RT: Blackwater was CIA’s extension, founder Erik Prince admits

From: 2012: What's the 'real' truth?

Edited time: March 14, 2013 23:28

A picture taken on July 5, 2005 shows contractors of the US private security firm Blackwater securing the site of a roadside bomb attack near the Iranian embassy in central Baghdad. (AFP Photo / Ahmad Al-Rubaye)

Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater – now known as Academi – claims his firm “became a virtual extension of the CIA,” taking orders from the agency.

Erik Prince, chairman of the Prince Group. (AFP Photo / Tim Sloan)

In an interview published Thursday by the Daily Beast, Prince revealed how deeply connected Blackwater was to the Central Intelligence Agency, especially in the early 2000s. Last month, federal prosecutors dropped felony charges against Blackwater personnel after it was revealed that the employees had been acting under the orders of the US government. After a three-year-long prosecution, most of the company’s executives walked free and two men received nothing more than probation, house arrest and $5,000 fines.

But the tens of thousands of pages of court documents from the case shed light on an argument the company made throughout those three years – that Blackwater itself was an extension of the CIA.

“Blackwater’s work with the CIA began when we provided specialized instructors and facilities that the Agency lacked,” Prince told the Daily Beast.“In the years that followed, the company became a virtual extension of the CIA because we were asked time and again to carry out dangerous missions, which the agency either could not or would not do in-house.”

Initially, lawmakers believed the CIA was “looking for skills and capabilities, and they had to go to outside contractors like Blackwater to make sure they could accomplish their mission,” said retired Congressman Pete Hoekstra. But the relationship was in fact much closer than believed.

When King Abdullah of Jordan visited the US in 2005, he took a trip to the Blackwater headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina, where company executives awarded him two gifts – a modified Bushmaster AR-15 rifle and a Remington shotgun. The weapons were labeled with the Blackwater logo, but Prince says that the CIA asked the company to give Abdullah the guns “when people at the agency had forgotten to get gifts for him.”

In a 2008 raid of the Blackwater headquarters, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discovered that the weapons given to Abdullah had been registered as personal property by two employees at the agency – and there was no paperwork indicating that they were now in the possession of Jordanian royalty.

Additionally, the ATF found that many of Blackwater’s weapons had been purchased illegally. Some of these weapons, which included Romanian AK-47s and 17 Bushmaster AR-13s, had illegally had their barrels shortened and been exported to other countries in violation of federal gun laws.  MORE