Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

For a brief moment after 9/11, Cofer Black had helped run an unprecedented covert war that some officials had salivated for their entire careers. That now was history as human rights groups and lawyers worked feverishly to dismantle the shadowy system Black had worked so diligently to build. In 2005, he was targeted for sanction, along with George Tenet and another CIA official, by the agency’s Inspector General (IG) for bearing responsibility in the 9/11 intelligence failure. 106The Bush Administration, however, worried that Tenet would retaliate and embarrass the White House by revealing damning information, buried the IG’s report, saving Black in the process. 107

Congressional Democrats would later use Black’s covert program as evidence that the Administration had “outsourced” the job of hunting bin Laden. But while his work as a government official may have ended, Black found a gold mine of opportunity in the dramatically expanding world of private military, intelligence, and security contracting—where human rights oversight was optional at best. On February 4, 2005, Blackwater USA officially announced that it had hired Black as the company’s vice chairman. “Ambassador Black brings with him thirty years of experience in combating terrorism around the globe and absolute devotion to freedom and democracy and the United States of America,” said Erik Prince. “We are honored to have him as part of our great team.” 108

For Blackwater, hiring Cofer Black was an unbelievable score. In marketing terms, it would be almost impossible to rival. The company moved swiftly to use him as a brand in and of himself. In August 2005, Black incorporated his own “consulting” practice, The Black Group, which would specialize in executive protection and security. “The 9/11 attacks were designed to damage the economy of the United States,” Black said in a statement on his Web site. “To successfully inflict the greatest possible harm, terrorists will target the lifeblood of a nation: its economy. For that reason, Fortune 500 companies are especially attractive targets as governments continue to emphasize Homeland Security. We seek to anticipate and defeat the next terrorist tactic—disruptions of supply chains, coordinated attacks on key assets or customers, or even assassinations of top executives. Corporations are the most vulnerable targets. It’s our job to keep them safe.” 109The Black Group boasted, “With leadership drawn from the Executive Branch of the United States Government, The Black Group has the practical experience and the network to mitigate any security issue. Ensure the security of your people and your assets.” 110

On The Black Group’s Web site, various images of potential targets flash on the screen: a crowd gathered at the Mall in Washington, D.C., a power plant, a man in a suit using a device to inspect the bottom of a car in an underground garage, a Wall Street sign. On the contact page, the other main figure listed on the site is Francis McLennand, another career CIA officer, who worked alongside Black at the agency. 111The contact phone number for the company was the same number used by Erik Prince’s “Prince Group” in McLean, Virginia, not far from the CIA Counterterrorism Center Black once headed.

Few other Americans had their hands as deeply into the inner workings of U.S. covert operations in the post-9/11 world as Cofer Black. He soon would begin acting as a godfather of sorts to the mercenary community as it refined its rebranding campaign. Potential Blackwater clients could now assume they were getting direct access to the resources of the CIA and intelligence world from “a leadership team drawn from senior levels of the United States government” 112—something few other private firms could boast or imply. Black was a heavy hitter among the heaviest of them, the man who caught Carlos the Jackal and brought down the Taliban. He would soon take the lead in promoting Blackwater as a privatized peacekeeping force that could deploy at a moment’s notice in places like Darfur, Sudan, or domestically in U.S. Homeland Security operations. Other influential ex-government officials would soon join him at Blackwater as the company turned its sights on lucrative disaster contracting in the United States in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in late 2005. But just as Black was rolling up his sleeves in his fancy new digs, more Blackwater men were dying in Iraq in what would be the deadliest days to date for the company.

WHEN PAULBremer skulked out of Iraq on June 28, 2004, he left behind a violent, chaotic mess that the White House called “a free and sovereign” Iraq. 1Just how unstable the country was when Bremer departed was evident in the fact that he actually had to stage an exit in one plane for the press and then fly out of Baghdad in another to “get me out of here… preferably in one piece.” 2In real terms, this “sovereignty,” which President Bush described as “the Iraqi people hav[ing] their country back,” 3was a way to set the stage for U.S. officials to blame the puppet government in Baghdad for the worsening American-made disaster. When Bremer’s secret flight fled Iraq, anti-U.S. attacks were increasing by the day as more mercenaries poured into the country—now officially operating with immunity. In the meantime, more Iraqi factions began arming militias, and talk of civil war began drowning out that of a united resistance to the U.S. occupation. It was in the midst of these developments that Bremer’s successor arrived on the ground in Baghdad.

Ambassador John Negroponte was certainly no stranger to wanton bloodletting and death-squad-style operations, having cut his teeth working under Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War. 4Beginning in 1981, Negroponte was the Reagan administration’s point man in fueling death squads in Central America. 5As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte had presided over the second largest embassy in Latin America at the time and the largest CIA station in the world. 6From that post, Negroponte had coordinated Washington’s covert support for the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and for the Honduran junta, covering up the crimes of its murderous Battalion 316. 7During Negroponte’s tenure in Honduras, U.S. officials who worked under him said the State Department human rights reports on the country were drafted to read more like Norway’s than anything reflecting the actual reality in Honduras. 8Negroponte’s predecessor in Honduras, Ambassador Jack R. Binns, told the New York Times that Negroponte had discouraged reporting to Washington of abductions, torture, and killings by notorious Honduran military units. “I think [Negroponte] was complicit in abuses, I think he tried to put a lid on reporting abuses and I think he was untruthful to Congress about those activities,” Binns said. 9The Wall Street Journal reported that in Honduras, “Negroponte’s influence, backed by huge amounts of U.S. aid, was so great that it was said he far outweighed the country’s president and that his only real rival was Honduras’s military chief.” 10He was “such a powerful ambassador in Honduras in the early 1980s that he was known as ‘the proconsul,’ a title given to powerful administrators in colonial times,” the Journal noted in a story published shortly after Negroponte’s nomination to the Iraq post. “Now President Bush has chosen him to reprise that role in Iraq.” 11

Perhaps there was little irony, then, that shortly after Negroponte’s appointment as ambassador to Iraq, in April 2004, the Honduran government announced it was pulling its 370 troops out of the “coalition of the willing.” 12Despite Negroponte’s well-documented record of involvement with a policy of horrible human rights abuses and killings, his confirmation as ambassador to Iraq went smoothly—he was approved by the Senate in a 95-3 vote on May 6, 2004. Senator Tom Harkin, who as a Congressman in the 1980s had investigated Negroponte’s activities in Central America, said he wished he had done more to stop Negroponte’s appointment. “I’ve been amazed at how this individual—from what he did in Central America, where under his watch hundreds of people disappeared—has moved up. He falsified reports and ignored what was happening,” Harkin said. “This is going to be our ambassador to Iraq at this time?” 13