How to Get Away With Murder in America (12 page)

Bush adopted Black’s recommendations and passed them into law through an executive order—called a “finding”—signed on September 17, 2001. Jane Mayer, who reported on Black’s memo and its influence on the president in
The Dark Side,
summed up the order, writing, “To give the President deniability, and to keep him from getting his hands dirty, the finding called for the president to delegate blanket authority to Tenet to decide on a case-by-case basis whom to kill, whom to kidnap, whom to detain and interrogate, and how.”

Tenet appears to have delegated much of the authority granted to him to Cofer Black at the CTC, which reportedly oversaw the most controversial new operations—black site prisons, enhanced interrogations, and a massively scaled-up rendition program, with hundreds estimated to have been undertaken in the first year. Ricky Prado had his hands full. He supervised all field aspects of the new operations, though it’s not certain what direct role, if any, he had in running the secret prison program or the interrogations.

What Prado became most associated with was the CTC’s “targeted assassination unit.” Bush’s finding had authorized creation of the unit, conceiving it as a full-service program to gather intelligence on potential targets, surveil them, and mount untraceable, deadly attacks. It came into existence at about the same time the CIA started carrying out assassinations using drones, but Prado’s assassination unit had a different role. Drone attacks are public spectacles, easily traced to the United States, with serious potential for collateral damage. Prado’s unit was developed for occasions when the government needed to kill people with precision, without getting caught.

Since the unit’s existence was first disclosed, in 2009, CIA officials have told an evolving story of what it actually did. Initially a spokesman said it was never more than a “PowerPoint presentation.” Later, sources said it became operational but never fully carried out a mission.

The most surprising revelation about the unit was that, in 2004, the CIA handed over its operation to Blackwater, the private military contracting firm. Prado reportedly negotiated the deal to transfer the unit, and then retired from the CIA and was hired by Blackwater, where he ran the assassination unit as a private citizen. The move was historic: It seems to have marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise. Prado earns at least a footnote in history for bringing it about, but he appears not to have been acting alone.

Cofer Black’s career at the CTC had ended in May 2002, when he was reportedly sacked; some reports say he was actually locked out of his office. Word had gotten out in the intelligence community about the bungled operation that permitted two of the hijackers to enter the country unmolested. Some in the CIA referred to this as his “9/11 problem,” and were afraid Black would damage the agency’s reputation when he was called to testify before the 9/11 Commission, which was then being created. Black has since denied that the agency fired him. Even if it did, his knack for failing up held. Before leaving the CIA, he, Prado, and a handful of others were showered with medals, and President Bush made Black a special ambassador at the State Department, in charge of counterterrorist programs.

Both Black and Prado left government service in 2004 and started at Blackwater months later. For Prado, it was almost like sleight of hand: One day he was running the assassination unit for the CIA; not long after, he was at an office a few miles from Langley, running the same program for Blackwater. Once again, he was serving Cofer Black.

Prado and Black each spent about four years at Blackwater. Theirs was a rocky road. Blackwater had been founded in 1997 to provide support to the military. Under international law, countries are permitted to send only national military personnel into combat. Use of mercenaries is a war crime, and Americans have taken a dim view of them ever since the British hired the Hessians to put down the Revolution. But since the 1990s the United States has interpreted international law to permit it to field armed contractors. Although the legal justifications aren’t entirely coherent, they have coalesced around the idea that armed contractors are permissible as long as they serve defensive roles. The rationale behind Blackwater was that the company would take on drudge work—guarding bases, convoys, or diplomats—and free up soldiers for dangerous offensive operations.

Shortly after Prado and Black arrived at Blackwater, a series of scandals rocked the company. Most of them stemmed from offenses the company’s guards committed in Iraq, culminating in the massacre of seventeen unarmed civilians in 2007. That same year, several Blackwater executives, including its president, faced indictments for their alleged role in a gun-trafficking scheme. Neither Black nor Prado was implicated. The scandals apparently did not bother Mitt Romney, who during a 2007 campaign debate boasted of Black’s role as his top national security adviser.

Prado’s creation of an assassination unit at the firm remained secret until 2009, and even then the extent of its operations was hard to determine. After its existence was disclosed, administration officials later admitted to the
New York Times
that it had conducted surveillance and training missions preparatory to carrying out assassinations, and an official suggested that the Blackwater unit may have been involved in some renditions. After Prado created the unit at Blackwater, the CIA appears to have awarded the firm contracts worth about $600 million—though it’s not clear what portion of this went to Prado’s assassination unit.

In 2007, Prado and Black launched Total Intelligence Solutions (TIS), the Blackwater subsidiary on whose website I first found Prado’s résumé. They billed it as a corporate security firm, and in 2007 Black and Prado permitted reporters to tour TIS’s Global Fusion Center, a high-tech command post modeled after one at the CTC. Reporters counted sixty-five employees at the TIS center, but there was no hint of who the firm’s clients were. Black wouldn’t say, but he did assure reporters, “We break no laws.”

In 2010, James Risen and Mark Mazzetti reported in the
New York Times
that Blackwater had created some thirty “false front companies.” Unlike TIS, which made clear its ties with Blackwater, these firms seemed to have been created to hide the nature and volume of Blackwater’s contracts with the government. The reporters obtained documents suggesting that within this skein of corporate entities, Prado and his colleagues had created not just an assassination unit but a complete espionage service, a sort of mini-CTC. One of the documents they obtained was an e-mail Prado had written to an unknown recipient that boasted of his unit’s capabilities:

The
Times
report didn’t determine the extent to which the government availed itself of Prado’s service. But its mere existence raised questions. Blackwater’s original rationale—to free up the military’s resources by taking on less-skilled work—had at least made sense. But why would the CIA outsource its most sensitive tasks—the stuff that makes a spy a spy—to a start-up company best known for ill-trained, trigger-happy security guards? The answer seemed to lie in Prado’s e-mail: “deniability.”

The CIA’s quest for deniability—through the use of front companies or other types of surrogates—is nothing new. But its use of Blackwater seems to have taken this to a new level. In the past, the CIA was subject to oversight, however tenuous, from the president and Congress. There had been a line that connected elected officials with the CIA and its employees. President Bush’s 2001 executive order severed this line by transferring to the CIA his unique authority to approve assassinations. By removing himself from the decision-making cycle, the president shielded himself—and all elected authority—from responsibility should a mission go wrong or be found illegal. When the CIA transferred the assassination unit to Blackwater, it continued the trend. CIA officers would no longer participate in the agency’s most violent operations, or witness them. If it practiced any oversight at all, the CIA would rely on Blackwater’s self-reporting about missions it conducted. Running operations through Blackwater gave the CIA the power to have people abducted, or killed, with no one in the government being exactly responsible.

The deniability that protects the government also shields the bureaucrats who run it. In such a system, it’s nearly impossible to detect mistakes, incompetence, or corruption. Given Black’s own failures in government—and
The 9/11 Commission Report
is unequivocal about those—turning the CIA into a responsibility-free zone may have appealed to him personally. From a citizens’ standpoint, secret, violent entities funded by the government, but not directly overseen by it, would appear to reduce reasonable expectations for the rule of law. Whether or not Prado’s unit at Blackwater was completely activated, it was by definition a lawless entity, little different from Albert San Pedro’s Transworld Detective Agency.

Prado’s end at Blackwater seems to have come about because of all the scandals associated with the firm’s security services, and he left in 2008 to found his own intelligence firm. Documents obtained by Jeremy Scahill, reporting for the
Nation,
revealed that Cofer Black, who remained at Blackwater a while longer, struggled to sign up corporate clients for TIS. An e-mail Black sent to Prado detailed his attempt to sell Monsanto on a scheme to infiltrate European animal-rights groups. Monsanto rejected the offer. The man who a few years earlier had sold the president on the invasion of Afghanistan was now pitching a
Spies Like Us
caper aimed at PETA activists. The air of flop-sweat desperation around this effort suggested that CIA patronage had dried up. But another e-mail Prado wrote to a TIS employee referred to a counterterrorist operation his new firm was undertaking in Africa that was “of extreme interest to our major sponsor.” The e-mail seemed to suggest that at the end of the day, Prado and some Blackwater employees were still working for the CIA.

The reporting on Prado’s activities at Blackwater produced no evidence that the firm’s employees had ever killed anyone on behalf of the CIA—until I spoke to Blackwater employees who insisted that they had.

Two Blackwater contractors told me that their firm began conducting assassinations in Afghanistan as early as 2008. They claimed to have participated in such operations—one in a support role, the other as a “trigger puller.” The contractors, to whom I spoke in 2009 and 2010, were both ex–Special Forces soldiers who were not particularly bothered by assassination work, although they did question the legality of Blackwater’s involvement in it.

According to the “trigger puller,” he and a partner were selected for one such operation because they were Mexican Americans, whose darker skin enabled them to blend in as Afghan civilians. The first mission he described took place in 2008. He and his partner spent three weeks training outside Kabul, becoming accustomed to walking barefoot like Afghans while toting weapons underneath their jackets. Their mission centered on walking into a market and killing the occupant of a pickup truck, whose identity a CIA case worker had provided to them. They succeeded in their mission, he told me, and moved on to another.

This contractor’s story didn’t completely fit with other accounts about Prado’s unit at Blackwater. The e-mail written by Prado and later obtained by the
Times
seemed to indicate that the unit wouldn’t use Americans to carry out actual assassinations. Moreover, two CIA sources insisted that the contractors I spoke to were lying. As one put it, “These guys are security guards who want to look like Rambo.”

When I asked Ed O’Connell, a former Air Force colonel and RAND analyst with robust intelligence experience in Afghanistan, to evaluate these contractors’ claims, he first told me they were almost certainly a “fantastical crock of shit.” But a year later, in 2011, after a research trip in Afghanistan for his firm, Alternative Strategies Institute, O’Connell had changed his assessment. He told me, “Your sources seem to have been correct. Private contractors are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA.”

While Blackwater’s covert unit began as a Bush administration story, President Obama now owns it. In 2010, his administration intervened on behalf of the Blackwater executives indicted for weapons trafficking, filing motions to suppress evidence on the grounds that it could compromise national security. The administration then awarded Blackwater (which is now called Academi) a $250 million contract to perform unspecified services for the CIA. At the same time, Obama has publicly taken responsibility for some lethal operations—the Navy SEALs’ sniper attack on Somali pirates, the raid on bin Laden. His aides have also said that he reviews target lists for drone strikes. The president’s actions give him the appearance of a man who wants the best of both worlds. He appears as a tough, resolute leader when he announces his role in killings that will likely be popular—a pirate, a terrorist. But the apparatus for less accountable killings grinds on.

According to several sources, Obama’s administration has surpassed Bush’s in the covert use of contractors in the Middle East. They serve in offensive roles and operate from bases they run jointly with the CIA. To maintain his principled vows to end two wars, the president has executed a strategy based on replacing American soldiers with American-led mercenaries. Apparently, the temptations offered by deniable, covert, private killers are too much for any president to resist.

Cofer Black is one election away, potentially, from massively failing up again. If Black’s chumminess with Romney translates into a White House post, it’s unclear whether Prado would follow him. In December 2011, a law enforcement source informed me that the FBI is investigating Prado for his activities at Blackwater—which activities, my source could not say. He also told me that the FBI had obtained the old OCS files, with an eye toward reopening one or more of the old murder cases.

Prado’s fingerprints may never be found on a murder weapon, but they are all over one of the darkest chapters of American history—the one we are in. Whether or not he was the idea man, he helped execute the plans. The privatization of a secret government assassination program was a concept unimaginable to most Americans, until we found out it had already happened.