CIA asked private security firm Blackwater to find al-Qaeda leaders

A secret CIA programme to hunt down and assassinate al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan was partly outsourced to Blackwater, the private security contractor being investigated for killing civilians in Iraq, it emerged yesterday. The revelation that the agency would use a private contractor to assist in such a covert programme has raised questions over the legality of the move.

The Times reported this month that Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, was accused in court documents by two unnamed former employees of murder, weapons smuggling and the deliberate slaughter of Iraqi civilians. He has denied the allegations, part of a lawsuit filed by Iraqi families who claim that relatives were unlawfully killed by Blackwater guards in Iraq.

The deadliest incident involved the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater personnel in Baghdad in September 2007, which led to manslaughter charges against six of them. The company has since lost its State Department contract in Iraq.

According to US officials familiar with the CIA assassination programme, Blackwater helped the agency with planning, training and surveillance. The programme never became fully operational and no assassination missions were carried out. It is unclear if there was ever any intent for Blackwater to carry out covert killings.

The existence of the programme was kept secret from Congress for seven years, but was revealed to congressional leaders in June by Leon Panetta, the new head of the CIA. He cancelled it because he believed that it was moving towards becoming fully operational. The North Carolina-based company, which has since changed its name to Xe Services, was paid millions of dollars to provide training and weaponry.

Mr Panetta also told congressional leaders that he believed that Capitol Hill had been kept in the dark about the project because Dick Cheney, then the Vice-President, told the CIA in 2002 that Congress did not need to be informed as the agency already had the authority to kill al-Qaeda leaders. The House Intelligence Committee has started an investigation into why Congress was not informed about the programme for so long, and whether it was kept illegally in the dark.

The CIA has regularly used contractors for intelligence analysis and operations, the former CIA director Michael Hayden told Congress last year. Contractors took part in the interrogations of terrorist suspects, but are no longer allowed to do so.