Blackwater founder Erik Prince claims he was a CIA spy

Washington, Dec. 5 (ANI): Blackwater founder Erik Prince has revealed he was a 'CIA operative' who was given a mission to hunt down and kill al-Qaeda militants for the US Government wherever they could be found.

Prince, who appeared to be the ruthless face of American military outsourcing in Iraq, faced backlash when his employees were accused of shooting dead 17 Iraqi civilians at a Baghdad crossroads in 2007.

In his interview with Vanity Fair magazine, he claimed that his own file as a "vetted asset" was kept at the agency's headquarters.

Apart from his work in Iraq, Prince set up America's closest forward operating base to the Pakistani border in Afghanistan, and helped to train a CIA assassination team that had an alleged senior al-Qaeda financier and Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan as its targets.

Prince, who is a billionaire and former member of the US Navy Seal Special Forces, avoided publicity during his long period as a favoured security contractor for the Pentagon, the US State Department and the CIA, The Times reports.

Despite the US Department of Justice's long probe into the 2007 Baghdad massacre, Prince hasn't made any public statements on his own relationship with the CIA.

However, now he feels betrayed by the CIA that has partially "outed" him.

"When it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under a bus. I'm an easy target. I'm from a Republican family and I own this company outright. Our competitors have nameless, faceless management teams," he said. (ANI)