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Blackwater founder Erik Prince arrives for a closed meeting with members of the
House Intelligence Committee, Thursday, Nov. 30, 2017, on Capitol Hill in
Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Trump White House Weighing Plans for Private Spies to Counter “Deep State”
Enemies
Matthew Cole, Jeremy Scahill
December 4 2017, 10:24 p.m.
The Trump administration is considering a set of proposals developed by
Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from
Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal — to provide CIA Director
Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would
circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current
and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals.
The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of
countering “deep state” enemies in the intelligence community seeking to
undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.
The creation of such a program raises the possibility that the effort would be
used to create an intelligence apparatus to justify the Trump administration’s
political agenda.
“Pompeo can’t trust the CIA bureaucracy, so we need to create this thing that
reports just directly to him,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official
with firsthand knowledge of the proposals, in describing White House
discussions. “It is a direct-action arm, totally off the books,” this person
said, meaning the intelligence collected would not be shared with the rest of
the CIA or the larger intelligence community. “The whole point is this is
supposed to report to the president and Pompeo directly.”
North, who appears frequently on Trump’s favorite TV network, Fox News, was
enlisted to help sell the effort to the administration. He was the “ideological
leader” brought in to lend credibility, said the former senior intelligence
official.
Some of the individuals involved with the proposals secretly met with major
Trump donors asking them to help finance operations before any official
contracts were signed.
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The proposals would utilize an army of spies with no official cover in several
countries deemed “denied areas” for current American intelligence personnel,
including North Korea and Iran. The White House has also considered creating a
new global rendition unit meant to capture terrorist suspects around the world,
as well as a propaganda campaign in the Middle East and Europe to combat
Islamic extremism and Iran.
“I can find no evidence that this ever came to the attention of anyone at the
NSC or [White House] at all,” wrote Michael N. Anton, a spokesperson for the
National Security Council, in an email. “The White House does not and would not
support such a proposal.” But a current U.S. intelligence official appeared to
contradict that assertion, stating that the various proposals were first
pitched at the White House before being delivered to the CIA. The Intercept
reached out to several senior officials that sources said had been briefed on
the plans by Prince, including Vice President Mike Pence. His spokesperson
wrote there was “no record of [Prince] ever having met with or briefed the VP.”
North did not respond to a request for comment.
According to two former senior intelligence officials, Pompeo has embraced the
plan and lobbied the White House to approve the contract. Asked for comment, a
CIA spokesperson said, “You have been provided wildly inaccurate information by
people peddling an agenda.”
At the heart of the scheme being considered by the White House are Blackwater
founder Erik Prince and his longtime associate, CIA veteran John R. Maguire,
who currently works for the intelligence contractor Amyntor Group. Maguire also
served on Trump’s transition team. Amyntor’s role was first reported by
BuzzFeed News.
Michael Barry, who was recently named NSC senior director for intelligence
programs, worked closely with Prince on a CIA assassination program during the
Bush administration.
Prince and Maguire deny they are working together. Those assertions, however,
are challenged by current and former U.S. officials and Trump donors who say
the two men were collaborating.
As with many arrangements in the world of CIA contracting and clandestine
operations, details of who is in charge of various proposals are murky by
design and change depending on which players are speaking. An Amyntor official
said Prince was not “formally linked to any contract proposal by Amyntor.” In
an email, Prince rejected the suggestion that he was involved with the
proposals. When asked if he has knowledge of this project, Prince replied: “I
was/am not part of any of those alleged efforts.”
The former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the efforts
scoffed at Prince’s denials. “Erik’s proposal had no company names on the
slides,” this person said, “but there is no doubt that Prince and Maguire were
working together.”
Prince and Maguire have a long professional relationship. Maguire recently
completed a stint as a consultant with Prince’s company, Frontier Services
Group, a Hong Kong-based security and logistics company partially owned by the
Chinese government. FSG has no known connections to the private spy plan.
Prince has strong ties to the Trump administration: His sister Betsy DeVos is
secretary of education, he was a major donor to the Trump election campaign,
and he advised the transition team on intelligence and defense appointments, as
The Intercept has previously reported. Prince has also contributed to Pence’s
campaigns.
Maguire spent more than two decades as a paramilitary officer in the CIA,
including tours in Central America working with the Contras. He has extensive
experience in the Middle East, where he helped plan the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Maguire and Prince met together in September with a senior CIA official at a
Virginia restaurant to discuss privatizing the war in Afghanistan.
Prince told a top fundraiser that Maguire was working on part of his
Afghanistan plan, characterizing it as the first part of a multi-pronged
program. The fundraiser added that Prince never directly asked him for money.
But sources close to the project say Maguire did seek private funding for
Amyntor’s efforts until a CIA contract materialized. “They’ve been going around
asking for a bridge loan to float their operations until the CIA says yes,”
said a person who has been briefed on the fundraising efforts.
Beginning last spring and into the summer, Maguire and a group of Amyntor
representatives began asking Trump donors to support their intelligence efforts
in Afghanistan, the initial piece of what they hoped would be a broader
program. Some Trump fundraisers were asked to provide introductions to
companies and wealthy clients who would then hire Amyntor for economic
intelligence contracts. Maguire explained that some of the profit from those
business deals would fund their foreign intelligence collection. Others were
asked to give money outright.
“[Maguire] said there were people inside the CIA who joined in the previous
eight years [under Obama] and inside the government, and they were failing to
give the president the intelligence he needed,” said a person who was pitched
by Maguire and other Amyntor personnel. To support his claim, Maguire told at
least two people that National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, in coordination
with a top official at the National Security Agency, authorized surveillance of
Steven Bannon and Trump family members, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric
Trump. Adding to these unsubstantiated claims, Maguire told the potential
donors he also had evidence McMaster used a burner phone to send information
gathered through the surveillance to a facility in Cyprus owned by George Soros.
Amyntor employees took potential donors to a suite in the Trump Hotel in
Washington, which they claimed was set up to conduct “secure communications.”
Some White House staff and Trump campaign supporters came to refer to the suite
as “the tinfoil room,” according to one person who visited the suite. This
account was confirmed by another source to whom the room was described. “John
[Maguire] was certain that the deep state was going to kick the president out
of office within a year,” said a person who discussed it with Maguire. “These
guys said they were protecting the president.”
Maguire and others at Amyntor have boasted that they have already sent
intelligence reports to Pompeo.
diptych-oliver-north-erik-prine-1512336421
Oliver North testifying before Congress in 1986, and Erik Prince testifying
before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in 2007, in
Washington, D.C.
Photos: AFP/Getty, AP
Prince, Maguire, and North have long shared a common frustration over the
failure of the U.S. government to bring two suspects from a high-profile
terrorist event in the 1980s to justice. Last summer, Maguire discussed
rendering the suspects with White House officials after learning the men had
been located in the Middle East. Despite having no U.S. government approval,
associates of Maguire began working on a snatch operation earlier this year,
according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Prince
colleague.
Maguire, concerned that the FBI would not take action, made an offer to senior
White House officials. The message, according to a person with direct knowledge
of the rendition plan, was: “We’re going to go get these guys and bring them to
the U.S. Who should we hand them over to?”
The rendition plan was meant to be a demonstration that Maguire and his
associates had an active intelligence network and the capability to grab
suspects around the world. Prince maintains he has nothing to do with that
plan. But according to a source with extensive knowledge of Prince’s networks,
Prince was working in parallel to assemble a team to help apprehend the men.
According to two people who have worked extensively with Prince in recent
years, Prince has been contacting former Blackwater personnel who worked on a
post-9/11 era CIA assassination program targeting Al Qaeda operatives. That
program, which the Bush White House prohibited the CIA from disclosing to
congressional intelligence committees, was revealed to Congress in 2009 by
then-CIA Director Leon Panetta. The CIA says the program did not result in any
assassinations.
Among the capabilities Prince offers is a network of deniable assets — spies,
fixers, foreign intelligence agents — spread across the globe that could be
used by the White House. “You pick any country in the world Erik’s been in, and
it’s there,” said a longtime Prince associate. “They’re a network of very dark
individuals.” The associate, who has worked extensively with Prince, then began
rattling off places where the private spies and paramilitaries already operate
— Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, “all across North
Africa.”
Opaque contracting arrangements are typical for Prince, who became a lightning
rod in his Blackwater days and now prefers to minimize controversy by operating
in the shadows, disguising his involvement in sensitive operations with layers
of subcontractors and elaborately crafted legal structures. “That’s his exact
MO,” said the longtime Prince associate, adding that Prince consistently
attempts to ensure plausible deniability of his role in U.S. and foreign
government contracts.
“I have zero to do with any such effort and saying that I did/do would be
categorically false,” Prince said in his email to The Intercept. “Knowingly
publishing false information exposes you to civil legal action. The only effort
I’ve quite publicly pitched is an alternative to Afghanistan.”
Erik Prince, Founder and CEO of Blackwater Worldwide drives through campus in
Moyock, N.C., Monday, July 21, 2008. Prince, along with another former Navy
SEAL, turned to the swamps of eastern North Carolina, where he could train
SEALS based at Virginia Beach and build a business among law enforcement and
military, believing all lacked a one-stop training site. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)
Erik Prince, then-CEO of Blackwater Worldwide, drives through campus where he
could conduct training in Moyock, N.C. in 2008.
Photo: Gerry Broome/AP
The intelligence and covert action program would mark an unorthodox return to
government service for Prince, the onetime CIA contractor who built a mercenary
force that became notorious during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would
also raise new questions about Prince’s foreign entanglements since he sold
Blackwater.
In addition to Prince’s former assassination network, the hidden cadre of spies
with no official cover — NOCs in CIA jargon — includes the assets of another
key player in the Iran-Contra affair, CIA Officer Duane Clarridge, who died in
2016. Maguire, who worked under Clarridge as a young CIA paramilitary in
Central America during the mid-1980s, took over the network of contract spies,
who operate mostly in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Last summer, as Prince pushed his public proposal to privatize the war in
Afghanistan, he and Maguire had broader ambitions, according to a person
involved in the discussions. “The goal was to eventually get their network of
NOCs worldwide, but they initially started with Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
“Prince seems to be firing on a lot of cylinders and pitching overt and covert
plans,” said a current intelligence officer who has closely monitored Prince’s
career and been briefed on several of Prince’s recent efforts, including the
proposals to Pompeo. The official declined to discuss details of the plans but
pointed to Prince’s much-discussed pitch to privatize the war in Afghanistan as
a smokescreen for offering other more controversial programs and operations.
Prince’s Afghanistan plan, which received substantial media attention and got a
hearing at the highest levels of the Trump administration, “was brilliant
because it changed the narrative and made him relevant,” the officer said,
referring to Prince’s scandal- and investigation-plagued career at Blackwater.
The officer also added that the very public Afghanistan pitch, replete with
cable news interviews and op-eds, provided a legitimate reason “to justify
meeting with people” at the White House, CIA, or other government agencies.
“Erik has no hobbies,” said the longtime Prince associate. “Counterterrorism is
his hobby.”
In some ways, these plans mirror operations Prince led during the Bush-Cheney
administration. When Prince was running Blackwater, he and a former CIA
paramilitary officer, Enrique Prado, set up a global network of foreign
operatives, offering their “deniability” as a “big plus” for potential
Blackwater customers, according to internal company communications obtained by
The Intercept.
In a 2007 email, with the subject “Possible Opportunity in DEA—READ AND
DELETE,” Prado sought to pitch the network to the Drug Enforcement
Administration, bragging that Blackwater had developed “a rapidly growing,
worldwide network of folks that can do everything from surveillance to ground
truth to disruption operations.” He added, “These are all foreign nationals
(except for a few cases where US persons are the conduit but no longer ‘play’
on the street), so deniability is built in and should be a big plus.”
The longtime Prince associate said that the nexus of deniable assets has never
gone away. “The NOC network is already there. It already exists for the better
part of 15 years now,” he said.
Prince has long admired North and viewed his role in Iran-Contra as heroic,
said the Prince associate. In 2007, Prince testified defiantly before Congress
following the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, in which Blackwater operatives
gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians, including women and children. Shortly after his
testimony, Prince’s longtime friend, conservative California Rep. Dana
Rohrabacher, praised the Blackwater chief. “Prince,” Rohrabacher said, “is on
his way to being an American hero just like Ollie North was.”
North, a Marine lieutenant colonel on the Reagan National Security Council,
oversaw a scheme to divert proceeds from illicit arms sales to Iran to Contra
death squads in Nicaragua. The resulting scandal became known as the
Iran-Contra affair, and North was convicted of three felonies, though these
convictions were later thrown out.
Both North and Maguire attended a small reception in 2014 celebrating Prince’s
third marriage — to his former spokesperson Stacy DeLuke. “It was an intimate
affair,” said the Prince associate. “Only Erik’s closest friends were invited
to that reception.” On election night in 2016, DeLuke posted photos on social
media from inside Trump headquarters.
On November 30, Prince testified behind closed doors before the House
Intelligence Committee about his January trip to the Seychelles to meet with
Mohammad bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and a Russian fund manager close
to Vladimir Putin. According to the Washington Post, Prince presented himself
as an unofficial envoy of President-elect Trump. The Intercept reported last
week that the fund manager was Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct
Investment Fund. Prince repeatedly said that he did not remember the identity
of the Russian, but on Thursday, in testimony before the House Intelligence
Committee, Prince admitted that he did in fact meet with Dmitriev.
Prince may have revealed part of his strategy in a July 2016 radio interview
with Steve Bannon, when he proposed recreating the CIA’s Phoenix Program, an
assassination ring used in the Vietnam War, to battle the Islamic State. Prince
said in the interview that the program would be used to kill or capture “the
funders of Islamic terror, the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it
from the Middle East.”
Top photo: Blackwater founder Erik Prince arrives for a closed meeting with
members of the House Intelligence Committee, Thursday, Nov. 30, 2017, on
Capitol Hill in Washington.