Discuss: Blackwater's Erik Prince to step down, reveals CIA role
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4169822December 04, 2009
Erik Prince which says he was a CIA asset for the past six years, before, he claims, he "was thrown under the bus."
But the truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction. For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwaters C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into denied areas—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence.