"After the invasion of Iraq, however, Blackwater grew far faster than Prince’s ability to manage it. The firm became, in Prince’s words, “something resembling its own branch of the military”... “They just ran out of people of the quality they needed,” a former senior U.S. military commander in Iraq tells Rolling Stone... Prince’s rising stock in post-9/11 America was also driven by his work with the CIA. According to Prince, he became an official asset, putting himself and his company’s resources at the spy agency’s disposal. Rolling Stone obtained an unpublished chapter of Prince’s book, which the CIA has blocked from release... Prince describes how, in addition to training CIA operatives and maintaining the agency’s drone fleet, he helped set up a program to train a terrorist hit squad at the behest of the spy agency. Prince writes that... he spent a “few million” recruiting and organizing a team of about a dozen foreign mercenaries... Prince says the off-the-books program had support...with then-Vice President Dick Cheney...Blackwater, but it soon fell apart — with deadly consequences. On September 16th, 2007, Blackwater personnel shot and killed 14 unarmed civilians in Nisour Square... The next day, the Iraqi government announced that it would revoke Blackwater’s license to operate and demanded to prosecute the Blackwater guards. The New York Times reported that Blackwater continued to operate in Iraq after Blackwater’s president authorized bribes of about $1 million to Iraqi officials, a charge Prince later dismissed as “false.”"