Expendable Assets: Blackwater Camouflaged as Fiction?
Bill Sizemore - Virginian-Pilot
Sep 26, 2011
Since his indictment last year on federal firearms charges, former Blackwater general counsel Andrew Howell hasn't been just sitting around feeling sorry for himself.
He has written a novel ripped straight from the headlines generated by his onetime employer, the controversial security company that became a hated name in much of the Muslim world for the aggressive tactics of its private warriors.
The just-published book, a political thriller, is set in Hampton Roads. Howell, a 17-year resident of the area, loaded it with local color. He also took the opportunity to settle some old scores.
Howell is a key figure in one of several still-lingering court cases spawned by Blackwater's decade of post-9/11 security work in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The company since has been renamed Xe Services and is under new ownership.
Howell is one of five former Blackwater executives facing felony charges of conspiring to violate federal firearms laws while deploying the company's overseas security teams from its 7,000-acre training complex in Moyock, N.C. As Blackwater's onetime in-house attorney, Howell is also charged with obstruction of justice, accused of trying to impede the federal investigation of the case. No trial date has been set.
In a separate case, four former Blackwater security contractors face manslaughter charges stemming from a 2007 shooting incident in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead and inflamed anti-American sentiment in Iraq, ultimately getting the company banned from operating there.
A similar incident is at the heart of Howell's book, "Expendable Assets," published by Charleston, S.C.-based On-Demand Publishing. The author, known as Andy during his Blackwater days, used the name Drew Howell for the book.
The book's hero is one of several private security operatives indicted for their part in a shooting incident in an Afghan village.
In this case, the shootout is a set-up job, masterminded by an Iranian terrorist bent on sowing anti-American hatred.
Nevertheless, the hero's attorney urges him to save his neck by cutting a deal with the prosecutors.
"We have nothing to confess!" he protests.
"There are two ways to totalitarian power," the attorney tells him. "One is to have no laws. The other is to have so many laws that there can be only selective enforcement, against whomever those with power choose. Either way, you aren't really being punished for specific offenses, but because you are politically undesirable. What you have done or not done is irrelevant."
Ultimately, the book's hero must decide whether to help the authorities thwart a terrorist plot against multiple targets in Hampton Roads, including Norfolk Naval Station, Joint Base Langley, the Jamestown ferry, Norfolk's new light-rail system and four ex-presidents gathered for an aircraft carrier christening at the Newport News shipyard.
"When enemies threaten but the republic is corrupt, are those who stand in harm's way for it patriots or fools?" the hero asks himself. "What loyalty do you owe a government that shows you none? At what point does the brave and able man who continues to serve the unjust, the dishonest or the tyrant become one with them?"
One of the book's most unvarnished villains is an ambitious congresswoman who wages a crusade against Blackwater-like companies. She is at once a venal opportunist and a doctrinaire leftist who reads radical scholar Noam Chomsky for fun.
On the eve of a congressional hearing, she delivers this reality lesson to an idealistic intern: "Alice, whatever in the world made you think hearings are about getting to the truth?"
Some details of Howell's description suggest the congresswoman might be a caricature of Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., one of Congress' most persistent critics of private military companies.
Howell, who has found himself in the hot seat at congressional hearings poking into Blackwater's activities, insisted in an email interview that any resemblance is coincidental.
"The character intentionally does not represent any one person," he said. "She's meant to reflect some of the more troubling aspects of our legislative branch."
Over the course of a 20-year Navy career and his tenure with Blackwater, Howell said, "I had the opportunity to 'look behind the curtain' and gain some unusual insights into the workings of our nation's political/military/legal/media machinery."
The book "sort of wrote itself," he said.
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