Six years later, with Bush—the theocons’ President—in the White House, Chuck Colson was in Michigan with his buddy Erik Prince at Calvin College talking about his faith-based prisons. During the lecture, Colson played to the largely Protestant crowd’s heritage as he advocated his theoconservative movement based on Catholic/Evangelical unity. Colson quoted a nineteenth-century Calvinist scholar who said, “Rome is not an antagonist but stands on our side, inasmuch as she also recognizes and then maintains the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, the Cross as an atoning sacrifice, the Scriptures of the Word of God, and the Ten Commandments as a divinely imposed rule of life. Therefore, let me ask, if Roman Catholic theologians take up the sword to do valiant and skillful battle against the same tendency that we ourselves mean to fight to the death, is it not part of wisdom to accept their valuable help?”
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Erik Prince has been in the thick of this right-wing effort to unite conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and neoconservatives in a common theoconservative holy war—with Blackwater serving as a sort of armed wing of the movement. As Prince himself once envisioned the role of his mercenaries, “Everybody carries guns, just like Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel—a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other.”
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In addition to his support for extremist Catholic organizations, Prince has continued to contribute heavily to the evangelical Christian causes that his parents supported, including large donations to a slew of Protestant schools and colleges. Prince has also donated at least $200,000 to the Haggai Institute in Atlanta, Georgia (to go along with the hundreds of thousands more from the broader Prince family).
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Haggai, one of the leading Christian missionary organizations in the world, boasts that it has “trained” more than sixty thousand evangelical “leaders” around the globe, with a concentration on poor or developing countries.
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Prince has also served on the board of directors of and donated to Christian Freedom International, formerly Christian Solidarity International, a crusading missionary group active operating everywhere from Somalia to Sudan to Afghanistan and Iraq. Its mission statement reads: “More Christians have been martyred in the past 100 years than in all prior 1900 years combined. And the persecution of Christians is growing. Today more Christians are oppressed for their faith than ever. In many nations—right now—Christians are harassed, tortured, imprisoned, and even martyred for their faith in Jesus Christ.”
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Jim Jacobson, a former aide to Gary Bauer in Ronald Reagan’s White House, runs the group, which has taken public positions against the work of the United Nations, calling some of its agencies “merchants of misery,”
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and has protested that Iraqi self-determination could harm Christians.
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In calling for the United States to attack Afghanistan after 9/11, Jacobson declared, “Only unequivocal military strikes will express our commitment to world peace and the rule of law.”
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The board of directors included Blackwater lobbyist Paul Behrends, former Republican Senator Don Nickles, and former Voice of America director Robert Reilly, who began his career as a Reagan White House propagandist for the Nicaraguan Contras and worked briefly for war contractor SAIC on its ill-fated attempt to create a new Iraqi information ministry.
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In 2000 Erik Prince was on hand for a Michigan benefit to raise money for one of his family’s (and the theoconservative movement’s) pet causes—school vouchers. At the event, Prince spoke to the
Wall Street Journal,
saying both his family and the DeVos clan believe in conservative, Christian, free-market ideals, and that his beloved father’s business—the one responsible for building up Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council—“was an engine that generated cash that he could use to do good things.”
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He said his sister Betsy was using those “same energies.”
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By that time, the thirty-year-old Prince had his own small cash-generating engine, on the brink of becoming much, much bigger. While Erik continued the Prince family tradition of supporting the right-wing Christian movement, his Blackwater empire was steadily growing in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. How fast it would grow wouldn’t become clear until two planes smashed into the World Trade Center a year later, in a horrible tragedy that would fuel Erik Prince’s meteoric rise to become head of one of the most powerful private armies in the world. Prince would soon draw on his father’s ideals and money to build up an army of soldiers who would serve on the front lines of a global battle, waged largely on Muslim lands, that an evangelical President Prince helped put in the White House would boldly define as a “crusade.”
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CHAPTER THREE
BLACKWATER BEGINS
ARMY. NAVY.
Air Force. Marines. Blackwater.
Erik Prince might now see his empire as the fifth branch of the U.S. military, but his designs for Blackwater started off much more modestly, and they weren’t really his own designs. While he served as the hands-on ATM for the creation of Blackwater, the location, plans, and virtually every detail of the new company came not from Prince but rather from one of his mentors in the Navy SEALs: Al Clark, who spent eleven years as one of the elite unit’s top firearms trainers. In an interview, Clark said that in 1993, when Prince was just beginning his military career, Clark had already “started drawing the sketches for Blackwater.”
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The concept grew out of Clark’s experiences as a Navy firearms trainer, when he recognized firsthand what he saw as an inadequate training infrastructure for what was one of the most vaunted forces in the U.S. military machine. “There were no facilities. We didn’t have anything. The Navy never owned ranges, they always had to borrow from the Marine Corps or the Army,” he said. “[Private] facilities were out there that had different pieces of the programs we needed, but no one had one-stop shopping.”
2
But one essential element was missing from Clark’s plan: money. Little did Clark know that within a few years, one of the wealthiest men ever to serve in the U.S. military would be one of his pupils. In 1996, Clark was transferred to SEAL Team 8 to run its tactical training program. Lt. Erik Prince was in the first platoon that Clark trained there, but “I didn’t know he had a gazillion dollars,” Clark recalled.
3
Prince went through Clark’s training, though the two never discussed any sort of business partnership. Eventually, Prince set off on a deployment with SEAL Team 8.
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Seven months later, Al Clark had learned not only that his former pupil was loaded with cash but that the two shared a common interest in the burgeoning world of privatized training. When Prince returned to the States after his SEAL deployment, “I hooked it up with him through the request of somebody else,” Clark recalled. “Basically, we just kind of started the dialogue from there.”
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For Prince, that period was a bittersweet time. His father had died in 1995, and every indication suggests that Prince wanted to remain in the SEALs, instead of jumping head first into the family business. But the combination of his father’s death and the worsening condition of his first wife, Joan—then sick with cancer—and the needs of their four children left Prince little choice. “Just prior to a deployment, my dad unexpectedly died,” Prince recalled a decade later. “My family’s business had grown to great success and I left the Navy earlier than I had intended to assist with family matters.”
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In short order, however, the family sold Edgar Prince’s empire. The 1996 sale for $1.35 billion in cash allowed Erik Prince to begin building his own kingdom, one that would combine his various religious, political, and military passions.
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“I wanted to stay connected to the military, so I built a facility to provide a world-class venue for U.S. and friendly foreign military, law enforcement, commercial, and government organizations to prepare to go into harm’s way,” Prince claimed in 2006. “Many Special Operations guys I know had the same thoughts about the need for private advanced training facilities. A few of them joined me when I formed Blackwater. I was in the unusual position after the sale of the family business to self-fund this endeavor.”
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But Prince’s attempt to claim virtually sole credit for Blackwater’s founding spurs sharp reactions from some of his early Blackwater cohorts. According to several sources involved with Blackwater’s founding and early history, the story of the company’s genesis had never been in dispute until Blackwater rose to prominence after the 2003 Iraq occupation. That was when Erik Prince began peddling what appeared to be a bit of revisionist history. The company Web site boasted, “Our founder is a former U.S. Navy SEAL. He created Blackwater on the belief that both the military and law enforcement establishments would require additional capacity to train fully our brave men and women in and out of uniform to the standards required to keep our country secure.”
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Prince has claimed the Blackwater concept came to him during his time with SEAL Team 8, when he was deployed in Haiti, the Middle East, Bosnia, and the Mediterranean. “As I trained all over the world, I realized how difficult it was for units to get the cutting-edge training they needed to ensure success,” he said. “In a letter home while I was deployed, I outlined the vision that is today Blackwater.”
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Al Clark and other former Blackwater executives hotly dispute that version of Blackwater’s history. “[Clark] was the guy that came up with the idea for Blackwater as a training center in the beginning and mentioned it to Erik Prince,” says a former Blackwater executive. “Al was the idea [man] and Erik came up with the money. Erik gets the credit for it because he’s the owner, but it was actually Al’s idea.”
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Moreover, Prince’s claim that he laid out “the vision that is today Blackwater” in 1996 is dubious given how closely linked to the “war on terror” the company’s success has been. But because of his upbringing and the training he received at the hands of his father and the family’s conservative friends and allies, Erik Prince was a committed disciple of free-market economic theory and privatization; he clearly understood what led Al Clark to envision a “one-stop shopping” training facility for the federal government. In many ways, the Blackwater project couldn’t have come at a better time—converging as it did with the government’s embrace of some of the very policies the Prince family had long advocated.
Blackwater was born just as the military was in the midst of a massive, unprecedented privatization drive that had begun in force during Dick Cheney’s time as Defense Secretary, from 1989 to 1993, under George H. W. Bush. “In his first year in office, Cheney reduced military spending by $10 billion. He cancelled a number of complicated and expensive weapons systems, and reduced the number of troops from 2.2 million to 1.6 million. Year after year, from 1989 to 1993, the military budget shrank under Cheney,” wrote Dan Briody in his book
The Halliburton Agenda.
“The army depended very little on civilian contractors in the early 1990s and Cheney was inclined to change that. The idea was to free up the troops to do the fighting while private contractors handled the back-end logistics. It was also a tidy way of handling the public relations nightmare that ensued every time the United States committed troops overseas. More contractors meant fewer troops, and a much more politically palatable troop count.”
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At the end of his tenure, Cheney commissioned Halliburton subsidiary Brown and Root (later renamed KBR following a merger with engineering contractor M. W. Kellogg) to do a classified study on how the military could privatize the majority of support services—troop housing, food, laundry, etc.—for U.S. international military operations.
13
Brown and Root was paid $3.9 million to write a report that would effectively create a hugely profitable market for itself by greatly expanding the Pentagon’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP).
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Indeed, by late August 1992, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had selected Halliburton, soon to be run by Cheney himself, to do virtually all of the support work for the military over the next five years.
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That first Halliburton contract burst open the door for the rapid privatization that would culminate in the contracting bonanza in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere ushered in by the war on terror.
By the time Al Clark, Erik Prince, and a handful of others began serious planning for what would become Blackwater in the mid-1990s, the military had been downsizing for years, and training facilities were some of the casualties of that trend. Those facilities were also some of the most valuable components of the military machine. But the Base Realignment and Closure Act process that had begun during the Reagan/Bush era, ostensibly as a money-saving venture, had accelerated under Bill Clinton and had left the military with what many in the special forces community saw as an inadequate number of training venues. This downsizing would provide fertile ground for Blackwater to sprout and grow fast. “There was a need for training for military and for Special Operations units, because most of the ranges and facilities were World War II and they were antiquated,” said Bill Masciangelo, the first president of Blackwater, who now runs military and government sales for hotel giant Cendant. “Since they were running out of places to train, and nobody provided a modern military facility, that was the whole concept behind Blackwater when it was first conceived.”
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Al Clark said that at the time of Blackwater’s founding it was “not an original idea. Everybody knew for twenty years there needed to be a place like this built.”
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Not long after Clark pitched his idea to Prince in 1996, Clark says his former pupil told him, “Let’s do it.”
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