Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (40 page)

To do the day-to-day work,
Blackwater recruited primarily from veterans
of the U.S. military’s special operations forces. The men working with the CIA had to be specially vetted to a higher standard than run-of-the-mill guards, including through the use of polygraph tests. Those who met the CIA’s demanding standards were employed by a subsidiary known as Blackwater Select. They were paid $550 per day and received more flexibility than they had known in the more hierarchical and rule-ridden culture of the armed forces. They could even hope to cadge a drink after going off duty—the CIA’s “Talibar” was one of the few legal sources of booze in a strictly Islamic country where the U.S. military was prohibited from imbibing even on its own bases.

Because Blackwater kept the Kabul station safe, it won the CIA’s trust and was awarded additional contracts to protect more CIA bases that were springing up around southern and eastern Afghanistan—the heartland of the Taliban. Not only did Blackwater deploy teams of guards to each base;
aircraft belonging to its aviation arm
, Presidential Airways, helped to supply these CIA bases along with military bases. Blackwater flew thousands of supply sorties, its aircraft going low to parachute supplies into remote outposts. This expanding Blackwater role was covert, in line with all CIA activities; it received publicity only when things went wrong.

Things went as wrong as they possibly could have on December 30, 2009, at Forward Operating Base Chapman, a CIA enclave located in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, just a few miles from the Pakistan border. The CIA’s chief of base there, Jennifer Matthews, along with a number of her subordinates and a Jordanian intelligence officer, had gathered to welcome Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor and jihadist whom the CIA and Jordanian intelligence believed had been recruited to penetrate al-Qaeda’s top echelon. In reality al-Balawi had been “turned” by al-Qaeda into a triple agent—and a suicide bomber. Rather than meeting with his CIA contacts, al-Balawi blew them up with a suicide vest hidden under his robes. Nine people were killed, not counting al-Balawi, making this the CIA’s worst loss of life since the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983.

Among those killed were two employees of Xe Services, as Blackwater was then known: a forty-six-year-old former Green Beret named Dane
Paresi
, who had previously won a Bronze Star for his heroism in Afghanistan, and a thirty-five-year-old former SEAL named Jeremy Wise. The fact that al-Balawi was able to set off his bomb in the presence of Blackwater security guards might indicate that Paresi and Wise had failed at their jobs, but postbombing inquiries exonerated them of any wrongdoing or negligence.

The most detailed account of the attacks,
The Triple Agent
by the Pulitzer Prize–winning
Washington Post
reporter Joby Warrick, depicts Paresi and Wise as being more alive to the danger posed by al-Balawi than some of their complacent CIA colleagues, who insisted that he be allowed on the base without once being searched. “Paresi,” Warrick writes, “was highly skeptical of the security plan the officers had rehearsed, and he had said so, sharing his concerns with both his [Blackwater] supervisor back in Virginia and the CIA’s security chief in Khost, Scott Roberson [who was also killed in the blast].”

Warrick adds that Paresi, who was “
known for his unflappable calm and his Zen-like insistence
on looking after the small details,”
was willing to speak up when the decisions of his superiors “
exasperated him” but he “also understood his place
”—“he had a family to feed and would do his job, even if he didn’t like it.”

When the day came, Paresi and Wise did their jobs well, even if they could not stop al-Balawi’s suicide attack. Warrick recounts that the two men “had instinctively raised their guns when Balawi balked at exiting on their side of the car” and had “watched with growing alarm as Balawi hobbled around the vehicle, one hand grasping the crutch and the other hidden ominously under his shawl.” The two men shouted in unison: “
Hands up
! Get your hand out of your clothing!” Instead al-Balawi detonated his vest.

The CIA subsequently honored Paresi and Wise by adding stars for them to its memorial wall, which honors CIA employees killed in the line of duty, even though, as contractors, they were not eligible for burial in Arlington National Cemetery. Indeed many other attacks against CIA officers in Iraq and Afghanistan were thwarted by Blackwater, which, despite its propensity to generate controversy, had an exemplary record of safeguarding the “principals” under its care—as the U.S. government implicitly acknowledged by repeatedly renewing Blackwater’s contracts for protective services.

Blackwater’s responsibilities did not end at the perimeter of CIA bases where they provided “static” security. By 2005, with insurgencies growing in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA mandated that its officers not venture outside headquarters in Kabul and Baghdad without a personal security detail. Blackwater provided teams of bodyguards who would accompany CIA officers on all of their missions. Inevitably, because Blackwater employees were experienced veterans of the special operations forces, they became closely involved in both mission planning and execution. Indeed young CIA officers would have been negligent if they had not asked grizzled veterans of Delta Force about the best way to carry out an operation. Blackwater personnel wound up going well beyond a narrowly defensive role to take part in “snatch and grab” missions on an almost nightly basis. Sometimes the contractors operated in conjunction
with secretive military special mission units. They and their CIA colleagues also worked with “strike forces” made up of locally recruited fighters. Hand-picked Blackwater employees also provided security for the transportation of detainees to CIA “black sites” for interrogation and detention.

A former Blackwater official told the
New York Times
that their personnel “were supposed to be the outer layer of the onion, out on the perimeter” but instead had become “
the drivers and the gunslingers
” on CIA missions. A retired CIA officer explained to the
Washington Post
: “
There was no bench strength
with either the CIA or Special Forces, so sometimes they would turn to contractors, who often had lots of the same skills.”

The transformation of Blackwater’s role had occurred with the full support of—indeed at the request of—the CIA personnel on the ground even if agency superiors in Washington were not always aware of the enhanced role being played by contractors in the field. Erik Prince says he never knew everything his men did, either, because they operated under the cloak of secrecy, but he repeatedly
encouraged them to do “whatever it takes
” to help their CIA clients. “Several former Blackwater guards” told the
New York Times
“that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency,
the military and Blackwater became blurred
.” “A former top CIA officer” added: “
It became a very brotherly relationship
. There was a feeling that Blackwater eventually became an extension of the agency.”

This was not the only area where the dividing line between CIA and Blackwater blurred. Prince hired a series of high-level CIA officials to work at Blackwater, most notably J. Cofer Black, the flamboyant former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, famous for assuring President George W. Bush after 9/11 that, by the time the CIA was done, Osama bin Laden and his confederates “
would have flies walking across their eyeballs
.” Others included Enrique “Ric” Prado, former chief of operations at the Counterterrorism Center, and Robert “Rob” Richer, former associate deputy director
of the National Clandestine Service. According to Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mark Mazzetti, Prince also “
regularly invited top CIA officers to the Kentucky Derby
, or down to Blackwater’s headquarters, in eastern North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp, for a day of shooting at the company’s expansive training grounds.”

The new hires from the CIA helped Prince start the new subsidiary Total Intelligence Solutions, designed to provide risk assessment for companies doing business overseas. They also helped Blackwater land more contracts from the intelligence community. There was nothing nefarious about this; it was standard operating procedure in Washington, where both former CIA director J. James Woolsey and future director of national intelligence James Clapper, for instance, went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton, a much larger contractor than Blackwater.

One of the contracts Blackwater won was to operate the drones that the CIA flew over Pakistan from bases in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. The most famous of these was the Predator, known in its armed and updated configuration as the Reaper, but there were also other, less publicized drones, some of them built specially for stealth. Armed with Hellfire missiles and five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs, the drones were at the cutting edge of the war on terror. They had first been used after the September 11 attacks, and their employment had dramatically expanded under the Obama administration. According to the Web site
Long War Journal
, a project of the nonprofit Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and considered an essential source for drone strike statistics, the
number of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan
grew from 35 in 2008 to 53 in 2009 and 117 in 2010, most of them taking place in North and South Waziristan, strongholds of the Haqqani network and both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. The drone strikes have been criticized for stoking resentment of the United States, but they also undoubtedly disrupted al-Qaeda plots and made it harder for that organization to regroup.

The drones could be remotely piloted, and their munitions fired, by CIA personnel sitting in the United States; contractors would not be
responsible for deciding whom the U.S. government would blow up. But someone had to be on the ground to recover, service, and arm the aircraft. Blackwater—or, more accurately, Xe Services—won a contract to do just that; the deal also included guarding the drone bases, the biggest one being in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, which would be the launch site of the SEAL Team raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Blackwater personnel traveled to Nellis Air Force Base
in Nevada, home of the Air Force’s remotely piloted vehicle program, to be trained in their tasks. Thus, just as Blackwater had been crucial for President Bush’s war on terror, so it proved indispensible for President Obama’s continuation of that struggle against al-Qaeda, notwithstanding the hostility against Blackwater exhibited by some of the president’s supporters.

CIA director Leon
Panetta finally terminated Xe’s drone operations contract
in 2009, after leaks to the
New York Times
sparked controversy about the company’s role in carrying out “inherently governmental functions” such as conducting offensive military and intelligence operations. (The U.S. armed forces continue to rely on other contractors to service aircraft in the field.)

While voiding the Predator contract, in June 2010 Panetta renewed Xe’s contract to continue providing security for CIA operatives in the field. To get that work, worth an estimated $100 million, Xe beat out in competitive bidding two other contractors, DynCorp and Triple Canopy, which had shared the work of protecting State Department personnel in Iraq.

Unsurprisingly, the new CIA contract drew criticism from Representative Jan Schakowsky, who complained, “I am
continually and increasingly mystified by this relationship
. To engage with a company that is such a chronic, repeat offender is reckless.” However, Panetta publicly defended the decision, saying
Blackwater had “cleaned up its act
.” A government official explained to the
Washington Post
, on the condition of anonymity, why the firm had beaten out its competitors: “Blackwater has
undergone some serious changes
. They’ve had to if they want to survive. They’ve had to prove to the government that they’re a responsible outfit. Having satisfied every
legal requirement, they have the right to compete for contracts. They have people who do good work, at times in some very dangerous places. Nobody should forget that, either.”

The murkiest part of Blackwater’s relationship with the CIA concerns its involvement in what has been described as a “
secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives
of Al Qaeda.” The program dated back to the early post-9/11 days, when Ric Prado, then still with the CIA, worked to develop a capability to deploy small teams to kill or capture wanted terrorists.

Although countless movies have depicted the CIA as having legions of assassins at its beck and call, the reality is otherwise. The CIA’s capacity for lethal action had been shut down after the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s exposed plots against Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and other world leaders. President Gerald Ford subsequently issued an executive order forbidding assassinations.

Prado was eager to reconstitute that capability after 9/11, in order to augment the hunting of terrorists that was being conducted by the U.S. armed forces and by both military and CIA aircraft. All of this was fully legal. Both the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress on September 14, 2001, and an executive order signed by President Bush authorized killing al-Qaeda members just as the military killed other enemy combatants.

To train the new CIA direct-action team, made up initially of full-time agency employees, Prado turned to Blackwater. “
Wary of attracting undue attention
,” Adam Ciralsky reported in
Vanity Fair
, “the team practiced not at the company’s North Carolina compound but at Prince’s own domain, an hour outside Washington, D.C. The property looks like an outpost of the landed gentry, with pastures and horses, but also features less traditional accents, such as an indoor firing range.”

The direct action team’s targets reportedly included Mamoun Darkazanli, an al-Qaeda financier living in Hamburg, and A. Q. Khan, the rogue Pakistani scientist who’s helped the nuclear weapons programs of Iran, Libya, and North Korea. CIA teams were said
to have deployed to track Darkazanli in Germany and Khan in Dubai, but senior officials in Washington never authorized pulling the trigger. Apparently they were willing to kill terrorists with bombs and missiles—but not with sniper’s bullets.