CEO of Blackwater: Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy
I’m impressed with Vanity Fair’s ability to employ the best writers in the world and don’t know much about Adam Ciralsky, but I’m looking forward to reading this frightening piece.
As much as this paints a picture of the mess we are still digging out of from the Bush years, it puts the troop escalation that came from my President’s pulpit last night into an even more baffling context. Shadow mercenary activities for years have gotten us nowhere in the region and its doubtful this last gasp will have much effect except to further our debt and erode the will of the President’s supporters.
via kateoplis:
CEO of Blackwater: Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy
Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater security firm (renamed Xe), 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.
“I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” Prince says as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.”
For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to 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—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence. But Prince, with a new administration in power, and foes closing in, is finally coming in from the cold. This past fall he decided it was time to tell his side of the story—to 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’s going to walk away from it all.
