"I am unabashedly an admirer of outsourcing.. . . There's very few things in life you can't outsource," General Barry McCaffrey, former US Drug War Czar

The drumbeat of war has pushed the corporate scandals off the front pages, while compounding economic worries. There are few worries among America's military and security contractors, whose profits are all but assured as the US ramps up the War on Terrorism.

Prominent among the mercenary corporations is Dyncorp, headquartered in Reston Virginia and boasting close ties to everybody from the CIA to Enron.

Not quite fortune 500 (it's listed as 730) the company reported more than $1.9 billion in sales for 1991. 95% of Dyncorp's revenue comes from US government clients like the Defense Department, the DOE, State Department, DEA, National Institutes of Health, Defense Information Systems Agency, NASA, EPA, FCC the Treasury Department and the IRS.

Its "principle activity is to provide diversified management, technical, engineering, and professional services to US government customers." Its 17,500 employees do everything from provide telephone and internet services to HUD, to flying airplanes for the State Department and CIA in anti-drug and counterinsurgency operations in South America.

And given the times, they are busy. A war against Iraq will include a hefty support role for the company. As CEO Paul Lombardi says "we support the logistics, supply chain, we fuel base camps, build roads, run telecommunications. We're all over the place in the Gulf states."

Dyncorp provides aircraft maintenance at US airbases in Kuwait, Bahrain and Suadi Arabia. The company is also in the bioweapons vaccine business, advises the military on biological and chemical warfare and provides experts and technicians for a host of advanced weaponry.

The Bush administration recently announced its intention to turn over security for Afghan president Hamid Karzai to a private contractor, Dyncorp being their preferred choice. Karzai is currently being protected by US special forces soldiers who replaced Karzai's Afghan guards after the prominent assassinations of some cabinet ministers heightened concern over security. The plan to privatize Karzai's security has drawn bipartisan criticism. Congressmen Henry J. Hyde (R.-Ill.) and Tom Lantos (D.-Calif.) recently expressed their written discomfort to the State Department. "Experience with such contractors elsewhere leads us to believe that the presence of commercial vendors acting in this capacity would send a different message to the Afghan people and to President Karzai's adversaries: that we are not serious enough about our commitment to Afghanistan to dispatch U.S. personnel."

The "experience elsewhere," the congressmen are referring too includes Bosnia, where Dyncorp, besides de-mining operations and maintaining US airbases, provides the USA's contingent of police officers to the UN peacekeeping mission. Most sponsor countries, as a matter of national pride, send their best national police officers to participate in UN missions. The US is unique in outsourcing the job. And the message Dyncorp has sent is Bosnia is not a source of pride for the US. Several Dyncorp employees in Bosnia have been implicated in prostitution and the outright buying and selling of young girls. A few employees were fired after the Bosnian police opened an investigation, but the problem is believed to be more widespread and continuing. The fired employees have never been prosecuted and the US government disavows any responsibility for the behavior of its contractors.

Problems have turned up in South America as well where Dyncorp has a $600 million contract with the State Department to "participate in eradication missions, training, and drug interdiction, [also] air transport, reconnaissance, search and rescue, airborne medical evacuation, ferrying equipment and personnel from one country to another, as well as aircraft maintenance." Besides operating all of the State Department's aircraft in the region, Dyncorp's pilots perform the aerial spraying of herbicides on areas suspected of containing coca plants. Operating in a war zone, the company maintains a nearly complete war fighting infrastructure in Colombia, from helicopter fleets to administrative personnel.

In 2000, Colombian customs seized two vials of what it says was heroin that Dyncorp was shipping back to it's US headquarters on X base in Y. The vials were labeled as samples of used aircraft oil collected for routine analysis. The company insists it is innocent. The evidence and the whole case have conveniently disappeared into the hazy War on Drugs.

Dyncorp has been busy in Peru as well. The CIA contractors that directed the Peruvian air force to shoot down the planeload of American missionaries in 2001 were Dyncorp employees patrolling Peru's border for drug smugglers. Language difficulties apparently contributed to the confusion that led to the strafing of the civilian plane by a fighter jet and the death of a mother and her 7 month year old child. Neither Dyncorp nor the CIA have accepted responsibility.

Founded in 1946, Dyncorp was taken private in a 1987 buyout and is largely owned by it's employees.Those employees include retired military technicians, pilots, special forces and former police officers. It also employs a large number of unqualified maintenance personnel, according to complaints from current and former employees. Expressing concern for the "safety of the men and women flying the aircraft and those employees whose professional reputations are at stake," 20 year employee Tom Greer charges "that untrained personnel are being allowed to perform maintenance on highly technical weapons systems." He accuses the company of "misrepresenting themselves," and their employees' qualifications to the US military.

Dyncorp's domestic US contracts have drawn fire as well. The nexus for these complaints is Herbert S. "Pug" Winokur, CEO of Capricorn Holdings one of Dyncorp's main investors. Winokur was the chairman of DynCorp's board of directors from 1987 to 1997 and remains a DynCorp board member and chair of its compensation committee.

Winokur also happens to be a major player in Enron. That's where things get really interesting according to Catherine Austin Fitts, Assistant Secretary of Housing under the first President Bush.

According to Fitts, she was hired to "help clean up $100 billion sized financial frauds [of] Iran Contra, the S&L crisis, BCCI and the HUD scandal." Leaving government after 18 months, reportedly out of frustration, Fitts has since become a corporate scandal watcher.

Interviewed on KPFA's Flashpoints program in March 2002 she suggests a continuing Enron coverup, with Pug Winokur, chairman of Enron's finance committee at the center.

Dyncorp performs telecommunications and database management for a host of government agencies, including the SEC, supposed corporate as well as the CIA and FBI. As Fitts put it "American taxpayers pay Pug and his company to collect and manage data on all of us." Pointing to the free ride Congress gave Winokur during his Enron testimony earlier this year, she indicated it wouldn't be far fetched to equate Winokur with a privatized version of J. Edgar Hoover - a man with enough dirt on enough politicians that no one wants to question him too closely.

Such outsourced fascism might not be the reality some people suggest, but there is more than enough cause for concern over Dyncorp's relationship with the US government and with the role of the USA's mercenary contractors in general.

Sources include: "Outside the law," Robert Capps, www.salon.com; "The Anatomy of a Cover-Up," 3/12/02, Flashpoints News Radio, KPFA, Berkeley; "Contractors Playing Increasing Role in U.S. Drug War," Tod Robberson, Dallas Morning News, 02/27/00; http://www.colombiareport.org; "DynCorp faces an ethical dilemma," Leona C. Bull, Journal of Aerospace and Defense Industry News, 04/12/02; and http://www.dyncorp-sucks.com.