The night before four Blackwater USA contractors were lynched in Iraq, their boss was desperately writing to the company, begging for equipment that might have saved their lives.

“Guys this [is] reality,” Blackwater USA’s Baghdad chief, Tom Powell, wrote to his superiors on March 30, 2004. “I have vehicles that I have sent to Jordan for a pickup that are suspect. The ones going to Kuwait are in bad shape. The Baghdad ones … [have] bearing and wheel problems [and] one is overheating.”