Results tagged “private security contractors” from SpyTalk

DC Firm Becomes Intelligence Powerhouse

By Jeff Stein | October 22, 2008 2:18 PM | | Comments (0)

It snuck up on cat's feet -- a modest press release here, a short news announcement there.

But overnight, it seems, DC Capital Partners has become an intelligence and security powerhouse.

The firm, with offices downtown and in Alexandria, Va., was founded in 1988 by venture capitalist Thomas J. Campbell as a private equity investment company. Since then it has expanded from capitalizing middle market firms with military contracts into acquiring major players in U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism consulting.

Its board includes heavy hitters like Richard Armitage, the former deputy Secretary of State, Eric Shinseki,  the Army chief of staff who clashed with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over troop needs for an invasion of Iraq, Jeffrey Smith, former general counsel of the CIA, and Henry Crumpton, the State Department's former counterterrorism coordinator.

But its recent hiring of Jose Rodriguez, the controversial former head of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, signaled that DCCP had gone big-time into the spook world, with its tentacles deeply wound up in the work of U.S. intelligence agencies and the departments of defense, energy and homeland security. 

The new issue of Intelligence Online, the Paris-based newsletter, has a chart showing the hydra-headed conglomerate.

Tags: CIA, DC Capital Partners, Defense Department, Donald Rumsfeld, Energy Department, Eric Shinseki, Henry Crumpton, homeland security, Jose Rodriguez, private security contractors, Richard Armitage

American in Mexico Torture Training Scandal Linked to Miami Anti-Castro Group

By Jeff Stein | July 22, 2008 7:00 AM | | Comments (0)

I'm a little late getting to this, what with everything else going on in the intelligence world, but an investigation by Mexico-based U.S. freelance reporter Kristin Bricker on the American contractors caught on video teaching torture techniques to police in Leon deserves belated attention.

Bricker has identified one of the men, Gerardo "Jerry" Arrechea as a "high-ranking member of the Comandos F4,"  a Miami based anti-Castro exile group that has vowed to carry out armed attacks on Cuba as well as Venezuela. 

Cuban exile groups long ago perfected the p.r. stunt of inviting TV cameras to "secret locations" in the Everglades to show their masked men crawling through mud with guns and vowing to overthrow Castro. But it's also true that the CIA has intermittently intrigued with such groups for half a century. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the connections Bricker turned up on Arrechea and his sidekick Jerry Wilson (AKA Orlando, AKA Andrew Wilson), last seen dragging a Mexican police trainee through his own vomit, are yet another sign that U.S. private security contractors are out of control. 

(Take a peek at my recent review of Tim Shorrock's Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, in The Washington Post, then read the rest of Bricker's comprehensive take.)



Tags: CIA, Cuba, Cuban exiles, interrogators, Mexico, Miami, private security contractors, torture