Enrique "Ric" Prado
Blackwater/XE

Former CIA Agent, Enrique "Ric" Prado

Jeremy Scahill interview  Prado and Erik Prince were the two figures that set up the CIA assassination program that Blackwater was at the center of. And what the documents that I obtained show is that Ric Prado, beginning in 2007, took the network of foreign operatives that Blackwater had developed for the CIA’s assassination program, operatives that Ric Prado describes in the documents I obtained as "deniable," and therefore a "big plus" to clients that would want to hire them, and attempted to offer this network of deniable assets around the world to the Drug Enforcement Administration. ....And among the services, you could pay more than $33,000 to have Ric Prado set up a - lead a four-man counter-surveillance team or counterintelligence team in the United States. You could pay $250,000 to have Prado set up a safe-house for you, plus expenses. And these services were also offered in places around the globe, in North Africa, in China, Japan, Russia, throughout Latin America.

[2010 Sept] Blackwater's Black Ops by Jeremy Scahill   The coordinator of Blackwater's covert CIA business, former CIA paramilitary officer Enrique "Ric" Prado, set up a global network of foreign operatives, offering their "deniability" as a "big plus" for potential Blackwater customers, according to company documents. The CIA has long used proxy forces to carry out extralegal actions or to shield US government involvement in unsavory operations from scrutiny. In some cases, these "deniable" foreign forces don't even know who they are working for. Prado and Prince built up a network of such foreigners while Blackwater was at the center of the CIA's assassination program, beginning in 2004. They trained special missions units at one of Prince's properties in Virginia with the intent of hunting terrorism suspects globally, often working with foreign operatives. A former senior CIA official said the benefit of using Blackwater's foreign operatives in CIA operations was that "you wouldn't want to have American fingerprints on it."