Canada's diplomats in Kabul and visiting high-value targets like Prime Minister Stephen Harper are protected by a group of heavily armed gunmen hired by Saladin Security, a British firm with a long history of secretive and clandestine operations.
Department of Foreign Affairs officials in Ottawa are tight-lipped about the deal struck with Saladin, whose gun-toting employees provide perimeter security, operate checkpoints, serve as bodyguards and form a heavily armed rapid-reaction force designed to move quickly to thwart an attempted kidnapping and rescue survivors of suicide attacks or car-bombings in Kabul.
The department won't even confirm that Saladin's most recent contract - which ended in June of 2007 - has been renewed, but observers of the Canadian embassy in Kabul say Saladin employees remain on guard. Some Saladin guards, in baseball caps and paramilitary uniforms, openly patrol the road outside the Canadian diplomatic compound in Kabul.
But details of the extent of Canada's reliance on a private firm for diplomatic protection are even more scant than the now-controversial U.S. deal with Blackwater Security, the American firm whose hired gunmen killed 17 Iraqi civilians last month while protecting a diplomatic convoy.
In Kabul, as in Baghdad, senior government officials have voiced outrage over the cavalier, trigger-happy swagger of some outside security firms.
Iraq's government wants Blackwater kicked out of the country. In Kabul, the government of Prime Minister Hamid Karzai has accused gunmen hired by several private security firms of robbery and murder.
Two firms - Watan and Caps - were shut down after raids by Kabul police uncovered illegal weapons. Some Western firms are apparently on a list of 10 other security companies that may be closed or forced to cease operations in Afghanistan. Saladin, which operates worldwide, has not been publicly implicated in any of the alleged excesses or crimes attributed to private security firms in Afghanistan.
The company declined to respond to a request for details of its activities on behalf of the Canadian government. But it apparently provides armour-plated black vans and SUVs, as well as some drivers and bodyguards.
"Saladin Afghanistan was fully registered with the Afghan Government in 2002 and has been open and transparent with the Afghan Ministries and MOI [Ministry of the Interior]at all times; we run our Afghan operations in a professional discreet manner," said Paul Brooks, in an e-mailed reply to The Globe and Mail.
"Unfortunately, with success comes jealousy and resentment from outside and in; having no skeletons in the cupboard we are in a very comfortable position," he said.
In Ottawa, Foreign Affairs officials took more than a week to respond and after repeatedly asking for more time to prepare answers to written questions about the matter, eventually replied to the Globe with a terse: "Matters relating to the operational security of the embassy are not public."
So it remains unclear whether Saladin guards are, for instance, subject to Canadian or Afghan law or - in the event of a shooting - could be spirited out of the country, as occurred when a Blackwater operative killed one of the Iraqi Prime Minister's personal bodyguards at a New Year's Eve party.
A private security guard working for another firm in Kabul left the country after shooting his translator.
"They operate in a grey area and that's part of the problem," said Stuart Hendin, an expert in the law of war at the University of Ottawa. He suggested that the Harper government may have opted to hire private security because the Canadian military is stretched too thin to deploy soldiers to protect the embassy and its diplomats. But by contracting out, the government might still be held liable, Prof. Hendin said. If one of the guards were to injure or kill someone, they might be considered agents of the state - in this case, Canada.
Also unexplained is why, in Kabul, despite the presence of thousands of NATO troops, Canada has opted to contract Saladin to provide the rapid-reaction force to deal with any attacks on diplomatic compounds or convoys. Similarly, the rules of engagement governing Canada's hired security forces are unknown. Some private firms, such as Blackwater, contracted by the U.S. State Department, have told Congress that they can and do shoot first if they believe they face imminent attack.
Canada contracted Saladin's Afghanistan subsidiary for the standby services of its rapid-reaction force in Kabul for the year ending June, 2007. But it is not clear whether there were other contracts for the armed Saladin guards outside the embassy or the buildings housing Canadian military and diplomatic personnel in the Afghan capital. Canada has more than a dozen senior military officers, known as the Strategic Advisory Team, who provide advice to Afghan ministers. The SAT team is also apparently protected by Saladin guards.
Saladin has a huge, armed presence in Afghanistan, employing more than 2,000 guards. That makes its private army larger than all but a handful of NATO contingents. Canada has about 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan.
Keenie Meenie reconstituted
Saladin, the secretive security agency hired by the Canadian government in Kabul, has a long and sometimes murky lineage dating back decades and including black and covert operations for the CIA and others in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Saladin is the successor to KMS, which in turn was originally known as Keenie Meenie Services. It proudly boasts that "Saladin with its predecessor KMS Ltd., has provided security services since 1975. It was the original company to offer specialist security services in difficult and high risk areas of the world."
But Saladin's capsule history on its website doesn't include any mention of providing mercenaries or working with Oliver North, the U.S. operative who ran the illegal Iran-Contra operations during the administration of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan. Col. North admitted that KMS was hired to send mercenaries into Nicaragua.
Numerous published reports place Saladin and its predecessor firms at the heart of clandestine operations run by both the U.S. and British governments.
"It was indeed KMS ... to which the main British role in training holy warrior cadre for the Afghan jihad seems to have fallen. KMS has a subsidiary called Saladin Security," runs one typical passage in Unholy Wars, John Cooley's 2002 book that traces the co-operation between U.S. administrations and radical Islamic groups.
The Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit journalism website, says "KMS's Iran-Contra sabotage operations were only a small part of its business. In the same years as fighting in Nicaragua, KMS teams were operating side by side with the official SAS in providing bodyguards for British embassies and Saudi princes - and ... being paid by the CIA and [the British]SIS to train Afghan mujahedeen and other fundamentalist Islamic guerrillas."
Keenie Meenie and its successors, founded by former British special operations officer Major David Walker in the 1970s, seems to have engaged in everything from routine security for oil companies to running Oman's air force and providing operatives to blow up government aircraft in Nicaragua.
It was also hired to train and, according to some accounts, equip Islamic insurgents battling Russian forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Some of those jihadists now have near-legendary status among the Taliban insurgents seeking to oust Canadian and other "infidel" troops.
The company has mostly kept a low profile. The name, Keenie Meenie, is reportedly derived from the Swahili phase for a snake slithering through the grass.
In the past 10 years, KMS has largely been supplanted by Saladin, at least for the group's publicly acknowledged operations.
"Towards the end of the 1980s the company reorganized, developed and extended its range of conventional security services and started working consistently with commercial companies," says Saladin's website.
But the company also provides security, personal protections, kidnap, extortion and crisis negotiation services for both governments and commercial companies. Paul Koring