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Did the non-disclosure clauses just expire for some former Blackwater Xe executives? It would seem to be the case, based on the New York Times' series of scoops on the company's more-intimate-than-previously-reported ties to the CIA.
The latest revelation: The company's contractors help assemble and load missiles and smart bombs on the CIA's Predator drones. The firm, the Times reports, also provided security at secret bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
That latter point should come as little surprise to Blackwater-watchers. According to Robert Young Pelton's Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror, Blackwater first got into the security business to provide protective details for the CIA in Afghanistan post-9/11.
Six months after September 11, 2001, Pelton wrote, "the Global Response Staff, the CIA's security division, was overstretched, and they needed protection for their newly established Kabul station. The CIA had hired corporations for collection and other covert needs before, but they had rarely contracted out their field officers' security to private industry."
Enter Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who even went over himself to Afghanistan as a security contractor for a few weeks in spring 2002. The experience in the field, Pelton wrote, "energized him. He loved the intrigue and excitement so much that the thirtysomething head of the Prince family empire decided he wanted to join the CIA's Special Activities Division and enter the world of covert operations as a paramilitary."
Things didn't work out as Prince hoped, however, so he focused instead on growing his business. Blackwater morphed from an obscure training facility and target manufacturer to a major private security player.
And the use of contractors to help operate drones, incidentally, is not new: In 2007, I interviewed private contractors who were operating the Hunter unmanned aerial vehicles in Iraq; the contractors had to step aside and led "green-suiters" (Army operators) take over when they were dropping Viper Strike glide bombs.
[PHOTO: Wikimedia]
See Also:
- CIA: Our Drones are Killing Terrorists. Promise.
- Blackwater Chief is a Super Villian: Ex-Employees
- Blackwater Takes Our Advice, Adopts Inscrutable, Opaque Name ...
- Layoffs at Blackwater Worldwide Xe
- Blackwater Air Also Forced to Leave Iraq
- Blackwater's Pirate-Fighting Ops Sunk After Discrimination Suits ...
- Blackwater Mercs Staying in Iraq; Will Hillary Keep 'Em Elsewhere ...
