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WORLD
East Oregonian
Thursday, May 4, 2017
U.S. company turned blind eye
to wild behavior on Iraq base
By DESMOND BUTLER
and LORI HINNANT
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The
two American investigators
felt a sense of foreboding that
Sunday as they headed to an
emergency meeting with their
boss on the Iraqi air base.
But they didn’t expect to be
surrounded by armed guards,
disarmed, detained against
their will — and fired without
explanation.
It was March 12 — less
than two months ago. Robert
Cole and Kristie King were
in Iraq working as investiga-
tors for Sallyport Global, a
U.S. company that was paid
nearly $700 million in federal
contracts to secure Balad Air
Base, home to a squadron of
F-16 fighter jets as part of the
U.S.-led coalition to annihi-
late the Islamic State.
Cole and King had spent
more than a year together in
Iraq investigating all manner
of misconduct at Balad and
beyond.
They’d
uncovered
evidence that Sallyport
employees were involved
in sex trafficking, they said.
Staff on base routinely flew
in smuggled alcohol in
such high volumes that a
plane once seesawed on the
tarmac under the weight.
Rogue militia stole enormous
generators off the base using
flatbed trucks and a 60-foot
crane, driving past Sallyport
security guards.
Managers repeatedly shut
down Cole and King’s inves-
tigations and failed to report
their findings to the U.S.
government that was footing
the bill, the investigators said.
Right before they were
fired, Cole and King had
opened an investigation into
allegations of timesheet fraud
among Sallyport employees.
In a call with Sallyport
lawyers, they said, they were
advised to keep two sets of
books about potential crimes
and contract violations.
“One for the government
to see and one for the govern-
ment not to see,” King told
The Associated Press.
In a statement to the AP,
Sallyport said it follows all
contracting rules at the base,
home to the F-16s that are a
key to the fight against the
Islamic State.
“Sallyport has a strong
record of providing security
and life support services in
challenging war zones like
Iraq and plays a major but
unheralded role in the war
against ISIS,” Chief Oper-
ating Officer Matt Stuckart
wrote.
“The
company
takes any suggestion of
wrongdoing at Balad very
seriously.”
More than 150 documents
obtained by AP, as well as
interviews with more than a
half-dozen former or current
Sallyport employees, show
how a contractor ran amok
after being hired for lucrative
and essential combat support
operations. The investigators
and other witnesses describe
grave security breaches and
illegal schemes that went
unreported until the govern-
ment asked about them.
The point behind requiring
contractors to employ their
own investigators was to limit
the waste and corruption that
has marred federal security
contracting going back to
the aftermath of the Sept. 11
attacks.
The Pentagon’s own audi-
tors, who were frequently on
the base 50 miles north of
Baghdad, were not told of the
serious problems until early
this year, a potential viola-
tion of law. The Pentagon
auditors’ reports, obtained
by the AP, detail dozens of
more minor infractions. That
gap illustrates the limits of
U.S. oversight for billions of
dollars in contracts run by
companies that have cashed
in on the fight to protect
Americans from extremism.
The Defense Department
declined to comment.
The morning of March 12,
King had gone to church and
was still carrying her Bible
when she and Cole walked
into the office foyer for the
meeting with the boss. To
their astonishment, they were
immediately surrounded by
armed security guards and
forced to turn over the 9 mm
pistols they both routinely
AP file photos
TOP: One of four new U.S.- made F-16 fighter jets outside a hardened hangar upon
its arrival to Balad air base, north of Baghdad, Iraq in July 2015. ABOVE LEFT: Security
camera footage of a crane leaving Balad Air Base unchallenged by Sallyport Global
security guards on Nov. 14, 2016, after it was involved in stealing generators. ABOVE
RIGHT: An Iraqi bodyguard hired by Sallyport Global to protect VIPs. When a Toyota
SUV was stolen from Balad air base, he became the chief suspect and was linked
to a dangerous Iran-backed militia and was viewed by investigators as “a hard-core
recruit to become a terrorist who poses a serious threat to all personnel on this base.”
carried on the job.
The boss, David Saffold,
informed them they were
being fired but wouldn’t say
why.
“We knew too much,”
King told AP in an interview
at her home in Amarillo,
Texas. “They want to cover it
up and move on because it’s a
huge amount of money.”
Bodyguard or terrorist?
In 2004, Rob Cole was
a retired California police
officer and licensed private
investigator when he decided
to go to Iraq for a series of
contracting jobs. Like many
U.S. contractors working in
hazardous regions, he went
because the work paid a lot
more than he could make
back home.
Americans have been at
Balad on and off since 2003.
Sallyport’s parent company,
Michael Baker International,
announced in 2014 its subsid-
iaries had been awarded $838
million for work on the base.
Cole’s first job at Balad
was cut short in June 2014, a
month after he arrived, when
“We knew too
much. They
want to cover
it up and move
on because it’s
a huge amount
of money.”
— Kristie King,
Former contractor fired by
Sallyport Global
the Islamic State group began
sweeping across Iraq and
Syria. The extremists ulti-
mately made it to the gates of
Balad, which was evacuated.
When the Americans went
back, they found a looted
base largely under the control
of Iranian-backed Shiite mili-
tias that were supporting the
Iraqi government, according
to former employees. A
former senior manager told
the AP that Sallyport reached
an understanding with the
militias that they would not
enter the flight and residential
areas. He declined to be
named because he wasn’t
authorized to discuss the
matter and didn’t want to be
blacklisted from future jobs.
Cole, now 62, returned
to Balad in May 2015, as
Sallyport was preparing for
the arrival of American F-16s
sold to the Iraqi government.
Sallyport’s mission, along
with its parent company, was
to keep the base operating
smoothly, train the Iraqis, and
most importantly maintain
security on the base, where
thousands of Iraqis and
hundreds of contractors work.
The federal contract
required investigations into
potential crimes and viola-
tions involving the compa-
ny’s work at Balad. That was
Cole and King’s assignment.
“They wanted someone
to be competent enough to
process an investigation,
if there was a crime, or if
someone turned up dead,”
King said. “The way it was
put to me: If someone turned
up with a knife in their back,
who are you going to call?”
From the start, it was clear
that much was awry on the
base. Despite the urgency of
fighting IS, the delivery of
the F-16s had been delayed
by months amid security
concerns. It would be cata-
strophic if IS seized the base
and its multimillion-dollar jets.
On July 13, 2015, four
F-16s flew in from Arizona,
the first of 36 fighter jets that
the U.S. planned to deliver.
Brett McGurk, then the
U.S. deputy envoy for the
international coalition against
IS, hailed the arrival in a
tweet .
“After years of prepara-
tion & training in the U.S.,
Iraqi pilots today landed the
1st squadron of Iraqi F16s in
#Iraq,” he wrote.
The first security breach
came in less than 24 hours:
A long black skid mark on
the tarmac was reported. It
stopped about 45 yards from
the nose of one of the fighter
jets. A truck had plowed
through a rope barrier in the
“no-go” zone, where lethal
force is authorized to protect
the planes. For more than
10 minutes, no one even
responded as the vehicle
drove away, according to
reports citing surveillance
video.
That turned out not to be
a terrorist. But Cole says the
out-of-control truck was a
harbinger. He noted the lax
protection for the F-16s in his
report and forwarded it to the
chief of security, Steve Asher.
Under the requirements of the
contract, Cole’s report should
have then made its way to the
Pentagon. But he says Asher
kept a lid on the incident.
Three months later, in
October 2015, Cole reported
another security breach, the
theft of a Toyota SUV that
Sallyport had assigned to
bodyguards to drive VIPs
around the base. Cole eventu-
ally uncovered a plot by three
Iraqi Sallyport staff working
with a dangerous Iran-backed
militia, known as Kataib
Imam Ali.
The Shiite militia was an
ongoing headache, politically
connected and operating
outside the law, with sidelines
in theft and gunrunning. It
has ties to the leader of the
umbrella militia Popular
Mobilization Forces, which is
on the U.S. list of designated
terrorists.
To Cole’s astonishment,
the prime suspect threatened
to join the militia during
his interrogation. He was a
Sallyport bodyguard. In fact,
the investigators later found a
photo of him on his Facebook
page, dressed in black militia
garb and a patch indicating
his allegiance to the group.
He is “viewed by the Inves-
tigations Unit as a hard-core
recruit to become a terrorist
who poses a serious threat to
all personnel on this base,”
Cole wrote in another report.
The Toyota was recovered
within a few days, but Cole
was ordered off the case. In an
interview with AP, the former
senior manager defended
the company’s order, saying
negotiations with the militias
were highly sensitive and
had to be handled with Iraqi
BRIEFLY
Le Pen, Macron
come out swinging
in TV debate
cooperation. Still, the suspect
was supposed to be banned
from the base, and Cole later
saw the man walking around
freely.
Liquor smuggling
The longer Cole was
on the base, the more he
suspected that management
was turning a blind eye to
criminal activity.
On the books, Balad is a
dry base, where alcohol is
restricted. But in reality the
booze was everywhere and
everyone knew it. Finding
out how it got there led to
more troubling questions.
A Sallyport employee who
worked in the air terminal
reported in late 2015 that
co-workers were involved
in a smuggling scheme.
They were bringing in cases
and cases of water bottles
filled with liquor that they’d
sneaked onto planes flying in
from Baghdad.
According to investigative
documents and people who
watched the smuggling in
action, three empty suitcases
would routinely be loaded
onto a flight to Baghdad. Each
time, the bags came back with
plastic water bottles filled
with liquor. When they were
unloaded, the bags were not
searched but taken directly
outside to be picked up — a
serious security risk in a war
zone.
“You could be putting
a bomb in there,” said one
former
employee
who
witnessed the smuggling.
“You’ve got people just
going rogue.” He spoke only
on condition of anonymity
because he didn’t want to
imperil his new job with a
different overseas contractor.
Steve Anderson, who
worked on flight logistics,
says he was pressured to sign
off on faked flight manifests
that omitted passenger names
and falsified the weight
of cargo to cover for the
alcohol smuggling and other
infractions — a violation of
international flight regula-
tions. The planes were getting
so weighed down he was
worried about flight safety.
“They were playing
Russian roulette with the
passengers’ lives — including
mine,” Anderson said.
Once, he watched a plane
that was being unloaded tip
nose-forward on its wheels
onto the tarmac because it
was so overloaded.
“I could hear the people
inside the aircraft yelling. I
never seen anything like that
in my entire life,” he recalled.
“It was like a seesaw.”
PARIS (AP) — In a
heated, high-pressure
primetime TV debate,
French presidential candi-
date Emmanuel Macron
warned of “civil war” if
his far-right opponent
Marine Le Pen is elected,
saying Wednesday that
her hard-line plans to
combat Islamic radicals
would play into their
hands. She painted him
as subservient to Islamic
extremism, saying: “They
control you.”
The barbed exchange
over France’s fight against
terrorism characterized the
ill-tempered tone of the
debate. Both candidates
sought to land damaging
blows, in a clash of styles,
politics and personalities
that highlighted their
polar-opposite visions and
plans for France.
Le Pen painted the
former banker and
economy minister as a
servant of big business
and finance, and declared
herself “the candidate of
the people, of the France
that we love.”
Saying that Islamic
extremists must be
“eradicated” in the wake
of repeated attacks since
2015, Le Pen charged that
Macron wouldn’t be up to
the task. “You won’t do
that,” she charged.
Macron countered that
Le Pen’s anti-terror plans
would play into the hands
of the extremists and divide
France, adding that this is
“what the terrorists expect.
It’s civil war, it’s division,
it’s heinous speech.”
Russia, Turkey
agree to support
safe-zones in Syria
BEIRUT (AP) — The
presidents of Russia and
Turkey said on Wednesday
they support the creation
of safe-zones in war-torn
Syria as a delegation of
Syrian rebels walked out
of cease-fire talks with the
Damascus government
underway in Kazakhstan,
citing repeated violations
of a similar truce agreed on
in December.
Meeting in the Russian
resort town of Sochi,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
and Vladimir Putin
expressed hope the Syrian
government and rebels
would adopt this latest
proposal to “de-escalate”
the conflict, which has
run now for six years and
claimed some 400,000
lives.
L i t t le
D a r l i n gs !
This special section will be fi lled with photos of and
messages for adorable little darlings from Umatilla County.
Families will want to keep this special keepsake for
their child and family for years to come.
PUBLISHES:
June 28, 2017
DEADLINES:
June 15, 2017
Olivia,
t.
I loved you from the very star
heart.
my
ed
rac
emb
,
You stole my breath
un.
beg
just
has
er
Our life togeth
.
You’re part of me, my little one
Love, Mom
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