The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Mon Jul 23 08:18:08 PDT 2012


http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/the-terrifying-background-of-the-man-who-ran-a-cia-assassination-unit/259856/

The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

By Conor Friedersdorf

Jul 18 2012, 1:39 PM ET 123

A federal investigation alleged Enrique Prado's involvement in seven murders,
yet he was in charge when America outsourced covert killing to a private
company.

cia full cia.png CIA

It was one of the biggest secrets of the post-9/11 era: soon after the
attacks, President Bush gave the CIA permission to create a top secret
assassination unit to find and kill Al Qaeda operatives. The program was kept
from Congress for seven years. And when Leon Panetta told legislators about
it in 2009, he revealed that the CIA had hired the private security firm
Blackwater to help run it. "The move was historic," says Evan Wright, the
two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist who wrote Generation
Kill. "It seems to have marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced
a covert assassination service to private enterprise."

The quote is from his e-book How to Get Away With Murder in America, which
goes on to note that "in the past, the CIA was subject to oversight, however
tenuous, from the president and Congress," but that "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." None of this is new information, though I imagine that many
people reading this item are hearing about it for the first time.

Isn't that bizarre?

The bulk of Wright's e-book (full disclosure: I help edit the website of
Byliner, publisher of the e-book) tells the story of Enrique Prado, a
high-ranking CIA-officer-turned-Blackwater-employee who oversaw assassination
units for both the CIA and the contractor. To whom was this awesome
responsibility entrusted? According to Wright's investigation, a federal
organized crime squad run out of the Miami-Dade Police Department produced an
investigation allegedly tying Prado to seven murders carried out while he
worked as a bodyguard for a narco crime boss. At the time, the CIA declared
him unavailable for questioning; the investigation was shut down before he
was arrested or tried.

There's a lot more to the story -- Wright's e-book is almost 50 pages long --
but this bit is of particular note:

    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. But 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."

So there you have it: A former Air Force lieutenant colonel, speaking on the
record and using the present tense, said in 2011 that "private contractors
are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA."

Says Wright:


    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.

Needless to say, this ought to spark an investigation, but more than that, it
should cause Americans to step back and reflect on how vulnerable we've made
ourselves to bad actors in the post-9/11 era. We're giving C.I.A. agents and
even private security contractors the sort of power no individual should
wield. And apparently our screening apparatus turns out to be lacking.





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