Blackwater's Sudan operations ignored U.S. sanctions

Quote: WASHINGTON -- The security contractor Blackwater Worldwide tried for two years to secure lucrative defense business in southern Sudan while the country was under U.S. economic sanctions, according to current and former U.S. officials and hundreds of pages of documents reviewed by McClatchy Newspapers. The effort to drum up new business in East Africa by Blackwater owner Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL who had close ties with top officials in the George W. Bush White House and the CIA, became a major element in a continuing four-year federal investigation into allegations of sanctions violations, illegal exports and bribery. The Obama administration, however, has decided for now not to bring criminal charges against Blackwater, according to a U.S. official close to the case. Blackwater, now known as Xe, is based in Moyock in northeastern North Carolina. Instead, the U.S. government and the private military contractor are negotiating a multimillion-dollar fine to settle allegations that Blackwater violated U.S. export control regulations in Sudan, Iraq and elsewhere. Prince renamed the company Xe Services in an apparent attempt to shake off a reputation for recklessness, and this month put it up for sale. Had the company been indicted, it could have been suspended from doing business with the U.S. government, and a conviction could have brought debarment from all government contracts, including providing guard services for the CIA and State Department in war zones. In recent weeks the Obama administration awarded the firm a $120 million State Department security contract, and about $100 million in new CIA work. Africa's largest country in land area, Sudan has been torn for more than two decades by a civil war. More than 2 million have been killed and millions more forced to flee, creating one of the planet's worst humanitarian crises. The story of Blackwater's efforts in Sudan is a tale of mixed motives that echo an earlier era of overseas empires, of evangelical Christians who offered to help defend Christian and animist southern Sudan from the Muslim Arab military dictatorship in the north, but also sought to exploit the region's oil and mineral wealth. According to two former senior U.S. officials, the firm headed by Prince, who has long been active in evangelical groups, at one point proposed a broad defense package that would have required southern Sudan to pledge as much as half of its mineral wealth to pay for Blackwater's services. It's also a story of a divided Bush administration. Prince personally lobbied Vice President ######## Cheney to lift the sanctions on southern Sudan, according to the documents and a former senior U.S. official, who said that one meeting took place aboard Air Force Two. Prince's aides also helped draft a letter from southern Sudan's leader, Salva Kiir, to President George W. Bush seeking an end to the sanctions. Cheney supported Blackwater's sales pitch, according to the documents. The State, Justice and Commerce departments, however, investigated whether Blackwater had violated the sanctions that were imposed on Sudan beginning in 1997, some of which the Bush administration lifted in late 2006. McClatchy reporters reviewed the documents on Blackwater's drive for a security contract with Sudan and interviewed more than a dozen senior officials who were involved in Sudan policy decisions in the Bush and Obama administrations. None would speak on the record because of the sensitivity surrounding a law enforcement investigation. The company didn't respond to repeated requests for comment.