This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Polk Award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill. He spent the past few years investigating the private military contractor Blackwater, which has played a major role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Scahill is the author of the 2007 book "Blackwater," and is the national security correspondent for The Nation.
When we left off, we were talking about a civil suit against Blackwater in which two affidavits submitted by former Blackwater employees, each known only as John Doe, make several allegations against Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, including that he's a Christian crusader and that he may have facilitated the murder of individuals cooperating with the criminal probe of Blackwater.
So in one of these affidavits, John Doe A or B says that Prince views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe and that his companies encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.
That's a really strong statement. It...
Mr. SCAHILL: Well, I mean...
GROSS: Yeah.
Mr. SCAHILL: ...that was one of the least shocking things that I read in there because, you know, I've been tracking this story since 2004 and it's abundantly clear to me that Erik Prince views himself, and I don't say this rhetorically, Terry, Erik Prince views himself as a Christian crusader. There's almost no doubt about that. I wasn't stunned at all when I read that. Everyone at Blackwater knows that.
GROSS: What do you think people mean when they describe Erik Prince, the head of Blackwater, as a Christian crusader? What has he done that might fit that description?
Mr. SCAHILL: Well, the first time that that term officially came to the public light was in the form of these affidavits in terms of coming from people from within the company. And the description that they offer is that Erik Prince actually encouraged a climate where people were using - regularly using racist terms like Haji to describe Iraqis or other Muslims, and that there were operations where Blackwater men were encouraged to go night hunting in helicopters with night vision goggles and they were essentially shooting Iraqis for sport.
The Department of Justice has a filing in the criminal case against Blackwater where they say that some Blackwater operatives viewed the killing of Iraqis as - innocent Iraqis - as payback for 9/11. And you also have a culture at Blackwater where Erik Prince himself, my understanding is, has given speeches to people about the epic crusade that they're on and has in fact used that term himself - the term crusade.
So it would be the combination of encouraging an environment where racist terms are being used to describe innocent Iraqis, where they're night hunting, where they're celebrating their kills, as they're called, and just the general tone for the operations that's set in Iraq and Afghanistan.
GROSS: Now, in this profile of Erik Prince in Vanity Fair that you mentioned, it says that he was a CIA asset - a CIA spy. Is there any hint of when he was?
Mr. SCAHILL: Well, I'll tell you what I know about this, Terry. In 2002, Blackwater was first hired by the CIA on a black contract - a covert contract -to go inside of Afghanistan as part of a force that would protect CIA operatives and operations and they originally guarded the CIA outpost in Kabul and then in a border town called Shkin along the Afghan/Pakistan border, and then the line started to gray, where you had Blackwater guys supposed to be guarding the CIA but in fact they would end up going out on missions with them. And because they were former Special Forces guys, it seemed like a natural fit to the CIA and to Blackwater.
Prince himself not long after that, my understanding is, tried to join the CIA. And in fact in the Vanity Fair article he actually acknowledges this, that he was rejected by the CIA. So what happened, Terry, to answer your question directly, is that beginning in 2004, 2005, Prince started working in a different way with the CIA and they opened up what they call a 201 file on him that essentially made him an asset that had been vetted by the CIA. So he wasn't officially an employee but he became an asset of the CIA.
And Prince used his - one of his actual homes to train special secret forces that were going to be working for the CIA in sensitive operations around the world, according to Vanity Fair, and that really kicked off this different level of a relationship between Erik Prince and the CIA. So 2004, 2005 is when things started to get really intense Erik Prince, Blackwater and the CIA. It also was a time when a bunch of high level CIA guys jumped over to Blackwater and took up employment with Erik Prince.
