Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the CIA’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, former company employees and intelligence officials said.
The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency between 2004 and 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called “snatch and grab” operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said.
Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the CIA, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for CIA officers, they said, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.
Separately, former Blackwater employees said they helped provide security on some CIA flights transporting detainees in the years after the 2001 terror attacks in the US.
The secret missions illuminate a far deeper relationship between the spy agency and the private security company than government officials have previously acknowledged. Blackwater’s partnership with the CIA has been enormously profitable for the North Carolina-based company, and became even closer after several top agency officials joined Blackwater.
“It became a very brotherly relationship,” one former top CIA officer said. “There was a feeling that Blackwater eventually became an extension of the agency.”
George Little, a CIA spokesman, would not comment on Blackwater’s ties to the agency. But he said the CIA employs contractors to “enhance the skills of our own work force, just as American law permits.”
“Contractors give you flexibility in shaping and managing your talent mix — especially in the short term — but the accountability’s still yours,” he said.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Blackwater, said on Thursday that the firm was never under contract to participate in clandestine raids with the CIA or with Special Operations personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else.
Blackwater’s role in the secret operations raises concerns about the extent to which private security firms, hired for defensive guard duty, have joined in offensive military and intelligence operations.
Representative Rush Holt, the chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, said in an interview that “the use of contractors in intelligence and paramilitary operations is a scandal waiting to be examined.”
While he declined to comment on specific operations, Holt said that the use of contractors in such operations “got way out of hand. It’s been very troubling to a lot of people.”
Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, has come under intense criticism for what Iraqis have described as reckless conduct by its security guards, and the company lost its lucrative US State Department contract to provide diplomatic security for the US embassy in Baghdad earlier this year after a 2007 shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.
Blackwater’s ties to the CIA have emerged in recent months, beginning with disclosures in the New York Times that the agency had hired the company as part of a program to assassinate leaders of al-Qaeda and to assist in the CIA’s Predator unmanned vehicle program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Leon Panetta, the CIA director, recently initiated an internal review examining all Blackwater contracts with the agency to ensure that the company was performing no missions that were “operational in nature,” one government official said.
Five former Blackwater employees and four current and former US intelligence officials interviewed for this article would speak only on condition of anonymity because Blackwater’s activities for the agency were secret and former employees feared repercussions from the company.
The Blackwater employees said they participated in the raids or had direct knowledge of them.
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