Blackwater Founder: CIA 'Threw Me Under the Bus'

Erik Prince says he and Blackwater—the defense contractor now known as Xe—got a raw deal from the government. "I put myself and my company at the CIA's disposal for some very risky missions," the firm's founder tells Vanity Fair. "But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus."

Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic says if Prince's venting is correct, it "rips open a closed package of secrets," specifically about the now-terminated assassination program the company ran in cahoots with the CIA. A Blackwater team tracked an al-Qaeda financier to Germany and prepared to kill him, and the CIA informed neither its own station office nor German officials. That's a "serious violation of NATO intelligence sharing arrangements," writes Ambinder, and it contradicts Leon Panetta's claim that the program was never operational.
(More Erik Prince stories.)