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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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October 13th,
2007 - Building Blackwater |
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Founder Seeks ‘Better, Smarter, Faster’ Security As History, Iraq
Shape the Firm’s Fortunes By Robert O'Harrow Jr. & Dana Hedgpeth Washington Post October 13, 2007 Moyock, N.C. - Erik Prince
bounded up the stairs of a sand-colored building and paused on the flat roof,
a high point of the 7,000-acre facility in North Carolina known as Blackwater
Lodge and Training Center. As owner of Blackwater, he
has been the focus of intense scrutiny recently by Congress and critics
because the company's private security forces have at times operated with
impunity in Iraq, including allegations that they murdered innocent
civilians. But on a steamy afternoon this week, just days after testifying on
Capitol Hill, Prince seemed like a king surveying his domain. Below him was a complex he
calls Little Baghdad, a collection of drab structures used to prepare
security forces for urban warfare in Iraq and elsewhere. In the distance, a
half-dozen battered cars raced around a track in a high-speed motorcade,
kicking up dust as they practiced tactics with a role-playing assailant in
pursuit. Blackwater has an airstrip
and hangar filled with gleaming helicopters, a manufacturing plant for
assembling armored cars, a pound filled with bomb-sniffing dogs and a lake
with mock ships for training sailors. An armory is stacked to the ceiling
with rifles. Throughout the place are outdoor ranges where military,
intelligence and law enforcement authorities from around the country practice
shooting handguns and assault rifles at automated metal targets made by the
firm. An incessant pop, pop, pop fills the air. There's no other place quite
like Blackwater, at least not in private hands. The complex anchors a global
training and security operation that is one of the government's
fastest-growing contractors and both a fixture and a flashpoint of the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a decade, Blackwater's
revenue from federal government contracts has grown exponentially, from less
than $100,000 to almost $600 million last year. In August, the company won
its biggest deal ever, a five-year counternarcotics training contract worth
up to $15 billion shared with four other companies. Blackwater's extraordinary
rise would not have been possible without a swirl of historic forces,
including sharp cuts in military and security staffing in the 1990s, the Bush
administration's drive to outsource government services to the private sector
and the sudden demand for improved security in response to the threat of
terrorism. Some law enforcement
officials trained by Blackwater consider the firm a resounding success. "They're the Cadillac
of training services," said J. Adler, national executive vice president
of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association. "You've got the
best of the best teaching close-quarter-combat tactics." But critics focused more on
Blackwater's role in Iraq, where nearly a thousand of the firm's heavily
armed contractors provide security, describe the firm as a private army and
Prince as a war profiteer. During a recent hearing, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings
(D-Md.) questioned whether Blackwater has "created a shadow military of
mercenary forces that are not accountable to the United States government or
to anyone else." Prince seemed incredulous
that anyone would suggest such a thing. "The idea we have a
private army is ridiculous," he said, as a group of sheriff's department
deputies cleaned their weapons nearby. "This idea of a private mercenary
army is nonsense. These guys have sworn the oath as military or law
enforcement persons. These are guys who served voluntarily. They are all
Americans, working for Americans, protecting Americans." A Field of Dreams The organization most people
think of as Blackwater is actually a collection of companies with Prince and
his McLean-based holding company, the Prince Group, at the top. Prince, a
former Navy Seal and heir to an industrial fortune, owns everything. Blackwater Maritime has a
183-foot long ship for naval training. Two aviation-services businesses
operate more than 50 planes and helicopters. Blackwater Manufacturing makes
special armored cars the firm hopes to market to the military, as well as
moving metal targets for training. Total Intelligence Solutions is led by
former CIA officials, including Blackwater executive Cofer Black, who worked
on counterterrorism at the CIA and State Department. The most well-known company
is Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, a subsidiary of Blackwater
Worldwide, which until recently was known as Blackwater USA. More than 100,000 people in
the military and in local, state and federal law enforcement agencies,
including those in Virginia and Maryland, have taken the center's courses. So
have thousands of special operations personnel from the Navy, Army and other federal
agencies. Before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the training center
hosted up to 50 people a day. Now the number of students on a given day is
500, sometimes higher. The company has more than 550 full-time employees and
1,400 contractors, who operate in nine countries, including Jordan,
Azerbaijan and Burkina Faso. Contractors in Iraq earn the equivalent of
$115,000 a year, a company official said. Federal government officials
generally have declined to discuss contractual arrangements with the company.
As a private corporation, Blackwater does not have to divulge such details.
Public procurement data show that over the past six years, about half of
Blackwater's federal contracts were awarded with little or no competition
from other companies, according to a congressional report. Company officials
dispute the data, claiming that the bulk of the awards were openly competed. Prince said the increasingly
large awards came as a result of good service and the word spreading among
government officials. He said he has largely made good on his goal of doing a
better job training special military and police forces than the government.
He said he aims for a "country-club like experience" with tight
schedules and good service. Strolling on a garden path marked
by 30 stones, each bearing the name of a Blackwater contractor who died on
assignment in Iraq or elsewhere, he spoke about the success of his idea
almost as an inevitability. He said the company has never reached out to
Capitol Hill for help. "This started as a
field of dreams: Build it, and they will come," he said. "It was a
little success that led to another success to another success." A review of legal papers,
contracting documents, company literature and news accounts, along with
interviews with Blackwater and government officials, suggests the story is
more complicated. One factor fueling the
company's ascent is the business savvy and deep pockets of Prince, 38, a
zealous entrepreneur and heavy contributor to conservative and Christian
causes. Prince was a White House
intern under President George H.W. Bush. His political donations over the
past two decades total almost $263,000 to Pat Buchanan, Oliver North, Rep.
Ron Paul (R-Tex.) and former senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania
Republican, among others. His sister, Betsy DeVos, is former chairwoman of
the Republican party in Michigan. She's married to Dick DeVos, son of the
co-founder of Amway and a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan.
After he was sued in 2005, Prince retained former special prosecutor Kenneth
Starr and current White House counsel Fred Fielding, who was then in private
practice. Prince has hired a stable of
former officials from the Navy, State Department, CIA, FBI and other
agencies. He also maintains a database of 40,000 contractor candidates,
mostly former military and law enforcement officials, and their particular
military, language, mechanical and other skills. And there's his timing.
Prince started the company at a time of sharp cutbacks in federal spending on
the military and security. The al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks created sweeping security demands by
the government, contractors and others, in and out of the war zones. Behind it all was the Bush
administration's philosophical push to shrink government. Over the past seven
years, federal agencies have used changes in contracting rules launched
during the Clinton administration to outsource an unprecedented amount of
government business, including life-and-death duties once the domain of the
military. Prince insists the security
work that brings in so much of the company's revenue was supposed to be a
secondary part of the business, behind the training operations. The company
was called on by the government in a time of need, he said, and it answered
that call. "The customer demanded
it. People asked us to do something, and we did it well," Prince said.
"It pushed us as an organization. It made us better. But we're paying a
huge price politically." At odds with that assertion,
though, were Black's boasts last year. At a conference in Amman, Jordan,
Black touted the company's willingness to provide more aggressive
peacekeeping forces around the globe. "We're low-cost and fast. The
issue is, who's going to let us play on their team?" he said, according
to a story in the Virginian-Pilot. ‘Better, Smarter, Faster’ The birth of Blackwater
began with the death of Prince's father in 1995. Edgar Prince, a native of
Holland, Mich., founded Prince Corporation and made a fortune inventing and
selling auto parts. He also helped found and guide some of the country's most
aggressive Christian and family-values groups, including the Family Research
Council and Focus on the Family. "I can say without
hesitation that without Ed and Elsa and their wonderful children, there
simply would not be a Family Research Council," Gary Bauer, then
president of the organization, wrote to his members shortly after Prince's
death. At the time, Erik Prince was
a Navy Seal on a ship in the Mediterranean, he said. He had joined the Navy
after studying economics at Hillsdale College in Michigan and, he said, loved
being a Seal. But he was dissatisfied with the military's training, saying
the facilities were often shabby and lacked good instructors. While on the
USS America, he wrote a letter to his wife about the possibility of starting
what he later described as his own "state of the art facility." He was driven by the same
entrepreneurial zeal as his father, who he said wanted "precision in all
things" and tried to solve problems by making things "better,
smarter, faster." "I wanted to do a free-market
version of how units could be trained," he said. "I wanted to do
something excellent in this world." Prince's inheritance funded
Blackwater's launch. In July 1996, Prince and his family sold much of his
father's business for $1.35 billion. Prince used about $900,000 of his share
to buy the first 3,100 acres of land in North Carolina, not far from Norfolk
and about 220 miles south of the District. Prince bought a backhoe and,
for a while, worked at clearing the land himself. The company's name was inspired
by the dark, brackish water he encountered everywhere on the low, sandy
expanse near the Great Dismal Swamp. Its logo - a bear claw in a rifle scope -
alludes to the nearly 100 black bears he says are on the property. The company's first training
contract came in 1998. A Seal unit in California had heard about the camp
through word of mouth in the close-knit special forces world, and it came to
practice combat, shooting and other skills. For the next few years, the
company worked with law enforcement and small military units. It considered a
$40,000 contract a big deal. All that changed after the
October 2000 al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden. The
suicide bombing not only killed17 sailors and crippled a high-tech destroyer,
but it also exposed how unprepared the Navy was to defend against a new,
unpredictable kind of threat. The top brass demanded better training. Blackwater employees, many
of them former Navy pilots and special forces, heard that demand and called
everyone they knew in the military to promote the company. It eventually won a $46
million training contract in September 2002. It was the pivot-point in the
company's brief history because it gave Blackwater credibility in Washington. "It was our first big-volume,
predictable customer," Prince said. "It conferred legitimacy. ...
At that point, we became a government contractor." By then, the other key event
shaping Blackwater's history had occurred. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks changed the security landscape. Suddenly, everyone from corporate
America to agencies across the Defense Department and the rest of the
government felt the need for protection against looming terrorist threats. Once again, Prince and his
Blackwater colleagues put out the word in the special forces community.
"We made it known to them that we have a lot of capacity and we're ready
to help in any way we can," he said. Not long after Sept. 11,
2001, he received a call from an agency he won't name. He went to a meeting
in a room filled with people seeking urgent and classified help in
Afghanistan. He was told that a couple of secret buildings in Afghanistan
needed protection. Prince himself was among a
small group of Blackwater contractors who made the initial trip. Although he
still declined to name the agency, Prince said officials were so satisfied
with the performance of Blackwater contractors that they hired the company to
do similar work in Iraq at the beginning of the war. "We're a service
business. We bend over backwards," he said. "Our direction to the
guys is to make themselves indispensable." ‘They're Greatly Disliked’ In August 2003, the company
won a $25 million contract to protect L. Paul Bremer, administrator of the
Coalition Provisional Authority. It was a step into the center of the
conflict in Iraq - and undreamed-of revenue for Blackwater. The scene of Blackwater
guards moving throughout Baghdad became a familiar, menacing sight. The
entourage looked like something out of a movie. A dozen bodyguards wearing
assault rifles joined U.S. soldiers to flank Bremer. A Blackwater helicopter
or two hovered over their convoys of dark sport-utility vehicles. Blackwater is only one of
dozens of security firms from around the world operating in the region. The
estimated 160,000 contractors of all stripes working in Iraq equal the number
of war fighters. Security contractors number about 48,000. Still, Blackwater stood out.
Retired Marine Col. Thomas X. Hammes, who served in Iraq in 2004, said the
Blackwater contractors were no-nonsense guards who did whatever necessary to
protect Bremer. In contrast to other security guards in the Green Zone, he
said, they were "remarkably professional." But that was part of the
problem. They didn't seem to care how abusive they could be to regular
Iraqis, and they didn't seem to be under the control of U.S. authorities,
Hammes said. In addition, when Bremer left his post, he signed an order
exempting U.S. contractors such as Blackwater from being prosecuted under
Iraqi law. As a consequence of the
contractors' aggressive behavior, Hammes said, Blackwater undermined the
counterinsurgency efforts that depend so heavily on winning over civilians.
"They're greatly disliked," he said. That animosity boiled over
on March 31, 2004, when four Blackwater contractors driving in the battered
city of Fallujah were ambushed by three insurgents in a large truck. The
attackers shot and killed all four contractors and fled. A crowd of onlookers
took two of the bodies, burned them and hung them on a bridge crossing the
Euphrates River. The company's striking name and its bear-paw logo suddenly
became, for some, horrific symbols of everything wrong with the war in Iraq. And Blackwater's performance
became a high-profile issue. In November of that year, a plane owned by
Blackwater subsidiary Presidential Airways crashed into a mountain in
Afghanistan, killing three soldiers and three Blackwater contractors on a
mission under a $35 million Air Force contract. Families of the victims in
both incidents have filed lawsuits against the company, claiming Blackwater
failed to prepare the men to go into those areas. More questions arose from
the inspector general at the State Department, who said in 2005 that
Blackwater had failed to keep track of contractors' hours, appeared to
double-bill for drivers and vehicles that weren't used and allegedly charged
more than double the proper amount for overhead expenses. On Dec. 24, 2006, a
Blackwater contractor got drunk and shot dead a bodyguard for Iraqi Vice
President Adel Abdul Mahdi. Blackwater worked with the State Department to
fly the contractor back to the United States and fired him. Five months
later, Blackwater guards shot and killed an Iraqi driver outside the Interior
Ministry in Baghdad, prompting an armed standoff between ministry commandos
and the guards. On Sept. 16 of this year,
during a chaotic confrontation in downtown Baghdad, Blackwater contractors allegedly
shot and killed 17 Iraqis in a crowded square. As such incidents mounted,
Blackwater hired some of the most politically connected and conservative
lawyers and lobbyists in the country. The Alexander Strategy Group - Jack Abramoff's
former lobbying outfit - provided public relations advice. Former independent
counsel Starr is defending Blackwater in the Fallujah case, and Joseph
Schmitz, former inspector general for the Pentagon, joined the Prince Group
as in-house counsel. All the while, Blackwater's
contracting business continued to grow markedly, according to federal
procurement data collected by Eagle Eye, a database marketing company. In early 2004, the State
Department announced a need for a contractor to protect the new U.S. Embassy
in Baghdad. DynCorp had a contract to protect U.S. embassies worldwide but
was unable to do the work in Baghdad, according to a document provided by
Blackwater. So the State Department turned to a company already in position
through its work for the Coalition Provisional Authority: Blackwater. In June 2005, Blackwater's
revenue stream took another leap. After a competition, the State Department
awarded Blackwater, DynCorp and Triple Canopy work worth $2.5 billion in the
coming years to provide security in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Israel and Iraq. Democrats in Congress could
not have been clearer how they view Blackwater during a packed oversight
hearing last week. The company, lawmakers said, operates as an
out-of-control, mercenary force. As Prince drove around the
grounds of his property Monday, six days after the hearing, he still fumed at
the accusations. Acting as a proud tour guide
in a black Suburban, he seemed to want the facilities to prove that Congress
and other critics are wrong and that he has nothing to hide. In his hangar, he looked on
as technicians took meticulous care of $4.5 million helicopters, the gray
painted floor gleaming beneath them. Prince noted that Blackwater has lost
$10 million in aviation equipment in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said
Blackwater helicopters have repeatedly helped save the lives of U.S.
soldiers. At the center's original
lodge, he proudly pointed out a stuffed bobcat, a wild turkey and a beaver
that he recalled killing. The lobby of the Blackwater headquarters resembles
a ski lodge with a twist: The front doors feature barrels from .50-caliber
machine guns. Inside, a glass showcase displays replicas of guns used to
assassinate presidents. Prince visits the complex
once or twice a week. He wrapped up his tour and prepared to go home to
McLean. He hopped in a waiting helicopter that shuttled him to another
airstrip, where he boarded a small Presidential Airways prop plane normally
used to fly government and corporate VIPs. Prince had become more
voluble about his business, but he grew frustrated when pressed about exactly
who can hold his growing Blackwater empire accountable. When it comes to his
contractors, he said, there's only so much he can do. It's up to the Justice
Department and the Pentagon to enforce criminal infractions. In the end, he said,
Blackwater is always ultimately answerable as a business to its government
customers. "We're open honest
Americans trying to do a good job," he said. "If they don't like
what we're doing then" - he snapped his fingers - "cut off that
revenue steam right now." Staff researcher Julie Tate
contributed to this report. External link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2007/10/12/ST2007101202550.html |