Vanity Fair on Blackwater’s Erik Prince
December 3rd, 2009Blackwater is a CIA cutout that got so big that it just happened to become a household name.
—Feds Investigating Blackwater USA for Selling Weapons to Iraqi Insurgency
We get into the Coincidence? category because the article just happens to be written by a “former” CIA attorney.
Via: Vanity Fair:
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’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.
Erik Prince is another Ollie North, and
Blackwater/Xe is just another “off the
shelf intelligence capability”
Shocking. Next thing we’ll hear is that
they’re somehow involved in drugs or
extraordinarily illegal renditions.
There’s only one way out, folks. “Starve
the beast.”
As an erstwhile friend of mine once observed:
Psychopaths go far.