Mercenary torquewad Erik Prince graymailing prosecutors?

January 6th, 2010

The

in-depth Vanity Fair

profile of the infamous owner

of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is remarkable

on many levels–not least among them that Prince appeared

to give the story’s author, former CIA lawyer Adam Ciralsky, unprecedented

access to information about sensitive, classified and lethal operations not only of

Prince’s forces, but Prince himself. In the article, Prince is revealed not

just as owner of a company that covertly provided contractors

to the CIA for drone bombings and targeted

assassinations, but as an

actual CIA asset

himself.

While

the story appears

to be simply a profile of Prince,

it might actually be the world’s most famous

mercenary’s insurance policy against future criminal prosecution.

The term of art for what Prince appears to be doing in the VF interview is

graymail: a legal tactic that has been used for years by intelligence operatives or

assets who are facing prosecution or fear they soon will be. In short, these operatives or

assets threaten to reveal details of sensitive or classified operations in order to ward

off indictments or criminal charges, based on the belief that the government would

not want these details revealed. “The only reason Prince would do this

[interview] is that he feels he is in very serious jeopardy of criminal

charges,” says Scott Horton, a prominent national security

and military law expert. “He absolutely

would not do these things

otherwise.”

There is

no doubt Prince is in the

legal cross-hairs: There are reportedly

two separate Grand Juries investigating Blackwater on a

range of serious charges, ranging from gun smuggling to extralegal

killings; multiple civil lawsuits alleging war crimes and extrajudicial killings;

and Congress is investigating the assassination program in which Prince and his

company were central players. “Obviously, Prince does know a lot and the

government has to realize that once they start prosecuting him,” says

Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor and the executive

director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in

Washington. “In some ways, graymail is what

any good defense lawyer would do. This

is something that’s in your

arsenal.”

Jeremy Scahill