on, on more than one occasion,” Massoud
recalled. “I saw killing and destruction in Iraq … and those
memories will always be with me.”
Located in the ethnically
mixed, oil-rich north of Iraq, the U.S. base and its environs were
“swarming with intelligence officers from all different countries
– Americans, Turkish, Israeli, Syrian, etc.,” attested Massoud.
According to him, the Turkish government’s early concern for the Iraqi
Turkoman minority had led them to send six Turkish army officers along
to Kirkuk with the Americans. “Our site manager told us not to talk to
them or ask them what they were doing there,” said Massoud. “And even
though we thought they were ‘our guys,’ and might protect us if need
be, we never did get beyond a cup of tea, the usual small talk, you
know.”
According to Massoud, it was easy to tell the spooks from
the legitimate workers for Titan or Brown & Root, who were also
there. “The spies were so obvious,” he said. “They’d be the kind of
guys who looked really out of place and would ask too many questions,
things that they didn’t have any reason to ask about – especially
funny since they were asking me, and I was just a translator.”
When
asked what nationality’s agents were most easy to identify, Massoud
chuckled. “You can pick out our guys [Turks] from a mile away. Even if
they were dressed like regular civilians, they were the ones wearing
these standard-issue military boots.”
Local Overtures and Innuendo
Although
he apparently knew nothing more than the soldiers did about potential
external threats, Massoud did have one advantage: his ability to
communicate with the locals.
“We translators were always able to
live much better than the soldiers,” he reminisced. “Whereas they were
stuck with MREs for dinner, we all had fresh and cheap local vegetables
and chicken from the Kurdish people in the area.”
In fact, this
relationship became somewhat more provocative when, aside from the
usual buying and selling, local Iraqi women started showing up outside
the base.
“They were inviting us, saying, ‘come on, come out and
visit us in our homes,'” Massoud said. “But how? We were trapped on the
base like the soldiers. … It was hard to explain this concept to
them.”
Apparently, some of these women were looking for a
husband, and thought they might find one among the ranks of ostensibly
well-off Turkish Kurds working for the U.S. However, since the local
women also were asking for soldiers, there were suspicions that the
even wealthier Americans were being sought out, too. Yet could an
American soldier really be successfully integrated into the tight-knit
and conservative Kurdish tribal culture, even if he wanted to?
“I don’t know if they were interested in marriage,” Massoud reflected. “Maybe just sex.”
I
marveled at how such an act could transpire, given the nature of
Kurdish society and the fact that the Americans weren’t especially
popular, to say the least. “Well, yes, they possibly could have sex
with a soldier,” he nodded, pausing for a final sip of beer.
“Afterwards they might get to kill him too, of course.”
And with
that, apologizing that the hour was late, Massoud shook my hand and
disappeared as quickly as he’d come into the wet, foggy Istanbul night.
::Tullycast:: 