WASHINGTON — The CIA's decision to hire contractors from Blackwater USA for a covert assassination program was part of an expanding relationship in which the agency has relied on the widely criticized firm for tasks including guarding CIA lockups and loading missiles on Predator aircraft, according to current and former U.S. government officials.
The 2004 contract cemented what was then a burgeoning relationship with Blackwater, setting the stage for a series of departures by senior CIA officials who took high-level positions with the North Carolina security company.
The revolving door helped fuel a backlash against what many inside the agency and on Capitol Hill came to regard as an overuse of outside firms, many of which made millions of dollars after filling their staffs with former CIA employees.
"I have believed for a long time that the intelligence community is over-reliant on contractors to carry out its work," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "This is especially a problem when contractors are used to carry out activities that are inherently governmental."
Her comment underscored how the Blackwater contract's disclosure has renewed questions about the sort of work the CIA has outsourced since the Sept. 11 attacks. In recent years, the agency has also faced criticism for using contractors to interrogate prisoners.
Experts said that there may not be any legal barrier against using contractors to kill terrorism suspects or subject them to brutal interrogations. Still, they said, there tends to be deep public discomfort with the idea of delegating certain activities -- whether issuing pardons, making arrests or pulling triggers -- to people who are not direct government employees.
"The use of force has been traditionally thought of as inherently governmental," said Jeffrey Smith, former CIA general counsel. "The use of a contractor actually employing lethal force is clearly troublesome, but I'm not sure it's necessarily illegal."
U.S. officials familiar with the targeted-killing program said that Blackwater's involvement was limited in scope and duration, and that the arrangement ended several years before CIA Director Leon E. Panetta killed the program two months ago.
The program was kept secret from Congress for nearly eight years before Panetta told lawmakers about it in June. CIA officials have emphasized that the program was never operational and that it did not lead to the capture or killing of a single terrorism suspect.
