Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

^{CHAPTER SIXTEEN} COFER BLACK: THE GLOVES COME OFF

SINCE 9/11, few people have had the kind of access to President Bush and covert “war on terror” planning as Ambassador J. Cofer Black. A thirty-year CIA veteran, Black was a legendary figure in the shadowy world of international espionage, having been personally marked for death by Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. He rose to prominence in the spy world following the central role he played in Sudan in catching the famed international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as “Carlos the Jackal.” Black had spent his career in Africa and the Middle East, and when the 9/11 attacks happened, he enthusiastically seized a key role in plotting out the immediate U.S. response.

On September 13, 2001—two days after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—Black was sitting in the White House Situation Room.¹ The career CIA veteran was there to brief the President on the kind of campaign he had prepared for since joining the agency in 1974 but had been barred from carrying out.² After clandestine operations training, Black had been sent to Africa, where he spent the bulk of his CIA career. He worked in Zambia during the Rhodesian War, then Somalia and South Africa during the apartheid regime’s brutal war against the black majority.³ During his time in Zaire, Black worked on the Reagan administration’s covert weapons program to arm anticommunist forces in Angola.⁴ After two decades in the CIA and a stint in London, Black arrived under diplomatic cover at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, where he served as CIA Station Chief from 1993 to 1995.⁵ There, he watched as a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden built up his international network into what the CIA would describe at the end of Black’s tour as “the Ford Foundation of Sunni Islamic terrorism.”⁶

During much of the 1990s, agents tracking bin Laden worked under an “Operating Directive” that restricted them to intelligence collection on bin Laden and his network; they did not yet have authorization from the Clinton administration to conduct covert actions.⁷ In bin Laden, Black saw a man who was a threat and who needed to be taken out. The administration, however, refused to authorize the type of lethal action against bin Laden and his cronies favored by Black. Some of Black’s men were enthusiastic about killing the wealthy Saudi but were rebuffed. “Unfortunately, at that time permissions to kill—officially called Lethal Findings—were taboo in the outfit,” according to CIA operative Billy Waugh, who worked closely with Black in Sudan. “In the early 1990s we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders.”⁸ Among Waugh’s rejected ideas was an alleged plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum and dump his body at the Iranian Embassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran, an idea Waugh said Cofer Black “loved.”⁹

But while Black and the CIA watched bin Laden, they, too, were under surveillance. In 1994, bin Laden’s group in Khartoum had reportedly determined that Black, who maintained cover as a simple embassy diplomat, was indeed CIA.¹⁰ In his definitive book on the secret history of the CIA and bin Laden, Ghost Wars, Steve Coll wrote that bin Laden’s men began to track Black’s routes to and from the U.S. Embassy. “Black and his case officers picked up this surveillance and started to watch those who were watching them,” Coll wrote. “The CIA officers saw that bin Laden’s men were setting up a ‘kill zone’ near the US embassy. They couldn’t tell whether the attack was going to be a kidnapping, a car bombing, or an ambush with assault rifles, but they were able to watch bin Laden’s group practice the operation on a Khartoum street. As the weeks passed, the surveillance and counter-surveillance grew more and more intense. On one occasion they found themselves in a high-speed chase. On another the CIA officers leveled loaded shotguns at the Arabs who were following them. Eventually, Black dispatched the US ambassador to complain to the Sudanese government. Exposed, the plotters retreated.”¹¹ When Black left Khartoum, bin Laden was more powerful than when the veteran spy had arrived; a fact that would help fuel what would become Black’s professional obsession for years to come.

Black’s greatest triumph in Sudan, therefore, resulted from the capture of an international fugitive whose notoriety long predated bin Laden’s. Billy Waugh described how, in Sudan, he was pulled off surveillance of someone who “wasn’t much of a big fish at the time”—Osama bin Laden—for “the biggest fish” in December 1993.¹² Waugh described a meeting at the Khartoum Embassy where Black announced their new target: “In this city of one million souls, we would be responsible for finding and fixing none other than Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the man known far and wide as Carlos the Jackal, the world’s most famous terrorist.”¹³ After the meeting, Waugh recalled, “Cofer Black pulled me aside and said, ‘Billy, this is the man. You’ve got to get this guy.’ At that moment, given the gravity evident in his voice, I knew the agency was making this a top priority…. I wanted to be the guy who caught this asshole.”¹⁴ Carlos was accused of a series of political killings and bombings throughout the 1970s and ’80s and, while Cofer Black was in Sudan, was perhaps the most famous wanted man in the world.

Black, Waugh, and the Jackal team caught a break when Carlos called a trusted bodyguard from overseas to keep him out of trouble, after Carlos’s guard had been thrown in a Khartoum jail for drunkenly waving a pistol at a local shopkeeper.¹⁵ They were able to ID the new bodyguard and his vehicle when he arrived in Khartoum and eventually traced the Toyota Cressida to the Jackal’s home. After months of careful and detailed surveillance from a rented apartment with a view of his home, the move was made in August 1994.¹⁶ Waugh wrote of entering the CIA station that day, unsure of Carlos’s fate: “Immediately, Cofer and the fine lady station manager handed me a glass of champagne. Cofer bellowed, ‘Toast, Billy, you sweet son of a bitch. Carlos is in prison in France.’”¹⁷ The arrest of the Jackal secured Cofer Black’s legendary status in CIA circles and remains one of his top career bragging points. After Khartoum, Black was named in 1995 as CIA Task Force Chief in the Near East and South Asia Division, continuing his monitoring of bin Laden’s network, before a brief stint in 1998 as Deputy Chief of the Agency’s Latin America Division.¹⁸ In 1999, Black was awarded a significant promotion, heading up the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC).¹⁹

By the time Black officially took over at CTC, his nemesis, bin Laden, was a household name, publicly accused of masterminding and ordering the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than two hundred people, among them twelve U.S. citizens. Bin Laden left Sudan shortly after Black did, allegedly relocating to Afghanistan. Once a name known only in intelligence circles and in the Arab and Muslim world, bin Laden was now on FBI most-wanted posters. Among Black’s duties beginning in 1999 was overseeing the special bin Laden unit of the CTC, known as Alec Station—internally referred to as the “Manson family,” for its cultlike obsession with “the rising al Qaeda threat.”²⁰ Black dove enthusiastically into planning and overseeing covert operations. “He would make pronouncements that were meant to be dramatic and tough-guy colloquial—to make you think, Oh, my God, this guy’s got brass balls, and he knows the score,” said Daniel Benjamin, head of the National Security Council’s counterterrorism team in the Clinton administration, in an interview with Vanity Fair. “He’d say things like, ‘No more screwing around. This is going to get rough, and people are gonna come home in body bags. That’s all there is to it. You guys gotta know that.’ He’d talk about body bags all the time.”²¹

Shortly after Black officially took over the CTC, the CIA made a damning admission to the White House in early December 1999. “After four years and hundreds of millions of dollars, Alec Station had yet to recruit a single source within bin Laden’s growing Afghanistan operation,” asserted investigative author James Bamford. “It was more than embarrassing—it was a scandal…. It was a dangerous time to be without intelligence. Within days, the 9/11 plotters began their operation.”²² While Black was technically in charge, he had only recently been named to that position, and he would later complain that he and his colleagues within the CTC were not given adequate support to take out bin Laden. “When I started this job in 1999, I thought there was a good chance I was going to be sitting right here in front of you,” Black told the 9/11 Commission in April 2004. “The bottom line here, and I have to tell you, and I’ll take part of the blame on this, I kind of failed my people despite doing everything I could. We didn’t have enough people to do the job. And we didn’t have enough money by magnitudes.” ²³ Black asserted that the CTC “had as many people as three infantry companies [that] can be expected to cover a front of a few kilometers” even though “our counterterrorism center has worldwide responsibilities.” ²⁴ Black said that before 9/11, when it came to “numbers of people, finances, and operational flexibility,” these were “choices made for us. Made for the CIA and made for my counterterrorism center.”²⁵

There were indeed budget cuts happening during Black’s tenure—in 1999, he faced a 30 percent reduction in the CTC’s cash operating budget, including in the bin Laden unit.²⁶ Some analysts, though, said lack of resources was not the heart of the problem. Rather, they say, it stemmed from Black and his allies’ strong emphasis on paramilitary covert operations over the more tedious work of infiltrating Al Qaeda or bin Laden’s circle.²⁷ In 1999, briefing documents Black’s office had prepared for the Clinton White House acknowledged that “without penetrations of [the] UBL organization,” the CIA was in trouble. Black’s brief said that there was a need “to recruit sources” but added that “recruiting terrorist sources is difficult.” ²⁸ What was done (or not) about this problem would be the source of a substantial amount of finger-pointing after 9/11.

In the two years before 9/11, Black’s strategy to fight Al Qaeda focused on using Afghanistan’s neighbor, Uzbekistan, as a launching pad into Afghanistan.²⁹ Black clandestinely traveled to the capital of Tashkent and oversaw U.S. funding and training of an Uzbek paramilitary force that would supposedly try to kidnap bin Laden or his deputies through “covert snatch operations.”³⁰ Uzbekistan’s dictator, Islam Karimov, was fighting his own war against Islamic groups in the country and was adept at using threats of Islamic rebellion to justify wide-ranging repressive domestic policies, including arresting prodemocracy activists.³¹ When the CIA came knocking, Karimov was happy to use the veneer of a war against bin Laden to justify covert military aid from Washington. While the CIA was able to use the country’s air bases for some operations and install communications and eavesdropping equipment inside Uzbekistan, the end result of Black’s covert U.S. support was that the brutal leader, Karimov, received millions of dollars of CIA money, which he used “to keep his torture chambers running,” according to Bamford. “And the commando training would be useful to continue the repression of women and ethnic minorities.”³² Karimov was also known to have political enemies boiled to death; a practice the British ambassador in the country said was “not an isolated incident.”³³

Black also kicked up U.S. covert support for Ahmed Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir” and his Northern Alliance, which regarded bin Laden and Al Qaeda as enemies. On at least one occasion as CTC director, Black met face to face with Massoud—in Tajikistan in the summer of 2000.³⁴ Black and his units’ heavy reliance on Massoud in confronting Al Qaeda was controversial—even within the intelligence world. Massoud’s forces represented an ethnic minority in Afghanistan’s complicated landscape and were based in the north, far from bin Laden’s main operations. There were also broader concerns. “While one part of the CIA was bankrolling Massoud’s group, another part, the CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center, was warning that he posed a great danger,” according to Bamford. “His people, they warned, were continuing to smuggle large amounts of opium and heroin into Europe. The British came to the same conclusion.”³⁵ White House counterterror expert Richard Clarke opposed the military alliance with Massoud, describing the Northern Alliance as “drug runners” and “human rights abusers.”³⁶ Black, though, told his colleagues that this support was about “preparing the battlefield for World War Three.”³⁷ Massoud would not live to see it, though. He was assassinated, allegedly by Al Qaeda operatives posing as journalists, on September 9, 2001.³⁸ During this time, Black was also pressing the Air Force to accelerate its production of an unmanned Predator spy drone that could be equipped with Hellfire missiles to launch at bin Laden and his lieutenants.³⁹

Some former counterterrorism officials have alleged that during Black’s time at CTC, there was more interest in using Al Qaeda to justify building up the bureaucracy of the CIA’s covert actions hub, the Directorate of Operations, than the specific task of stopping bin Laden. “Cofer Black, he arrived, and he was the man, he was the pro from the D.O.,” said veteran CIA official Michael Scheuer, who headed the bin Laden unit from 1995 to 1999 before Black’s appointment.⁴⁰ Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke told Vanity Fair, “There’s some truth to the fact that they didn’t have enough money, but the interesting thing is that they didn’t put any of the money they had into going after al-Qaeda.” Clarke alleged, “They would say ‘Al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda’ when they were trying to get money, and then when you gave them money it didn’t go to al-Qaeda. They were trying to rebuild the D.O. [Directorate of Operations], and so a lot of it went to D.O. infrastructure, and they would say, ‘Well, you can’t start by going after al-Qaeda, you have to repair the whole D.O.’… And what I would say to them is ‘Surely there must be a dollar somewhere in C.I.A. that you could re-program into going after al-Qaeda,’ and they would say ‘No.’ The other way of saying that is everything else they’re doing is more important.”⁴¹

The public blame war over who in the U.S. intelligence community and the Clinton and Bush administrations was responsible for the failure to prevent 9/11 intensified when Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial was published in September 2006. In it, Woodward detailed a meeting that reportedly took place on July 10, 2001, two months before the 9/11 attacks. Then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with Black, then head of the CTC, at CIA headquarters. The two men reviewed current U.S. intelligence on bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Black, Woodward reported, “laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.”⁴² At the time, “Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.”⁴³ After reviewing the intelligence with Black, Tenet called National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice from the car en route to the White House. When Black and Tenet met with Rice that day, according to Woodward, they “felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off.” Black later said, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”⁴⁴

On August 6, 2001, President Bush was at his Crawford Ranch, where he was delivered a Presidential Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” It twice mentioned the possibility that Al Qaeda operatives may try to hijack airplanes, saying FBI information “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in [the U.S.] consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”⁴⁵ Nine days later, Black addressed a secret Pentagon counter-terrorism conference. “We’re going to be struck soon,” Black said. “Many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.”⁴⁶

While the debate on responsibility for 9/11 would continue for years—with Clinton and Bush administration officials hurling stones at one another—it was irrelevant to Cofer Black in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Black found himself in the driver’s seat with a Commander in Chief ready and eager to make Black’s covert action dreams a reality. Black had long been frustrated by the restraints and prohibitions governing U.S. covert actions—namely a prohibition against assassinations—and the war on terror had changed the rules of the game overnight. “My personal emotion was, It is now officially started,” Black said. “The analogy would be the junkyard dog that had been chained to the ground was now going to be let go. And I just couldn’t wait.”⁴⁷

In his initial meeting with President Bush after the 9/11 attacks, Black came prepared with a PowerPoint presentation, and he threw papers on the floor as he spoke of deploying forces inside Afghanistan.⁴⁸ On September 13, he told Bush point-blank that his men would aim to kill Al Qaeda operatives. “When we’re through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,” Black promised, in a performance that would earn him a designation in the inner circle of the administration as “the flies-on-the-eyeballs guy.”⁴⁹ The President reportedly loved Black’s style; when he told Bush the operation would not be bloodless, the President said, “Let’s go. That’s war. That’s what we’re here to win.”⁵⁰

That September, President Bush gave the green light to Black and the CIA to begin inserting special operations forces into Afghanistan. Before the core CIA team, Jawbreaker, deployed on September 27, 2001, Black gave his men direct and macabre directions. “Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement,” Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen. “I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead…. They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that.”⁵¹ Schroen said it was the first time in his thirty-year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempting a capture.⁵² Black asked if he had made himself clear. “Perfectly clear, Cofer,” Schroen told him. “I don’t know where we’ll find dry ice out there in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field.”⁵³ Black later explained why this would be necessary. “You’d need some DNA,” Black said. “There’s a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!”⁵⁴

As the United States plotted its invasion of Afghanistan, Black continued with his apparent fixation with corporal mutilation when he accompanied Colin Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, to Moscow for meetings with Russian officials. When the Russians, speaking from experience, warned Black of the prospect for a U.S. defeat at the hands of mujahedeen, Black shot back. “We’re going to kill them,” he said. “We’re going to put their heads on sticks. We’re going to rock their world.”⁵⁵ Interestingly, the covert operations Black organized immediately after 9/11 relied heavily on private contractors, answering directly to him, rather than active-duty military forces. Black’s men used their contacts to recruit about sixty former Delta Force, ex-SEALs, and other Special Forces operators as independent contractors for the initial mission, making up the majority of the first Americans into Afghanistan after 9/11.⁵⁶

In late 2001, Black was exactly where he had wanted to be his entire career, playing an essential role in crafting and implementing the Bush administration’s counterterror policies. “There was this enormous sense among the officers that had lived in this campaign before Sept. 11 that… finally, these lawyers and these cautious decision makers who had gotten in our way before can be overcome, and we can be given the license that we deserve to have had previously,” said Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars.⁵⁷ Black’s CTC rapidly expanded from three hundred staffers to twelve hundred. ⁵⁸ “It was the Camelot of counterterrorism,” a former counterterrorism official told the Washington Post. “We didn’t have to mess with others—and it was fun.”⁵⁹ People were abducted from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other hot spots and flown to the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—most held without charge for years, designated as enemy combatants and denied access to any legal system. Others were kept at hellish prison camps inside Afghanistan and other countries. In 2002, Black testified to Congress about the new “operational flexibility” employed in the war on terror. “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11,” Black said. “After 9/11 the gloves come off.”⁶⁰

Black would later brag, in 2004, that “over 70 percent” of Al Qaeda’s leadership had been arrested, detained, or killed, and “more than 3,400 of their operatives and supporters have also been detained and put out of action.”⁶¹ As part of this new “operational flexibility,” the CIA carried out “extraordinary renditions” of prisoners—shipping them to countries with questionable or blatantly horrible human rights records, where they were sometimes psychologically or physically tortured. The Washington Post reported that Black’s CTC heavily utilized its “Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.”⁶² According to the Post’s Dana Priest:

The CIA would provide the host countries with questions it wanted answered by the prisoners. One anonymous U.S. official directly involved in rendering captives told the Post, “We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.”⁶⁴ Another official who supervised the capture and transfer of prisoners told the paper, “If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job,” adding, “I don’t think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA.”⁶⁵

Black played an integral role from the very beginning in the use of “extraordinary renditions” in the war on terror, beginning in November 2001 when the United States captured alleged Al Qaeda trainer Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi. ⁶⁶ New York-based FBI agent Jack Cloonan felt that Libi could be a valuable witness against Zacarias Moussaoui and alleged would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid, both of whom had trained at the Khalden camp Libi allegedly ran. Cloonan told FBI agents to “handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York.”⁶⁷ He said, “I remember talking on a secure line to them. I told them, ‘Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don’t. It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the bureau’s reputation, if you don’t. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is right.’”⁶⁸ But that didn’t sit well with the CIA, which felt it could get more information out of Libi using other methods. Invoking promises of wider post-9/11 latitude in questioning suspects, the CIA Afghanistan station chief asked Black, then counterterrorism chief, to arrange for the agency to take control of Libi. Black in turn asked CIA Director George Tenet, who got permission for the rendition from the White House over the objections of FBI Director Robert Mueller.⁶⁹

The White House, meanwhile, had its lawyers feverishly working to develop legal justifications for these ultraviolent policies. It “formally” told the CIA it couldn’t be prosecuted for “torture lite” techniques that did not result in “organ failure” or “death.”⁷⁰ Black had quickly earned an insider’s pass to the White House after 9/11, and his former colleagues said he would return from meetings at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. “inspired and talking in missionary terms.”⁷¹

A year later, with Osama bin Laden still at large, releasing videotaped messages and praising anti-U.S. resistance, Cofer Black abruptly left the CIA. Some charged that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had him fired after Black allegedly served as a “deep background” source for a Washington Post story published on April 17, 2002, that described how the Pentagon allegedly allowed bin Laden to escape after being injured at Tora Bora in Afghanistan.⁷² In its lead paragraph, the paper called it the administration’s “gravest error in the war against al Qaeda.”⁷³ A month later, buried within another Post story on May 19, came this announcement: “In other developments yesterday, CIA officials said Cofer Black, head of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center for the past three years, has been assigned to another position. They described the move as part of normal turnover at the agency.”⁷⁴ The UPI news agency later interviewed former CIA officials, one of whom said, “Black was fired. He was kicked out.”⁷⁵ The news agency also reported, “Not only was Black fired, but he was barred from entering CIA headquarters. ‘That’s standard procedure if you’ve been fired,’ former CIA Iraq analyst Judith Yaphe told UPI. Humiliated, Black was restricted to an agency satellite location at Tysons Corner, which separated him from old, trusted colleagues and the comfort of familiar surroundings.” ⁷⁶ Black, however, was not yet finished in government and clearly retained friends in high places. On October 10, 2002, President Bush appointed him as his coordinator for counterterrorism, with the rank of at-large ambassador at the State Department .⁷⁷

Shortly after assuming his new post, Black spoke to a group of Egyptian journalists via satellite from Cairo, where he was pressed on several of the administration’s new “war on terror” policies. “I have been to Guantánamo,” Black told them. “I must say that I have been very well pleased. I mean, you know, you and I would be very lucky to be housed that way by our enemies.”⁷⁸ It wouldn’t take long for controversy to hit him.

During the 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush declared, “Tonight, I am instructing the leaders of the FBI, the CIA, the Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense to develop a Terrorist Threat Integration Center, to merge and analyze all threat information in a single location. Our government must have the very best information possible.”⁷⁹ As part of this mission, Black was to coordinate the government’s annual report on “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” which would serve as a report card of sorts for how the administration’s “war on terror” was progressing. A few months later, on April 30, 2003, Black released the report and claimed that 2002 had seen “the lowest level of terrorism in more than 30 years.”⁸⁰ While there was little public scrutiny of the statement at the time, that would not be the case when Black released the report a year later and made an almost identical claim.

On April 29, 2004, with anti-U.S. resistance in Iraq exploding, Black and Deputy Secretary of State Armitage unveiled “Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003,” boldly claiming it showed that the United States was winning its loosely defined war on terror. “You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight,” said Armitage. The report, he said, was prepared “so that all Americans will know just what we are doing to keep them safe.”⁸¹ For his part, Black said that 2003 “saw the lowest number of international terrorist attacks since 1969. That’s a 34-year low. There were 190 acts of international terrorism in 2003. That’s a slight decrease from the 198 attacks that occurred the previous year, and a drop of 45 percent from the 2001 level of 346 attacks.”⁸² For the White House, the report was held up as clear evidence of a successful strategy; after all, the Congressional Research Service called the State Department’s annual report “the most authoritative unclassified U.S. government document that assesses terrorist attacks.”⁸³

The trouble was, it was a fraud. Congressional investigators and independent scientists soon revealed the truth. “The data that the report highlights are ill-defined and subject to manipulation—and give disproportionate weight to the least important terrorist acts,” wrote Alan Krueger and David Laitin, two independent experts, from Princeton and Stanford, in the Washington Post shortly after the report was released. “The only verifiable information in the annual reports indicates that the number of terrorist events has risen each year since 2001, and in 2003 reached its highest level in more than 20 years…. The alleged decline in terrorism in 2003 was entirely a result of a decline in non-significant events.”⁸⁴ Instead of a 4 percent decrease in terrorist acts, as Black’s report claimed, there had actually been a 5 percent increase.⁸⁵ Attacks classified as “significant,” meanwhile, hit the highest level since 1982.⁸⁶ What’s more, the report stopped its tally on November 11, 2003, even though there were a number of major terrorist incidents after that date.⁸⁷ Despite the fact that in speeches, U.S. officials routinely referred to resistance fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan as “terrorists,” in Black’s report attacks on forces in Iraq were classified as combat, not terrorism. Black said they “do not meet the longstanding U.S. definition of international terrorism because they were directed at [combatants], essentially American and coalition forces on duty.”⁸⁸ California Democratic Representative Ellen Tauscher later said this was evidence that the administration “continues to deny the true cost of the war and refuses to be honest with the American people.”⁸⁹

On May 17, 2004, in a letter to Black’s direct supervisor, Secretary of State Colin Powell, California Democratic Representative Henry Waxman, the ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee, blasted the report, saying its conclusions were based on a “manipulation of the data” that “serve the Administration’s political interests…. Simply put, it is deplorable that the State Department report would claim that terrorism attacks are decreasing when in fact significant terrorist activity is at a 20-year high.”⁹⁰

“The erroneous good news on terrorism also came at a very convenient moment,” wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “The White House was still reeling from the revelations of the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who finally gave public voice to the view of many intelligence insiders that the Bush administration is doing a terrible job of fighting Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Bush was on a ‘Winning the War on Terror’ campaign bus tour in the Midwest.”⁹¹ By June, the White House was forced to issue a major correction of the report, acknowledging there had actually been a significant increase in terror attacks since the launch of Bush’s “war on terror.” The revised report said that 3,646 people were wounded by terror attacks in 2003, more than double the number in Black’s original report, while 625 were killed, dwarfing the report’s original count of 307.⁹² As Krugman observed, Black and other officials blamed the errors on “‘inattention, personnel shortages and [a] database that is awkward and antiquated.’ Remember: we’re talking about the government’s central clearinghouse for terrorism information, whose creation was touted as part of a ‘dramatic enhancement’ of counterterrorism efforts more than a year before this report was produced. And it still can’t input data into its own computers? It should be no surprise, in this age of Halliburton, that the job of data input was given to and botched by private contractors.”⁹³ Bush’s Democratic challenger in the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry, charged through a spokesperson that Bush was “playing fast and loose with the truth when it comes to the war on terror,” adding that the White House “has now been caught trying to inflate its success on terrorism.”⁹⁴ There was talk of heads rolling at the State Department over the report, but not Black’s. “It was an honest mistake,” Black claimed, “not a deliberate deception.”⁹⁵

Despite the controversy, the State Department post allowed Black to remain at the center of U.S. counterterror policy. Black worked directly under Colin Powell, with whom he reportedly shared a common adversary within the administration—Donald Rumsfeld. As the Pentagon attempted to change U.S. policy after 9/11 to allow the military to insert Special Operations forces into countries without approval from the U.S. ambassador or CIA mission chief, Black became the point person in thwarting Rumsfeld’s plan. “I gave Cofer specific instructions to dismount, kill the horses and fight on foot—this is not going to happen,” Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, told the Washington Post, describing how he and others had stopped a half dozen Pentagon attempts to weaken chief-of-mission authority.⁹⁶ (Interestingly, Black, Armitage, and Powell all resigned within two weeks of one another in November 2004 after Bush’s reelection, while Rumsfeld continued on for another two years.)

Among Black’s other duties in his new post was coordinating security for the 2004 Olympics in Greece. He traveled to Athens and oversaw the training of more than thirteen hundred Greek security personnel under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Assistance (ATA) program.⁹⁷ More than two hundred of those trained were instructed in handling underwater explosives and responding to possible WMD attacks.⁹⁸ Blackwater was awarded a contract for an undisclosed amount of money in 2003 to train “special security teams” in advance of the international games.⁹⁹ The company denied there was anything untoward about that contract and that Black’s subsequent hiring was unrelated.¹⁰⁰

On April 1, 2004, a day after the Blackwater Fallujah ambush, Black was testifying before the House Committee on International Relations in a hearing on “The Al Qaeda Threat” when he made his first public comments about Blackwater. “I can’t tell you how sad we all are to see that. And this takes me back; I have seen these things before,” he said. “I think since it specifically happened in the Fallujah area, which is very Saddam Hussein-oriented, tribally oriented, they do see us as the enemy, and their natural inclination, until we prove them otherwise, is to vent their frustration, what they see as their humiliation and defeat against an outside force, against representatives of that entity. It’s not that uncommon.”¹⁰¹ Black continued, “The people that did this were not, you know, three guys, you know, on an excellent adventure. You know, these are people that have had the training, have a vested interest.” Asked about “any relationship you see between Al Qaeda and that kind of Islamic terrorism” evidenced in Fallujah, Black responded, “I think it is, from our perspective, it’s associated, it’s in proximity. There’s not, specifically, a direct tie between that crowd and Al Qaeda as we know it. They just find themselves with the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”¹⁰²

The next month, Black was giving a keynote dinner address at Blackwater’s World SWAT Challenge. In a mass e-mail announcing the speech, Blackwater president Gary Jackson wrote, “Dinner on Thursday night at Water-side has a fantastic guest speaker in Ambassador Cofer Black. Ambassador Black’s responsibilities include coordinating U.S. Government efforts to improve counterterrorism cooperation with foreign governments, including the policy and planning of the Department’s Antiterrorism Training Assistance Program.”¹⁰³

In late 2004, two months before the U.S. presidential election, Black grabbed headlines after claiming on Pakistani television that the United States was near to capturing bin Laden. “If he has a watch, he should be looking at it because the clock is ticking,” Black declared. “He will be caught.”¹⁰⁴ These bold declarations were controversial and quickly put senior White House and Pakistani officials on the defensive in the media. In November 2004, Black resigned his State Department post, he said, to explore new professional opportunities. “He thought it would be a good time between administrations to go,” said State Department spokesperson Adam Ereli. “He has a number of offers in the private sector, and he’s going to take some time to think about them.”¹⁰⁵

For a brief moment after 9/11, Cofer Black had helped run an unprecedented covert war that some officials had salivated for their entire careers. That now was history as human rights groups and lawyers worked feverishly to dismantle the shadowy system Black had worked so diligently to build. In 2005, he was targeted for sanction, along with George Tenet and another CIA official, by the agency’s Inspector General (IG) for bearing responsibility in the 9/11 intelligence failure.¹⁰⁶ The Bush Administration, however, worried that Tenet would retaliate and embarrass the White House by revealing damning information, buried the IG’s report, saving Black in the process.¹⁰⁷

Congressional Democrats would later use Black’s covert program as evidence that the Administration had “outsourced” the job of hunting bin Laden. But while his work as a government official may have ended, Black found a gold mine of opportunity in the dramatically expanding world of private military, intelligence, and security contracting—where human rights oversight was optional at best. On February 4, 2005, Blackwater USA officially announced that it had hired Black as the company’s vice chairman. “Ambassador Black brings with him thirty years of experience in combating terrorism around the globe and absolute devotion to freedom and democracy and the United States of America,” said Erik Prince. “We are honored to have him as part of our great team.”¹⁰⁸

For Blackwater, hiring Cofer Black was an unbelievable score. In marketing terms, it would be almost impossible to rival. The company moved swiftly to use him as a brand in and of himself. In August 2005, Black incorporated his own “consulting” practice, The Black Group, which would specialize in executive protection and security. “The 9/11 attacks were designed to damage the economy of the United States,” Black said in a statement on his Web site. “To successfully inflict the greatest possible harm, terrorists will target the lifeblood of a nation: its economy. For that reason, Fortune 500 companies are especially attractive targets as governments continue to emphasize Homeland Security. We seek to anticipate and defeat the next terrorist tactic—disruptions of supply chains, coordinated attacks on key assets or customers, or even assassinations of top executives. Corporations are the most vulnerable targets. It’s our job to keep them safe.”¹⁰⁹ The Black Group boasted, “With leadership drawn from the Executive Branch of the United States Government, The Black Group has the practical experience and the network to mitigate any security issue. Ensure the security of your people and your assets.”¹¹⁰

On The Black Group’s Web site, various images of potential targets flash on the screen: a crowd gathered at the Mall in Washington, D.C., a power plant, a man in a suit using a device to inspect the bottom of a car in an underground garage, a Wall Street sign. On the contact page, the other main figure listed on the site is Francis McLennand, another career CIA officer, who worked alongside Black at the agency.¹¹¹ The contact phone number for the company was the same number used by Erik Prince’s “Prince Group” in McLean, Virginia, not far from the CIA Counterterrorism Center Black once headed.

Few other Americans had their hands as deeply into the inner workings of U.S. covert operations in the post-9/11 world as Cofer Black. He soon would begin acting as a godfather of sorts to the mercenary community as it refined its rebranding campaign. Potential Blackwater clients could now assume they were getting direct access to the resources of the CIA and intelligence world from “a leadership team drawn from senior levels of the United States government”¹¹²—something few other private firms could boast or imply. Black was a heavy hitter among the heaviest of them, the man who caught Carlos the Jackal and brought down the Taliban. He would soon take the lead in promoting Blackwater as a privatized peacekeeping force that could deploy at a moment’s notice in places like Darfur, Sudan, or domestically in U.S. Homeland Security operations. Other influential ex-government officials would soon join him at Blackwater as the company turned its sights on lucrative disaster contracting in the United States in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in late 2005. But just as Black was rolling up his sleeves in his fancy new digs, more Blackwater men were dying in Iraq in what would be the deadliest days to date for the company.