Blackwater USA has been developing its in-house intelligence capabilities, publicly indicated by their regular hiring of retirees from the intelligence community. The company has been openly agressive in recruiting highly-qualified former intel officers, so it came as surprise to learn that Total Intelligence Solutions has been launched as a non-Blackwater entity.
Although Blackwater-watcher Bill Sizemore reported that an official company spokesman denied any corporate affiliation, the principals are not only all high level Blackwater employees, but the new company touts direct links with Erik Prince-owned entities like The Terrorism Research Center.
A Blackwater spokesperson described Total Intelligence Solutions as “under the Prince umbrella," but there is a clear attempt to not link the private intelligence gathering endeavor with Blackwater Security. Instead, three current Blackwater senior employees, Cofer Black, Rick Prado, and Rob Richer--also former high-level CIA employees--have spun off the separate corporate intelligence consultancy.
Most, if not all, private security companies integrate intel gathering as a cornerstone of their operations and services. Blackwater has always offered intelligence services, but has found numerous restrictions when working for their government clients. The foray into the private sector under a different corporate brand should free them up to pursue clients without answering to their main Blackwater client--the State Department.
Total Intelligence Solutions seems to graft the real-world experience of Blackwater's ex-CIA hires onto the rather geek-like underpinnings of the Terrorism Research Center--a company started by a group of computer nerds who parlayed their decision to buy the URL "www.terrorism.com" in the mid 90s into a minor training and intelligence consultancy.
TRC was initially more of a hobby for the founders to create a database of terrorist events and group profiles on their time off and then see if there were patterns. However, the events of 9/11 and googling journalists soon turned the deskbound keyboardists into terrorism experts. TRC was eventually purchased by Erik Prince and now has expanded its scope dramatically. TRC runs training programs like "Mirror Image" and tracks global terrorism threats much like the OSAC database and other incident tracking services.
The core product of the new Erik Prince-funded, Alexandria, Virginia-based TIS offers a similar world map of incidents, with a higher level of risk management for global corporations. The staffing of TRC slash TIS has also expanded to include experts on terrorism financing, tactics, psychology and history--a one-stop shopping center for any client wanting a global or local perspective on terrorism.
TIS's website says they "will support Fortune 500 businesses through its Global Fusion Center (GFC), a 24/7 intelligence fusion and warning center that monitors civil unrest, terrorism, economic stability, environmental and health concerns, and information technology security. The GFC fuses information from thousands of open and proprietary sources to create predictive intelligence for an international client base."
(Editor’s note: predictive intelligence is also the service offered by Praedict, Iraqslogger’s parent company)
Muddying the already "black water" is that Cofer Black has his own intel/consulting venture,The Black Group. Black touts his own set of corporate partners that can provide canines, event security, and even chem-bio expertise. Matt Devost, the president of TIS and original principal of TRC, also has his own company that can provide a list of competing services.
The other two top officers of TIS, Rob Richer is BW's VP for Intel and was formerly number two in the CIA's Clandestine Service, and Rick Prado is head of Blackwater's "Special Government Programs" and served in Latin America with the CIA's current director of the Clandestine Service. Cofer, Richer and Prado seem to be part of the program to feather the Blackwater nest with former high-level government employees..
Private intelligence companies run the gamut from active to passive these days. The Lincoln Group has morphed from media management to a “private Directorate of Operations” as one former employee described it. Other intelligence companies exist to provide insight and information gathering of open source data on a customized or subscription basis, similar to Stratfor.
Private security and intelligence firms are increasingly coming under scrutiny for lack of transparency and accountability in their work on government contracts. Firms like Diligence recently got into trouble by posing as British Intelligence to gain access to information on an upcoming audit inside KPMG. UK-based Erinys made the news when it was discovered they had employed former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.
Blackwater's move into corporate intelligence is both smart and timely, but the Diligence/KPMG debacle may prompt further inquiry on what exactly private intelligence companies actually do and don’t do. Private intelligence is actually a bigger potential marketplace than private security, estimated to be a $50 billion marketplace in 2004. Some may view Blackwater's unannounced links to TIS as a suspicious and impenetrable corporate move, though others may look at it as the right response at the right time.
For further reading, see last week's piece on Blackwater's current corporate growth.
