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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/11/05/erik-prince-trump-ukraine-china/">https://theintercept.com/2019/11/05/erik-prince-trump-ukraine-china/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">the <span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.1em; box-shadow: white 0px 1px 0px, rgb(17, 17, 17) 0px 4px 0px; text-transform: uppercase;">WALL STREET JOURNAL</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"> </span><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/security-contractor-erik-prince-is-in-talks-to-acquire-ukraines-motor-sich-11572949809?redirect=amp#click=https://t.co/3LlZC0ETNp" style="letter-spacing: 0.01em; box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">reported</a><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;">on Tuesday that the Trump administration approached Blackwater founder and Trump shadow adviser Erik Prince about potentially buying a Ukrainian aerospace company that the U.S. government wants to prevent the Chinese government from acquiring. “Motor Sich is a leading maker of helicopter and airplane engines and the U.S. wants to scuttle its pending sale to a group of Chinese companies to keep Beijing from acquiring vital defense technology,” according to the report. “A U.S. government official sought out Mr. Prince in Washington earlier this year. Mr. Prince expressed interest in Motor Sich, as long as the company remained a Ukrainian entity and he could receive its client list, the U.S. official said.” Prince is an interesting choice if the White House wanted to prevent China from acquiring the firm. Prince’s latest venture, Frontier Services Group, is a Hong Kong-based company and largely controlled by the Chinese government’s powerful investment arm.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;">
</span></font></div><div data-reactid="226" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This story comes as BuzzFeed News <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/mueller-report-secret-memos-1?bftwnews&utm_term=4ldqpgc#4ldqpgc" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">published files</a> from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, including dozens of pages of documents detailing some of Prince’s role during the Trump campaign and transition. These files were produced by the FBI as part of its interviews with former top White House adviser Steve Bannon.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill and Matthew Cole discussed all of these developments.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><strong style="letter-spacing: 0.01em; box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[audio]</font></strong></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="letter-spacing: 0.01em; box-sizing: border-box;"> Scahill:</strong><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;">Just by way of context, Erik Prince, of course, comes from a really powerful family in the state of Michigan. His sister, Betsy DeVos, is married to Dick DeVos, the heir to the Amway Corp. fortune, which is a multilevel marketing scheme.<b> And those two families merged together and were the premier bank rollers of the radical religious right, as well as the Republican revolution that swept Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America to power in the early and mid-1990s.</b></span></font></p></div><div data-reactid="229" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fast-forward past the Blackwater years, and Erik Prince running a mercenary company, to the end of Obama and the 2016 campaign kicking into gear. Erik Prince originally was in the Ted Cruz camp and then started to transition over to Donald Trump. This latest batch of <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6537542-LEOPOLD-BUZZFEED-NEWS-FBI-Mueller-302s-FOIA" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">documents</a> that we have been able to read through because of Jason Leopold and BuzzFeed contains some pretty extensive notes and documents from<b> interviews with Steve Bannon about Erik Prince’s role in the Trump campaign, and then ultimately during the transition period.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And what’s interesting, I think, to note is that Erik Prince’s connection to Trump world is multifaceted. You have the fact that Erik Prince and his family were close to Vice President Mike Pence when he was a member of Congress, and Prince and his mother had raised money for him. They were bundling money and raising money for Donald Trump when they eventually switched over from Ted Cruz to Donald Trump.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And then it gets us to where we are in these documents, where you have Erik Prince via his relationship with Steve Bannon, and the two of them, by Bannon’s admission, had known each other for eight or nine years when the Trump campaign had kicked into gear.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Erik Prince, of course, had <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/01/17/notorious-mercenary-erik-prince-is-advising-trump-from-the-shadows/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">been on</a> Steve Bannon’s radio show on Breitbart many times, where he was already openly pitching a return to the glory years of the Phoenix program — the assassination program in Vietnam — and talking about how the U.S. needed to get back into the covert operations game in a very serious way</span>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">And from the initial Bannon descriptions of Prince, it sounds like Erik Prince was coming up to the 14th floor in Trump Tower and essentially just wandering around and pitching ideas to people.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What’s your first assessment, Matthew, of the documents that we’re now reading about Erik Prince’s time wandering around Trump Tower and trying to play a role in the world of Donald Trump?</font></p><p class="p1" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;" /></div><div class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo" data-reactid="230" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-top: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); padding: 20px 0px 10px; margin: 7px 40px 20px 0px; float: left; width: 400px;"><a class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link" href="https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/erik-prince-trump-uae-project-veritas/" data-reactid="231" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; display: flex; flex-direction: row;" /><div class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link-thumbnail" data-reactid="232" style="box-sizing: border-box; padding-right: 20px; position: relative; z-index: 1;"><a class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link" href="https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/erik-prince-trump-uae-project-veritas/" data-reactid="231" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; display: flex; flex-direction: row;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">
</font></a></div><div class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link-text" data-reactid="234" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><h6 class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link-eyebrow" data-reactid="235" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; font-kerning: normal; font-feature-settings: "kern"; padding-bottom: 5px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Related</font></h6><h4 class="PromoteRelatedPost-promo-link-title" data-reactid="236" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 22px; margin: 0px; font-kerning: normal; font-feature-settings: "kern";"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000" style="font-weight: normal;">How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable Comeback</font></h4></div></div><div data-reactid="237" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Matthew Cole:</strong><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Well, I think it’s pretty clear that Erik’s description of himself and his connection to the Trump administration in his testimony to the House Intelligence Committee during the Russia investigation wildly downplayed his connection. I mean, he described himself under oath as having virtually no connection other than sending unsolicited policy memos and once or twice shaking Donald Trump’s hand at a campaign event. He really, really downplayed his connection</span>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And I think what we find from the FBI interviews with Bannon is that both before Trump won the election and then after the election, Erik Prince was all over the Trump campaign wherever he could [be]. Much of it was unsolicited, but he was allowed in. And I think what we see is that he starts there to become what — I think the only appropriate term is a <b>“shadow adviser” to, first, the Trump campaign via Bannon and, later, [through] his relationship with Eric Trump and Don Jr. as, I think, hunting buddies.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">JS:</strong> Well, let me just read that section from the <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">FBI notes: “<b>Bannon knew that Prince would go hunting with Eric Trump and Trump Jr.</b> during the campaign. Prince might have met with Trump Jr. and Bannon remembered one time <b>Trump Jr. may have walked Prince down” to the more secure level.</b></span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Let’s also remember that the Trump brothers <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/16/trump-sons-us-lifts-import-ban-african-elephant-trophies" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">like going and killing</a> exotic animals or endangered species. Erik Prince and the Trump brothers: hunting buddies. But that doesn’t seem to be the primary connection for Erik Prince at Trump Tower, it may have helped him get in, but he was wandering around<b> talking to the likes of Mike Flynn and Kellyanne Conway and [Sebastian] Gorka and maybe even Mike Pompeo.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">MC:</strong> Well, I only bring up the sons to your point that it was multifaceted. There were multiple places and ways in which Erik was connecting with the Trump campaign and later with the president-elect in the transition. And one that you forgot is that his wife, Stacy — <b>Erik’s wife, Stacy — is very close to Rebecca Mercer and the Mercers, of course, bankrolled — they are probably the single largest bank rollers of the Trump campaign and their win.</b> And [they] had financed and backed Bannon. But they also had started with supporters of Cruz during the election until it became clear that Trump was going to win.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">JS:</strong> Well, the Mercers, I think, were the ones that convinced Elsa Prince, Erik’s mother, and the real controller of the money in that family, to — and she was reluctant to do it — to get into Trump camp.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">MC:</strong> Right. So, I think that what these [FBI] Bannon interviews show is that Erik’s involvement with, first, the campaign and, then, with the transition were quite extensive. What influence he had, that’s a debatable question. But two years ago, you and I <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/12/04/trump-white-house-weighing-plans-for-private-spies-to-counter-deep-state-enemies/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">reported</a> the story of<b> Erik trying to pitch Trump and the Trump administration on a<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> private CIA that would work only for the director of the CIA and for Donald Trump, the president. And that original plan really snuck through.</span></b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">They sold that in part to Don Jr. They were talking with everyone. They got meetings with Pompeo. They absolutely had meetings at the White House. But the way in which they got into Donald Trump’s ear on that one was through Don Jr.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So he has proven himself to be quite effective at getting his message across to the president of the United States through multiple avenues. And what these FBI interviews show is that, at least in 2016, he was aggressively working with Bannon to try to help the campaign wherever he could and where we’re at today where he is an informal, a shadow adviser to the White House, of which this administration has more than most, because it’s so unusual and unorthodox. It has many people like that, outside advisers who are unofficial carriers of a message to and from the president.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">JS:</strong> You know, it is reminiscent in some [ways] of what we understand about how the Nixon White House operated, particularly when you’re talking about covert operations, that you had these shadowy figures, some of whom were part of the Watergate burglars, the “plumbers,” and others who were pitching a million ideas of how they wanted to kill Fidel Castro, invade Cuba, and if even one of their thousand crazy ideas landed, that was considered a victory for them.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In fact, Erik Prince has talked about how his father, who was a legitimately successful businessman, who built up a successful company and was an inventor — how, if one of his ideas out of 10,000 of them hit, that was considered a really solid idea. Erik Prince is now trying to do that in the realm of covert operations. You mentioned the <b>privatized intelligence force that would allow Donald Trump to circumvent the “deep state” campaign against him. But also, Erik Prince’s privatization agenda, mercenaries to solve everything. In one of these memos, policy papers that Erik Prince wrote and then passed on to Bannon hoping it would get to Trump, he wants to privatize the entire Veterans Administration and the health care system for veterans.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">MC:</strong> Yeah, I don’t think that there is any question that Erik Prince always sees — there’s not a scenario where Prince doesn’t see an opportunity to sell privatization of a known or accepted government function</span>. And it’s for that reason, among others, that he has also had support for years from Dick Cheney, the former vice president under George W. Bush, and Erik, I understand, is still spending a lot of time with Cheney. And Erik Prince has that drive to privatize, to find ways to make a profit for a corporation, and promotes the idea that these proposals are making the government more efficient and saving money for the U.S. taxpayer. It’s mostly smoke and mirrors, but it is certainly their view of the free economy. And the idea that Prince, a former Navy SEAL, a son of a billionaire, would try to pitch the privatization of the VA, and not that the VA doesn’t have an enormous amount of problems, but he’s the ultimate definition of a hammer [to] which every problem looks like a nail. And that’s the service that he’s going to sell you. Like his father, he’d be happy if one of 10,000 works, because all of them provide some opportunity for Erik Prince to make a lot of money.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">JS:</strong> Yeah. And if you go back and you look at some of the position papers that [Prince] passed along to the campaign on the issue of Syria and Iraq and ISIS, one thing that jumps out is Erik Prince says Iraq and Syria are finished as states and the next president could have a great opportunity to redraw the maps of the Middle East</span>. And he talks about abolishing the Sykes-Picot agreement that Erik Prince, I think, rightly says was a remnant of a colonial agenda of European powers. But his solution is at one point describing Raqqa, the then capital of the ISIS so-called caliphate, he says we should we should unload on them with everything non-nuclear we have, including explosives, artillery, rockets, cluster bombs, et cetera, et cetera. Kill everything in every grid square surrounding the marines, the U.S. Marines are there, while also “<b>flattening Dresden-style their caliphate capital of Raqqa, Syria.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Nothing will be as demotivating for their recruiting efforts as well publicized video of total destruction of their forces. As gruesome as that may sound, they think with medieval perspective and you must give them a pounding they will understand.”</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">MC:</strong> You know, Erik’s ideology drives him like few that we’ve ever seen. I mean, he’s a unique American figure who has virtually no military experience — while he did serve and was a young officer in the Navy SEALs, he left after three or four years — [but] he served no time in battle</span>. It’s one of the things that people who know him well always remark [on]: that what drives him more than anything is that the guy never got to fire a weapon on a battlefield. And likewise, he never got to command a unit, he never got to lead anyone into a conflict.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And for whatever reason, that drives him to where he wants to go. And so, he may … He’s not a dumb man. He does rightly point out that that the Sykes agreement was the vestige of a colonial era that divided up a region that had no bearing on the ethnic makeup of that geographic part of the Middle East.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But his solution is lunacy and betrays a total lack of understanding of the dynamics on the ground.</b> That position paper, in fact, I read it closely. And one of the things that’s amazing about it is it really skims over the fact that the disaster in the Middle East that we currently see is being fed largely — not exclusively, but largely — by the war. [With] the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 [and] the removal of Saddam Hussein, Iran saw, for instance, an opportunity to gain influence in the Middle East and to push back against that the Arab world. And instead of talking about a sort of holistic, whole-of-government approach, the international community, [for] how to resolve the crisis in the Middle East, again, here’s the hammer, and the only solution is bomb everyone to smithereens, redraw the map like a new version of a colonial power.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All he’s describing is “well, those guys were the old one, here’s an opportunity for the president to be a new version of the colonial power.” And actually, in the three years that we’ve had President Trump, you can see why a message like that would be appealing to him. That is very appealing to him.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">JS:</strong> It does seem from just from this first blush look at some of the raw documents from the FBI interviews with Steve Bannon that Erik Prince was not exactly truthful when he testified in front of Congress on these issues. And one of the documents that’s getting the most attention was that Erik Prince wrote another memo that he wanted [presented to] Trump, who he calls “Mr. T,” on Russian election influence issue. And Erik Prince starts this memo by saying, “It’s unclear to me if Russia is directly involved in attempting to influence the U.S. election,” but then he proposes that Donald Trump adopt a line and use it to attack Hillary Clinton by saying if Russia wants to influence the elections, because they know Hillary Clinton, they’re not afraid of her. They would prefer her to be president. And he ends this memo to Trump, Erik Prince does, by saying that Trump could say, “I am largely an unknown. Unknowns carry risk for our opponents.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">MC:</strong> You know, that memo to me, that piece of singular piece of advice to me, demonstrates how far off the deep end the people in and around this administration have gone that if you if you really look at that, what Prince has done there is adopt absolutely a Soviet era, Russian propaganda playbook, which is to say, “the cup that you see here on that table is, in fact, no cup at all. You know, don’t believe your lying eyes.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At that moment in time, in which it was clear that whether there was any connection at all to the Trump campaign, that the Russians had been involved in some effort to influence the election, and again, separating whether or not they were successful, there really was very little question about that at that moment. But even if you were skeptical, the idea that you would take the basic facts, which were that Vladimir Putin and the government of Russia were extremely hostile to her because of her time as secretary of state — I mean, it’s not a disputed fact.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was just basic things. And to say, “No, what the candidates should do is walk out there and tell the world that the sky that they see above them is, in fact, not blue.” And I was sort of just stunned at the willingness that Erik Prince would go down. And again, he was selling it to the right person, right? I mean, President Trump, both as a candidate and then in office, maybe his singular, most pronounced characteristic is saying things that are just simply untrue. Beginning with, of course, in the first day in office that his inauguration size was the greatest ever. And so, I was just stunned at how much Prince was sort of parroting this, you know, the “Evil Empire’s” playbook as someone who is a professed cold warrior who sort of longs for the era in which we were in a Cold War against the Evil Empire and could do all of these covert actions and paramilitary strikes to defeat the big bad Russian bear.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong style="letter-spacing: 0.01em; box-sizing: border-box;">jS:</strong><span style="letter-spacing: 0.01em;"> Also this this week, on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published a story saying that<b> Erik Prince is in discussions to purchase a Ukrainian aerospace manufacturer Motor Sich, and that this is a company that the U.S. has been trying to prevent China from buying.</b> John Bolton, when he was national security adviser, and others, trying to pressure the Ukrainian government and this company not to sell to China. What is this about?</span></font></p></div><div data-reactid="248" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">MC:</strong> Well, it’s not fully clear. It’s actually pretty confusing. I reached out to several of my sources this morning after I read the story, which was fantastic, and one of the immediate things that came back and it’s obvious is that <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Erik’s company, Frontier Services Group, is a Hong Kong- and Beijing-based Chinese company and the single largest investor in the company is the Chinese central government’s economic arm, their<b> bank, CITIC. It’s their biggest investment arm.</b></span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>And so, if FSG were to buy this company, which is one of the things that’s suggested in this article, ultimately China would own it anyway</b>. And so, it’s very confusing. One thing we can see is Erik has an obsession with planes and aviation, and he always has since he was a child, and he has longingly looked at the Russian company Antonov and Russian, Soviet-era aviation hardware and software.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5; margin: 0px 0px 1em; letter-spacing: 0.01em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So it’s not totally surprising. It’s just really surprising that the administration sort of urged him to take a look at this company and buy it. I don’t know how it would work. I think it’s clear that there are more questions than there are answers. But if you needed a sign that Erik Prince is — despite what would appear to be having misled the House Intelligence Committee, and for which they sent to the Department of Justice a [criminal] referral — he seems to be in very good standing with this White House even today. And it probably speaks to the fact that, again, he’s a shadow adviser who, when they need a favor, they will turn to. And in exchange, you have to ask yourself what favors the government is doing for Erik Prince.</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div>The Nation</div><div>
</div><div>BLOG</div><div><b>Firm Tied to Israeli Special Forces Wants US Security Contracts in Jerusalem, Iraq, Afghanistan</b></div><div>As the Obama Administration continues the military privatization agenda, a CIA-connected firm and an Israeli-run company named Instinctive Shooting International are looking to cash in.</div><div>By Jeremy ScahillTwitter APRIL 29, 2010</div><div>
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</div><div>The Obama administration has continued the Bush-era reliance on private contractors to sustain the US occupation of Iraq and the US operations in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Obama has surpassed Bush’s reliance on contractors with current contractor levels surpassing 100,000 Defense Department contractors deployed. In Iraq, Obama has maintained the long-standing ratio of one contractor to every US soldier.</div><div>
</div><div>General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan/Pakistan, said recently that he believes the US has “created in ourselves a dependency on contractors that is greater than it ought to be.” He added: “I think it doesn’t save money. I actually think it would be better to reduce the number of contractors involved, increase the number of military if necessary.”</div><div>
</div><div>Despite such proclamations, the pattern of dependence on contractors is continuing unabated—and not just within the Department of Defense.</div><div>
</div><div>On April 20, the US State Department posted a solicitation for armed private security contractors to deploy in “critical or higher than critical threat areas” globally under its Worldwide Protective Services program. <b>Among the firms that have held these contracts are Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy and Armor Group.</b>ArmorGroup was exposed last year by whistleblowers for a range of misconduct at the US embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. Among the actions revealed by the Project on Government Oversight were hazing rituals involving nudity and heavy drinking that at times included personnel urinating on each other. The whistleblowers alleged that ArmorGroup personnel created a general atmosphere of fear and intimidation. Last December, following POGO’s revelations, the State Department said it was phasing out ArmorGroup.</div><div>
</div><div>In its solicitation for contract bids, the State Department says it will hire as many as six “qualified US firms” for “anticipated and unanticipated personal protective, static guard, and emergency response” functions. The contracts are slated to last one year with the potential for four, year-long options.</div><div>
</div><div>To qualify for the contracts, security companies must have a total annual value of at least $15 million in security contracts and must possess a valid “Final Secret Facility Security Clearance.” After the contracts are awarded, the State Department says that it will then sponsor the contractor for “Top Secret Facility Clearance.” In addition, bidding companies must have at least two years of experience operating in “austere and hostile environments overseas” such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq and experience in “operating long term personal protective security details for executive level dignitaries.” The solicitation indicates that the work will include “a static guard and emergency response team requirement in Baghdad, Iraq, a static guard and emergency response team requirement in Kabul, Afghanistan, and a personal protective security service requirement in Jerusalem.”</div><div>
</div><div>Among the companies listed as “interested vendors” to bid on the contracts are the predictable list of<b> industry giants: L-3 Services, SAIC, USIS, Northrop Grumman, and DynCorp. Blackwater,</b> which has been a prime contractor under the WPS program since the beginning of the Iraq invasion, does not appear to be bidding on the contract. If that remains the case, it could represent the end of an era in the mercenary business.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> In a sea of heavy-hitters, two lesser-known firms in particular that have expressed interest in the contracts jump out: Instinctive Shooting International and Evergreen International Aviation.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Hiring <b>Instinctive Shooting International</b> for any type of armed contract in a Muslim country, particularly to operate in Jerusalem with a stamp of US government legitimacy, should be cause for serious concern and Congressional inquiry.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Instinctive Shooting International (ISI) was founded by Hanan Yadin, a former member of the Israel National Counter-Terrorism Agency and a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces. According to his bio [PDF], Hanan “received advanced training at the Israeli Anti-Terror Academy and served as an instructor at the Israeli Military Intelligence Academy. As part of a Special Ops unit he executed high-risk missions against terrorist’s cells. Hanan is an expert marksman and has completed advanced training in crisis response, Krav Maga (the Israeli unarmed fighting system), urban warfare and tactical operations.”</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>I encountered ISI operatives, all former Israeli soldiers, manning an armed check-point in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.</b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">At the time, in 2005, its website described ISI’s personnel as “veterans of the Israeli special task forces from the following Israeli government bodies: Israel Defense Force (IDF), Israel National Police Counter Terrorism units, Instructors of Israel National Police Counter Terrorism units, General Security Service (GSS or ‘Shin Beit’), Other restricted intelligence agencies.”</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Today the website has changed dramatically. Its main graphic is of US soldiers wearing American flag patches, wielding automatic weapons in what appears to be Iraq. “After 9/11, ISI was able to bring to bear all of its resources, expertise and experience to work with U.S. military and government agencies in gaining a deeper understanding of radical Islam and provide proven tactical techniques to improve counter-terror operations,” according to the website. This would hardly be ISI’s first US government contract. It has received many training and security contracts since its founding in 1993. According to the company, it is currently under a five-year contract with the US Army that began in November 2009.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>Evergreen has had long-standing ties to the CIA.</b> “In 1980 an Evergreen plane flew the recently deposed Shah of Iran from Panama to Egypt, hours before the Panamanian government was due to receive an extradition request from the new government in Tehran,” according to SourceWatch. “Giving rides to dictators is something of a specialty for the company – it also allowed El Salvador’s President Duarte to use its helicopter, which was officially in the country to help repair power lines. And according to a series of articles in The Oregonian in 1988, Evergreen’s owner and founder Delford M. Smith ‘…acknowledged one agreement under which his companies provide occasional jobs and cover to foreign nationals the CIA wants taken out of other countries or brought into the United States.’”</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Evergreen is perhaps best known more recently for offering—unsolicited—its security services to Oregon county clerks ahead of the 2008 elections. “During this crucial election Evergreen Defense and Security Services has recognized the potential conflict that could occur on November 4,” an email from company president Evergreen president Tom Wiggins to election officials stated</span>. “Never has there been a more heated battle in the race for president and voters seem more involved and determined to achieve their respective goals. EDSS proposes to post sentries at each voting center on November 4 to assure that disputes among citizens do not get out of control. All guards will be unarmed but capable of stopping any violence that may occur, and detaining troublemakers until law enforcement help arrives.” The offer was suspect on several fronts, not the least of which being that Oregon has no polling places and votes by mail.</div><div>
</div><div>According to State Department documents, among the projects up for bidding are:</div><div>
</div><div>—<b>Private security teams in Jerusalem</b>. The solicitation calls for 46 personnel, including 36 “security specialists” and team/shift leaders for armed details.</div><div>
</div><div>—Embassy guards and an Emergency Response Team in Kabul. The solicitation calls for 219 personnel, including a 142-member embassy guard force and 49 “emergency response” personnel.</div><div>
</div><div>—Embassy guards and an Emergency Response Team in Baghdad, Iraq. The solicitation calls for 551 personnel, including 357 “armed guards” and an Emergency Response Team consisting of 30 protective security specialists and four “designated defense marksmen.”</div><div>
</div><div>The US embassy in Iraq, according to the documents, requires the greatest number of contractors. This is likely because the embassy there is the largest of any embassy of any nation in history.</div><div>
</div><div>The State Department has a conference for prospective bidders scheduled for April 27-28 in Arlington, Virginia. Attendance is mandatory for interested companies.</div><div>
</div><div>Jeremy ScahillTWITTERJeremy Scahill is the author of the best-selling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. Nation Books released his second book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, in 2013. He is the writer, with David Riker, and a producer of the documentary feature film Dirty Wars, released by IFC Films in 2013.</div><div>
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