At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special

Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members

of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program

in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al

Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other

sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The

Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering

intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign

that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes,

according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence

apparatus.

The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years,

including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of

Blackwater's involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of

anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the

program is so "compartmentalized" that senior figures within the Obama

administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of

its existence.

The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking

comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm.

Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The

Nation, "We do not discuss current operations one way or the other,

regardless of their nature." A defense official, on background,

specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or

intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. "We don't have any contracts to do

that work for us. We don't contract that kind of work out, period," the

official said. "There has not been, and is not now, contracts between

JSOC and that organization for these types of services." The previously

unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct

from the CIA assassination program that the agency's director, Leon

Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. "This is a parallel

operation to the CIA," said the source. "They are two separate beasts."

The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation

within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not

declared war--knowledge that could further strain the already tense

relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United

States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan

to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny

it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed

to have any active military operations in the country. Blackwater, which

recently changed its name to Xe Services and US Training Center, denies

the company is operating in Pakistan. "Xe Services has only one employee

in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government,"

Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to The

Nation, adding that the company has "no other operations of any kind

in Pakistan."

A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military

intelligence source's claim that the company is working in Pakistan for

the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations

force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for

the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based

security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with

Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids

and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and

elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said,

allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations

forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military

presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a

facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan.

The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity.

His account and that of the military intelligence source were borne

out by a US military source who has knowledge of Special Forces actions

in Pakistan and Afghanistan. When asked about Blackwater's covert work

for JSOC in Pakistan, this source, who also asked for anonymity, told

The Nation, "From my information that I have, that is absolutely

correct," adding, "There's no question that's occurring."

"It wouldn't surprise me because we've outsourced nearly

everything," said Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of

State Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, when told of

Blackwater's role in Pakistan. Wilkerson said that during his time in

the Bush administration, he saw the beginnings of Blackwater's

involvement with the sensitive operations of the military and CIA. "Part

of this, of course, is an attempt to get around the constraints the

Congress has placed on DoD. If you don't have sufficient soldiers to do

it, you hire civilians to do it. I mean, it's that simple. It would not

surprise me."

The Counterterrorism Tag Team in Karachi

The covert JSOC program with Blackwater in Pakistan dates back to at

least 2007, according to the military intelligence source. The current

head of JSOC is Vice Adm. William McRaven, who took over the post from

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC from 2003 to 2008 before being

named the top US commander in Afghanistan. Blackwater's presence in

Pakistan is "not really visible, and that's why nobody has cracked down

on it," said the source. Blackwater's operations in Pakistan, he said,

are not done through State Department contracts or publicly identified

Defense contracts. "It's Blackwater via JSOC, and it's a classified

no-bid [contract] approved on a rolling basis." The main JSOC/Blackwater

facility in Karachi, according to the source, is nondescript: three

trailers with various generators, satellite phones and computer systems

are used as a makeshift operations center. "It's a very rudimentary

operation," says the source. "I would compare it to [CIA] outposts in

Kurdistan or any of the Special Forces outposts. It's very bare bones,

and that's the point."

Blackwater's work for JSOC in Karachi is coordinated out of a Task

Force based at Bagram Air Base in neighboring Afghanistan, according to

the military intelligence source. While JSOC technically runs the

operations in Karachi, he said, it is largely staffed by

former US special operations soldiers working for a division of

Blackwater, once known as Blackwater SELECT, and intelligence analysts

working for a Blackwater affiliate, Total Intelligence Solutions (TIS),

which is owned by Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince. The military

source

said that the name Blackwater SELECT may have been changed recently.

Total Intelligence, which is run out of an office on the ninth floor of

a building in the Ballston area of Arlington, Virginia, is staffed by

former analysts and operatives from the CIA, DIA, FBI and other

agencies. It is modeled after the CIA's counterterrorism center. In

Karachi, TIS runs a "media-scouring/open-source network," according to

the source. Until recently, Total Intelligence was run by two former

top

CIA officials, Cofer Black and Robert Richer, both of whom have left

the

company. In Pakistan, Blackwater is not using either its original name

or its new moniker, Xe Services, according to the former Blackwater

executive. "They are running most of their work through TIS because the

other two [names] have such a stain on them," he said. Corallo, the

Blackwater spokesperson, denied that TIS or any other division or

affiliate of Blackwater has any personnel in Pakistan.

The US military intelligence source said that Blackwater's

classified contracts keep getting renewed at the request of JSOC.

Blackwater, he said, is already so deeply entrenched that it has become

a staple of the US military operations in Pakistan. According to the

former Blackwater executive, "The politics that go with the brand of BW

is somewhat set aside because what you're doing is really one military

guy to another." Blackwater's first known contract with the CIA for

operations in Afghanistan was awarded in 2002 and was for work along the

Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

One of the concerns raised by the military intelligence source is

that some Blackwater personnel are being given rolling security

clearances above their approved clearances. Using Alternative

Compartmentalized Control Measures (ACCMs), he said, the Blackwater personnel are

granted clearance to a Special Access Program, the bureaucratic term

used to describe highly classified "black" operations. "With an ACCM,

the security manager can grant access to you to be exposed to and

operate within compartmentalized programs far above 'secret'--even

though you have no business doing so," said the source. It allows

Blackwater personnel that "do not have the requisite security clearance

or do not hold a security clearance whatsoever to participate in

classified operations by virtue of trust," he added. "Think of it as an

ultra-exclusive level above top secret. That's exactly what it is: a

circle of love." Blackwater, therefore, has access to "all source"

reports that are culled in part from JSOC units in the field. "That's

how a lot of things over the years have been conducted with

contractors," said the source. "We have contractors that regularly see

things that top policy-makers don't unless they ask."

According to the source, Blackwater has effectively marketed itself

as a company whose operatives have "conducted lethal direct action

missions and now, for a price, you can have your own planning cell. JSOC

just ate that up," he said, adding, "They have a sizable force in

Pakistan--not for any nefarious purpose if you really want to look at it

that way--but to support a legitimate contract that's classified for

JSOC." Blackwater's Pakistan JSOC contracts are

secret and are therefore shielded from public oversight, he said. The source is

not sure when the arrangement with JSOC began, but he says that a

spin-off of Blackwater SELECT "was issued a no-bid contract for support

to shooters for a JSOC Task Force and they kept extending it." Some of

the Blackwater personnel, he said, work undercover as aid workers.

"Nobody even gives them a second thought."

The military intelligence source said that the Blackwater/JSOC

Karachi operation is referred to as "Qatar cubed," in reference to the

US forward operating base in Qatar that served as the hub for the

planning and implementation of the US invasion of Iraq. "This is

supposed to be the brave new world," he says. "This is the Jamestown of

the new millennium and it's meant to be a lily pad. You can jump off to

Uzbekistan, you can jump back over the border, you can jump sideways,

you can jump northwest. It's strategically located so that they can get

their people wherever they have to without having to wrangle with the

military chain of command in Afghanistan, which is convoluted. They

don't have to deal with that because they're operating under a

classified mandate."

In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against

suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the

CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC

inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater

does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces.

"That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don't know if

you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan," he

said. "So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?"

Pakistan's Military Contracting Maze

Blackwater, according to the military intelligence source, is not

doing the actual killing as part of its work in Pakistan. "The SELECT

personnel are not going into places with private aircraft and going

after targets," he said. "It's not like Blackwater SELECT people are

running around assassinating people." Instead, US Special Forces teams

carry out the plans developed in part by Blackwater. The military

intelligence source drew a distinction between the Blackwater operatives

who work for the State Department, which he calls "Blackwater Vanilla,"

and the seasoned Special Forces veterans who work on the JSOC program.

"Good or bad, there's a small number of people who know how to pull off

an operation like that. That's probably a good thing," said the source.

"It's the Blackwater SELECT people that have and continue to plan these

types of operations because they're the only people that know how and

they went where the money was. It's not trigger-happy fucks, like some

of the PSD [Personal Security Detail] guys. These are not people that

believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, these are not people that kill

innocent civilians. They're very good at what they do."

The former Blackwater executive, when asked for confirmation that

Blackwater forces were not actively killing people in Pakistan, said,

"that's not entirely accurate." While he concurred with the military

intelligence source's description of the JSOC and CIA programs, he

pointed to another role Blackwater is allegedly playing in Pakistan, not

for the US government but for Islamabad. According to the executive,

Blackwater works on a subcontract for Kestral Logistics, a powerful

Pakistani firm, which specializes in military logistical support,

private security and intelligence consulting. It is staffed with former

high-ranking Pakistani army and government officials. While Kestral's

main offices are in Pakistan, it also has branches in several other

countries.

A spokesperson for the US State Department's Directorate of Defense

Trade Controls (DDTC), which is responsible for issuing licenses to US

corporations to provide defense-related services to foreign governments

or entities, would neither confirm nor deny for The Nation that

Blackwater has a license to work in Pakistan or to work with Kestral.

"We cannot help you," said department spokesperson David McKeeby after

checking with the relevant DDTC officials. "You'll have to contact the

companies directly." Blackwater's Corallo said the company has "no

operations of any kind" in Pakistan other than the one employee working

for the DoD. Kestral did not respond to inquiries from The

Nation.

According to federal lobbying records, Kestral recently hired former

Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger

Noriega, who served in that post from 2003 to 2005, to lobby the US

government, including the State Department, USAID and Congress, on

foreign affairs issues "regarding [Kestral's] capabilities to carry out

activities of interest to the United States." Noriega was hired through

his firm, Vision Americas, which he runs with Christina Rocca, a former

CIA operations official who served as assistant secretary of state for

South Asian affairs from 2001 to 2006 and was deeply involved in shaping

US policy toward Pakistan. In October 2009, Kestral paid Vision Americas

$15,000 and paid a Vision Americas-affiliated firm, Firecreek Ltd., an

equal amount to lobby on defense and foreign policy issues.

For years, Kestral has done a robust business in defense logistics

with the Pakistani government and other nations, as well as top US

defense companies. Blackwater owner Erik Prince is close with Kestral

CEO Liaquat Ali Baig, according to the former Blackwater executive. "Ali

and Erik have a pretty close relationship," he said. "They've met many

times and struck a deal, and they [offer] mutual support for one

another." Working with Kestral, he said, Blackwater has provided convoy

security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that

would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater, according to the former

executive, would guard the supplies as they were transported overland

from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border

crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in

Afghanistan.

According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also

integrate with Kestral's forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations

in the North-West Frontier Province, where they work in conjunction with

the Pakistani Interior Ministry's paramilitary force, known as the

Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as "frontier scouts"). The

Blackwater personnel are technically advisers, but the former executive

said that the line often gets blurred in the field. Blackwater "is

providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism operations]

and Kestral's folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they're having

the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go

out with the teams when they're executing the job," he said. "You can

see how that can lead to other things in the border areas." He said that

when Blackwater personnel are out with the Pakistani teams, sometimes

its men engage in operations against suspected terrorists. "You've got

BW guys that are assisting... and they're all going to want to go on the

jobs--so they're going to go with them," he said. "So, the things that

you're seeing in the news about how this Pakistani military group came

in and raided this house or did this or did that--in some of those

cases, you're going to have Western folks that are right there at the

house, if not in the house." Blackwater, he said, is paid by the

Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. "That

gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, 'Hey, no, we don't have

any Westerners doing this. It's all local and our people are doing it.'

But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for

[counterterrorism]-related work."

The military intelligence source confirmed Blackwater works with the

Frontier Corps, saying, "There's no real oversight. It's not really on

people's radar screen."

In October, in response to Pakistani news reports that a Kestral

warehouse in Islamabad was being used to store heavy weapons for

Blackwater, the US Embassy in Pakistan released a statement denying the

weapons were being used by "a private American security contractor." The

statement said, "Kestral Logistics is a private logistics company that

handles the importation of equipment and supplies provided by the United

States to the Government of Pakistan. All of the equipment and supplies

were imported at the request of the Government of Pakistan, which also

certified the shipments."

Who is Behind the Drone Attacks?

Since President Barack Obama was inaugurated, the United States has

expanded drone bombing raids in Pakistan. Obama first ordered a drone

strike against targets in North and South Waziristan on January 23, and

the strikes have been conducted consistently ever since. The Obama

administration has now surpassed the number of Bush-era strikes in

Pakistan and has faced fierce criticism from Pakistan and some US

lawmakers over civilian deaths. A drone attack in June killed as many as

sixty people attending a Taliban funeral.

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In August, the New York Times reported that Blackwater works

for the CIA at "hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the

company's contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound

laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft." In February,

The Times of London obtained a satellite image of a secret CIA

airbase in Shamsi, in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan,

showing three drone aircraft. The New York Times also reported

that the agency uses a secret base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to strike

in Pakistan.

The military intelligence source says that the drone strike that

reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, his wife

and his bodyguards in Waziristan in August was a CIA strike, but that

many others attributed in media reports to the CIA are actually JSOC

strikes. "Some of these strikes are attributed to OGA [Other Government

Agency, intelligence parlance for the CIA], but in reality it's JSOC and

their parallel program of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] because they

also have access to UAVs. So when you see some of these hits, especially

the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC

strikes." The Pentagon has stated bluntly, "There are no US military

strike operations being conducted in Pakistan."

The military intelligence source also confirmed that Blackwater

continues to work for the CIA on its drone bombing program in Pakistan,

as previously reported in the New York Times, but added that

Blackwater is working on JSOC's drone bombings as well. "It's Blackwater

running the program for both CIA and JSOC," said the source. When

civilians are killed, "people go, 'Oh, it's the CIA doing crazy shit

again unchecked.' Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that's JSOC

[hitting] somebody they've identified through HUMINT [human

intelligence] or they've culled the intelligence themselves or it's been

shared with them and they take that person out and that's how it works."

The military intelligence source says that the CIA operations are

subject to Congressional oversight, unlike the parallel JSOC bombings.

"Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and

the CIA knows that," he says. "Contractors and especially JSOC personnel

working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so

they just don't care. If there's one person they're going after and

there's thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going

to die. That's the mentality." He added, "They're not accountable to

anybody and they know that. It's an open secret, but what are you going

to do, shut down JSOC?"

In addition to working on covert action planning and drone strikes,

Blackwater SELECT also provides private guards to perform the sensitive

task of security for secret US drone bases, JSOC camps and Defense

Intelligence Agency camps inside Pakistan, according to the military

intelligence source.

Mosharraf Zaidi, a well-known Pakistani journalist who has served as

a consultant for the UN and European Union in Pakistan and Afghanistan,

says that the Blackwater/JSOC program raises serious questions about the

norms of international relations. "The immediate question is, How do you

define the active pursuit of military objectives in a country with which

not only have you not declared war but that is supposedly a front-line

non-NATO ally in the US struggle to contain extremist violence coming

out of Afghanistan and the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan?"

asks Zaidi, who is currently a columnist for The News, the

biggest English-language daily in Pakistan. "Let's forget Blackwater for

a second. What this is confirming is that there are US military

operations in Pakistan that aren't about logistics or getting food to

Bagram; that are actually about the exercise of physical violence,

physical force inside of Pakistani territory."

JSOC: Rumsfeld and Cheney's Extra Special Force

Colonel Wilkerson said that he is concerned that with General

McChrystal's elevation as the military commander of the Afghan

war--which is increasingly seeping into Pakistan--there is a concomitant

rise in JSOC's power and influence within the military structure. "I

don't see how you can escape that; it's just a matter of the way the

authority flows and the power flows, and it's inevitable, I think,"

Wilkerson told The Nation. He added, "I'm alarmed when I see

execute orders and combat orders that go out saying that the supporting

force is Central Command and the supported force is Special Operations

Command," under which JSOC operates. "That's backward. But that's

essentially what we have today."

From 2003 to 2008 McChrystal headed JSOC, which is headquartered at

Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where Blackwater's

7,000-acre operating base is also situated. JSOC controls the Army's

Delta Force, the Navy's SEAL Team 6, as well as the Army's 75th Ranger

Regiment and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and the Air

Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron. JSOC performs strike operations,

reconnaissance in denied areas and special intelligence missions.

Blackwater, which was founded by former Navy SEALs, employs scores of

veteran Special Forces operators--which several former military

officials pointed to as the basis for Blackwater's alleged contracts with JSOC.

Since 9/11, many top-level Special Forces veterans have taken up

employment with private firms, where they can make more money doing the

highly specialized work they did in uniform. "The Blackwater individuals

have the experience. A lot of these individuals are retired military,

and they've been around twenty to thirty years and have experience that

the younger Green Beret guys don't," said retired Army Lieut. Col.

Jeffrey Addicott, a well-connected military lawyer who served as senior

legal counsel for US Army Special Forces. "They're known entities.

Everybody knows who they are, what their capabilities are, and they've

got the experience. They're very valuable."

"They make much more money being the smarts of these operations,

planning hits in various countries and basing it off their experience in

Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia, Ethiopia," said the military intelligence

source. "They were there for all of these things, they know what the

hell they're talking about. And JSOC has unfortunately lost the

institutional capability to plan within, so they hire back people that

used to work for them and had already planned and executed these [types

of] operations. They hired back people that jumped over to Blackwater

SELECT and then pay them exorbitant amounts of money to plan future

operations. It's a ridiculous revolving door."

While JSOC has long played a central role in US counterterrorism and

covert operations, military and civilian officials who worked at the

Defense and State Departments during the Bush administration described

in interviews with The Nation an extremely cozy relationship that

developed between the executive branch (primarily through Vice President

Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and JSOC. During the

Bush era, Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation

that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct

coordination with the White House. Throughout the Bush years, it was

largely General McChrystal who ran JSOC. "What I was seeing was the

development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where

Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the

conventional commander even knowing what they were doing," said Colonel

Wilkerson. "That's dangerous, that's very dangerous. You have all kinds

of mess when you don't tell the theater commander what you're doing."

Wilkerson said that almost immediately after assuming his role at

the State Department under Colin Powell, he saw JSOC being politicized

and developing a close relationship with the executive branch. He saw

this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg.

"I think Cheney and Rumsfeld went directly into JSOC. I think they went

into JSOC at times, perhaps most frequently, without the SOCOM [Special

Operations] commander at the time even knowing it. The receptivity in

JSOC was quite good," says Wilkerson. "I think Cheney was actually

giving McChrystal instructions, and McChrystal was asking him for

instructions." He said the relationship between JSOC and Cheney and

Rumsfeld "built up initially because Rumsfeld didn't get the

responsiveness. He didn't get the can-do kind of attitude out of the

SOCOM commander, and so as Rumsfeld was wont to do, he cut him out and

went straight to the horse's mouth. At that point you had JSOC operating

as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive

branch--read: Cheney and Rumsfeld--wanted it to do. This would be more

or less carte blanche. You need to do it, do it. It was very alarming

for me as a conventional soldier."

Wilkerson said the JSOC teams caused diplomatic problems for the

United States across the globe. "When these teams started hitting

capital cities and other places all around the world, [Rumsfeld] didn't

tell the State Department either. The only way we found out about it is

our ambassadors started to call us and say, 'Who the hell are these

six-foot-four white males with eighteen-inch biceps walking around our

capital cities?' So we discovered this, we discovered one in South

America, for example, because he actually murdered a taxi driver, and we

had to get him out of there real quick. We rendered him--we rendered him

home."

As part of their strategy, Rumsfeld and Cheney also created the

Strategic Support Branch (SSB), which pulled intelligence resources from

the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA for use in sensitive JSOC

operations. The SSB was created using "reprogrammed" funds "without

explicit congressional authority or appropriation," according to the

Washington Post. The SSB operated outside the military chain of

command and circumvented the CIA's authority on clandestine operations.

Rumsfeld created it as part of his war to end "near total dependence on

CIA." Under US law, the Defense Department is required to report all

deployment orders to Congress. But guidelines issued in January 2005 by

former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone

stated that Special Operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT

operations...before publication" of a deployment order. This effectively

gave Rumsfeld unilateral control over clandestine operations.

The military intelligence source said that when Rumsfeld was defense

secretary, JSOC was deployed to commit some of the "darkest acts" in

part to keep them concealed from Congress. "Everything can be justified

as a military operation versus a clandestine intelligence performed by

the CIA, which has to be informed to Congress," said the source. "They

were aware of that and they knew that, and they would exploit it at

every turn and they took full advantage of it. They knew they could act

extra-legally and nothing would happen because A, it was sanctioned by

DoD at the highest levels, and B, who was going to stop them? They were

preparing the battlefield, which was on all of the PowerPoints:

'Preparing the Battlefield.'"

The significance of the flexibility of JSOC's operations inside

Pakistan versus the CIA's is best summed up by Senator Dianne Feinstein,

chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Every single

intelligence operation and covert action must be briefed to the

Congress," she said. "If they are not, that is a violation of the law."

Blackwater: Company Non Grata in Pakistan

For months, the Pakistani media has been flooded with stories about

Blackwater's alleged growing presence in the country. For the most part,

these stories have been ignored by the US press and denounced as lies or

propaganda by US officials in Pakistan. But the reality is that,

although many of the stories appear to be wildly exaggerated, Pakistanis

have good reason to be concerned about Blackwater's operations in their

country. It is no secret in Washington or Islamabad that Blackwater has

been a central part of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that the

company has been involved--almost from the beginning of the "war on

terror"--with clandestine US operations. Indeed,

Blackwater is accepting applications for contractors fluent in Urdu and

Punjabi. The US Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, has denied

Blackwater's presence in the country, stating bluntly in September,

"Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan." In her trip to Pakistan in

October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dodged questions from the

Pakistani press about Blackwater's rumored Pakistani operations.

Pakistan's interior minister, Rehman Malik, said on November 21 he will

resign if Blackwater is found operating anywhere in Pakistan.

The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that

Blackwater "provides security for a US-backed aid project" in Peshawar,

suggesting the company may be based out of the Pearl Continental, a

luxury hotel the United States reportedly is considering purchasing to

use as a consulate in the city. "We have no contracts in Pakistan,"

Blackwater spokesperson Stacey DeLuke said recently. "We've been blamed

for all that has gone wrong in Peshawar, none of which is true, since we

have absolutely no presence there."

Reports of Blackwater's alleged presence in Karachi and elsewhere in

the country have been floating around the Pakistani press for months.

Hamid Mir, a prominent Pakistani journalist who rose to fame after his

1997 interview with Osama bin Laden, claimed in a recent interview that

Blackwater is in Karachi. "The US [intelligence] agencies think that a

number of Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are hiding in Karachi and

Peshawar," he said. "That is why [Blackwater] agents are operating in

these two cities." Ambassador Patterson has said that the claims of Mir

and other Pakistani journalists are "wildly incorrect," saying they had

compromised the security of US personnel in Pakistan. On November 20 the

Washington Times, citing three current and former US intelligence

officials, reported that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Afghan

Taliban, has "found refuge from potential U.S. attacks" in Karachi "with

the assistance of Pakistan's intelligence service."

In September, the Pakistani press covered a report on Blackwater

allegedly submitted by Pakistan's intelligence agencies to the federal

interior ministry. In the report, the intelligence agencies reportedly

allege that Blackwater was provided houses by a federal minister who is

also helping them clear shipments of weapons and vehicles through

Karachi's Port Qasim on the coast of the Arabian Sea. The military

intelligence source did not confirm this but did say, "The port jives

because they have a lot of [former] SEALs and they would revert to what

they know: the ocean, instead of flying stuff in."

The Nation cannot independently confirm these allegations and

has not seen the Pakistani intelligence report. But according to

Pakistani press coverage, the intelligence report also said Blackwater

has acquired "bungalows" in the Defense Housing Authority in the city.

According to the DHA website, it is a large gated community established

"for the welfare of the serving and retired officers of the Armed Forces

of Pakistan." Its motto is: "Home for Defenders." The report alleges

Blackwater is receiving help from local government officials in Karachi

and is using vehicles with license plates traditionally assigned to

members of the national and provincial assemblies, meaning local law

enforcement will not stop them.

The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive

operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes

with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional

barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When

things go wrong, it's the contractors' fault, not the government's. But

the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions,

particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. "We are

using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered

to be a violation of the Geneva Convention," said Lt. Col. Addicott, who

now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of

Law in San Antonio, Texas. "In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope

to the breaking limit, and it's almost a fiction that these guys are not

in offensive military operations." Addicott added, "If we were subjected

to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be

picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That's one of the

reasons we're not members of the International Criminal Court."

If there is one quality that has defined Blackwater over the past

decade, it is the ability to survive against the odds while

simultaneously reinventing and rebranding itself. That is most evident

in Afghanistan, where the company continues to work for the US military,

the CIA and the State Department despite intense criticism and almost

weekly scandals. Blackwater's alleged Pakistan operations, said the military

intelligence source, are indicative of its new frontier. "Having learned

its lessons after the private security contracting fiasco in Iraq,

Blackwater has shifted its operational focus to two venues: protecting

things that are in danger and anticipating other places we're going to

go as a nation that are dangerous," he said. "It's as simple as that."