Blackwater is the private military contractor founded by Erik Prince that performed extensive paramilitary and intelligence work for the Central Intelligence Agency during the post-September 11 period. The company is the institutional embodiment of the post-9/11 contractor-intelligence model: its board of directors was populated almost entirely by former CIA officers, with Cofer Black — the former head of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center — installed as Vice President, and a network of former CTC officers heading its operational divisions. John Kiriakou describes the resulting relationship between the agency and the company as “quasi-CIA”: “Everybody’s from the CIA. Everybody’s getting rich, right? Because remember, post-9/11, money was literally not an issue.”[1][2]
Global assassination program
Blackwater ran a worldwide assassination program for the CIA. Its existence was first publicly acknowledged by Leon Panetta in his memoir — Panetta wrote that one of his first acts on arriving as CIA Director was to shut it down. He gave no detail; the program was identified as Blackwater’s by external reporting in the aftermath of the disclosure, which also revealed that Panetta in the process publicly outed Erik Prince to the House Intelligence Committee. “That’s why Erik Prince lives in Dubai now and not in the United States.”[3]
Kiriakou’s position on the program is that Panetta — whom he otherwise does not like personally — was correct to terminate it. The fundamental problem is institutional: “How do you control people who don’t actually work for you? You can’t. And you risk them going rogue, which of course they do because it’s their nature.” The predictable failure mode is the misidentified target — “you convince yourself that Ahmed Schmmed is a really bad guy. And actually, no, it’s a cousin with a similar name, but you just put a bullet in this guy’s head. Okay, you write a check for 100 grand to his widow and just move on. And that’s not cool. It’s a crime.”[4][5]
GRS and paramilitary work
In addition to the assassination program, Blackwater ran the Global Response Staff (GRS) program for the CIA — protective security for case officers, especially in Baghdad’s Green Zone during the Iraq War. Kiriakou describes GRS duty as one of the most dangerous in the post-9/11 contractor space: “your job is literally to throw your body in front of the other guy so the other guy doesn’t get killed and can complete the meeting.”[3][6][7]
Spy network
Blackwater also operated as a private intelligence-collection enterprise — a fact Kiriakou cites as surprising even to him. “Blackwater was involved in stealing secrets. Like, they had a network of spies. When you think about Blackwater, you think about boots on the ground, military contracts. People know that they ran the GRS program for CIA, but…”[1]
Ninth Circuit ruling (2025)
In approximately July 2025, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on the legality of contractor-conducted killings in CIA service. The plaintiff was Abu Zubaydah, who sought to sue contractors who had tortured him. The court held that contractors operating under a written CIA contract are legally protected as agents of the agency — meaning the CIA’s authority to act under Executive Order 12333 extends to its contractors. “The reason I paid attention was because it was Abu Zubaydah who was the plaintiff in the case. … The court was like, ‘Yeah, sorry. You got tortured, but they were acting on behalf of the CIA.’”[8][9]