Two stories, from two different sources (neither of them explicitly political), about two quite different men who share one thing: They are each very, very angry at the American government for its handling of the Iraqi occupation.
In Vanity Fair, Adam Ciralsky tells us of Erik Prince, “Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy”:
Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month…
For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s 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…
Today, Prince claims, he is shelling out $2 million a month in legal fees to cope with a spate of civil lawsuits as well as what he calls a “giant proctological exam” by nearly a dozen federal agencies. “We used to spend money on R&D to develop better capabilities to serve the U.S. government,” says Prince. “Now we pay lawyers.”
…Prince blames Democrats in Congress for the leaks and maintains that there is a double standard at play. “The left complained about how [C.I.A. operative] Valerie Plame’s identity was compromised for political reasons. A special prosecutor [was even] appointed. Well, what happened to me was worse. People acting for political reasons disclosed not only the existence of a very sensitive program but my name along with it.”
Then there is John Cook’s story on Gawker about “The Man Who Was Really There”:
Firas Al-Qaisi is an Iraqi attorney who risked his life helping the American forces in Baghdad which led to weeks of torture and dentention by Shiite militias. Now he’s suing the U.S. for $200 million for trying to murder him.
The case of Al-Qaisi v. The American Military Forces in Iraq is a terrible window into just a few of the millions of lives our stupid and cruel adventure has wrecked in that country. We came across the lawsuit, which Al-Qaisi filed in October in a federal court in Virginia, randomly while searching the electronic docket system for another case. It is a quixotic, conspiratorial, and hopeless narrative, filed without the aid of lawyers by a man whose mind appears to have been ruined by the violence unleashed by the Shiite thugs that we handed his country to after turning it into shit. But Al-Qaisi’s Kafka-esque odyssey, told in a humane and engaging voice, also offers a memorable glimpse of the brutal nightmare we conjured in his homeland…
A lawyer by training, he was a proud collaborator with the Americans he thought were capable of returning the rule of law to his country. He ran the risk of retribution from religious fanatics in his Baghdad neighborhood for wearing a western suit to work each day. U.S. forces saved his life after he was abducted by a Shiite faction of Iraq’s American-backed Interior Ministry in 2007, and he was evacuated to the U.S. along with his pregnant wife and brother on a flight ordered by none other than Gen. David Petraeus two years ago, because staying in Iraq meant certain death. He landed in Northern Virginia, homeless, unable to speak English, living on charity. A September 2007 U.S. News & World Report story on his successful effort to seek asylum confirms some of these details. Two years later, the passage of time seems to have embittered him. His ordeal, he now believes, was an American-hatched plan to have him killed.
Both articles are well worth reading in their entirety. I actually looked on YouTube for a clip of Maddy Prior singing “Dives and Lazarus”, but embedding one here would be… unserious. As a DFH, I am required to notice that Mr. Prince rates a glossy magazine spread complete with glamour photography, but I still find Mr. Cook’s writing more compelling:
Anyway, this is how stupid wars end these days. With pathetic and desperate lawsuits from the good men whose lives we destroyed. On to Afghanistan.
spudvol
Maybe Prince can hire Al-Qaisi to defend him for $1 million/hr and charge it to the U.S. government…problem solved.
Cerberus
Uh huh, yeah, I’m SO sure Prince is telling the truth, especially as his would be the first voice linking him to being a spy as far as I can tell, the lawsuits more originated with all the genocide and fraud they committed in their “front operation” as mercenaries.
If he is telling the truth, there needs to be a massive clean-up at CIA headquarters to fire whoever thought that was a good idea. Prince is a deluded genocidal christianist, unable to fulfill even his CEO duties as a contractor with any measure of success. Anyone who thought he’d make a … what’s a word for competent would be a wet dream spy has obviously watched way too many Bond films.
But yeah, sounds like it’s his last ditch maneuver to try and continue to evade the numerous war crimes he has been dodging responsibility for.
Why oh why
Actually, CIA officers are “spies”. CIA assets in other countries are, in a word, traitors. Perhaps that would be a better word to describe Prince.
NobodySpecial
The problem with being a lying sack of shit would be keeping your stories straight. Particularly when you’re an amoral asshole. Also.
NobodySpecial
Up above, forgot to put the (in 1995) in the second blockquote.
demkat620
This is further evidence that: Eric with a “c” good. Erik with a “k” bad.
That’s the rule.
Napoleon
@NobodySpecial:
Great catch. Yeah, one moment he is one of the most highly trained and experienced member of the armed forces the next he is a 4-F bum. This is the right in this country in a nutshell, immoral pathological liars.
MikeJ
@Napoleon: Meh. there’s a difference between the skills the CIA wants and what the Navy Seals want. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still a shitty person, but I have no doubt that he both did have military experience and the CIA did turn him down. I have been led to believe that gung ho hyper military types aren’t necessarily high on the list of people CIA recruit.
Uncle Glenny
Just passing through and not all here, but (1) poor Eric Prince, I wouldn’t mind giving him a proctological examination.
(2) Al-Qaisi? $200,000,000? Doesn’t he know we have billion-dollar planes to give away? (Maybe John McCain will help.) How much was the Exxon-Valdez disaster worth again?
(sorry, sleepless, cranky)
4tehlulz
Automatic journalism fail.
cmorenc
Re: Erik Prince, the most troubling thing is that he is the epitome of the sort of talent the Bush Administration thought essential to a successful outcome in Iraq, rather than the Iraqui experts in the State Department, who were not merely ignored, but actively shut aside and out by Rumsfeld’s hard-elbowed Pentagon political power plays.
And Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld went on to comfortable retirements (Cheney’s mouth not so well-retired unfortunately), without ever a moment’s personal inconvenience or deprivation or suffering for the consequences of the disasterous misadventure they inflicted on the US and Iraq.
Napoleon
@MikeJ:
I originally read what he said as him trying to re-enlist in the military. After your comment and re-reading it perhaps that is not a fair reading and you are correct.
WereBear
Our record in other countries is not good. Which is terrible, and I’m sick over what trusting us comes to.
Prince is another twisted Christianist who was allowed to flourish by the Bush administration. So far, no good has come of that, either.
NobodySpecial
I look at it as lying because he claimed he had ‘not enough time in the field’ while being in two separate hot spots. (Haiti and the ME. Bosnia don’t count.)
Uncle Glenny
@Uncle Glenny: Forgot to mentioned: we kidnapped and tortured some Canadian guy and didn’t even apologize. (Did we even get him a plane home?)
Shaun
I’m having a hard time understanding how on the one hand you can run a paramilitary organization, getting billions of dollars from the US government to kill people and then on the other hand also be a super-secret spy for the US.
Did they think they would catch Osama by surprise?
“You, Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, giant military contractor for the US government were secretly working for the US government all along?!?!? Boy is my face red.”
Uncle Glenny
@cmorenc: Agree with your second paragraph (throw in Rove, but have him and Chaney perform a mutual posterior-cranial inversion).
As for Prince and his ilk, I think what you say is partly right,(if for no other reason than accountability) but I also think he was part of the private-industry feeding frenzy. A few years back I saw a timeline someone had put together on the blowup of the use of these contractors over there, in particular for use by State. Anyone know what those contractors get paid (compared to our own grunts/soldiers)?
ploeg
@Shaun:
You can do both if you’re not being paid on performance.
aimai
I don’t get the air of phony shock and surprise from Vanity Fair over this:
First of all, the fiction isn’t very fictional–they lump the “accusations” that Blackwater shot and killed numerous innocent Iraqis and tried to bribe the Iraqi government in with the noxious “he looks like Daniel Craig and Hollywood loves him” theme. But that doesn’t make the stories about just how evil Blackwater is at all incredible. It just makes the writer look like an idiot.
Second of all, why would it be at all strange that the CIA would have ties to a major government contractor? Dusty Foggo anyone? The CIA has ties to lots of people–that doesn’t make him a “spy”–they clearly didn’t use him to gather intelligence. That makes him a government contractor. Despite the breathless, bodice ripping, style of the article this is not a case of “truth being stranger than fiction” its a case of truth being truth: wars and militarism produce a whole lot of money for various low lives to pick up on the promise of performance of unpleasant, illegal, and dangerous acts. As we know full well from the history of subcontracting in Iraq all it takes is some fancy letterhead and a few connections for complete losers to get their hands on government money. And they never need to come through with an actual project, or complete the work assigned. That’s what makes war zones so attractive for contractors. Its not that the work is so difficult and dangerous–its that you very seldom have to actually produce anything to get paid.
aimai
Xanthippas
The story on Prince is the exact reason that we should reign in the CIA’s ability to carry out paramilitary operations. If the CIA’s only problem was it’s glaring inability to read intelligence situations accurately (or to stand up to political pressure to read them inaccurately) we’d be doing alright. I agree with aimai; there’s really nothing that remarkable about the CIA paying private citizens with government/military ties to do nasty things in other countries. They’ve been doing it for the better part of 60 years now, and that’s exactly the problem.
geg6
Umm, Vanity Fair is just catching on to exactly who and what Erik Prince is? Seriously? And they believe this bullshit about being a spy? Seriously? After all the shit about Abu Ghraib? Seriously? And all the other instances of verifiable coordination of CIA covert operations, renditions, and torture with Blackwater/Xe since the start? Not a spy. Like amai says, just a contractor. Highly paid mercenaries doing what the even the CIA felt queasy about doing. This is old news. I can’t wait until this fucker is wearing an orange jumpsuit. Christian, my goddam ass. Psychopath.
matoko_chan
In retrospect I wonder about the Blackwater contractors that were hung from a bridge and burned at the onset of the Occupation of Iraq.
Could they possibly have been engaged in the same activity as the Iraqi Rape Squad that inspired the Menchaca/Tucker mutilation video?
I remember a young boy stomping on the burned remains….certainly the contractors did something to piss the villagers off.
That is why I prefer the Roman model of occupation to the WEC model (white evangelical christian) ….at least the romans were honest rapists and brought their own camp-followers in large part….WECs are so sexually repressed they can’t even acknowledge human nature….in an occupied country with no indigeous prostitute class, camp followers and sex-workers would increase the odds of winning hearts and minds of the locals. Hard to accomplish while raping and molesting the wives and daughters of the occupied populace.
America has sowed a whole lot of dragons teeth in Iraq, and the reavers are going to keep a-coming for the forseeable future.
But while the mills of history grind slow they grind exceeding small….I think we will find out more and more as time goes on.
Paris
The history of the CIA has has demonstrated that its negatives have far outweighed any of its usefulness. It should be eliminated.
Redleg
The CIA needs to pick better operatives. Seems like Prince outed himself. What a douche.
gopher2b
Is there anyone in this world more dangerous than Erik Prince? Doubtful.
Mike in NC
Maybe Erik Prince (of Darkness) could team up with Erik Erickson over at RedState.com and form a new entity: the Red State Rape Force! Full of win…
tomvox1
Ciralsky forgot “Holy Warrior.”
tomvox1
And the Wiki entry on Mr. Super Secret Spy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Prince
Deep cover indeed.
Sentient Puddle
@demkat620:
Erm, I’m an Erik with a K…
Joel
None of those things are contradictory. The Vanity Fair article was kind of a fluff piece and it didn’t change my mind on Prince at all.
Boots Day
When exactly was Prince’s CIA cover blown? I haven’t been following the story all that closely, but Leon Panetta ended the secret program he was supposedly working in July. It doesn’t exactly blow your cover to reveal your identity long after the mission has ended.
At any rate, this seems to be mostly about Prince’s delusions of grandeur. He and his company did an awful lot of work for the U.S. government, some of which was out in the open and some of which the government wanted kept quiet. So what?
In the end, he’s just another welfare queen getting rich off the government’s teat.
Wile E. Quixote
@Vanity Fair
The writer of this piece should have their thick skull caved in with a framing hammer. How is serving as C.E.O of Blackwater and supposedly being a C.I.A operative an “…astonishing double life.”? Where did this idiot learn to write? Now if he were writing a story titled “Tycoon, Contractor, Gay Porn Star” that contained the paragraph.
That would be describing an “…astonishing double life”. Well actually, it wouldn’t, because people expect that sort of thing from uptight Republicans and Jesus freaks these days, but you get the point.
Comrade Luke
These are contradictory?
Why is this guy even being written about?
Ruckus
@matoko_chan:
nice firefly reference.
@Boots Day:
At any rate, this seems to be mostly about Prince’s delusions of grandeur. He and his company did an awful lot of work for the U.S. government, some of which was out in the open and some of which the government wanted kept quiet. So what?
He and his company did a lot of awful work for the U.S. government, some of which was out in the open and some of which the government wanted kept quiet. So what?
Fixed