Blackwater Executives were doing CIA bidding in Quid pro quo deal with Erik Prince

Contrary to prosecutors’ claims, the former executives now say the king’s visit to Moyock “was not a Blackwater marketing effort, but was instead a CIA-organized and CIA-sanctioned diplomatic event attended by dozens of U.S. Government officials with the aim not of increasing Blackwater’s potential profits, but instead of furthering relations between the two countries.”

The royal visit arose out of a personal relationship between the king and Blackwater founder Erik Prince and was organized with the assistance of other government agencies including the State Department and the Secret Service, they say.

5 ex-Blackwater execs cite CIA in Jordan gun gifts
The Associated Press – 2 June, 2012

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Five former executives of the private security firm once called Blackwater are defending themselves against federal firearms charges by saying the CIA asked them to provide guns as gifts to the king of Jordan.

Federal prosecutors in 2010 accused former Blackwater Worldwide president Gary Jackson and four past colleagues of various federal firearms violations. A group of charges related to five guns given to King Abdullah II of Jordan. Prosecutors said the guns were part of a bid for Blackwater to land a lucrative overseas contract, but allege that records tracking the guns were later falsified to claim the weapons were sold to individuals.

Defense attorneys filed declarations from two retired CIA officials who say they are familiar with gifts presented during the king’s 2005 visit to Blackwater’s Moyok, N.C., headquarters. John Macguire, who described himself as a CIA officer for 23 years ending in 2005, and Charles Seidel, who said he was CIA station chief in the Jordanian capital of Amman in 2005, said they would be willing to testify about their knowledge of government involvement if the spy agency allows it.

“I have information related to the transfer of firearms to the King of Jordan described in numerous counts of the indictment and how the U.S. government’s authorization for the transfer of those weapons took place,” Maguire said in a statement filed in federal court in Raleigh, where the case is pending.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment Saturday.

“The CIA does not, as a rule, comment on matters pending before U.S. courts,” agency spokesman Preston Golson said in an email.

On Friday, the former Blackwater executives asked the judge in the firearms case to dismiss the charges related to the gun gift and others in the indictment.

The filings were first reported by the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Va. (story HERE).

A group of investors bought Blackwater in December 2010 from founder Erik Prince. It is now called Academi.

Prince, a former Navy SEAL, opened Blackwater in 1997 in North Carolina, a half-hour drive south of the world’s largest naval base, in Norfolk, Va. He built it into a contractor that provided training and protection for government workers in war zones around the globe. But Blackwater guards were involved in a series of high-profile shootings, the most notorious being the 2007 shootings in Nisoor Square in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqis dead.

Academi’s owners said in January that the company settled the last lawsuit brought by survivors and estates of Iraqis killed during the Nisoor Square shooting.

Arlington, Va.-based Academi also announced in January that it had settled a lawsuit brought by families of former Blackwater security guards who were killed and mutilated during a mission in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. Two of the guards’ bodies were photographed hanging from a Fallujah bridge, producing one of the most disturbing images of the Iraq war. …source