For Homeland Security operations, counterinsurgency, or “war on drugs” activities, Blackwater is manufacturing an unmanned aerial vehicle, the Polar 400. The surveillance blimp is remote-controlled and, unlike traditional drones, will be capable of remaining in the air for days at a time, operating at an altitude of up to 15,000 feet and a speed of sixty miles per hour. “We can sit it over the top of Baghdad at 18,000 feet and watch all that goes on,” Jackson claimed. “The problem is if it really does work, it will be hard to produce them fast enough. I believe airships will be a multibillion-dollar business.”26 In late 2007, Blackwater conducted a test flight of a 170-foot prototype and predicted it would begin production in 2008.27 Blackwater, once again, was placing itself in the middle of a rapidly expanding market. Defense spending on unmanned aerial vehicles rose from $284 million in 2000 to more than $2 billion in 2005, a trend analysts predicted would continue.28 Blackwater, according to the Virginian-Pilot , is “touting its airship as a lower-cost, longer-operating alternative to the fixed and rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles now widely used by the Air Force and other military services.” Alan Ram, the head of production and business development for Blackwater Airships, said, “We think it’s a niche product with a lot of markets.”29
Blackwater also continues to publicly agitate for a greater role in Homeland Security operations, disaster response, and international peacekeeping. Prince has consistently suggested Blackwater could be used in Darfur, saying in interviews after Nisour Square, “I mean, who can watch Hotel Rwanda and not want a different outcome?”30 In a 2007 interview, Jackson said, “The question is not, ‘Why would we use the private sector in humanitarian operations, ’ but, ‘Why aren’t we using the private sector to the fullest extent possible to reduce human suffering around the world?’”31 Prince said a friend of his actually contacted actor George Clooney on Prince’s behalf in an attempt to sell Clooney on a potential Blackwater role in Darfur. Clooney, who has been outspoken on the situation in Darfur, reportedly did not return the call.32 The UN peacekeeping budget is estimated as being between $6 billion and $10 billion.33 While private military companies have been used for years in UN operations for logistical support, the types of armed “services” Blackwater offers would undoubtedly spark major international controversy. “If you have now a marketplace for warfare, it is a commercial issue rather than a political issue involving a debate in the countries,” said Hans von Sponeck, a thirty-two-year veteran UN diplomat, who served as a deputy secretary general. “To outsource security-related, military-related issues to nongovernment, nonmilitary forces is a source of great concern.”34 While Blackwater continues to push that project, another major one, involving one of the most sensitive sectors of U.S. national defense, is already well under way.
Spies Like U.S.
What could prove to be one of Blackwater’s most profitable and enduring enterprises is one of the company’s most secretive initiatives—a move into the world of privatized intelligence services. In April 2006, Prince quietly began building Total Intelligence Solutions, which boasts that it “brings CIA-style” services to the open market for Fortune 500 companies.35 Among its offerings are “surveillance and countersurveillance, deployed intelligence collection, and rapid safeguarding of employees or other key assets.”36
As the U.S. finds itself in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in the nation’s history, few areas have seen as dramatic a transformation to privatized services as the world of intelligence. “This is the magnet now. Everything is being attracted to these private companies in terms of individuals and expertise and functions that were normally done by the intelligence community,” says former CIA division chief and senior analyst Melvin Goodman. “My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control. It’s outrageous.”37
In late 2007, R.J. Hillhouse, a blogger who investigates the clandestine world of private contractors and U.S. intelligence, obtained documents from the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) showing that Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $17.54 billion in 2000.38 That means 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget is currently going to private companies. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the head of the DNI, as of the spring of 2008, was Mike McConnell, the former chair of the board of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the private intelligence industry’s trade association.
Hillhouse also revealed that one of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence documents, the Presidential Daily Briefing, is prepared in part by private companies, despite having the official seal of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. “Let’s say a company is frustrated with a government that’s hampering its business or business of one of its clients. Introducing and spinning intelligence on that government’s suspected collaboration with terrorists would quickly get the White House’s attention and could be used to shape national policy,” Hillhouse argued.39
Total Intelligence, which opened for business in February 2007, is a fusion of three entities bought up by Prince—the Terrorism Research Center; Technical Defense; and The Black Group, Blackwater vice chair Cofer Black’s consulting agency.40 The company’s leadership reads like a who’s who from the CIA’s early “war on terror” operations after 9/11. In addition to the twenty-eight-year CIA veteran Black, who is chairman of Total Intelligence, the company’s executives include CEO Robert Richer, the former associate deputy director of the agency’s Directorate of Operations and the second-ranking official in charge of clandestine operations. From 1999 to 2004, Richer was head of the CIA’s Near East Division, where he ran clandestine operations throughout the Middle East and South Asia. As part of his duties, he was the CIA liaison with Jordan’s King Abdullah, a key U.S. ally and Blackwater client, and briefed President Bush on the burgeoning Iraqi resistance in its early stages.41 Total Intelligence’s chief operating officer is Enrique “Ric” Prado, a twenty-four-year CIA veteran and former senior executive officer in the Directorate of Operations. He spent more than a decade working in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and ten years with the CIA’s “paramilitary” Special Operations Group.42 Prado and Black worked closely together at the CIA.43 Prado also served in Latin America with Jose Rodriguez, who would gain infamy in late 2007 after it was revealed that as director of the National Clandestine Service at the CIA he was allegedly responsible for the destruction of videotaped interrogations of prisoners, during which “enhanced” interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, were reportedly used.44 Richer told the New York Times he recalled many conversations with his then boss, Rodriguez, about the tapes. “He would always say, ‘I’m not going to let my people get nailed for something they were ordered to do,’” Richer said.45 Before the scandal, there were reports that Blackwater had been “aggressively recruiting” Rodriguez.46 He has since retired from the CIA.