The Man Behind Blackwater

Dutiful and intense, son of a self-made billionaire, Erik Prince is an adventure seeker and conservative true believer. An exclusive.

By Evan Thomas | NEWSWEEK | Oct. 13, 2007

Erik Prince likes to point out that in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, stand the statues of four military officers who helped whip the ragtag Continental Army into shape to defeat the British in the Revolutionary War. Prince can quote the inscription under the statue of Gen. Wilhelm von Steuben, who trained George Washington's troops at Valley Forge, Pa.: "He gave military training and discipline to the citizen soldiers who achieved the independence of the United States." The private soldiers employed by Prince's company, Blackwater USA, to protect American officials in Iraq are in a "noble tradition," Prince tells NEWSWEEK. Indeed, at Blackwater, Lafayette Park is jokingly called "Contractor Park."

But don't call the Blackwater men "mercenaries." That's a "slanderous term" used by Blackwater's detractors, "an inflammatory word they use to malign us," says Prince. Mercenaries, he says, are professional soldiers who work for a foreign government. Blackwater's men are "Americans working for the American government." (Never mind that von Steuben was Prussian, and that the other three statues—of the Marquis de Lafayette, Comte de Rochambeau and Thaddeus Kosciuszko—honor two Frenchmen and a Pole.) If Prince seems a little defensive, it is not hard to understand why. Described in the press as "secretive," in part because he has in the past put his hands over his face around photographers, Prince has been in focus lately. A month ago, Blackwater guards protecting an American diplomat killed 17 apparently unarmed Iraqis in a chaotic scene in a Baghdad square. (After the incident, the company said it had "acted lawfully and appropriately in response to a hostile attack.") A recent book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," by Jeremy Scahill, strongly suggests that Prince is a "neo- crusader," a "Theocon" with a Christian-supremacist agenda.

It is true that the Blackwater Web site has a "Chaplain Corner" with a distinctly evangelical message. In the past 15 years, Prince says, he has attended "one or two" meetings of the Council for National Policy, a Christian right organization founded by the Rev. Tim LaHaye, author of the "Left Behind" series. But Prince plays down any connection between his religion and his business. "Look," he says, "I'm a practicing Roman Catholic, but you don't have to be Catholic, you don't have to be a Christian to work for Blackwater." A more telling criticism of the company may come from the State Department officials whom Blackwater protects. Certainly, they are grateful to be guarded by former Navy SEALs and other Special Forces veterans, rather than green, young National Guardsmen. Blackwater likes to boast, accurately, that it has never lost a client. Still, some American diplomats—and not a few professional soldiers in the U.S. military—look askance at the heavy-handed swagger of the Blackwater guards, who often sport goatees and tattoos, wear wraparound shades, brandish their weapons and have been known to run anyone off the road who gets in their way. One State Department official, who spoke anonymously so as not to offend any guardians, tells NEWSWEEK, "It was one step forward in a meeting with Iraqis and two steps back as cars were getting bumped off the road on the ride home."

In his NEWSWEEK interview, Prince, 38, wanted to rebut the suggestion that he is building a private army that is beyond the control of the American government and answerable only to him. He argues that his thousand-odd men in Iraq are not trigger-happy, and blames trial lawyers and congressional staffers for hyping false stories. But his own story suggests a restless search for higher forces and powers, for a kind of martial and religious purity that is not sullied or bogged down by bureaucrats and nosy reporters. In his occasional public utterances at security conferences, his vision emerges. He was once quoted by a defense-industry newsletter describing why his private contractors could provide better—more effective, more efficient—"relief with teeth" in a dangerous environment than international aid organizations or even the U.S. military: "Everybody carries guns, just like Jeremiah rebuilding the Temple in Israel, a sword in one hand, a trowel in the other." Prince, a weapons expert and adventure seeker since he outgrew playing with lead soldiers as a boy, has seen the promised land, and it is righteous and well armed.

Prince's father set a standard that was impossible to live up to. (Prince tells NEWSWEEK he is "not as smart as my dad was.") A self-made billionaire (he invented an illuminated mirror widely used in cars), Edgar Prince spearheaded efforts to save his hometown of Holland, Mich., from the scourge of modernism. While other fading Michigan auto towns were being hollowed out by strip malls and Wal-Mart, Prince Senior restored Holland's downtown to its Victorian charm. Today, seven bronze footsteps cast from Ed Prince's shoes lead to a statue of children singing while nearby bronze musicians play instruments. WE WILL ALWAYS HEAR YOUR FOOTSTEPS, reads the engraved memorial to the patriarchal Prince. (Other bronze statues show children pledging allegiance to the flag and Ben Franklin reading the Constitution.) Edgar was befriended by Christian leaders Gary Bauer and James Dobson and partially financed the Family Research Council, which both men helped lead. When Prince died in 1995, Bauer wrote, "Ed Prince was not an empire builder. He was a Kingdom Builder."

Hard work, family and God were the elder Prince's core beliefs. Old friends whom NEWSWEEK interviewed described Erik as dutiful and intense, but with a taste for practical jokes and danger. Obtaining a pilot's license before a driver's license, Prince wanted to fly Navy jets. He went from Holland Christian High School to the U.S. Naval Academy but transferred to Hillsdale College, an institution with an almost Ayn Rand-like faith in free markets, in the middle of his second year at Annapolis. Prince says he chafed at the Naval Academy's petty rules for new midshipmen, like chewing no more than three times before swallowing when questioned by an upperclassman at mealtime. Prince's former history professor from Hillsdale, John Willson, tells NEWSWEEK Prince found the Naval Academy to be insufficiently tough and conservative. (Prince denies saying this.)

The Prince family gave heavily to GOP candidates. Erik donated his first $15,000 to the Republican Party when he was 19. (Though Prince has since given more than $250,000 to GOP candidates, he denies the money had any influence on Blackwater's obtaining government contracts.) In 1990 he got a six-month internship in George H.W. Bush's White House. Prince says the experience was an "eye opener," but declined to elaborate. At the time, he told the Grand Rapids Press, "I saw a lot of things I didn't agree with— homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement [which raised taxes], the Clean Air Act [which was expensive for business] …" Back at Hillsdale, Prince was a volunteer firefighter who liked to dive into the icy waters of inland lakes looking for cars or snowmobiles that had fallen through the ice. In 1992, he joined the Navy SEALs.

There can be few more-grueling experiences, but Prince apparently thrived. Jack Lynch, president of a national SEALs association, says, "He was a good operator. Guys liked going in the water with him." Deployed to Haiti, Bosnia and the Middle East, Prince saw no actual combat, though, he says, "I've certainly been mortared and rocketed a few times" in war zones since then. Prince left the SEALs in 1996 after his father died and Prince needed to figure out what to do with the family company. (The family sold it for more than $1 billion.) Prince received a double shock when his wife, Joan, was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was pregnant with their second child.

One of Joan's close friends, who declined to be identified discussing private matters, tells NEWSWEEK a doctor recommended Joan terminate the pregnancy before the cancer could be fed by the further rush of estrogen. Joan, a devout Catholic, had the baby—and then had two more. She died of cancer in 2003. Prince, who remarried in 2004, converted to Roman Catholicism at Easter time in 1992. His family had been members of the Calvinist Dutch Reform Church, though with an evangelical bent. No one seems to have been shocked or upset by Prince's embrace of Rome. Several knowledgeable friends, who did not wish to be identified discussing private conversations, say Prince talked about his reverence for the continuity of the Catholic Church, his desire to go to mass every morning and his appreciation of confession.

With a portion of his inherited wealth, Prince bought some 6,000 acres of land in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina to create a state-of-the-art private training ground for shooters and security operators. Located near SEAL and Delta Force bases, the Blackwater (named after the swamp's peat-colored bogs) facilities are rented out to federal and local government agencies training soldiers and SWAT teams. (One testing ground: a mocked up "RU Ready High School" to simulate school shootings, complete with taped screams.) Business boomed after 9/11. "The phone is ringing off the hook," Prince told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly two weeks after the Qaeda attacks. Prince himself went to Afghanistan with Blackwater operators on a security contract with the CIA. According to some accounts, he sought to join the agency but stumbled during a polygraph test. "All I can tell you is I have a very high security clearance," Prince says. But did he want to join the CIA? "I think everybody wanted to help the U.S. government in some way after 9/11," says Prince. (A CIA spokesman would not comment.)

Prince has added some colorful characters to his executive suite. He hired Cofer Black, a former counterterror chief at the CIA (who promised to run down Qaeda leaders until there were "flies on their eyeballs"), and Joseph Schmitz, a former Pentagon inspector general who was so impressed with von Steuben's legacy that he put the Prussian general's family motto ("Always Under the Protection of the Almighty") on the IG's official seal. Since 9/11, Blackwater has reportedly scored $1 billion in government contracts (the figures are exaggerated, says Prince, though he acknowledges that the total "could add up" to a billion). He says Blackwater is thoroughly audited and that it does nothing without government authorization. Though diplomats complain about the cowboy tactics of Blackwater guards, it should be noted that Blackwater is only carrying out State Department orders to keep the roads clear for diplomats on the move.

Prince says his company is being hounded by "trial lawyers" working in cahoots with Democratic congressional staffers. In 2004, four Blackwater contractors were killed, and two were dismembered and burned, in Fallujah, Iraq. When evidence surfaced that their mission (prosaically, to pick up and deliver kitchen equipment) was underarmed and probably ill conceived, the families of the dead soldiers sued Blackwater. After the Fallujah slaughter, Prince reached out to some family members ("He's not a monster," one tells NEWSWEEK), but then Blackwater turned icily unresponsive. Prince has hired some heavy-duty defense lawyers, including former independent counsel Ken Starr, and countersued the families for $10 million.

Prince now plays down some of his earlier rhetoric about creating a private battalion that could be dropped into a trouble spot anywhere around the world (he has mentioned Darfur in the past). His focus seems to be more on developing the latest high-tech gadgetry to sell to the government. Blackwater has a prototype of a spy blimp—an unmanned dirigible that could hover for days. Though he despises doing media interviews, Prince felt his company had been so maligned he was compelled to speak out. The interview with NEWSWEEK OVER, the reporter was ushered out, past a large portrait of George Washington, on his knees in the snow beside a white horse, praying. Fox News played on the TV screen. On the door of the suite of the offices in the faceless building in the corporate sprawl of northern Virginia, there is no name.

By Jeremy Scahill, The Nation  (Posted on March 20, 2007)

This article is adapted from Jeremy Scahill's new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books).

On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda or imagined the possibility of a "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting -- many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation -- Rumsfeld issued a declaration of war.

"The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America," Rumsfeld thundered. "It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." He told his new staff, "You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world.... [But] the adversary's closer to home," he said. "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the private sector. Announcing this major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience, "I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself."

The next morning, the Pentagon would be attacked, literally, as a Boeing 757 -- American Airlines Flight 77 -- smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn't take long for Rumsfeld to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war -- laid out just a day before -- on the fast track. The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. "We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists," Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs titled "Transforming the Military."

Although Rumsfeld was later thrown overboard by the Administration in an attempt to placate critics of the Iraq War, his military revolution was here to stay. Bidding farewell to Rumsfeld in November 2006, Bush credited him with overseeing the "most sweeping transformation of America's global force posture since the end of World War II." Indeed, Rumsfeld's trademark "small footprint" approach ushered in one of the most significant developments in modern warfare -- the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of war, including in combat.

The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq -- an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.

To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a "road map for change" at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the "Department's Total Force" as "its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors -- constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions." This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors -- conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.

Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations. "We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren't being counted, and the danger is that there's zero accountability," says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.

While the past years of Republican monopoly on government have marked a golden era for the industry, those days appear to be ending. Just a month into the new Congressional term, leading Democrats were announcing investigations of runaway war contractors. Representative John Murtha, chair of the Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Defense, after returning from a trip to Iraq in late January, said, "We're going to have extensive hearings to find out exactly what's going on with contractors. They don't have a clear mission and they're falling all over each other." Two days later, during confirmation hearings for Gen. George Casey as Army chief of staff, Senator Jim Webb declared, "This is a rent-an-army out there." Webb asked Casey, "Wouldn't it be better for this country if those tasks, particularly the quasi-military gunfighting tasks, were being performed by active-duty military soldiers in terms of cost and accountability?" Casey defended the contracting system but said armed contractors "are the ones that we have to watch very carefully." Senator Joe Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has also indicated he will hold hearings on contractors. Parallel to the ongoing investigations, there are several bills gaining steam in Congress aimed at contractor oversight.

Occupying the hot seat through these deliberations is the shadowy mercenary company Blackwater USA. Unbeknownst to many Americans and largely off the Congressional radar, Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power and protection within the US war apparatus. This company's success represents the realization of the life's work of the conservative officials who formed the core of the Bush Administration's war team, for whom radical privatization has long been a cherished ideological mission. Blackwater has repeatedly cited Rumsfeld's statement that contractors are part of the "Total Force" as evidence that it is a legitimate part of the nation's "warfighting capability and capacity." Invoking Rumsfeld's designation, the company has in effect declared its forces above the law -- entitled to the immunity from civilian lawsuits enjoyed by the military, but also not bound by the military's court martial system. While the initial inquiries into Blackwater have focused on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically connected private army that has become the Bush Administration's Praetorian Guard.