{"id":5319,"date":"2010-01-05T23:47:22","date_gmt":"2010-01-06T08:17:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/?p=5319"},"modified":"2010-01-05T23:49:23","modified_gmt":"2010-01-06T08:19:23","slug":"is-is-blackwater-ceo-graymailing-the-u-s-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/?p=5319","title":{"rendered":"Is Blackwater CEO ‘graymailing’ the U.S. Government?"},"content":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/doc\/20091221\/scahill2<\/a><\/p>\n

Is Erik Prince ‘Graymailing’ the US Government?<\/h1>\n

By Jeremy Scahill<\/p>\n

December 4, 2009<\/p>\n

The in-depth Vanity Fair profile of the infamous owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is remarkable on many levels–not least among them that Prince appeared to give the story’s author, former CIA lawyer Adam Ciralsky, unprecedented access to information about sensitive, classified and lethal operations not only of Prince’s forces, but Prince himself. In the article, Prince is revealed not just as owner of a company that covertly provided contractors to the CIA for drone bombings and targeted assassinations, but as an actual CIA asset himself. While the story appears to be simply a profile of Prince, it might actually be the world’s most famous mercenary’s insurance policy against future criminal prosecution. The term of art for what Prince appears to be doing in the VF interview is graymail: a legal tactic that has been used for years by intelligence operatives or assets who are facing prosecution or fear they soon will be. In short, these operatives or assets threaten to reveal details of sensitive or classified operations in order to ward off indictments or criminal charges, based on the belief that the government would not want these details revealed. “The only reason Prince would do this [interview] is that he feels he is in very serious jeopardy of criminal charges,” says Scott Horton, a prominent national security and military law expert. “He absolutely would not do these things otherwise.”<\/p>\n

There is no doubt Prince is in the legal cross-hairs: There are reportedly two separate Grand Juries investigating Blackwater on a range of serious charges, ranging from gun smuggling to extralegal killings; multiple civil lawsuits alleging war crimes and extrajudicial killings; and Congress is investigating the assassination program in which Prince and his company were central players. “Obviously, Prince does know a lot and the government has to realize that once they start prosecuting him,” says Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “In some ways, graymail is what any good defense lawyer would do. This is something that’s in your arsenal.”<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most prominent case of graymail was by Oliver North when he and his lawyers used it to force dismissal of the most serious charges against him stemming from his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair. In another case, known as Khazak-gate, a US businessman, James Giffen, allegedly paid $78 million in bribes to former Khazakh Prime Minister Nurlan Balgimbayev in an attempt to win contracts for western oil companies to develop the Tengiz oil fields in the 1990s. In 1993, he was charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the largest overseas bribery case in history. After Giffen was indicted, he claimed that if he did what he was accused of, he did it in the service of US intelligence agencies. The case has been in limbo ever since.<\/p>\n

“This is as old as the hills as a tactic and it has a long track record of being very effective against the government,” says Horton. “It’s basically a threat to the government that if you prosecute me, I’ll disclose all sorts of national security-sensitive information. The bottom line here is it’s like an act of extortion or a threat: you do X and this is what I’m going to do.” Horton said that the Vanity Fair article was Prince “essentially putting out the warning to the Department of Justice: ‘You prosecute me and all this stuff will be out on the record.'”<\/p>\n

According to Ciralsky’s article, Prince was a “full-blown asset” of “the C.I.A.’s National Resources Division [which] recruited Prince in 2004 to join a secret network of American citizens with special skills or unusual access to targets of interest:”<\/p>\n

Two sources familiar with the arrangement say that Prince’s handlers obtained provisional operational approval from senior management to recruit Prince and later generated a “201 file,” which would have put him on the agency’s books as a vetted asset. It’s not at all clear who was running whom, since Prince says that, unlike many other assets, he did much of his work on spec, claiming to have used personal funds to road-test the viability of certain operations…<\/p>\n

Prince was developing unconventional means of penetrating “hard target” countries–where the C.I.A. has great difficulty working either because there are no stations from which to operate or because local intelligence services have the wherewithal to frustrate the agency’s designs. “I made no money whatsoever off this work,” Prince contends. He is unwilling to specify the exact nature of his forays. “I’m painted as this war profiteer by Congress. Meanwhile I’m paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security, out of my own pocket.”<\/p>\n

“I think that [Prince] will use all of his information and his knowledge of these secret dealings in basically what is an extortion play: ‘You come after me, and I’ll spill the beans on everything,'” says Horton. “That’s the essence of graymail and the Department of Justice will usually get its feathers all ruffled up and they’ll say, ‘You can’t deal with the government like this. This is unfair and improper.’ But in the end, it usually works.”<\/p>\n

In the Vanity Fair article, Prince alleges that he was outed–by whom he does not say, but the implication is that CIA Director Leon Panetta named him in a closed door hearing of the Intelligence Committee last June, and then the name was leaked by one of the attendees of that hearing. Sloan, the former federal prosecutor, said that if what Prince says in the Vanity Fair article about his role in secret CIA programs is true, he has a case that laws were broken in revealing his identity. “I’m not his fan, but he’s not wrong. For somebody to leak his identity as a CIA asset clearly merits a criminal investigation,” Sloan said. “Whether they should have ever hired Erik Prince or made him into an asset is a separate question. Assuming he really was a CIA asset, basically a spy, an undercover operative, and somebody decided to leak that, that’s not acceptable and that is a violation of the same law that leaking Valerie [Plame]’s identity was. If you can’t leak one person, you can’t leak any person, not just the people you like versus the people you don’t like.”<\/p>\n

While much of the focus in the Vanity Fair story was on Prince’s work with the CIA, the story also confirmed that Blackwater has an ongoing relationship with the US Special Forces, helping plan missions and providing air support. As The Nation reported, Blackwater has for years been working on a classified contract with the Joint Special Operations Command in a drone bombing campaign in Pakistan, as well as planning snatch-and-grab missions and targeted assassinations. Part of what may be happening behind closed doors is that the CIA is, to an extent, cutting Blackwater and Prince off. But, as sources have told The Nation, the company remains a central player in US Special Forces operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Prince’s choice of Adam Ciralsky to tell his story is an interesting one as well. Ciralsky was a CIA lawyer who in 1997 was suspended under suspicion he was having unauthorized contacts with possible Israeli intelligence agents. Ciralsky vehemently denied the allegations, saying he was the victim of a “witch-hunt” at the Agency. In any case, there is no question that Prince would view Ciralsky through the lens of his own struggle against the CIA. “When I saw the article, the first thing that just leapt off the page was his name. I thought, ‘My god, why would he go to Adam?'” said Horton. “And then I read the article and I thought, of course he’d go to Adam. There is this legal theme being developed in the article and Adam, as a lawyer who had dealt with the CIA, fully understands that. I mean I think he fully understood he was going to do a piece that would help Prince develop his legal defense and that’s what this is. The amazing thing to me is that Vanity Fair printed it. Do the editors of Vanity Fair not understand what’s going on here?”<\/p>\n

+++<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/features\/2010\/01\/blackwater-201001<\/a><\/p>\n

Scandal<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy<\/h1>\n

Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month. Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he\u2019s been playing in America\u2019s war on terror.<\/p>\n

By Adam Ciralsky<\/p>\n

January 2010<\/p>\n

I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.\u2019s disposal for some very risky missions,\u201d says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. \u201cBut when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.\u201d Prince\u2014the founder of Blackwater, the world\u2019s most notorious private military contractor\u2014is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.<\/p>\n

Erik Prince has an image problem\u2014the kind that\u2019s impervious to a Madison Avenue makeover. The 40-year-old heir to a Michigan auto-parts fortune, and a former navy seal, he has had the distinction of being vilified recently both in life and in art. In Washington, Prince has become a scapegoat for some of the Bush administration\u2019s misadventures in Iraq\u2014though Blackwater\u2019s own deeds have also come in for withering criticism. Congressmen and lawyers, human-rights groups and pundits, have described Prince as a war profiteer, one who has assembled a rogue fighting force capable of toppling governments. His employees have been repeatedly accused of using excessive, even deadly force in Iraq; many Iraqis, in fact, have died during encounters with Blackwater. And in November, as a North Carolina grand jury was considering a raft of charges against the company, as a half-dozen civil suits were brewing in Virginia, and as five former Blackwater staffers were preparing for trial for their roles in the deaths of 17 Iraqis, The New York Times reported in a page-one story that Prince\u2019s firm, in the aftermath of the tragedy, had sought to bribe Iraqi officials for their compliance, charges which Prince calls \u201clies \u2026 undocumented, unsubstantiated [and] anonymous.\u201d (So infamous is the Blackwater brand that even the Taliban have floated far-fetched conspiracy theories, accusing the company of engaging in suicide bombings in Pakistan.)<\/p>\n

In Hollywood, meanwhile, a town that loves nothing so much as a good villain, Prince, with his blond crop and Daniel Craig mien, has become the screenwriters\u2019 darling. In the film State of Play, a Blackwater clone (PointCorp.) uses its network of mercenaries for illegal surveillance and murder. On the Fox series 24, Jon Voight has played Jonas Hodges, a thinly veiled version of Prince, whose company (Starkwood) helps an African warlord procure nerve gas for use against U.S. targets.<\/p>\n

But the truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction. For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater\u2019s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.\u2019s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into \u201cdenied areas\u201d\u2014places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating\u2014to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009\u2014by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials\u2014Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition\u2014the very attributes that have galvanized his critics\u2014also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence. (Full disclosure: In the 1990s, before becoming a journalist for CBS and then NBC News, I was a C.I.A. attorney. My contract was not renewed, under contentious circumstances.)<\/p>\n

But Prince, with a new administration in power, and foes closing in, is finally coming in from the cold. This past fall, though he infrequently grants interviews, he decided it was time to tell his side of the story\u2014to respond to the array of accusations, to reveal exactly what he has been doing in the shadows of the U.S. government, and to present his rationale. He also hoped to convey why he\u2019s going to walk away from it all.<\/p>\n

To that end, he invited Vanity Fair to his training camp in North Carolina, to his Virginia offices, and to his Afghan outposts. It seemed like a propitious time to tag along.<\/p>\n

Split Personality<\/strong><\/p>\n

Erik Prince can be a difficult man to wrap your mind around\u2014an amalgam of contradictory caricatures. He has been branded a \u201cChristian supremacist\u201d who sanctions the murder of Iraqi civilians, yet he has built mosques at his overseas bases and supports a Muslim orphanage in Afghanistan. He and his family have long backed conservative causes, funded right-wing political candidates, and befriended evangelicals, but he calls himself a libertarian and is a practicing Roman Catholic. Sometimes considered arrogant and reclusive\u2014Howard Hughes without the O.C.D.\u2014he nonetheless enters competitions that combine mountain-biking, beach running, ocean kayaking, and rappelling.<\/p>\n

The common denominator is a relentless intensity that seems to have no Off switch. Seated in the back of a Boeing 777 en route to Afghanistan, Prince leafs through Defense News while the film Taken beams from the in-flight entertainment system. In the movie, Liam Neeson plays a retired C.I.A. officer who mounts an aggressive rescue effort after his daughter is kidnapped in Paris. Neeson\u2019s character warns his daughter\u2019s captors:<\/p>\n

If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don\u2019t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills \u2026 skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you [don\u2019t] let my daughter go now \u2026 I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.<\/p>\n

Prince comments, \u201cI used that movie as a teaching tool for my girls.\u201d (The father of seven, Prince remarried after his first wife died of cancer in 2003.) \u201cI wanted them to understand the dangers out there. And I wanted them to know how I would respond.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t escape the impression that Prince sees himself as somehow destined, his mission anointed. It comes out even in the most personal of stories. During the flight, he tells of being in Kabul in September 2008 and receiving a two a.m. call from his wife, Joanna. Prince\u2019s son Charlie, one year old at the time, had fallen into the family swimming pool. Charlie\u2019s brother Christian, then 12, pulled him out of the water, purple and motionless, and successfully performed CPR. Christian and three siblings, it turns out, had recently received Red Cross certification at the Blackwater training camp.<\/p>\n

But there are intimations of a higher power at work as the story continues. Desperate to get home, Prince scrapped one itinerary, which called for a stay-over at the Marriott in Islamabad, and found a direct flight. That night, at the time Prince would have been checking in, terrorists struck the hotel with a truck bomb, killing more than 50. Prince says simply, \u201cChristian saved Charlie\u2019s life and Charlie saved mine.\u201d At times, his sense of his own place in history can border on the evangelical. When pressed about suggestions that he\u2019s a mercenary\u2014a term he loathes\u2014he rattles off the names of other freelance military figures, even citing Lafayette, the colonists\u2019 ally during the Revolutionary War.<\/p>\n

Prince\u2019s default mode is one of readiness. He is clenched-jawed and tightly wound. He cannot stand down. Waiting in the security line at Dulles airport just hours before, Prince had delivered a little homily: \u201cEvery time an American goes through security, I want them to pause for a moment and think, What is my government doing to inconvenience the terrorists? Rendition teams, Predator drones, assassination squads. That\u2019s all part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such brazenness is not lost on a listener, nor is the fact that Prince himself is quite familiar with some of these tactics. In fact Prince, like other contractors, has drawn fire for running a company that some call a \u201cbody shop\u201d\u2014many of its staffers having departed military or intelligence posts to take similar jobs at much higher salaries, paid mainly by Uncle Sam. And to get those jobs done\u2014protecting, defending, and killing, if required\u2014Prince has had to employ the services of some decorated vets as well as some ruthless types, snipers and spies among them.<\/p>\n

Erik Prince flies coach internationally. It\u2019s not just economical (\u201cWhy should I pay for business? Fly coach, you arrive at the same time\u201d) but also less likely to draw undue attention. He considers himself a marked man. Prince describes the diplomats and dignitaries Blackwater protects as \u201cAl Jazeera\u2013worthy,\u201d meaning that, in his view, \u201cbin Laden and his acolytes would love to kill them in a spectacular fashion and have it broadcast on televisions worldwide.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stepping off the plane at Kabul\u2019s international airport, Prince is treated as if he, too, were Al Jazeera\u2013worthy. He is immediately shuffled into a waiting car and driven 50 yards to a second vehicle, a beat-up minivan that is native to the core: animal pelts on the dashboard, prayer card dangling from the rearview mirror. Blackwater\u2019s special-projects team is responsible for Prince\u2019s security in-country, and except for their language its men appear indistinguishable from Afghans. They have full beards, headscarves, and traditional knee-length shirts over baggy trousers. They remove Prince\u2019s sunglasses, fit him out with body armor, and have him change into Afghan garb. Prince is issued a homing beacon that will track his movements, and a cell phone with its speed dial programmed for Blackwater\u2019s tactical-operations center.<\/p>\n

Once in the van, Prince\u2019s team gives him a security briefing. Using satellite photos of the area, they review the route to Blackwater\u2019s compound and point out where weapons and ammunition are stored inside the vehicle. The men warn him that in the event that they are incapacitated or killed in an ambush Prince should assume control of the weapons and push the red button near the emergency brake, which will send out a silent alarm and call in reinforcements.<\/p>\n

Black Hawks and Zeppelins<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blackwater\u2019s origins were humble, bordering on the primordial. The company took form in the dismal peat bogs of Moyock, North Carolina\u2014not exactly a hotbed of the defense-contracting world.<\/p>\n

In 1995, Prince\u2019s father, Edgar, died of a heart attack (the Evangelical James C. Dobson, founder of the socially conservative Focus on the Family, delivered the eulogy at the funeral). Edgar Prince left behind a vibrant auto-parts manufacturing business in Holland, Michigan, with 4,500 employees and a line of products ranging from a lighted sun visor to a programmable garage-door opener. At the time, 25-year-old Erik was serving as a navy seal (he saw service in Haiti, the Middle East, and Bosnia), and neither he nor his sisters were in a position to take over the business. They sold Prince Automotive for $1.35 billion.<\/p>\n

Erik Prince and some of his navy friends, it so happens, had been kicking around the idea of opening a full-service training compound to replace the usual patchwork of such facilities. In 1996, Prince took an honorable discharge and began buying up land in North Carolina. \u201cThe idea was not to be a defense contractor per se,\u201d Prince says, touring the grounds of what looks and feels like a Disneyland for alpha males. \u201cI just wanted a first-rate training facility for law enforcement, the military, and, in particular, the special-operations community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Business was slow. The navy seals came early\u2014January 1998\u2014but they didn\u2019t come often, and by the time the Blackwater Lodge and Training Center officially opened, that May, Prince\u2019s friends and advisers thought he was throwing good money after bad. \u201cA lot of people said, \u2018This is a rich kid\u2019s hunting lodge,\u2019\u201d Prince explains. \u201cThey could not figure out what I was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, the site is the flagship for a network of facilities that train some 30,000 attendees a year. Prince, who owns an unmanned, zeppelin-esque airship and spent $45 million to build a fleet of customized, bomb-proof armored personnel carriers, often commutes to the lodge by air, piloting a Cessna Caravan from his home in Virginia. The training center has a private landing strip. Its hangars shelter a petting zoo of aircraft: Bell 412 helicopters (used to tail or shuttle diplomats in Iraq), Black Hawk helicopters (currently being modified to accommodate the security requests of a Gulf State client), a Dash 8 airplane (the type that ferries troops in Afghanistan). Amid the 52 firing ranges are virtual villages designed for addressing every conceivable real-world threat: small town squares, littered with blown-up cars, are situated near railway crossings and maritime mock-ups. At one junction, swat teams fire handguns, sniper rifles, and shotguns; at another, police officers tear around the world\u2019s longest tactical-driving track, dodging simulated roadside bombs.<\/p>\n

In keeping with the company\u2019s original name, the central complex, constructed of stone, glass, concrete, and logs, actually resembles a lodge, an REI store on steroids. Here and there are distinctive touches, such as door handles crafted from imitation gun barrels. Where other companies might have Us Weekly lying about the lobby, Blackwater has counterterror magazines with cover stories such as \u201cHow to Destroy Al Qaeda.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, it was al-Qaeda that put Blackwater on the map. In the aftermath of the group\u2019s October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, in Yemen, the navy turned to Prince, among others, for help in re-training its sailors to fend off attackers at close range. (To date, the company says, it has put some 125,000 navy personnel through its programs.) In addition to providing a cash infusion, the navy contract helped Blackwater build a database of retired military men\u2014many of them special-forces veterans\u2014who could be called upon to serve as instructors.<\/p>\n

When al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. mainland on 9\/11, Prince says, he was struck with the urge to either re-enlist or join the C.I.A. He says he actually applied. \u201cI was rejected,\u201d he admits, grinning at the irony of courting the very agency that would later woo him. \u201cThey said I didn\u2019t have enough hard skills, enough time in the field.\u201d Undeterred, he decided to turn his Rolodex into a roll call for what would in essence become a private army.<\/p>\n

After the terror attacks, Prince\u2019s company toiled, even reveled, in relative obscurity, taking on assignments in Afghanistan and, after the U.S. invasion, in Iraq. Then came March 31, 2004. That was the day insurgents ambushed four of its employees in the Iraqi town of Fallujah. The men were shot, their bodies set on fire by a mob. The charred, hacked-up remains of two of them were left hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was absolutely gut-wrenching,\u201d Prince recalls. \u201cI had been in the military, and no one under my command had ever died. At Blackwater, we had never even had a firearms training accident. Now all of a sudden four of my guys aren\u2019t just killed, but desecrated.\u201d Three months later an edict from coalition authorities in Baghdad declared private contractors immune from Iraqi law.<\/p>\n

Subsequently, the contractors\u2019 families sued Blackwater, contending the company had failed to protect their loved ones. Blackwater countersued the families for breaching contracts that forbid the men or their estates from filing such lawsuits; the company also claimed that, because it operates as an extension of the military, it cannot be held responsible for deaths in a war zone. (After five years, the case remains unresolved.) In 2007, a congressional investigation into the incident concluded that the employees had been sent into an insurgent stronghold \u201cwithout sufficient preparation, resources, and support.\u201d Blackwater called the report a \u201cone-sided\u201d version of a \u201ctragic incident.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Fallujah, Blackwater became a household name. Its primary mission in Iraq had been to protect American dignitaries, and it did so, in part, by projecting an image of invincibility, sending heavily armed men in armored Suburbans racing through the streets of Baghdad with sirens blaring. The show of swagger and firepower, which alienated both the locals and the U.S. military, helped contribute to the allegations of excessive force. As the war dragged on, charges against the firm mounted. In one case, a contractor shot and killed an Iraqi father of six who was standing along the roadside in Hillah. (Prince later told Congress that the contractor was fired for trying to cover up the incident.) In another, a Blackwater firearms technician was accused of drinking too much at a party in the Green Zone and killing a bodyguard assigned to protect Iraq\u2019s vice president. The technician was fired but not prosecuted and later settled a wrongful-death suit with the man\u2019s family.<\/p>\n

Those episodes, however, paled in comparison with the events of September 16, 2007, when a phalanx of Blackwater bodyguards emerged from their four-car convoy at a Baghdad intersection called Nisour Square and opened fire. When the smoke cleared, 17 Iraqi civilians lay dead. After 15 months of investigation, the Justice Department charged six with voluntary manslaughter and other offenses, insisting that the use of force was not only unjustified but unprovoked. One guard pleaded guilty and, in a trial set for February, is expected to testify against the others, all of whom maintain their innocence. The New York Times recently reported that in the wake of the shootings the company\u2019s top executives authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi higher-ups in order to buy their silence\u2014a claim Prince dismisses as \u201cfalse,\u201d insisting \u201c[there was] zero plan or discussion of bribing any officials.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nisour Square had disastrous repercussions for Blackwater. Its role in Iraq was curtailed, its revenue dropping 40 percent. Today, Prince claims, he is shelling out $2 million a month in legal fees to cope with a spate of civil lawsuits as well as what he calls a \u201cgiant proctological exam\u201d by nearly a dozen federal agencies. \u201cWe used to spend money on R&D to develop better capabilities to serve the U.S. government,\u201d says Prince. \u201cNow we pay lawyers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does he ever. In North Carolina, a federal grand jury is investigating various allegations, including the illegal transport of assault weapons and silencers to Iraq, hidden in dog-food sacks. (Blackwater denied this, but confirmed hiding weapons on pallets of dog food to protect against theft by \u201ccorrupt foreign customs agents.\u201d) In Virginia, two ex-employees have filed affidavits claiming that Prince and Blackwater may have murdered or ordered the murder of people suspected of cooperating with U.S. authorities investigating the company\u2014charges which Blackwater has characterized as \u201cscandalous and baseless.\u201d One of the men also asserted in filings that company employees ran a sex and wife-swapping ring, allegations which Blackwater has called \u201canonymous, unsubstantiated and offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, last February, Prince mounted an expensive rebranding campaign. Following the infamous ValuJet crash, in 1996, ValuJet disappeared into AirTran, after a merger, and moved on to a happy new life. Prince, likewise, decided to retire the Blackwater name and replace it with the name Xe, short for Xenon\u2014an inert, non-combustible gas that, in keeping with his political leanings, sits on the far right of the periodic table. Still, Prince and other top company officials continued to use the name Blackwater among themselves. And as events would soon prove, the company\u2019s reputation would remain as combustible as ever.<\/p>\n

Spies and Whispers<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last June, C.I.A. director Leon Panetta met in a closed session with the House and Senate intelligence committees to brief them on a covert-action program, which the agency had long concealed from Congress. Panetta explained that he had learned of the existence of the operation only the day before and had promptly shut it down. The reason, C.I.A. spokesman Paul Gimigliano now explains: \u201cIt hadn\u2019t taken any terrorists off the street.\u201d During the meeting, according to two attendees, Panetta named both Erik Prince and Blackwater as key participants in the program. (When asked to verify this account, Gimigliano notes that \u201cDirector Panetta treats as confidential discussions with Congress that take place behind closed doors.\u201d) Soon thereafter, Prince says, he began fielding inquisitive calls from people he characterizes as far outside the circle of trust.<\/p>\n

It took three weeks for details, however sketchy, to surface. In July, The Wall Street Journal described the program as \u201can attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives.\u201d The agency reportedly planned to accomplish this task by dispatching small hit teams overseas. Lawmakers, who couldn\u2019t exactly quibble with the mission\u2019s objective, were in high dudgeon over having been kept in the dark. (Former C.I.A. officials reportedly saw the matter differently, characterizing the program as \u201cmore aspirational than operational\u201d and implying that it had never progressed far enough to justify briefing the Hill.)<\/p>\n

On August 20, the gloves came off. The New York Times published a story headlined “CIA sought Blackwater\u2019s help to kill jihadists.” The Washington Post concurred: “CIA hired firm for assassin program.” Prince confesses to feeling betrayed. \u201cI don\u2019t understand how a program this sensitive leaks,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd to \u2018out\u2019 me on top of it?\u201d The next day, the Times went further, revealing Blackwater\u2019s role in the use of aerial drones to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders: \u201cAt hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan \u2026 the company\u2019s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.\u201d<\/p>\n

Erik Prince, almost overnight, had undergone a second rebranding of sorts, this one not of his own making. The war profiteer had become a merchant of death, with a license to kill on the ground and in the air. \u201cI\u2019m an easy target,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m from a Republican family and I own this company outright. Our competitors have nameless, faceless management teams.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prince blames Democrats in Congress for the leaks and maintains that there is a double standard at play. \u201cThe left complained about how [C.I.A. operative] Valerie Plame\u2019s identity was compromised for political reasons. A special prosecutor [was even] appointed. Well, what happened to me was worse. People acting for political reasons disclosed not only the existence of a very sensitive program but my name along with it.\u201d As in the Plame case, though, the leaks prompted C.I.A. attorneys to send a referral to the Justice Department, requesting that a criminal investigation be undertaken to identify those responsible for providing highly classified information to the media.<\/p>\n

By focusing so intently on Blackwater, Congress and the press overlooked the elephant in the room. Prince wasn\u2019t merely a contractor; he was, insiders say, a full-blown asset. Three sources with direct knowledge of the relationship say that the C.I.A.\u2019s National Resources Division recruited Prince in 2004 to join a secret network of American citizens with special skills or unusual access to targets of interest. As assets go, Prince would have been quite a catch. He had more cash, transport, mat\u00e9riel, and personnel at his disposal than almost anyone Langley would have run in its 62-year history.<\/p>\n

The C.I.A. won\u2019t comment further on such assertions, but Prince himself is slightly more forthcoming. \u201cI was looking at creating a small, focused capability,\u201d he says, \u201cjust like Donovan did years ago\u201d\u2014the reference being to William \u201cWild Bill\u201d Donovan, who, in World War II, served as the head of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the modern C.I.A. (Prince\u2019s youngest son, Charles Donovan\u2014the one who fell into the pool\u2014is named after Wild Bill.) Two sources familiar with the arrangement say that Prince\u2019s handlers obtained provisional operational approval from senior management to recruit Prince and later generated a \u201c201 file,\u201d which would have put him on the agency\u2019s books as a vetted asset. It\u2019s not at all clear who was running whom, since Prince says that, unlike many other assets, he did much of his work on spec, claiming to have used personal funds to road-test the viability of certain operations. \u201cI grew up around the auto industry,\u201d Prince explains. \u201cCustomers would say to my dad, \u2018We have this need.\u2019 He would then use his own money to create prototypes to fulfill those needs. He took the \u2018If you build it, they will come\u2019 approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to two sources familiar with his work, Prince was developing unconventional means of penetrating \u201chard target\u201d countries\u2014where the C.I.A. has great difficulty working either because there are no stations from which to operate or because local intelligence services have the wherewithal to frustrate the agency\u2019s designs. \u201cI made no money whatsoever off this work,\u201d Prince contends. He is unwilling to specify the exact nature of his forays. \u201cI\u2019m painted as this war profiteer by Congress. Meanwhile I\u2019m paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security, out of my own pocket.\u201d (His pocket is deep: according to The Wall Street Journal, Blackwater had revenues of more than $600 million in 2008.)<\/p>\n

Clutch Cargo<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Afghan countryside, from a speeding perch at 200 knots, whizzes by in a khaki haze. The terrain is rendered all the more nondescript by the fact that Erik Prince is riding less than 200 feet above it. The back of the airplane, a small, Spanish-built eads casa C-212, is open, revealing Prince in silhouette against a blue sky. Wearing Oakleys, tactical pants, and a white polo shirt, he looks strikingly boyish.<\/p>\n

As the crew chief initiates a countdown sequence, Prince adjusts his harness and moves into position. When the \u201cgo\u201d order comes, a young G.I. beside him cuts a tether, and Prince pushes a pallet out the tail chute. Black parachutes deploy and the aircraft lunges forward from the sudden weight differential. The cargo\u2014provisions and munitions\u2014drops inside the perimeter of a forward operating base (fob) belonging to an elite Special Forces squad.<\/p>\n

Five days a week, Blackwater\u2019s aviation arm\u2014with its unabashedly 60s-spook name, Presidential Airways\u2014flies low-altitude sorties to some of the most remote outposts in Afghanistan. Since 2006, Prince\u2019s company has been conscripted to offer this \u201cturnkey\u201d service for U.S. troops, flying thousands of delivery runs. Blackwater also provides security for U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry and his staff, and trains narcotics and Afghan special police units.<\/p>\n

Once back on terra firma, Prince, a BlackBerry on one hip and a 9-mm. on the other, does a sweep around one of Blackwater\u2019s bases in northeast Afghanistan, pointing out buildings recently hit by mortar fire. As a drone circles overhead, its camera presumably trained on the surroundings, Prince climbs a guard tower and peers down at a spot where two of his contractors were nearly killed last July by an improvised explosive device. \u201cNot counting civilian checkpoints,\u201d he says, \u201cthis is the closest base to the [Pakistani] border.\u201d His voice takes on a melodramatic solemnity. \u201cWho else has built a fob along the main infiltration route for the Taliban and the last known location for Osama bin Laden?\u201d It doesn\u2019t quite have the ring of Lawrence of Arabia\u2019s \u201cTo Aqaba!,\u201d but you get the picture.<\/p>\n

Going \u201cLow-Pro\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blackwater has been in Afghanistan since 2002. At the time, the C.I.A.\u2019s executive director, A. B. \u201cBuzzy\u201d Krongard, responding to his operatives\u2019 complaints of being \u201cworried sick about the Afghans\u2019 coming over the fence or opening the doors,\u201d enlisted the company to offer protection for the agency\u2019s Kabul station. Going \u201clow-pro,\u201d or low-profile, paid off: not a single C.I.A. employee, according to sources close to the company, died in Afghanistan while under Blackwater\u2019s protection. (Talk about a tight-knit bunch. Krongard would later serve as an unpaid adviser to Blackwater\u2019s board, until 2007. And his brother Howard \u201cCookie\u201d Krongard\u2014the State Department\u2019s inspector general\u2014had to recuse himself from Blackwater-related oversight matters after his brother\u2019s involvement with the company surfaced. Buzzy, in response, stepped down.)<\/p>\n

As the agency\u2019s confidence in Blackwater grew, so did the company\u2019s responsibilities, expanding from static protection to mobile security\u2014shadowing agency personnel, ever wary of suicide bombers, ambushes, and roadside devices, as they moved about the country. By 2005, Blackwater, accustomed to guarding C.I.A. personnel, was starting to look a little bit like the C.I.A. itself. Enrique \u201cRic\u201d Prado joined Blackwater after serving as chief of operations for the agency\u2019s Counterterrorism Center (CTC). A short time later, Prado\u2019s boss, J. Cofer Black, the head of the CTC, moved over to Blackwater, too. He was followed, in turn, by his superior, Rob Richer, second-in-command of the C.I.A.\u2019s clandestine service. Of the three, Cofer Black had the outsize reputation. As Bob Woodward recounted in his book Bush at War, on September 13, 2001, Black had promised President Bush that when the C.I.A. was through with al-Qaeda \u201cthey will have flies walking across their eyeballs.\u201d According to Woodward, \u201cBlack became known in Bush\u2019s inner circle as the \u2018flies-on-the-eyeballs guy.\u2019\u201d Richer and Black soon helped start a new company, Total Intelligence Solutions (which collects data to help businesses assess risks overseas), but in 2008 both men left Blackwater, as did company president Gary Jackson this year.<\/p>\n

Off and on, Black and Richer\u2019s onetime partner Ric Prado, first with the C.I.A., then as a Blackwater employee, worked quietly with Prince as his vice president of \u201cspecial programs\u201d to provide the agency with what every intelligence service wants: plausible deniability. Shortly after 9\/11, President Bush had issued a \u201clethal finding,\u201d giving the C.I.A. the go-ahead to kill or capture al-Qaeda members. (Under an executive order issued by President Gerald Ford, it had been illegal since 1976 for U.S. intelligence operatives to conduct assassinations.) As a seasoned case officer, Prado helped implement the order by putting together a small team of \u201cblue-badgers,\u201d as government agents are known. Their job was threefold: find, fix, and finish. Find the designated target, fix the person\u2019s routine, and, if necessary, finish him off. When the time came to train the hit squad, the agency, insiders say, turned to Prince. Wary of attracting undue attention, the team practiced not at the company\u2019s North Carolina compound but at Prince\u2019s own domain, an hour outside Washington, D.C. The property looks like an outpost of the landed gentry, with pastures and horses, but also features less traditional accents, such as an indoor firing range. Once again, Prince has Wild Bill on his mind, observing that \u201cthe O.S.S. trained during World War II on a country estate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the team\u2019s targets, according to a source familiar with the program, was Mamoun Darkazanli, an al-Qaeda financier living in Hamburg who had been on the agency\u2019s radar for years because of his ties to three of the 9\/11 hijackers and to operatives convicted of the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in East Africa. The C.I.A. team supposedly went in \u201cdark,\u201d meaning they did not notify their own station\u2014much less the German government\u2014of their presence; they then followed Darkazanli for weeks and worked through the logistics of how and where they would take him down. Another target, the source says, was A. Q. Khan, the rogue Pakistani scientist who shared nuclear know-how with Iran, Libya, and North Korea. The C.I.A. team supposedly tracked him in Dubai. In both cases, the source insists, the authorities in Washington chose not to pull the trigger. Khan\u2019s inclusion on the target list, however, would suggest that the assassination effort was broader than has previously been acknowledged. (Says agency spokesman Gimigliano, \u201c[The] C.I.A. hasn\u2019t discussed\u2014despite some mischaracterizations that have appeared in the public domain\u2014the substance of this effort or earlier ones.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The source familiar with the Darkazanli and Khan missions bristles at public comments that current and former C.I.A. officials have made: \u201cThey say the program didn\u2019t move forward because [they] didn\u2019t have the right skill set or because of inadequate cover. That\u2019s untrue. [The operation continued] for a very long time in some places without ever being discovered. This program died because of a lack of political will.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Prado left the C.I.A., in 2004, he effectively took the program with him, after a short hiatus. By that point, according to sources familiar with the plan, Prince was already an agency asset, and the pair had begun working to privatize matters by changing the team\u2019s composition from blue-badgers to a combination of \u201cgreen-badgers\u201d (C.I.A. contractors) and third-country nationals (unaware of the C.I.A. connection). Blackwater officials insist that company resources and manpower were never directly utilized\u2014these were supposedly off-the-books initiatives done on Prince\u2019s own dime, for which he was later reimbursed\u2014and that despite their close ties to the C.I.A. neither Cofer Black nor Rob Richer took part. As Prince puts it, \u201cWe were building a unilateral, unattributable capability. If it went bad, we weren\u2019t expecting the chief of station, the ambassador, or anyone to bail us out.\u201d He insists that, had the team deployed, the agency would have had full operational control. Instead, due to what he calls \u201cinstitutional osteoporosis,\u201d the second iteration of the assassination program lost steam.<\/p>\n

Sometime after 2006, the C.I.A. would take another shot at the program, according to an insider who was familiar with the plan. \u201cEveryone found some reason not to participate,\u201d says the insider. \u201cThere was a sick-out. People would say to management, \u2018I have a family, I have other obligations.\u2019 This is the fucking C.I.A. They were supposed to lead the charge after al-Qaeda and they couldn\u2019t find the people to do it.\u201d Others with knowledge of the program are far more charitable and question why any right-thinking officer would sign up for an assassination program at a time when their colleagues\u2014who had thought they had legal cover to engage in another sensitive effort, the \u201cenhanced interrogations\u201d program at secret C.I.A. sites in foreign countries\u2014were finding themselves in legal limbo.<\/p>\n

America and Erik Prince, it seems, have been slow to extract themselves from the assassination business. Beyond the killer drones flown with Blackwater\u2019s help along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border (President Obama has reportedly authorized more than three dozen such hits), Prince claims he and a team of foreign nationals helped find and fix a target in October 2008, then left the finishing to others. \u201cIn Syria,\u201d he says, \u201cwe did the signals intelligence to geo-locate the bad guys in a very denied area.\u201d Subsequently, a U.S. Special Forces team launched a helicopter-borne assault to hunt down al-Qaeda middleman Abu Ghadiyah. Ghadiyah, whose real name is Badran Turki Hishan Al-Mazidih, was said to have been killed along with six others\u2014though doubts have emerged about whether Ghadiyah was even there that day, as detailed in a recent Vanity Fair Web story by Reese Ehrlich and Peter Coyote.<\/p>\n

And up until two months ago\u2014when Prince says the Obama administration pulled the plug\u2014he was still deeply engaged in the dark arts. According to insiders, he was running intelligence-gathering operations from a secret location in the United States, remotely coordinating the movements of spies working undercover in one of the so-called Axis of Evil countries. Their mission: non-disclosable.<\/p>\n

Exit Strategy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Flying out of Kabul, Prince does a slow burn, returning to the topic of how exposed he has felt since press accounts revealed his role in the assassination program. The firestorm that began in August has continued to smolder and may indeed have his handlers wondering whether Prince himself is more of a liability than an asset. He says he can\u2019t understand why they would shut down certain high-risk, high-payoff collection efforts against some of America\u2019s most implacable enemies for fear that his involvement could, given the political climate, result in their compromise.<\/p>\n

He is incredulous that U.S. officials seem willing, in effect, to cut off their nose to spite their face. \u201cI\u2019ve been overtly and covertly serving America since I started in the armed services,\u201d Prince observes. After 12 years building the company, he says he intends to turn it over to its employees and a board, and exit defense contracting altogether. An internal power struggle is said to be under way among those seeking to define the direction and underlying mission of a post-Prince Blackwater.<\/p>\n

He insists, simply, \u201cI\u2019m through.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the past, Prince has entertained the idea of building a pre-positioning ship\u2014complete with security personnel, doctors, helicopters, medicine, food, and fuel\u2014and stationing it off the coast of Africa to provide \u201crelief with teeth\u201d to the continent\u2019s trouble spots or to curb piracy off Somalia. At one point, he considered creating a rapidly deployable brigade that could be farmed out, for a fee, to a foreign government.<\/p>\n

For the time being, however, Prince contends that his plans are far more modest. \u201cI\u2019m going to teach high school,\u201d he says, straight-faced. \u201cHistory and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/doc\/20091221\/scahill2 Is Erik Prince ‘Graymailing’ the US Government? By Jeremy Scahill December 4, 2009 The in-depth Vanity Fair profile of the infamous owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is remarkable on many levels–not least among them that Prince appeared to give the story’s author, former CIA lawyer Adam Ciralsky, unprecedented access to information about sensitive, classified … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Is Blackwater CEO ‘graymailing’ the U.S. Government?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5319"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5319"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5321,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5319\/revisions\/5321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dmzhawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}