Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (41 page)

After Prado joined Blackwater in 2004, he tried to resuscitate the program, this time relying heavily on Prince for help. By this time
Prince had already been recruited
by the CIA as a vetted “asset”—a process that occurred in 2004 and required high-level approval and the generation of a “201” (personnel) file. This did not make Prince an employee of the CIA but designated him as a trusted individual who worked on behalf of the agency. This designation has been typically conferred on foreigners stealing their own country’s secrets on behalf of the United States, but sometimes it is conferred on Americans who possess unusual talents, resources, and contacts to help the CIA. Howard Hughes, for example, had been recruited as an agency asset in 1974 to build a ship known as the
Glomar Explorer
that would allow the CIA to salvage a sunken Russian submarine.

In similar fashion, Prince could mobilize his extensive resources, and Blackwater’s, to help the CIA achieve its mission. “
I was looking at creating a small, focused capability
,” Prince later explained, “just like [‘Wild Bill’] Donovan did years ago.” Indeed Donovan was famous for recruiting well-connected individuals such as Allen Dulles and Julia Child, who could use their private sector experience for the OSS’s benefit; the CIA followed a similar swashbuckling template in its early days before becoming heavily bureaucratized. Prince’s recruitment was, thus, a throwback to the CIA’s early days.

Much of what Prince did he did on “spec,” fronting his own money to help the CIA, much as his father had developed products for Detroit’s automakers on his own initiative. “
I grew up around the auto industry
,” Prince later explained. “Customers would say to my dad, ‘We have this need.’ He would then use his own money to create prototypes to fulfill those needs. He took the ‘If you build it, they will come’ approach.”

One of the initiatives that Prince and Prado quietly developed,
out of sight not only of the general public but also of most of their Blackwater colleagues, was a private network of foreign spies. “According to two sources familiar with his work,”
Vanity Fair
reported, “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.” In pitching his services to the Drug Enforcement Administration in October 2007, Prado wrote, “
We have a rapidly growing, worldwide network
of folks that can do everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations. These are all foreign nationals so deniability is built in and is a big plus.”

Publicly available details of what this “worldwide network” actually did are hard to come by, but
Vanity Fair
reported that “he and a
team of foreign nationals helped find and fix a target
in October 2008, then left the finishing to others. ‘In Syria,’ he says, ‘we did the signals intelligence to geo-locate the bad guys in a very denied area.’ 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.”

Prince also embraced
Prado’s proposal to set up teams to kill terrorist leaders. In so doing Prince was apparently acting in his private capacity as a CIA asset rather than as the owner of Blackwater. Apparently neither Cofer Black nor Rob Richer took part in this plan. Prince later explained to
Vanity Fair
: “We were building a unilateral, unattributable capability. If it went bad, we weren’t expecting the chief of station, the ambassador, or anyone to bail us out.”

Yet while the capability to carry out these missions was developed, it was never utilized. In 2006 the CIA pulled the plug because of what Prince described as “
institutional osteoporosis
.” By this time, with the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” programs already a matter of international controversy, there were few volunteers in the CIA’s ranks to push forward with an “assassination” program
that could expose its participants to negative publicity and even prosecution.

“
I put myself and my company at the CIA’s disposal
for some very risky missions,” Prince later said. One of the risks he ran was public exposure. In June 2009, CIA director Leon Panetta briefed the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on the already canceled covert action program to kill terrorists and named Prince and Blackwater as participants. It took only a few weeks for the news to leak, with the
Wall Street Journal
, the
New York Times
, and the
Washington Post
running headlines breathlessly reporting, as the
Post
put it, “CIA Hired Firm for Assassin Program.” Immediately thereafter came the
New York Times
’ revelations about Blackwater’s role in the Predator program.

Prince was livid and understandably so—his cover had been blown. “The left complained about how [CIA operative] Valerie Plame was compromised for political reasons,” he later told
Vanity Fair
. “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.” The CIA sent a referral of the case to the Justice Department, but, unlike in the case of Valerie Plame, no special counsel was appointed to investigate the matter and no one was ever prosecuted for leaking this highly classified information.

His outing as a CIA asset resulted, Prince says, in his being put on an al-Qaeda hit list, forcing him and his family to take extensive security precautions. All of the uproar around Blackwater also resulted in legal repercussions.

The prosecution began in 2008 when agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, their guns drawn, raided Blackwater’s Moyock compound to execute a federal search warrant. ATF agents had been regular visitors to the facility in the past; Blackwater was a registered federal firearms dealer and had to comply with numerous state and federal regulations. Now, in what Prince denounced as a “
cartoonish show of force
,” the ATF agents
were looking for evidence that Blackwater had skirted the law. The agents hauled away seventeen Romanian-made AK-47s and seventeen Bushmaster M4 rifles.

Federal prosecutors subsequently filed a raft of felony charges against five former Blackwater employees, including former president Gary Jackson, former executive vice president William Mathews, and former general counsel Andrew Howell. The federal indictment, filed in April 2010 in the Eastern District of North Carolina, charged that “
defendants conspired to commit offenses against the United States
, including making false statements in records of a federally licensed firearms dealer, possessing machine guns and unregistered firearms, and obstructing justice.”

The charges stemmed from three separate incidents. First, the defendants were accused of using the Camden County Sheriff’s Department to arrange “straw purchases” of automatic weapons (the M4s and AK-47s), which could be possessed lawfully only by law enforcement agencies. Second, the defendants were accused of giving King Abdullah II of Jordan a gift of several firearms (an M4, a Remington shotgun, and several Glock pistols, all engraved with the Blackwater logo) when the king visited the Blackwater facility on March 19, 2005, and subsequently falsifying paperwork to cover up the transfer. Third, the defendants were accused of overseeing the shortening by Blackwater’s armorers of 227 long rifles into short-barrel rifles “without registering the weapons as such.” The fact that some of the weapons in question were shipped to Iraq in sacks of dog food caught the attention of reporters; Blackwater explained that the subterfuge was necessary to prevent the weapons from being pilfered by corrupt foreign customs agents.

One Blackwater employee
, Gary Flannelly, had previously pleaded guilty to making false statements on a federal firearms form, but the five defendants in this case denied they had done anything wrong and fought back in court with the company’s support. The heart of their defense was that in all it did Blackwater was acting as a proxy for the CIA and the United States government. In support
of this argument, Blackwater submitted depositions from former senior CIA officials, including Buzzy Krongard, as well as various emails, memos, photos, and other documents. It even came out that
the CIA had its own secure telephone line
and SCIF, or sensitive compartmented information facility, at Blackwater’s headquarters for the handling of classified information.

One of Blackwater’s defense documents said that “the CIA routinely used Blackwater in missions throughout the world. These efforts were made under written and unwritten contracts and through informal requests. On many occasions, the CIA paid Blackwater nothing for its assistance. Blackwater also employed CIA officers and agents, and provided cover to CIA agents and officers operating in covert and clandestine assignments. In many respects Blackwater, or at least portions of
Blackwater, was an extension of the CIA
.”

Among the myriad duties that Blackwater performed for the CIA, Blackwater executives said, was
providing guns to Jordan’s
King Abdullah II. The king had visited Blackwater headquarters along with CIA officials, but the CIA had forgotten to supply gifts for him and asked Blackwater to provide them instead.

The defense was convincing enough—and, from the government’s standpoint, embarrassing enough—that Thomas G. Walker, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, eventually agreed to drop all the felony charges. On February 21, 2013, the
New York Times
reported: “
The federal government’s three-year prosecution
of five former officials of Blackwater Worldwide virtually collapsed on Thursday after charges against three of the officials were dismissed and the other two agreed to plead guilty to reduced misdemeanor charges with no jail time.” The only guilty pleas the government secured came from former Blackwater president Gary Jackson and former executive vice president William Mathews. They pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of faulty record keeping and agreed to three years of probation, four months of home confinement, and a fine of $5,000.

This was an ignominious end to such a high-profile case.
Blackwater’s critics could take solace from the fact that in 2010 the firm, after admitting “numerous mistakes” in its adherence to export control laws, had reached an
agreement with the State Department to pay a $42 million
civil penalty. Subsequently, in August 2012, Blackwater reached a settlement with the Justice Department to
pay $7.5 million more in civil fines
to settle charges that the company, by then ACADEMI, had been guilty of “unauthorized sales of satellite phones in Sudan; unauthorized military training provided to foreign governments, including Canada’s; illegal possession of automatic weapons; and other violations.” But all attempts to bring serious criminal charges against the firm and its employees had collapsed, in no small part because Blackwater had become so inextricably intertwined with the war-fighting functions of the United States government—including the CIA.

I learned to fly and to drive a boat while growing up in small-town Holland, Michigan, and had big dreams of attending the Naval Academy after high school. Here I am on the morning of my sixteenth birthday, after several solo flights—all before I got my automobile driver’s license.

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

In 1965 my father, Edgar Prince, and six coworkers struck out on their own to create Prince Manufacturing, which initially manufactured die-casting machines. It soon became the largest employer in the town where I grew up.

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

My excitement at enrolling in the Naval Academy (here with my mother, Elsa, and my father, Edgar) was short lived. I lasted only three semesters in Annapolis before my disillusionment with the culture there led me to Hillsdale College in Michigan.

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR