Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (16 page)
At the time, the United States was in the midst of one of the darkest moments in recent history for the Republican Party and the religious right. Bill Clinton’s defeat of George H. W. Bush in the 1992 presidential election meant the end of a twelve-year golden era of conservative governance, molded in large part by the policies of Ronald Reagan’s White House. While the right-wing political apparatus in which Edgar Prince was a key player did succeed in propelling the 1994 Republican Revolution and Newt Gingrich’s rise to Speaker of the House, the Clinton administration was viewed by the theocons as a far-left “regime” that was forcing a proabortion, progay, antifamily, antireligious agenda on the country. In November 1996—the month Clinton crushed Bob Dole and won reelection—the main organ of the theoconservative movement, Richard Neuhaus’s journal
First Things,
published a “symposium” titled “The End of Democracy?” which bluntly questioned “whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.”
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A series of essays raised the prospect of a major confrontation between the church and the “regime,” at times seeming to predict a civil-war scenario or Christian insurrection against the government, exploring possibilities “ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.”
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Erik Prince’s close friend, political collaborator, and beneficiary Chuck Colson authored one of the five major essays of the issue, as did extremist Judge Robert Bork, whom Reagan had tried unsuccessfully to appoint to the Supreme Court in 1987. “Americans are not accustomed to speaking of a regime. Regimes are what other nations have,” asserted the symposium’s unsigned introduction. “This symposium asks whether we may be deceiving ourselves and, if we are, what are the implications of that self-deception. By the word ‘regime’ we mean the actual, existing system of government. The question that is the title of this symposium is in no way hyperbolic. The subject before us is the end of democracy.” It declared, “The government of the United States of America no longer governs by the consent of the governed. . . . What is happening now is the displacement of a constitutional order by a regime that does not have, will not obtain, and cannot command the consent of the people.”
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The editorial quoted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia saying, “A Christian should not support a government that suppresses the faith or one that sanctions the taking of an innocent human life.”
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Colson’s essay was titled “Kingdoms in Conflict.” “[E]vents in America may have reached the point where the only political action believers can take is some kind of direct, extra-political confrontation of the judicially controlled regime,” Colson wrote, adding that a “showdown between church and state may be inevitable. This is
not
something for which Christians should hope. But it is something for which they need to prepare.” He asserted, “[A] ‘social contract’ that included biblical believers and Enlightenment rationalists was the basis of the founding of the United States. . . . If the terms of our contract have in fact been broken, Christian citizens may be compelled to force the government to return to its original understanding. . . . The writings of Thomas Jefferson, who spoke openly of the necessity of revolution, could also be called upon for support.” Colson stopped short of calling for an open rebellion, but he clearly viewed that as a distinct possibility/necessity in the near future, saying, “with fear and trembling, I have begun to believe that, however Christians in America gather to reach their consensus, we are fast approaching this point.”
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The
First Things
symposium sparked great controversy—even within the theoconservative movement. Among those who came to the defense of Colson, Bork, Neuhaus, et al. was Edgar Prince’s old friend, ally, and beneficiary James Dobson of Focus on the Family. “My deepest gratitude to the editors of
First Things
for facilitating what history may reveal to be their most important symposium. The moral legitimacy of our current government and the responsibility of the Christian towards it are questions of tremendous moment,” Dobson wrote. “I wonder—do we have the courage to act upon the conclusions we may reach in these deliberations?” Dobson said the essays had “laid an indisputable case for the illegitimacy of the regime now passing itself off as a democracy,” adding, “I stand in a long tradition of Christians who believe that rulers may forfeit their divine mandate when they systematically contravene the divine moral law. . . . We may rapidly be approaching the sort of Rubicon that our spiritual forebears faced: Choose Caesar or God. I take no pleasure in this prospect; I pray against it. But it is worth noting that such times have historically been rejuvenating for the faith.”
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It was against this backdrop—a throwing down of the political and religious gauntlet by many of the powerful conservative leaders Prince and his family had supported and built up—that Blackwater was born. A month after the
First Things
symposium explored the possibility of a “showdown between church and state” and a “morally justified revolution,”
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Erik Prince would begin building up one of the largest privately held stockpiles of weaponry inside the United States, a few hours outside Washington, D.C. Prince simultaneously strengthened his bonds with powerful Republican legislators and the leaders of the theoconservative movement, becoming a major bankroller on par with his father.
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On December 26, 1996, three months after being discharged from active duty with the SEALs,
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he incorporated Blackwater Lodge and Training Center.
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The next year, he purchased more than four thousand acres in Currituck County, North Carolina, for $756,000 and nearly one thousand acres in neighboring Camden County for $616,000. Prince’s new kingdom would be built near the Great Dismal Swamp.
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The stated idea behind Blackwater was “to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training.”
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Blackwater USA might now have influence over and access to some of the most powerful operatives roaming the chambers of power in Washington, D.C., but at its inception, the company struggled to convince the planning commission of Currituck County—population twenty-thousand
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—that Blackwater should be allowed to open for business. In the pre-9/11 days of Bill Clinton’s America, the planning commissioners weren’t worried about international terrorism and couldn’t have even comprehended the company that Blackwater would become. Instead, what concerned them was property values, noise ordinances, and the possibility that the types of militia groups that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had been linked to would come to their community for training. When Erik Prince appealed to the plan commissioners, his project was described as a “$2 million outdoor shooting range.”
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At the time, Prince estimated the facility could create up to thirty new jobs in the county and help to train its sheriff’s department. But before Prince could land approval for the facility, he needed to convince the planning commission to create a new ordinance that would allow it to be built, and to spell out the protections that would be put in place to keep the area quiet and stray bullets away from residences.
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Local opposition to the Blackwater project was strong. A year earlier, residents had been outraged when stray bullets from a hunter struck a truck and building at a local junior high during school hours.
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Consequently, county officials raised serious questions that a proposed 900-foot buffer between nearby properties and firing areas would be sufficient. “The 900-foot buffer is no buffer at all, really,” County Attorney William Romm said.
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One resident constructing a home near Blackwater’s proposed site said, “Nobody’s going to want to live anywhere near a shooting range,” while another resident asserted, “I’ve not spoken to anyone who is in favor of this.”
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One woman at one of the early meetings said she “would never consider buying anything next to a firing range of this magnitude.”
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The commission apparently didn’t seem sold on the idea, either, and a month later denied Prince’s request for a new ordinance. “We’re very disappointed,” Prince said at the time. “For a county that claims to be a sportsman’s paradise, it doesn’t bode well for safe-shooting sports.”
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After being rebuffed by Currituck, Prince went down the road to Camden County, which quickly approved the project.
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In June 1997, ground was broken on the Blackwater compound, and in May 1998, the company officially opened for business.
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Though the company’s name sounds ominous, it actually was inspired by the black waters of the Great Dismal Swamp—a 111,000-acre peat bog stretching from south-eastern Virginia to northeastern North Carolina—close to where Blackwater was contructed. While many later accounts from company executives and others would portray the early days of Blackwater as slow going, its volume of “black” and confidential contracts makes that difficult to confirm. As Clark remembers it, the company hit the ground running. “The SEAL community came down, because we came from the SEAL community and they were aware of it. They came down at least for the shootouts and the ranges to run their training. It filtered into a lot of law enforcement; the FBI came down, as word got out. The facility was the initial draw to a lot of them because it was something new and big and close by,” Clark said.
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While Blackwater was constructed on a swamp, it was strategically located a half-hour from the largest naval base in the world, the forty-three-hundred-acre Norfolk Naval Station,
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and not far from the epicenter of the U.S. intelligence and federal law enforcement communities. The facility would also provide various government agencies—federal, state, and local—with a remote and secure location to discreetly train forces. “A lot of the reason some of those agencies came down there was to get away from everybody else, get out of the public eye, for the press and the public,” Clark recalled. “Just because they’re wearing black outfits everybody want[ed] to come see what they’re doing.”
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Clark said Blackwater’s new training facility offered U.S. Special Operations forces another advantage over existing private shooting facilities, many of which were run by competitive “trophy shooters.” At Blackwater, Clark recalled, “the training that we exposed them to—mainly that I exposed them to while I was there—kind of gave them a breath of fresh air. You know, finally someone that’s not a competitive trophy shooter or some kind of action shooter.” Competitive shooting, Clark said, was “all about me, me, me. Second place for them is just a small trophy, but [for] tactical shooters, people who have to kick in doors or go to the desert, second place is not a very good place to be.”
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By 1998, Blackwater was doing a brisk business in training private and government customers in the use of a wide variety of weapons from pistols to precision rifles to machine guns. It was leasing out the facility to SEALs for their training. Police officers from Virginia, North Carolina, and Canada had enrolled in Blackwater training programs, and the company was starting to get inquiries from foreign governments. The Spanish government was interested in training security details that would protect presidential candidates, while Brazil expressed interest in counterterrorism training.
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“They are the best of the best . . . to come to a school where you are taught by the best in the world is great,” an early customer told the
Virginian-Pilot
in September 1998. “It is an honor to be here.”
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As word spread about Blackwater’s training, Prince and other executives wanted to make sure that Blackwater would earn a reputation as the premiere facility of its kind. “I was a retired Marine officer who had been in the hotel business for fifteen years, so they were looking for somebody that had that balance,” Masciangelo, the company’s first president, said in an interview. “Blackwater delivered more than training. The whole customer service issue and the ambiance and the setting and the facilities, that was the whole reason for them hiring me.”
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By late 1998, Blackwater boasted a nine-thousand-square-foot lodge with conference rooms, classrooms, lounge, pro shop, and dining hall. A wide variety of ranges including an urban street façade and a pond for water-to-land training were just some of the early offerings.
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Steve Waterman, a writer on assignment for
Soldier of Fortune
, visited Blackwater in 1999 and described the facility at Moyock in glowing terms. With “a great chow hall (I would describe it more as a cafeteria), satellite TV systems in the dorms and plenty of hot water in the showers, I would put Blackwater ahead of any of the civilian or military training sites I have visited,” Waterman wrote. “When you turn the last corner and are able to see the buildings, it quickly becomes obvious that the operators of this center are quite serious in their endeavors and nothing has been spared to make this a top notch facility. The buildings are brand new . . . and the place is well laid out and neat. Off to the right are the dorm facilities and the tactical house. Straight ahead is the main building which houses the classrooms, store, administrative offices, cafeteria, armory, and conference rooms, lounge, where tall tales may be spun and examples of taxidermy are displayed. A large black bear looms out at you over the fireplace and several other animals watch you through plastic eyes. The gun cleaning area is off to the side of the main building where there is room for more than a dozen people to clean weapons. The benches are chest high and there are compressed air nozzles for blowing dust and dirt out of weapons. The well-lighted rooms have four bunk beds in each with a spacious closet for each occupant. There are two heads (bathrooms to you landlubbers), each with several shower stalls. On both sides of the dorm building is a large room with a couch and several chairs. A TV in each lounge is fed by a satellite system. There is also a refrigerator and water cooler in each of these rooms. Magazines are there for the perusal of the guests.”
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In 1998 Blackwater hosted a police and military handgun competition, the first of many such events, later called the Shoot-Out at Blackwater, that would draw people from all over the world to Moyock. But Blackwater would soon demonstrate its powerful ability to capitalize on tragedy and fear. In fact, 1999 would kick off a string of almost annual high-profile violent incidents that would play out on international television and result in more business and growing profits for Blackwater.