Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

by Jeremy Scahill

  • Since February 2006, N964BW, a CASA 212, has flown the route from Johnston County to Dulles; been to Pinal Airpark three times; been to Pope Air Force Base twice; been to the Phillips Air Force Base and Mackall Army Air Field; and has also twice landed at the Camp Peary Landing Strip, home to the nine-thousand-acre CIA training facility known as “the Farm.”84

  • N962BW, a CASA 212, has made numerous trips between Johnston County and Dulles and has been to Camp Peary, Simmons Army Airfield at Fort Bragg, and Blackstone Army Airfield near Fort Pickett. Its last reported flight was in September 2006, when it was headed from Goose Bay, Newfoundland, a NATO and Canadian Air Force Base, to Narsarsuaq, Greenland.

  • N955BW, a SA227-DC Metro, is registered with Aviation Worldwide but has no recent flights. Nor does N961BW or N963BW, both CASA 212s. All of these planes have serial numbers that have not been assigned different N-numbers.

  • N956BW fell off the radar in January 2006 just after beginning a flight from Louisiana to North Carolina.

  • N965BW, a CASA 212, has traveled regularly to Pinal Airpark, the Southern California Logistics Airport, which is used by the military, and has made stops in Turks & Caicos, the Dominican Republic, Bahamas, St. Croix, and Trinidad and Tobago.

  • N966BW, a CASA 212, has been to Pinal Airpark, many of the same Carribean stops as N965BW, Pope Air Force Base, and has made several Dulles-Johnston trips.

  • N967BW, a CASA 212, was last recorded heading from Goose Bay to Narsarsuaq two weeks after N962BW.

  • N968BW, a CASA 212, which regularly stops at Johnston County, Dulles, Phillips Airfield, and Camp Peary, has been to Pope Air Force Base, Pinal Airpark, and Oceana Naval Air Station.

  In addition, though Blackwater’s aircraft in Afghanistan flew normal circuits, the company was also charged with flying out of the country, including to Uzbekistan. Air Force Capt. Edwin R. Byrnes was quoted in the FAA report on the crash of Blackwater 61 as saying that one of the aircraft English and Hammer were trained to use, “[t]he Metro was going to be used like a private jet to fly to Uzbekistan.”85 Uzbekistan has been one of the “key destinations” for both U.S. military and CIA renditions. Prisoners are alleged to have been brought there both for interrogation and repatriation from Afghanistan.86 Also, as it happens, Blackwater’s planes in Afghanistan operate out of Bagram, a known U.S.-run detention and torture facility. According to Blackwater /Presidential’s Afghanistan contract, all personnel “are required to possess a Secret security clearance.”87 The contract also outlined “operations security” requirements: “Information such as flight schedules, hotels where crews are staying, return trips, and other facts about the international mission shall be kept close hold and only communicated to persons who have a need to know this information. Flight crews should be aware of persons who are seeking information about the contractor, flights, etc. They should seek to maintain a low profile while operating DoD missions.”88 In June 2007 Blackwater released a statement in response to an article in London’s Daily Mail, accusing the company of engaging in renditions.89 “Blackwater and its affiliates do not now and have never conducted so-called ‘rendition flights,’ as the transport of detainees or terror suspects to interrogation centers has become known,” the statement said. (The paper quickly retracted the allegations.) 90 It would take a far-reaching investigation to determine what, if any, involvement Blackwater has had in the government’s secret rendition programs. Company president Gary Jackson has been bold in bragging of Blackwater’s “black” and “secret” contracts, which are not publicly available or traceable; he claimed these contracts were so secret he could not tell one federal agency about Blackwater’s work with another.91 Under the war on terror, Blackwater’s first security contract was a “black” contract with the CIA, an agency with which it has deep ties.92 And then there was this development: In early 2005, Blackwater hired the career CIA spy many believe was responsible for jump-starting the Bush administration’s post-9/11 rendition program: J. Cofer Black, the former chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center. In November 2001, when U.S. forces captured Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi, believed to have run the Al Qaeda training camp in Khalden, Afghanistan, Black allegedly requested and got permission, through CIA Director George Tenet, from the White House to render Libi, reportedly over the objections of FBI officials who said they wanted to see him dealt with more transparently. “They duct-taped his mouth, cinched him up and sent him to Cairo,” a former FBI official told Newsweek. “At the airport the CIA case officer goes up to him and says, ‘You’re going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I’m going to find your mother and I’m going to fuck her.’”93

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  COFER BLACK: THE GLOVES COME OFF

  SINCE 9/11, few people have had the kind of access to President Bush and covert “war on terror” planning as Ambassador J. Cofer Black. A thirty-year CIA veteran, Black was a legendary figure in the shadowy world of international espionage, having been personally marked for death by Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. He rose to prominence in the spy world following the central role he played in Sudan in catching the famed international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as “Carlos the Jackal.” Black had spent his career in Africa and the Middle East, and when the 9/11 attacks happened, he enthusiastically seized a key role in plotting out the immediate U.S. response.

  On September 13, 2001—two days after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—Black was sitting in the White House Situation Room.1 The career CIA veteran was there to brief the President on the kind of campaign he had prepared for since joining the agency in 1974 but had been barred from carrying out.2 After clandestine operations training, Black had been sent to Africa, where he spent the bulk of his CIA career. He worked in Zambia during the Rhodesian War, then Somalia and South Africa during the apartheid regime’s brutal war against the black majority.3 During his time in Zaire, Black worked on the Reagan administration’s covert weapons program to arm anticommunist forces in Angola.4 After two decades in the CIA and a stint in London, Black arrived under diplomatic cover at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, where he served as CIA Station Chief from 1993 to 1995.5 There, he watched as a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden built up his international network into what the CIA would describe at the end of Black’s tour as “the Ford Foundation of Sunni Islamic terrorism.”6

  During much of the 1990s, agents tracking bin Laden worked under an “Operating Directive” that restricted them to intelligence collection on bin Laden and his network; they did not yet have authorization from the Clinton administration to conduct covert actions.7 In bin Laden, Black saw a man who was a threat and who needed to be taken out. The administration, however, refused to authorize the type of lethal action against bin Laden and his cronies favored by Black. Some of Black’s men were enthusiastic about killing the wealthy Saudi but were rebuffed. “Unfortunately, at that time permissions to kill—officially called Lethal Findings—were taboo in the outfit,” according to CIA operative Billy Waugh, who worked closely with Black in Sudan. “In the early 1990s we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders.”8 Among Waugh’s rejected ideas was an alleged plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum and dump his body at the Iranian Embassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran, an idea Waugh said Cofer Black “loved.”9

  But while Black and the CIA watched bin Laden, they, too, were under surveillance. In 1994, bin Laden’s group in Khartoum had reportedly determined that Black, who maintained cover as a simple embassy diplomat, was indeed CIA.10 In his definitive book on the secret history of the CIA and bin Laden, Ghost Wars, Steve Coll wrote that bin Laden’s men began to track Black’s routes to and from the U.S. Embassy. “Black and his case officers picked up this surveillance and started to watch those who were watching them,” Coll wrote. “The CIA officers saw that bin Laden’s men were setting up a ‘kill zone’ near the US embassy. They couldn’t tell whether the attack was going to be a kidnapping, a ca
r bombing, or an ambush with assault rifles, but they were able to watch bin Laden’s group practice the operation on a Khartoum street. As the weeks passed, the surveillance and counter-surveillance grew more and more intense. On one occasion they found themselves in a high-speed chase. On another the CIA officers leveled loaded shotguns at the Arabs who were following them. Eventually, Black dispatched the US ambassador to complain to the Sudanese government. Exposed, the plotters retreated.”11 When Black left Khartoum, bin Laden was more powerful than when the veteran spy had arrived; a fact that would help fuel what would become Black’s professional obsession for years to come.

  Black’s greatest triumph in Sudan, therefore, resulted from the capture of an international fugitive whose notoriety long predated bin Laden’s. Billy Waugh described how, in Sudan, he was pulled off surveillance of someone who “wasn’t much of a big fish at the time”—Osama bin Laden—for “the biggest fish” in December 1993.12 Waugh described a meeting at the Khartoum Embassy where Black announced their new target: “In this city of one million souls, we would be responsible for finding and fixing none other than Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the man known far and wide as Carlos the Jackal, the world’s most famous terrorist.”13 After the meeting, Waugh recalled, “Cofer Black pulled me aside and said, ‘Billy, this is the man. You’ve got to get this guy.’ At that moment, given the gravity evident in his voice, I knew the agency was making this a top priority. . . . I wanted to be the guy who caught this asshole.”14 Carlos was accused of a series of political killings and bombings throughout the 1970s and ’80s and, while Cofer Black was in Sudan, was perhaps the most famous wanted man in the world.

  Black, Waugh, and the Jackal team caught a break when Carlos called a trusted bodyguard from overseas to keep him out of trouble, after Carlos’s guard had been thrown in a Khartoum jail for drunkenly waving a pistol at a local shopkeeper.15 They were able to ID the new bodyguard and his vehicle when he arrived in Khartoum and eventually traced the Toyota Cressida to the Jackal’s home. After months of careful and detailed surveillance from a rented apartment with a view of his home, the move was made in August 1994.16 Waugh wrote of entering the CIA station that day, unsure of Carlos’s fate: “Immediately, Cofer and the fine lady station manager handed me a glass of champagne. Cofer bellowed, ‘Toast, Billy, you sweet son of a bitch. Carlos is in prison in France.’”17 The arrest of the Jackal secured Cofer Black’s legendary status in CIA circles and remains one of his top career bragging points. After Khartoum, Black was named in 1995 as CIA Task Force Chief in the Near East and South Asia Division, continuing his monitoring of bin Laden’s network, before a brief stint in 1998 as Deputy Chief of the Agency’s Latin America Division.18 In 1999, Black was awarded a significant promotion, heading up the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC).19

  By the time Black officially took over at CTC, his nemesis, bin Laden, was a household name, publicly accused of masterminding and ordering the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than two hundred people, among them twelve U.S. citizens. Bin Laden left Sudan shortly after Black did, allegedly relocating to Afghanistan. Once a name known only in intelligence circles and in the Arab and Muslim world, bin Laden was now on FBI most-wanted posters. Among Black’s duties beginning in 1999 was overseeing the special bin Laden unit of the CTC, known as Alec Station—internally referred to as the “Manson family,” for its cultlike obsession with “the rising al Qaeda threat.”20 Black dove enthusiastically into planning and overseeing covert operations. “He would make pronouncements that were meant to be dramatic and tough-guy colloquial—to make you think, Oh, my God, this guy’s got brass balls, and he knows the score,” said Daniel Benjamin, head of the National Security Council’s counterterrorism team in the Clinton administration, in an interview with Vanity Fair. “He’d say things like, ‘No more screwing around. This is going to get rough, and people are gonna come home in body bags. That’s all there is to it. You guys gotta know that.’ He’d talk about body bags all the time.”21

  Shortly after Black officially took over the CTC, the CIA made a damning admission to the White House in early December 1999. “After four years and hundreds of millions of dollars, Alec Station had yet to recruit a single source within bin Laden’s growing Afghanistan operation,” asserted investigative author James Bamford. “It was more than embarrassing—it was a scandal. . . . It was a dangerous time to be without intelligence. Within days, the 9/11 plotters began their operation.”22 While Black was technically in charge, he had only recently been named to that position, and he would later complain that he and his colleagues within the CTC were not given adequate support to take out bin Laden. “When I started this job in 1999, I thought there was a good chance I was going to be sitting right here in front of you,” Black told the 9/11 Commission in April 2004. “The bottom line here, and I have to tell you, and I’ll take part of the blame on this, I kind of failed my people despite doing everything I could. We didn’t have enough people to do the job. And we didn’t have enough money by magnitudes.” 23 Black asserted that the CTC “had as many people as three infantry companies [that] can be expected to cover a front of a few kilometers” even though “our counterterrorism center has worldwide responsibilities.” 24 Black said that before 9/11, when it came to “numbers of people, finances, and operational flexibility,” these were “choices made for us. Made for the CIA and made for my counterterrorism center.”25

  There were indeed budget cuts happening during Black’s tenure—in 1999, he faced a 30 percent reduction in the CTC’s cash operating budget, including in the bin Laden unit.26 Some analysts, though, said lack of resources was not the heart of the problem. Rather, they say, it stemmed from Black and his allies’ strong emphasis on paramilitary covert operations over the more tedious work of infiltrating Al Qaeda or bin Laden’s circle.27 In 1999, briefing documents Black’s office had prepared for the Clinton White House acknowledged that “without penetrations of [the] UBL organization,” the CIA was in trouble. Black’s brief said that there was a need “to recruit sources” but added that “recruiting terrorist sources is difficult.” 28 What was done (or not) about this problem would be the source of a substantial amount of finger-pointing after 9/11.

  In the two years before 9/11, Black’s strategy to fight Al Qaeda focused on using Afghanistan’s neighbor, Uzbekistan, as a launching pad into Afghanistan.29 Black clandestinely traveled to the capital of Tashkent and oversaw U.S. funding and training of an Uzbek paramilitary force that would supposedly try to kidnap bin Laden or his deputies through “covert snatch operations.”30 Uzbekistan’s dictator, Islam Karimov, was fighting his own war against Islamic groups in the country and was adept at using threats of Islamic rebellion to justify wide-ranging repressive domestic policies, including arresting prodemocracy activists.31 When the CIA came knocking, Karimov was happy to use the veneer of a war against bin Laden to justify covert military aid from Washington. While the CIA was able to use the country’s air bases for some operations and install communications and eavesdropping equipment inside Uzbekistan, the end result of Black’s covert U.S. support was that the brutal leader, Karimov, received millions of dollars of CIA money, which he used “to keep his torture chambers running,” according to Bamford. “And the commando training would be useful to continue the repression of women and ethnic minorities.”32 Karimov was also known to have political enemies boiled to death; a practice the British ambassador in the country said was “not an isolated incident.”33

  Black also kicked up U.S. covert support for Ahmed Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir” and his Northern Alliance, which regarded bin Laden and Al Qaeda as enemies. On at least one occasion as CTC director, Black met face to face with Massoud—in Tajikistan in the summer of 2000.34 Black and his units’ heavy reliance on Massoud in confronting Al Qaeda was controversial—even within the intelligence world. Massoud’s forces represented an ethnic minority in Afghanistan’s complicated landscape and were based in the
north, far from bin Laden’s main operations. There were also broader concerns. “While one part of the CIA was bankrolling Massoud’s group, another part, the CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center, was warning that he posed a great danger,” according to Bamford. “His people, they warned, were continuing to smuggle large amounts of opium and heroin into Europe. The British came to the same conclusion.”35 White House counterterror expert Richard Clarke opposed the military alliance with Massoud, describing the Northern Alliance as “drug runners” and “human rights abusers.”36 Black, though, told his colleagues that this support was about “preparing the battlefield for World War Three.”37 Massoud would not live to see it, though. He was assassinated, allegedly by Al Qaeda operatives posing as journalists, on September 9, 2001.38 During this time, Black was also pressing the Air Force to accelerate its production of an unmanned Predator spy drone that could be equipped with Hellfire missiles to launch at bin Laden and his lieutenants.39

  Some former counterterrorism officials have alleged that during Black’s time at CTC, there was more interest in using Al Qaeda to justify building up the bureaucracy of the CIA’s covert actions hub, the Directorate of Operations, than the specific task of stopping bin Laden. “Cofer Black, he arrived, and he was the man, he was the pro from the D.O.,” said veteran CIA official Michael Scheuer, who headed the bin Laden unit from 1995 to 1999 before Black’s appointment.40 Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke told Vanity Fair, “There’s some truth to the fact that they didn’t have enough money, but the interesting thing is that they didn’t put any of the money they had into going after al-Qaeda.” Clarke alleged, “They would say ‘Al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda’ when they were trying to get money, and then when you gave them money it didn’t go to al-Qaeda. They were trying to rebuild the D.O. [Directorate of Operations], and so a lot of it went to D.O. infrastructure, and they would say, ‘Well, you can’t start by going after al-Qaeda, you have to repair the whole D.O.’ . . . And what I would say to them is ‘Surely there must be a dollar somewhere in C.I.A. that you could re-program into going after al-Qaeda,’ and they would say ‘No.’ The other way of saying that is everything else they’re doing is more important.”41