Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (39 page)

It remains to be seen what my future might hold. Tomorrow is one less day than I’ve got now, and only God knows how many more I’ll have. But in the meantime, I’m enjoying a quieter life. I had a small Hobie Cat delivered to our home in Abu Dhabi shortly after my family relocated. The kids are still learning their way around the fiberglass catamaran, the same way I once poked around with our Boston Whaler back in Michigan. But most every day in Abu Dhabi is a good day to skim across the bay, catching the next gust of wind and teaching my own children to feel at home on the water.

by Max Boot

This is the chapter the CIA wouldn’t want you to read.

Originally, Erik Prince had written a chapter for this book on his relationship with the CIA. But precisely because he did have a close relationship with the CIA, he was bound under the terms of his nondisclosure agreement to submit his manuscript for approval to the CIA’s Publications Review Board, which is charged with excising any classified information (and which often takes its charge so zealously that it deletes even commonly available information that any reader of Wikipedia can access in seconds). By the time the CIA’s censors were through, there were so many deletions that Prince and his publishers decided that the chapter as written was unsalvageable. So the publisher asked me to write this afterword, which provides the essential information about Prince’s dealings with the CIA based solely on publicly available reports. In so doing I have not had access to any classified material, nor have I spoken to Prince, with whom I have no personal or business relationship. In fact, I have met him only once—when,
years ago, he gave me a tour of the Blackwater facility in North Carolina, a tour he has given to numerous other writers and journalists over the years. Where he is quoted below, the quotations come from previously published media accounts.

What follows is written not from Prince’s own perspective or that of a defender of his but rather from the perspective of a disinterested observer trying to provide the most accurate depiction possible based on what is publicly known—which, needless to say, is not the entire story. Only those with access to the CIA’s own highly classified files know everything that went on, and possibly not even them, given the proclivity of government officials to avoid writing down the most sensitive information in their possession. This, however, is my best attempt to summarize what those of us on the outside know about what went on between Erik Prince and the CIA.

—Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of five books, most recently
Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present
(Liveright, 2013)

When on September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda operatives flew hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States was plunged into a war against a shadowy network for which it was not well prepared. This very lack of preparation created a business opportunity for Blackwater and other private sector firms that stepped forward to assist the armed forces and intelligence agencies that had been tasked with fighting a difficult and unfamiliar war on terror.

The U.S. armed forces had spent much of the previous, post–Gulf War decade focusing on high-tech conventional operations that fell into the category “network-centric warfare”—an approach better
suited to obliterating Saddam Hussein’s tanks in the deserts of Iraq than locating and killing individual terrorists hiding among a civilian population. The military’s special mission units, such as Delta Force, were better prepared to hunt terrorists in the shadows, but this was a role they had seldom been called upon to undertake by risk-averse politicians in Washington fearful of another “Black Hawk Down.” General Peter Schoomaker, a former Army chief of staff and commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, lamented: “Special Operations was never given the mission. It was very, very frustrating. It was
like having a brand-new Ferrari in the garage
, and nobody wants to race it because you might dent the fender.”

For its part, the CIA, the nation’s premier agency for human intelligence (i.e., espionage), had seen a precipitous decline of its covert action capabilities since the heady days of the 1960s, when it had waged a “secret war” in Laos, or even the 1980s, when it had supplied the mujahideen with the weapons that helped to evict the Red Army from Afghanistan. The CIA had maintained tenuous relations with some of the former mujahideen now reassembled as the Northern Alliance, a rebel group fighting the Taliban extremists and their al-Qaeda allies for control of Afghanistan. But there were no CIA officers permanently stationed in the Taliban’s Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Because the United States did not have diplomatic relations with either country, it lacked embassies that could provide a platform and cover for CIA operatives posing as diplomats.

The National Clandestine Service, the CIA division responsible for human espionage, had withered as a result of post–Cold War budget cuts. The Special Activities Division (SAD), the euphemistically named unit within the Clandestine Service responsible for paramilitary operations, had shrunk even more. In November 2001, Bob Woodward reported in the
Washington Post
that the SAD—an appropriate acronym under the circumstances—had just “
150 fighters, pilots and specialists
,” equivalent to just one company-sized formation in the army.

But, however small, the Special Activities Division still had the
ability to punch above its weight class. By the time Woodward wrote those words, the Special Activities operatives and the Army’s Special Forces “A-teams” had already established a presence on the ground in Afghanistan, long before the more ponderous conventional military forces could arrive on the scene. The CIA’s Jawbreaker team had been the first to arrive, on September 26, 2001, in a Russian-built, CIA-operated helicopter, carrying millions of dollars in cash to buy off Northern Alliance warlords. The A-teams, commonly known as Green Berets, arrived a few weeks later, carrying sophisticated communications equipment to enable them to call in air strikes. It was a potent combination of capabilities that rapidly enhanced the striking power of the Northern Alliance and brought to an end Taliban control of Afghanistan.

While the special operations forces provided military capabilities the CIA did not have, the CIA’s paramilitaries, most of them former special operations soldiers themselves, showed that they could deploy faster and with fewer constraints than their uniformed counterparts. That’s because the CIA operates under Title 50 of the U.S. Code, which authorizes covert actions based on a presidential finding, whereas the military operates under Title 10 war-fighting authority, which brings with it more public and congressional scrutiny—and a more ponderous chain of command. Military missions are often “clandestine,” meaning that the element of secrecy is employed to preserve tactical surprise, but the operation is then generally acknowledged to have been carried out by the U.S. armed forces. The CIA, by contrast, is empowered to carry out “covert” operations, which are defined under U.S. law as designed “
to influence political, economic, or military conditions
abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.” In other words, CIA covert actions are designed to have “deniability,” which actions by the uniformed military naturally lack. (There are some instances of military special operators operating in plain clothes, but these are relatively rare.)

The CIA also brought, theoretically at least, greater regional expertise and experience in dealing with prickly foreigners—and a greater willingness to undertake dangerous missions without all of the support infrastructure demanded by the military (such as having nearby quick reaction forces and search and rescue forces on call). The very first American killed in Afghanistan after 9/11 was Johnny “Mike” Spann, a member of the Special Activities Division, who was slain on November 25, 2001, during the uprising at the Qala-i-Jangi prison in the north.

For both the CIA and the special operations forces—which shared a common origin in the World War II–era Office of Strategic Services founded by
Erik Prince’s hero
, “Wild Bill” Donovan—the toppling of the Taliban in the fall of 2001 was their finest hour. But their job was not done with the capture of Kabul and the installation of Hamid Karzai as a Western-backed alternative to the Taliban. The Taliban and al-Qaeda had been defeated but not annihilated. Both sought and found refuge across the border in Pakistan, and they began to regroup to stage fresh attacks. It was imperative, from Washington’s standpoint, to keep after these extremists, and that, in turn, required dramatically beefing up American intelligence capabilities in Afghanistan and the tribal regions of Pakistan.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA began to hire thousands of new employees to wage the global war on terror. Many were young and inexperienced, and most were hired as intelligence collectors or intelligence analysts—not as paramilitaries. Yet collecting intelligence in a chaotic country like Afghanistan, or later Iraq, was not like collecting intelligence in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. In those days the CIA’s primary adversary was the KGB, a rival intelligence service that played by common rules. Both sides sought to stymie the other’s intelligence-gathering efforts, but each side recognized the other’s diplomatic immunity. CIA officers might be arrested in Russia, but if so they would be expelled, not killed. (It was a different story for local “assets” recruited by the CIA—as traitors to the Motherland, they would face execution or lengthy prison terms.)
The Taliban and al-Qaeda, by contrast, did not play by the rules of “civilized” espionage. They targeted for death any Westerners they could find, whether troops, aid workers, journalists, diplomats, or spies. Post-Taliban Afghanistan remained a lawless land where attacks from the Taliban, or common criminals, posed a lethal threat to any CIA operatives intent on gathering information.

Unfortunately, the CIA did not have enough of its own paramilitaries to protect its case officers as they gathered intelligence, recruited Afghan allies, and orchestrated raids on al-Qaeda and Taliban targets. In 2004, an article in
Foreign Affairs
referred to “
600–700 covert operators
” on the CIA’s payroll (the actual figure is classified), a substantial increase from the total of 150 cited by Bob Woodward three years earlier but still inadequate to meeting surging demand for their services. The strain only grew when the United States invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003. Now the CIA had two wars to wage. The CIA tried to make up some of the shortfall by borrowing special operations forces from the military, a procedure known as “sheep dipping.” But the Special Activities Division was still overstretched and so, too, was the Global Response Staff, whose specific mission was providing protective services to the Clandestine Service abroad.

Enter Blackwater, which was about to expand its operations from simply training military and police personnel at its sprawling complex in Moyock, North Carolina, to deploying its own employees to defend and facilitate America’s growing presence in Afghanistan and then Iraq. This was part of a growing trend of the U.S. government relying more on private contractors to wage wars. In the Gulf War there had been approximately one contractor for every sixty service personnel; in Iraq and Afghanistan, after a long period of downsizing in the military’s active-duty end strength,
the figure was closer to one to one
, meaning that if a hundred thousand troops deployed, a hundred thousand contractors would follow to support them. The figures for the intelligence services were classified but undoubtedly similar.
In 2010 the
Washington Post
reported, for example, that out of 854,000 people with top secret clearances, 265,000 of them were contractors, making up roughly a third of the intelligence community’s entire workforce. At the CIA alone, the
Post
reported,
there were 10,000 contractors from 114 different firms
.

Blackwater was only one of many private companies that stepped forward to fill this surging demand, and it was far from the biggest. (The
Washington Post
reports, for instance, that “
revenue from General Dynamics
’ intelligence- and information-related divisions, where the majority of its top-secret work is done, climbed to $10 billion in the second quarter of 2009, up from $2.4 billion in 2000.”) “You have to remember where CIA was after 9/11,” said Pete Hoekstra, a retired congressman who chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 2004 to 2006 and later served as its ranking member. “
They were gutted in the 1990s
. They were sending raw recruits into Afghanistan and other dangerous places. They were looking for skills and capabilities, and they had to go to outside contractors like Blackwater to make sure they could accomplish their mission.”

Prince recalls that he was eager to help
defend America after 9/11. He applied to join the Special Activities Division, and he says he was fully vetted but turned down on the grounds that he lacked sufficient “field experience,” presumably because his stint in the SEALs had been relatively brief.

Prince did not give up easily
. He did not have extensive contacts at the CIA, but he did know “Buzzy” Krongard, the CIA’s executive director, whose son had been, like Prince, a Navy SEAL. He recounts approaching Krongard and, through him, putting the CIA in touch with sources on the ground in Afghanistan. According to Prince’s own account in this book, which has not been reported elsewhere, his initial contact with Afghanistan came through a friend, Charlie Santos, who was an employee of a Saudi-based oil company and who also happened to be a friend of the important Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. Prince says he put Santos in touch with the CIA,
thereby facilitating a direct link between the CIA and Dostum that proved invaluable in the fall of 2001. From the start, then, Blackwater was involved not only in protective services, its signature initiative, but also in intelligence gathering—a less publicized role.

Blackwater’s role with the CIA was soon to grow substantially. Early in 2002 Blackwater received a contract to guard the CIA’s new station in Kabul, supposedly a secret location but widely known to be located in the Ariana Hotel downtown near the U.S. embassy and the multinational military command.
Prince says that he himself
was among the first guards on the scene and helped to establish the template for a Blackwater protective detail, creating tactics, techniques, and procedures that would be employed before long on a much wider scale across Afghanistan and Iraq.