Jeremy Scahill Thu Nov 15, 4:10 PM ET
The Nation -- Every day, new revelations emerge in the mounting scandal rocking the Bush Administration and the mercenary company Blackwater Worldwide. Much of the attention focuses on the now infamous shooting spree in Baghdad's Nisour Square on September 16, in which seventeen Iraqi civilians were killed and twenty-four wounded. FBI investigators are now alleging that fourteen were victims of unjustified and unprovoked shooting--some were shot while they were fleeing. Investigators also say they found nothing to substantiate Blackwater's claims of being fired on by Iraqis. This comes a month after a US Army investigation determined there was "no enemy activity involved" and labeled the shootings a "criminal event." But while Blackwater gets hammered in the press, the behind-the-scenes actions of the company's paymaster, the State Department, grow more scandalous by the minute.
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Though Blackwater was founded in 1997, Blackwater Security Consulting--its mercenary division--was incorporated in Delaware on January 22, 2002. Within months, as the United States occupied Afghanistan and began planning the Iraq invasion, Blackwater Security was already turning a profit, pulling in hundreds of thousands a month from a valuable CIA contract.
One of the players in forging that first Blackwater Security contract was Buzzy Krongard, at the time executive director of the CIA, the agency's number-three position. Krongard, who was named to that post in March 2001, had an unusual background for a spook, having spent most of his adult life as an investment banker. He had built up Alex.Brown, the country's oldest investment banking firm, into one of the most successful, and eventually sold it to Bankers Trust, from which he resigned in 1998. There have been some insinuations that Krongard was working undercover for the CIA years before he officially joined the agency in 1998 as a special adviser to George Tenet. But he won't reveal how he met the CIA director, except to say that it was through "mutual friends." The Princeton alum, Hall of Fame lacrosse player and former Marine boasts of having once punched a great white shark in the jaw; and he keeps one of its teeth on a chain and pictures of the animal in his office. Despite his bravado, some at the agency thought of Krongard as a wanna-be, according to a 2001 Newsweek story published shortly after his ascension to the number-three spot. "A wanna-be? Maybe I am. Maybe I'm not. That's as much as you're going to get," Krongard responded.
While working under Tenet at the CIA, Krongard acted internally, reorganizing divisions and pushing for projects like an intelligence venture capital firm, but he did on occasion speak publicly. In October 2001, he declared, "The war will be won in large measure by forces you do not know about, in actions you will not see and in ways you may not want to know about, but we will prevail."
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