The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/the-terrifying-background-of-the-man-who-ran-a-cia-assassination-unit/259856/

by philco • 14 years ago

248 120 14 years ago

theatlantic.com

mcantelon2• 14 years ago

Having NGOs conduct killing on behalf of the government is a tried-and-true method of counterinsurgence (South American paramilitary death squads for example). The plausible deniability introduced by working through a proxy allows the government to conduct more politically risky operations (including false flag attacks if public support is waning). Criticizing the government becomes riskier. And, if not held in check, the paramilitary elements will inevitably use their power for their own objectives.

fpp• 14 years ago

Well said - similar happened in Europe during the 1970s with people being classified as (left-wing) terrorists (and a few might have certainly been) and being "transported" between countries by so-called freelancers - TMK quite a few did not survive the travel and definitely no obituaries in the press.

ra2• 14 years ago

There's a great movie set in this context, "Munich"

cmdkeen• 14 years ago

It was also in the context of some European countries not co-operating with other countries to arrest/extradite terrorist suspects because they wanted a quiet life where terrorist groups didn't attack their interests.

toomuchcoffee• 14 years ago

Can you enumerate a few examples, please?

lusr2• 14 years ago

What puzzles me is why the person delegating authority is not considered responsible for the actions of those whom authority has been delegated to. Authority was delegated, not responsibility.

runjake3• 14 years ago

Because these actions are normally clandestine. Hence the plausible deniability.

RyanMcGreal2• 14 years ago

Plausible deniability is a velvety layer of insulation between the people who carry out the acts and the person elected or appointed to take responsibility. By the time the denials, obfuscations, delays, hand-wiping, shoulder-shrugging and tied-hands miming is done, the guilty parties are gone and the trail is so convoluted that it becomes very difficult to prove that the leader was anything more than ignorant of what went on. That feigned ignorance, in turn, provides lots of grist for righteous indignation about unauthorized overreach by lone rogue actors, partisan charges that the opposition is trying to muckrake and blah blah blah.

Political abstractions may be leaky, but they hold water long enough to get the job done.

anupj• 14 years ago

Maybe I've missed something here but how is this question relevent to hacker news?

johnohara• 14 years ago

Typo. Belongs on whacker news.

fooandbarify• 14 years ago

See the guidelines [1]. One could argue that it "gratifies intellectual curiosity", and it is certainly "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" (for varying values of new; it is nevertheless interesting new evidence).

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mcantelon2• 14 years ago

>"evidence of some interesting new phenomenon"

Accountability hacking perhaps.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

Dispatches from the twilight zone twixt sectors public and private. Highly relevant to hackers everywhere.

thisischris• 14 years ago

Belongs on Reddit along with the comments here... (including this one)

accountswu6• 14 years ago

If a dozen Americans killed by a whacko deserves to be on hacker news, the mass murder of Afghans and Iraqis also deserves to be mentioned. There have been no minutes of silence for the million+ Iraqis and Afghans, no American media outlet has run hours long stories about the victims, the survivors or their families.

mekwall• 14 years ago

So, we should all stop outsourcing and do our own dirty-work.

theorique3• 14 years ago

The book on Blackwater written by the journalist Jeremy Scahill has a lot of interesting background on Prado. Also, "American Desperado" (great book, also by Evan Wright) talks about some of Prado's interesting involvement in drug importation into Florida in the 1980s.

Sounds like an interesting guy, but probably not someone you want to meet in a dark alley.

Edit:

The Scahill book is http://www.amazon.com/Blackwater-Powerful-Mercenary-Revised-...

The Wright book is http://www.amazon.com/American-Desperado-Life---Soldier-Gove...

I've read both and highly recommend them.

smashing2• 14 years ago

That's an interesting expression. What kind of people would you LIKE to meet in a dark alley?

pessimizer• 14 years ago

ice cream vendors, flower salesmen, flashlight dealers...

gph• 14 years ago

Well, prostitutes and drug dealers if you're into that kind of thing.

theorique3• 14 years ago

People who are much smaller and/or less threatening than me, I suppose.

(But even a mouse can spook a grown man when he's tense and anticipating bad things happening.)

rhengles• 14 years ago

Pretty ladies.

jasonwatkinspdx• 14 years ago

Friends. The principled and empathetic. Those who give one another the benefit of the doubt and default to altruism in the absence of specific threat.

petdance• 14 years ago

Perhaps someone with a projector that could show entertaining films against the brick walls on either side of us.

jusben1369• 14 years ago

Rule 307. Never ask a sarcastic rhetorical question on these boards unless you're prepared for a lot of takers.

bjornsing• 14 years ago

> Sounds like an interesting guy, but probably not someone you want to meet in a dark alley.

True, but definitely someone to whom you want to entrust the President's most extreme authority.

reinhardt• 14 years ago

"The administration then awarded Blackwater (which is now called Academi) a $250 million contract to perform unspecified services for the CIA."

Your tax dollars at work.

daveying992• 14 years ago

I thought they had changed their name to Xe services. What sort of name is Academi for a private mercenary company?

cpeterso• 14 years ago

That's probably the point.

knowtheory3• 14 years ago

Honestly, that's probably why they changed it again. Blackwater was a comically villainous name to begin with.

rdl• 14 years ago

For a long time, they did run a lot of training as their primary business, too. (US Training Centers, in NC, is one of the best firearms/combat training centers in the world. They also make excellent reactive target systems.)

MrMatters• 14 years ago

Blackwater -> Xe -> Academi.

For trying to get away from the story book evil sounding-ness of an entity named "Blackwater", they sure didn't do very good with "Xe", which sounds even more mysterious and potentially evil-doing IMO.

Academi sounds a lot better though. And they do a lot US LE/gov't/etc. training which is probably what they would rather emphasize than their being a "private mercenary company".

thaumaturgy• 14 years ago

Remember all the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in 2010? One of them revealed that DynCorp had been spending money on pimps to buy young boys as "entertainment" (prostitution) for Afghanis. The money came from U.S. taxpayers.

How's that for your tax dollars at work?

kiba• 14 years ago

Never mind conspiracy theory, we have evidence openly showing how our government is doing bad things for the "right reason".

mtgx• 14 years ago

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'm sure the Spanish Inquisition had "good intentions" as well when they tortured the "heretics".

Governments can easily get out of hand if not vigilantly watched and stopped when necessary, or they will create situations where they can punish whoever they want for whatever reason they say.

jakeonthemove• 14 years ago

Well, to be fair, every government uses or at least has plans for these kind of tactics. KGB/FSB, Mossad, MI6, DGSE, otehr variations of a DSS agency - you've got to be very naive to believe they don't conduct covert operations and planned assassinations themselves or through third parties. It's only shocking when it comes to light (or maybe because it comes to light, when it shouldn't?)...

knowtheory3• 14 years ago

There is an Epic Level difference between a government agency who is ultimately responsible for their conduct to their citizens, one way or another having a secret assassination program, and a government paying a 3rd party to carry out assassinations.

One particular way in which this is different, is that the CIA can't go out and decide that it (as an organization) wants to freelance for other nations or organizations.

Blackwater, once set up as a paramilitary organization who specializes in covert assassinations... who's to say they're not moonlighting for Zetas or the Russian mob? What's the ethical block stopping them? They're already secretly killing people for money.

Zakharov2• 14 years ago

They're not moonlighting for the Zetas or the Russian mob because if they were, they'd lose billions of dollars of CIA money.

freshhawk2• 14 years ago

Half true, not every government and not these kinds of tactics.

The point is that when you move from dirty intelligence work to hiring mercenaries to perform large scale purges and intentionally make them unaccountable in order to shield yourself from war crime prosecution ... that's a level normally reserved for totalitarian states or exceptionally corrupt states.

Since the 70's and 80's these types of organizations have normally been called "death squads", most people have heard that term in connection to the violence in central and south america during that time.

You would have to be exceptionally cynical about the state of US democracy to not be a little shocked by the scale of this.

Zakharov2• 14 years ago

These aren't "large scale purges" or "death mobs", they're targeted assassinations. Blackwater, villainous as they may be, aren't killing indiscriminately to cause fear.

chernevik• 14 years ago

That's quite a headline. But the article is mostly about delegations of authority (and that not in any real detail), a story of US contractors conducting assassinations, and one (1) corroborating opinion -- that corroboration in no detail, and almost certainly second-hand.

There's a paragraph about the "terrifying background", in absolutely no detail whatsoever.

This sort of thing has become a subgenre of its own, one where the documentation almost always falls well short of the promise.

People should think about what the cries of "Wolf!" are doing to our ability to spot truly documented and disturbing problems.

knowaveragejoe• 14 years ago

I fully agree. I got to the bottom and thought, "This is it?". There's absolutely no story about the guy. This article just serves to become more noise.

pemulis• 14 years ago

What do you mean? The "terrifying background" seemed pretty clear to me -- a federal organized crime task force believed that he was involved in seven murders as a drug enforcer in Miami before becoming a contractor for the CIA.

justindocanto• 14 years ago

This. The title for this article is misleading.

KaoruAoiShiho• 14 years ago

The article says Obama approves the targets. So right there, accountability, Obama is 'owning' it.

baconner• 14 years ago

Better maybe, but when the kill list is secret and the reasons are secret that's not exactly "accountability"

ilaksh• 14 years ago

I like to think of the current structures that define and drive of our 'civilization' as a legacy design that is very difficult to replace, sort of like PC and Von Neumann-ish architecture, or a giant Perl codebase.

I think that in this technological era, secret government (or private) killings, war, domination of resources by force, etc., is completely inexcusable. I think that the structures are unfortunately supported by primitive Social Darwinist belief systems.

I am actually optimistic that when violence and violence suppression really becomes an information technology (i.e., a non-wealthy person can run a program/device that fabricates and launches his own swarm of protective robots) that will lead to a more equal distribution of resources and generally less violence and coercion. May sound far-fetched, and maybe it is.. but things are so fucked up, I have to hope for some science-fictiony sounding solutions.

r0s• 14 years ago

Just another reason that withdrawing "official" military from Iraq is a farce of the same level as declaring victory.

We don't officially torture prisoners (anymore), but unaccountable private contractors can run wild, hidden from all that pesky human rights oversight.

briandear• 14 years ago

It's almost ridiculous how some people get so indignant about CIA; I can almost feel their spittle as they shout at their computer screens. At the same time, people get equally outraged when terrorists kill people and then want to blame CIA for their failings.

It's a bad world. I am not sympathetic to the plight of those who associate with terrorists (even if they themselves haven't committed a terrorist act) and find themselves it Gitmo or dead. Are mistakes made? Of course, CIA has a long history of public f'ups, however their degree of success is noteworthy, though often unheralded. Bin Laden was found because of CIA, the Iranian and North K nuke programs have been slowed and countless people AREN'T dead because of CIA. The Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc was hastened due to CIA and Reagan forcing the issue by spending the Soviets into insolvency because of the arms race. Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton were avid weilders of covert action -- it's not a political party issue.

On the British side, MI6 is right there with CIA. The old Deuxiéme Bureau as well as German Intelligence is highly active in the black operations side of geopolitical affairs. This isn't peculiar to America, though in America, we have a (mostly) free press and a scandal-hungry populace that tends to sensationalize missteps or failures.

Let's not through the baby out with the bathwater. I'm far more worried about getting blown up on the PATH train than ending up in CIA (or their proxy's) crosshairs.

javert• 14 years ago

I agree with your overall sentiment. However, you're not portrating the enemy nuke programs in a way that I think is appropriate. In actuality, US leaders allowing adamantly anti-western nations to make so much progress towards acquiring nukes is probably the biggest national security failure in US history, and an act of utter and complete cowardice of the highest degree.

3amOpsGuy• 14 years ago

>> I am not sympathetic to the plight of those who associate with terrorists (even if they themselves haven't committed a terrorist act) and find themselves it Gitmo or dead.

There is a view that the US actions are unfair and unjust. The delivery method is not terrorism but the end result is indistinguishable in terms of justness or fairness. For example, torturing a man not found guilty of any crimes.

With that in mind, you yourself would be a co-conspirator of the nature you mention your lack of care for above.

If A.N. Other opposing, aggrieved party was to become as effective as the CIA at culling people, such as yourself or your loved ones (in no way are you or your loved ones doing anything "wrong" although you do sympathise with the American unaccountable "bully" philosophy) i'm certain your view would change overnight.

accountswu6• 14 years ago

>There is a view that the US actions are unfair and unjust. >The delivery method is not terrorism but the end result is indistinguishable in terms of justness or fairness. For example, torturing a man not found guilty of any crimes.

How is the delivery method not terrorism? If a guy named Muhammad kills 12 ordinary civilians he is a terrorist but if a guy named Andy/Joe/Steve kills 12 / 112 people in Iraq / Afghanistan by going on a shooting spree / dropping a bomb on a civilian home / aspirin factory / wedding and its not terrorism? There was a Muslimy-named guy who killed American soldiers (not civilians) at Fort Hood and he was labelled a terrorist. The guy named James who has killed 12 civilians is not a terrorist, he is a "suspect".

1998 Clinton knowingly bombed the aspirin factory that provided cheap medicines to millions of Africans:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/chatterbox/2...

Edit:

http://www.democracynow.org/2006/7/28/national_exclusive_hez...

<BEGIN QUOTE> In 1985, when I was the Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, they asked us—this is a Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism; I was the Deputy Director of the working group—they asked us to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities.

After the task force concluded its work, Congress got into it, and you can google into U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2331, and read the U.S. definition of terrorism. And one of them in here says—one of the terms, "international terrorism," means "activities that," I quote, "appear to be intended to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping."

Yes, well, certainly, you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in such activities. Ours is one of them. Israel is another. And so, the terrorist, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.

Volpe8• 14 years ago

> I am not sympathetic to the plight of those who associate with terrorists (even if they themselves haven't committed a terrorist act) and find themselves it Gitmo or dead.

I see, you've fallen for the pro-U.S propaganda. Where random groups are designated 'terrorists' and thus deserving of your hatred.

> Iranian and North K nuke programs have been slowed and countless people AREN'T dead because of CIA.

100% pure speculation. Other countries getting Nukes (or nuclear energy) is non of the USes business, unless you accept other countries making attempts to disable american power as well.

The US flat out lied about iraq, and was proved to have lied. Yet you believe them on North Korea and Iran... how about reflecting on facts, rather than propaganda?

gareim2• 14 years ago

There's nothing "random" about picking on Al-Qaeda. Also, the facts are that NK has nuclear capabilities. So yes, we believe the CIA about that.

jorahmormont• 14 years ago

Reading the comments here, you wouldn't be blamed for thinking we (the side of rational thinking and intelligence) have lost. The question you should ask yourselves is whether the CIA, or even a big chunk of our government are working to protect us or working to protect their own interests. They do these things in our name. Murder civilians and call it collateral damage. They make up fake dossiers and our media swallows it whole. What have we come to? We used to be the shining city on the hill. We didn't need to invade people to "protect" ourselves.

heretohelp• 14 years ago

>Reagan forcing the issue by spending the Soviets into insolvency because of the arms race

I agreed with most of what you said but you're wrong here, the Saudis forced the Soviets into insolvency because they didn't like the Soviet actions in Iran and Afghanistan. The Saudis were able to sell oil at a lower price than the USSR, took advantage of that and broke them. Any extra spending incurred by Reagan is a drop in the ocean compared the complete destruction of their revenue source.

refurb4• 14 years ago

"A central instrument for putting pressure on the Soviet Union was Reagan’s massive defense build-up, which raised defense spending from $134 billion in 1980 to $253 billion in 1989. This raised American defense spending to 7 percent of GDP, dramatically increasing the federal deficit. Yet in its efforts to keep up with the American defense build-up, the Soviet Union was compelled in the first half of the 1980s to raise the share of its defense spending from 22 percent to 27 percent of GDP, while it froze the production of civilian goods at 1980 levels."

http://wais.stanford.edu/History/history_ussrandreagan.htm

yourapostasy• 14 years ago

You, briandear, and refurb are painting with broad strokes where a more nuanced view might provide more insight. See the Reynolds, Kolodziej paper [1]. It was a complex situation with many factors.

I was curious about your claim, so I did some cursory digging to compare defense spend against potential oil export revenue. "Potential" because I can't find evidence the USSR exported before 1990.

According to some inflation-adjusted data I found [2], from 1980-1990 (approximately the period everyone is likely discussing here), in real terms the $/bbl dropped from $104.49 to $40.67. At this point the analysis of your claim becomes rather challenging. According to the US EIA [3], the USSR had no import/export figures to report prior to 1992. What we have left is to posit their total imputed revenue loss upon all production, and guess at their losses from various barter-like trades they performed for the oil. I'd appreciate it if anyone had more accurate data (unfortunately, Wolfram Alpha doesn't have this kind of data).

Assume for the sake of discussion you were right, and the Saudis pushed down the price of oil from 1980-1990. How much did this cost the USSR in lost oil production revenue? I pulled total production numbers from an US EIA spreadsheet [4]. By my calculations (I'll post the spreadsheet to a Google Docs if anyone is really interested in pursuing this), it is $2.2375E+12 USD in real terms, or $2.2T in round numbers. Even if the USSR consumed 50% and exported the rest in swap trades, that is still $1.1T over 10 years.

Taking refurb's numbers on defense spend and assuming an equal distribution across 10 years of $13.2B extra per year, or $132B over 10 years for the US. Even if we assume the USSR kept pace with that spending, or even doubled, you are right, the potential export losses on USSR oil dwarf the defense spending. If I were Russian, I'd want a Putin at the head of the table in a geopolitical climate that engineers that kind of machination, too. If this was engineered as some claim, it is one of the greatest untold stories of market manipulation and geopolitical chutzpah of astonishing scale.

Here is where it gets interesting and I can't connect the dots to tie up your theory. If you look at the US EIA figures [5], Saudi Arabian production dropped from 1980-1985. That is not consistent with the theory that Saudi Arabia pushed down prices during that period, as one would expect them to flood the market to accomplish a price decline.

I'm intrigued to hear other explanations of what caused that precipitous price decline in the 1980-1990 period that would be consistent with the available data.

[1] http://people.bu.edu/marek/FSU_Oil_Decline.pdf

[2] http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/historical...

[3] http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=RS&tr...

[4] http://www.eia.gov/ipm/supply.html

[5] http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=SA#pet

wpietri• 14 years ago

Personally, I'm more worried about getting blown up because somebody has ended up incorrectly killed by a government contractor.

fatbird2• 14 years ago

The CIA was responsible, under Eisenhower's direction, for overthrowing Mosaddegh in Iran, leading to the Shah, and then the hostage crisis and the current regime. When you wave your hands and pretend to be adding up wins and losses like this, do you consider where the CIA is a net liability? How did their arming of the Afghans who would later become the Taliban work out, in your accounting?

refurb4• 14 years ago

I have to disagree with the word "responsible". There was a huge domestic opposition to Mosaddegh's rule in Iran. Did the CIA encourage this dissent? Yes. Did the CIA hasten the overthrow of Mosaddegh? Yes.

If the CIA had never gotten involved in Iran, would Mosaddegh have maintained rule? It's doubtful.

specialist• 14 years ago

  At the same time, people get equally outraged when terrorists kill people and then want to blame CIA for their failings.

Right!

It's almost ridiculous how some people get so indignant about about imagined pacifist dirty hippies; I can almost feel their spittle as they typety tap tap their anonymous comments. At the same time, those narcissistic people get equally outraged when their imagined political opponents don't actually hold those silly projected beliefs and then want to blame those opponents for not buying into their logical fallacies.

Blah, blah, blah. Insert filler nonsensical blather here. End with some mindless proclamation demonstrating my reasonableness and obvious moral superiority.

accountswu6• 14 years ago

Are you a real human being or a brain-dead bot...? So it is good when CIA goes and kills anyone thousands of miles away (whether you call them civilians or you consider them guilty by default), you're just not sympathetic with those people who are victims of CIA...? Aren't you associating yourself to terrorism (i.e. killing innocent civilians) even if you are not committing the acts yourself?

Was a good thing that CIA installed brutal dictators after toppling the governments of dozens of elected leaders around the world from Chile and Brazil, Cuba and Guatemala and Iran to Indonesia?

https://www.google.com/search?q=cia+interventions+since+1945

Is it terrorism when a guy named James kills a dozen Americans and injures 5 dozen? Would he be called a "suspect" or a terrorist if his name happened to be Muhammad?

Is it a good thing when an American soldier kills a dozen Iraqi civilians?

https://www.google.com/webhp?&q=american%20soldier%20ira...

https://www.google.com/search?q=american+soldier+killing+spr...

batista• 14 years ago

>It's almost ridiculous how some people get so indignant about CIA; I can almost feel their spittle as they shout at their computer screens. At the same time, people get equally outraged when terrorists kill people and then want to blame CIA for their failings. It's a bad world.

For one, not all here are Americans. Some of us are Europeans, and lots of those are from countries that the CIA has royally fu*d over in the past. Like establishing a military dictatorship in my country in the 70s.

Second, it's "a bad world" mostly in part because of certain superpowers abusing their power and money-resource-influence grabbing. From the colonial overlords of the not-so-distance past, to the post-colonial overlords of today, and from the cold war superpowers, to the "global cop".

Things like arab fanatics are a sick byproduct of those forces (not to mention being directly _armed_ by the CIA in the past, like the OBL ally or that Hussein ally).

rdtsc• 14 years ago

> It's a bad world. I am not sympathetic to the plight of those who associate with terrorists

So ... you are saying you are very much an anti-American. But your post indicates support for CIA, so I am confused.

mmaunder• 14 years ago

"Your sources seem to have been correct. Private contractors are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA."

If you want to have a debate, lets talk about ending the various wars the USA is fighting in various forms around the world. Not whether a particular covert surgical tactic is being carried out by the correct kind of soldier.

runjake3• 14 years ago

I read Wright's book, How To Get Away With Murder. It's a quick read. It's not very focused and doesn't answer many questions. Ironically, there's very little focus on Ric Prado, who's the most interesting of the bunch.

AYBABTME• 14 years ago

[quote] So there you have it: A former Air Force lieutenant colonel, speaking on the record and using the present tense, said in 2011 that "private contractors are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA." [/quote]

A journalist looking for any reference that would support his article. I'm not saying the US Gov. isn't contracting private security firms to carry some of their dirty work. But saying "Huh a former lt-col from the Air Force confirmed <whatever>" isn't worth anything. In fact, all it does, in my opinion, is uncover and expose how naive is the reporter.

A former Air Force lieutenant-colonel... is it supposed to mean anything? It's a claim to Authority, with a weak authority to bring forward.

joering22• 14 years ago

Jesus Christ, think about it! a Blackwater employee killed your six year old son, but he turned out to be a wrong person. You have all the evidence in the world for justice to be served, and yet you get this: "oh, sorry, but this company and their employees have unofficially issued government license to kill. Neither your local sherrif office, nor police, nor your congressmen, people in congress, DOJ or Supreme Court alone can do shit about it".

And this happens on the soil of the United States of America!

joering22• 14 years ago

also from the article:

"At the time, the CIA declared him unavailable for questioning; the investigation was shut down before he was arrested or tried."

If this is not rotten corruption and MOB in its pures form, then what is?

EternalFury• 14 years ago

And then people ask: Why do they hate us? Nothing stays covert everywhere and forever.

vernon• 14 years ago

The privatization of assassinations is even scarier than illegal operations from the CIA.

The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

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