CSC Unit to Send Advisors to Iraq
From cops to construction, rebuilding post-war Iraq is becoming good business for California firms.
A unit of El Segundo-based Computer Sciences Corp. won a $50-million State Department contract Friday to provide up to 1,000 civilian law-enforcement advisors to rebuild Iraq’s police force, prisons and judiciary. Several industry analysts believe that the contract could be worth much more if it is extended beyond its one-year term.
The award to CSC’s DynCorp, based in Reston, Va., came less than 24 hours after the U.S. Agency for International Development gave its main Iraqi reconstruction contract to Bechtel Group of San Francisco, which is now responsible for repairing Iraq’s airports, roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, power grids and water and sewage systems.
Two other California companies, Fluor Corp. of Aliso Viejo and Parsons Corp. of Pasadena, are expected to bid for an Army Corps of Engineers contract to rebuild the Iraqi oil infrastructure, a pact that could be worth billions of dollars.
The Bechtel project is expected to be ultimately worth tens of billions, although the initial contract provides for up to $680 million over the next 18 months. Bechtel will focus first on the port of Umm al Qasr and on power plants, a spokesman said Friday. The port is a prime entry point for humanitarian aid, and much of Baghdad remains without power.
A senior port engineer and a senior power engineer will arrive in Kuwait by Tuesday and will join Iraq project chief Terry Valenzano and other staff, Bechtel spokesman Mike Kidder said.
Although Bechtel has overall authority, it intends to assign most of the actual work to subcontractors, Kidder said, and “to maximize the participation of Iraqis.”
In an e-mail message Friday to Bechtel’s 50,000 employees, Chairman Riley Bechtel said, “We won this work on our record, plain and simple.... It’s a record that few, if any, companies in the world can match.” He added that Bechtel was “proud to serve” the people of Iraq.
Under the law-enforcement contract, DynCorp will provide advisors who have at least a decade of experience in U.S. law enforcement, judicial affairs and corrections, including two years of police training, crime-scene investigation, border security and customs.
DynCorp already has recruited more than 150 advisors for the job under a contract it won in 1996 to help build new police forces in the Balkans. And judging by the response, the company probably will have little trouble finding at least 1,000 present or former U.S. law-enforcement officers to work in war-torn Iraq.
“The interest is very enthusiastic. I’m getting calls from law enforcement all over the country,” said Mike Dickerson, CSC’s chief spokesman. “There seems to be a tremendous amount of interest from the New York City region in particular, for whatever reason.”
Dickerson said it won’t be easy to establish new law-enforcement institutions in a nation that has no democratic tradition and has lived for a quarter-century under a draconian police state in which torture, executions and disappearances were common.
“I don’t believe we would have bid on the contract if we weren’t up to the challenge,” Dickerson said. “We’ve taken on rather daunting challenges in the past.”
DynCorp was one of just a few companies the State Department invited to bid on the Iraq law-enforcement contract. The absence of open, competitive bidding for Iraqi contracts has come under fire in Congress, but department officials insist it was necessary because the contract had to be awarded quickly.
DynCorp was an obvious front-runner. The firm, which was bought by CSC last month, started training police on contract for the State Department in Haiti in 1994. And its 1996 contract in the Balkans has been extended year after year to include police and judicial training in East Timor and Afghanistan.
It was under that 1996 contract that the State Department asked DynCorp to recruit the first 150 police, prison and judicial advisors for Iraq last month. That group will head to Baghdad in coming weeks, after an initial assessment is conducted by a team of 26 contract advisors to the Justice Department. The department advisors will begin arriving in the region next week, a State Department official said.
The DynCorp contract includes a provision for an additional year, “if there is a need for it,” Dickerson said. A State Department official said the contract, like the 1996 police-advisor contract in the Balkans, could be used for police services elsewhere in the world.
CSC already has more than 2,100 employees in the area around Iraq working under contracts with the Army Central Command. Most are providing logistics, information technology and base support for U.S. forces.
Under a separate contract with the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Services agency, DynCorp is providing bodyguards for Hamid Karzai, who was installed as Afghanistan’s interim president after U.S. forces drove the Taliban from power.
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Fineman reported from Washington and Streitfeld from Los Angeles. Times staff writer James Flanigan in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
