Former spooks run intelligence gathering and analysis outfit
Erik Prince’s security empire has an outfit called Total Intelligence Solutions which collects intelligence about natural disasters, business-friendly governments, overseas regulations, and global political developments for clients in industry and government
Follow the money. The Prince Group, the holding company which owns the controversial Blackwater Worldwide, is interested in more than providing body guards to State Department officials and legislators who visit Iraq. The group has been building an operation to collect intelligence about natural disasters, business-friendly governments, overseas regulations, and global political developments for clients in industry and government. The Washington Post’s Dana Hedgpeth writes that the operation, Total Intelligence Solutions, employs former CIA and miltiary intelligence people, and is run by chairman Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, and CEO Robert Richer, a former CIA associate deputy director of operations. “We’re not a private detective,” Black said. “We provide intelligence to our clients. It’s not about taking pictures. It’s business intelligence. We collect all information that’s publicly available. This is a completely legal enterprise. We break no laws. We don’t go anywhere near breaking laws. We don’t have to.”
Total Intel was launched in February by Erik Prince, who went from running a Moyock, North Carolina-based law enforcement training center to running a half-billion-dollar business called Blackwater Worldwide. Prince has nine other companies and subsidiaries in his Prince Group empire, offering different security and training services (one of his companies, Blackwater Security Consulting, is now being scrutinized after some of its employees killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in a 16 September incident). Prince created Total Intel by buying two companies owned by Matt Devost — the Terrorism Research Center and Technical Defense — and merging them with Black’s consulting group, the Black Group. Devost, a cybersecurity and risk management expert, is now president of Total Intel. Total Intel now has sixty-five full-time employees. Since 2000 the Terrorism Research Center portion of the company has done $1.5 million worth of contracts with the government, mainly from agencies like the Army, Navy, Air Force, Customs and the U.S. Special Operations Command buying its data subscription or other services.
