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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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March 20th,
2008 - Exclusive: Blackwater ‘Blood Money’ Angers Iraqis |
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Exclusive: Blackwater ‘Blood
Money’ Angers Iraqis Two Iraqi Families of Victims Killed by Blackwater Guards Tell ABC
News They’ve Refused Compensation From the Company By Aadel Faiq ABC News March 20, 2008 At least two Iraqi families
of victims killed by Blackwater security guards in September tell ABC News
they have refused compensation offered by the company. The father of a 9-year-old
boy, who says his son was one of the 17 civilians killed when Blackwater
guards, escorting a diplomatic convoy, opened fire at Baghdad's Nisour Square
on Sept. 16, says he is trying to file a lawsuit against the company. He told
ABCNews.com that Blackwater offered him $20,000 through an Iraqi prosecutor,
but he refused the money. Another Iraqi who lost both
his wife and son in the incident says he too has refused the company's offer
of compensation of $20,000 for each victim. Adel Jabur Shamma, who was injured
in the incident, says he was bed-ridden for six months after being shot in
the thigh. He says he was given $10,000 by the Iraqi prosecutor who is
mediating between the families and Blackwater, but that the amount isn't
nearly enough to cover his surgery. He says he took the money because he had
no other choice. While a federal grand jury
in Washington, D.C. investigates the deaths, Blackwater has been operating
behind the scenes in Iraq to offer condolence payments to survivors and
families of the dead. The company released a
statement this afternoon saying: "At the request of U.S. Embassy
Baghdad, Blackwater has reached out to the families of those killed or
injured in Nisoor Square on September 16 as part of this condolence payment
process. These are customary condolence payments, and are not an admission of
guilt, but recognize that Iraq is an extremely dangerous place. When faced
with an enemy intent on maximizing civilian casualties, innocent people will
tragically be caught in the crossfire; when that happens, their suffering
should not go unrecognized." Officials familiar with the
case told ABCNews.com last month that Blackwater had resisted U.S. government
demands that the company pay at least $100,000 per death, claiming the U.S.
government itself hasn't paid that much in similar situations. As ABCNews.com has reported,
the federal grand jury criminal investigation is focusing on two or three
Blackwater guards who opened fire, claiming they perceived a threat. Other
Blackwater guards have testified to federal agents, however, that they saw no
such threat. Several of the Iraqi
families have already filed lawsuits against Blackwater in U.S. courts,
alleging the security guards were guilty of "war crimes." External link: http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4489251&page=1 Blackwater’s World Of
Warcraft Need a private-label armored vehicle? A detachment of Chilean
infantrymen? A special forces “engagement team”? Erik Prince’s expanding
global private army is at your service - and the war in Iraq was just the
beginning. By Bruce Falconer & Daniel Schulman Mother Jones March 20, 2008 When Blackwater founder Erik
Prince took his seat before the House Committee on Oversight and Government
Reform last October, in the midst of a firestorm over the killing of 17
civilians in Baghdad by his contractors the previous month, the 38-year-old
was at the helm of a fast-growing global business - and had the confidence to
match. Sporting a neatly pressed suit and a fresh military-style haircut that
evoked his service as a Navy seal, Prince had been prepped by
crisis-management specialists from the Beltway PR firm Burson-Marsteller, and
throughout the tense four-hour hearing he leaned back frequently to confer
with his lawyer. A private man who seldom gives interviews, he nevertheless
seemed at ease in a room filled with politicians, cameras, and reporters. He
extolled his men's professionalism - "I believe we acted appropriately
at all times" - and bristled at the term most commonly used to describe
his line of work. "The Oxford dictionary defines a mercenary as a
professional soldier working for a foreign government," he said. "We
have Americans working for America, protecting Americans." The truth is a bit more
complex. As profit margins in the private security industry have narrowed -
Blackwater clears just 10 percent on its primary State Department contract,
Prince testified - the ceo has increasingly looked beyond American shores.
More and more of his foot soldiers now come from Third World countries, and
his corporate network is aggressively pitching for business from foreign
governments. (It has already trained naval commandos in Azerbaijan and has
been hired to train special forces troops in Jordan.) In his most ambitious
moments, Prince has set out a vision in which his companies would act as
for-profit peacekeepers, working with the United Nations and other
international organizations in conflict areas around the world. Even
Blackwater's marketing materials are infused with the imagery of global
humanitarianism; one of the company's recent ads shows a tiny malnourished
infant being spoon-fed and proclaims the company's intention to "provide
hope to those who still live in desperate times." Yet the most important
vehicle for Prince's global aspirations isn't Blackwater proper, but
Greystone Limited, a company he quietly founded in 2004 as his firm's
"international affiliate." According to Chris Taylor, a former
Marine Recon soldier who until May was Blackwater's vice president for
strategic initiatives, Prince sought to build a new brand. "Blackwater
has a sexy name and people pay attention to it," Taylor says, and
sometimes that high profile "may not fit the proposed mission." In
particular, he says, "international opportunities" were to be
"looked at through Greystone." Nearly all of the 20 or more
companies Prince has launched or acquired over the years are U.S. based. Greystone,
however, was incorporated in the Caribbean tax haven of Barbados, although it
is managed from Blackwater's headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina. (The
Barbados address and phone number listed in the federal government's
contractor database trace back to a firm that specializes in shielding
corporate revenues from U.S. tax authorities.) "As far as I know, they
were the same company with different names," notes a contractor who
worked for Blackwater in Iraq. Unlike Blackwater, Greystone
has managed to stay almost entirely out of public view, and it remains a
mystery even to industry insiders. Doug Brooks, president of the
International Peace Operations Association, a trade group of which Greystone
was a member until late last year, couldn't say what the company does.
(Blackwater pulled out of the group last October after the ipoa launched an
investigation into its conduct; Greystone followed suit in November.) Neither
could R.J. Hillhouse, a political scientist and private-security expert who
follows the industry closely. Even a spokesman for the State Department's
Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which has issued contracts to Blackwater on
which Greystone works as a subcontractor, admits he has never heard of the
company. Despite - or perhaps because
of - its close-to-the-vest MO, the company has built up a certain mystique.
One contractor we spoke to said he was present when Greystone managers
arrived to claim their office space at Blackwater's Baghdad headquarters.
They were a different breed from the "yee-haw cowboys" that filled
Blackwater's ranks, and their tattoos indicated backgrounds in elite military
units like Marine Recon, the Navy seals, and the Green Berets. "They
didn't talk to the other Americans," he said, let alone foreigners.
"They had different bodies, different mentalities, and used different
language. They had a different professional attitude." Greystone's managing
director is a 40-year-old ex-seal named Christopher Burgess, who first met
Prince while the pair was in training for the Navy's elite unit. Burgess
rarely grants interviews, but he agreed to answer some of our questions in
writing. Asked why Greystone had chosen to incorporate in Barbados, he
responded that the country "is a well known business center with
established business practices and banking systems." Tax benefits aside, at least
one industry observer has suggested that offshoring Blackwater's sister
company may have been an attempt to skirt strict regulations on the export of
military services. Burgess disputes the notion. Greystone, he said, seeks
"State Department licensure for all security services overseas,"
and complies with "other trade controls and restrictions." Taylor
admits that taxes were a factor, but says the primary goal was to better
position Greystone for international contracts. "It's a matter of focus
and efficiency," he says. "I don't think it obfuscates
anything." The scion of a prominent and
politically connected Michigan family, Erik Prince followed in his father's
entrepreneurial footsteps. Edgar Prince was a billionaire auto-parts maker
who provided seed money for conservative activist Gary Bauer's Family
Research Council. After his father's death in 1995, Prince combined his
inherited wealth and Special Forces background to launch Blackwater. The company's original
business goal was modest - training state and local cops to be better
marksmen. But then came the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with them a
bonanza for the private security industry. Since then, Prince's holding
company, Prince Group llc, has come to include numerous ventures. Among them
are Presidential Airways, an air-charter and cargo-transport firm; Pelagian,
a maritime security operation with its own 153-foot vessel, helipad-equipped
and outfitted for training and disaster response; and defense projects to
make high-tech armaments such as mine-resistant armored vehicles and
surveillance blimps. In February 2007, Prince rounded out his operations with
Total Intelligence Solutions, a "one-stop" intelligence and risk
consultancy for the private sector staffed by former cia officials. The total of the Prince
Group's federal contracts, some of which are classified, is hard to
ascertain. But according to government records, Blackwater alone pulled in
close to $600 million in fiscal year 2006 - an impressive figure considering
its annual take from government work was well under $1 million prior to 9/11.
Its checks come from a host of agencies, including the departments of State,
Defense, and Homeland Security, and the cia, which, a European Parliament
investigation alleges, has hired Prince's air-charter company to transport
terrorist suspects to secret interrogation sites. (Blackwater denies any
involvement in rendition flights.) The Prince business model
calls to mind an earlier generation of private security companies typified by
South Africa-based Executive Outcomes and U.K.-based Sandline International.
Through the 1990s, these companies deployed private armies for the embattled
regimes of countries such as Angola and Sierra Leone, waging war against
rebels allegedly in exchange for diamond and oil concessions. Although both
are now defunct, their alumni remain among the industry elite; Tim Spicer,
Sandline's former ceo, now runs Aegis Defence Services, which contracts with
the Pentagon to coordinate security for all reconstruction projects in Iraq.
And as Executive Outcomes founder Eeben Barlow wrote in a memoir released in
South Africa last year, the main difference between his company and those now
working in Iraq "under the guise of security companies" may simply
be that Blackwater et al. have government backing. "After we had blazed
the path for military consultancy and advisory work," he wrote,
"companies realised that the military market was an open playing
field." None, perhaps, realized it
more than Greystone, which has set out to meld government and corporate
business into a seamless global web. In February 2005, the company was
inaugurated at an exclusive event at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington,
D.C. There, a carefully selected coterie of foreign dignitaries and
international businessmen strode past armored vehicles conspicuously parked
near the entrance. Inside, they browsed tables stocked with military-grade
weapons and equipment, including uniforms, boots, knives, and gas masks,
according to one invited guest. The keynote speaker was Cofer Black, the
former State Department and cia official who, as head of the Agency's
Counterterrorist Center, famously promised after 9/11 to deliver Osama bin
Laden's head to the White House in a box of dry ice. Just two weeks before
the Ritz-Carlton shindig, Black (now chairman of Total Intelligence
Solutions) had joined a parade of officials leaving government service to
work for Prince. In his speech, he urged attendees to consider our
"changing world," the "far different threats" America
faces, and the "creative solutions and approaches" required to deal
with them. Black's rhetoric closely
echoed Greystone's promotional materials. "In today's grey world," reads
one of the company's pamphlets, "the solutions to your security concerns
are no longer as simple as black and white." Greystone offers clients
full protective details staffed by special operations, law enforcement, and
intelligence personnel "for any threat scenario around the world."
It is prepared to train indigenous forces "in developing a capability to
conduct defensive and offensive small group operations." Greystone
contractors can stage mock "red team" attacks on secure
installations to identify potential vulnerabilities. The company will work
"in support of national security objectives as well as private
interests" and is prepared to deploy "proactive engagement
teams" - suggestive of offensive forces, not just security guards.
Prince's companies maintain a small fleet of aircraft, including Little Bird
helicopters, commonly used in Special Forces operations, and casa-212s,
rugged turboprops with high-mounted wings for moving cargo or up to 28
passengers. Blackwater also has sought to acquire at least one Embraer Super
Tucano fighter - a lightweight plane used by several Latin American
governments for counterinsurgency, pilot training, and monitoring. In an
early promotional video (see motherjones.com/greystone), Greystone operators,
some wearing black ski masks, are shown doing everything from handing out
food to refugees and protecting diplomats to jumping out of airplanes,
running cars off the road, and landing strike teams on Iraqi rooftops - all
to a synthesized drum-and-bass soundtrack. "They have the ability
to do whatever tickles your pickle," says one private-security
contractor. "They have services literally from A to Z. Aviation. Special
operations. Rescue. Ransom. You name it. If you got the money, they got the
honey. You can hire 17 James Bonds with Arnold Schwarzenegger in charge, or
you can knock on the same door and tell them, 'I'm a Kuwaiti businessman and
would like protection for my convoys between Kuwait City and Baghdad, but I
only have half a million dollars a month.' Greystone will take the contract,
and they'll hire grunts." In addition to being a
regular subcontractor for Blackwater in Iraq, Burgess said Greystone has also
been hired directly by "foreign governments and private sector clients
to provide static security, K-9 support, [vulnerability] assessments,
aviation maintenance and management, and training." He wouldn't specify
clients or countries of operation "due to operational security
concerns," except to say Greystone has worked "in various Middle
Eastern countries." The company has also
registered with the UN's procurement division, theoretically allowing it to
compete for international peacekeeping contracts; speaking at a 2006
conference in Amman, Jordan, Black suggested that Blackwater could rapidly
dispatch a brigade-size force to, say, Darfur. Taylor, the former Blackwater
VP, says: "You just can't deny the capability that Erik Prince has
developed to assuage human suffering around the world." So far, though, the world
seems disinclined to take advantage of Greystone's capabilities: In late
December, after we asked a UN official about the company's presence in the
organization's procurement database, Greystone and Presidential Airways were
removed from the list; a UN source told us it was a temporary move pending an
investigation into "ethical" concerns. For its part, Blackwater has
tried to crack the African market with a bid to train South Sudanese security
forces long engaged in battle with the country's Islamic regime, although a
company spokeswoman says it has no current contracts to do so. Writing in the
Lebanese daily An-Nahar late last year, Sudan's ambassador to Lebanon said
that Blackwater had sought permission to enter Sudan under "a different
name" - Greystone. In addition to prospecting
for international contracts, Greystone has become Prince's primary recruiter
of foreign military muscle. On its website, the company says its operators
are drawn "from the best militaries throughout the world" and
represent "numerous nationalities." Its reliance on foreign
recruits, it claims, is a matter of "cultural sensitivity" and
"awareness." What the PR materials don't say is that Greystone,
along with other security companies, likely outsources its work overseas for
the same reason many other businesses do - it brings down costs and helps
bypass bothersome regulations. "They're going to pay these people a lot
less, and they're not going to respect the same type of employee and labor
rights that U.S. nationals would require," says Erica Razook, an Amnesty
International lawyer whose work focuses on private-security contractors. Consider the case of
Greystone subcontractor ID Systems. Incorporated in Panama and headquartered
in a nondescript office complex in Bogotá, Colombia, the company in 2005
placed newspaper ads that drew men with military experience - a plentiful
commodity in a country torn by civil war and terrorized by guerrillas and
paramilitaries. According to one ID Systems recruit, a former Colombian army
officer who asked to remain anonymous, he and at least 30 other men were
promised $4,000 per month to do security work for Blackwater in Iraq. They
went through a quick refresher course in firearms and hand-to-hand combat at
the Colombian army's cavalry school in northern Bogotá, he said; among the
instructors were several Americans, all ex-U.S. military working for
Greystone. Afterward, the recruits returned home to wait for the call to
Iraq. It came late one evening in
June 2006. The men assembled at ID Systems' offices, where they were met by
Gonzalo Adolfo Guevara, a former Colombian army captain who had overseen
their recruitment. He handed them contracts and told them to be at the
airport in four hours. They were told they would be making not $4,000 but
$2,700 per month - still not bad in Colombia, where some workers only earn
that much in a year. But the actual contract, which some of them didn't read
until after they were airborne, provided for just $1,000 per month, or $34
per day. On arriving in Baghdad, the
men were issued weapons and introduced to Blackwater and Greystone managers.
Bitterness turned to anger when they discovered that their pay was about
one-fourth that of the Romanians they were replacing. They composed a letter
to managers at ID Systems, Greystone, and Blackwater demanding either a raise
or a ticket back to Colombia. The companies stonewalled, and it wasn't until
three months later, after reports of the dispute had appeared in Semana,
Colombia's largest newsmagazine, that the men were finally sent home. (Chris
Taylor says there was no impropriety: "Before every single one of those
professionals were deployed, they understood there was a change in the
contract. Those who went understood perfectly what they were signing.")
According to the former recruit, ID Systems continues to supply personnel to
Greystone. But Guevara, the man who deceived the recruits about their wages,
is no longer involved - he was shot and left to die outside a Bogotá bakery
last May. It was neither guevara nor
Erik Prince who pioneered the idea of hiring foreign soldiers to do the
business of the U.S. government. That took the imagination of a Chilean
American businessman named José Miguel Pizarro. "Pizarro opened the
door," says José Luis Gómez del Prado, a former diplomat who heads the
UN Working Group on the use of mercenaries; it's thanks to Pizarro that
recruiting ex-soldiers from Latin America has become "a big
business." Born in California and
raised in Santiago, Pizarro served ten years as an officer in the Chilean
army and another three as a Marine Corps translator attached to the U.S.
Southern Command. By March 2003, he was heading a small defense-consulting
firm in suburban Washington, D.C. Pizarro was connected and well spoken. He
was also telegenic, and as the U.S. stormed toward Iraq he was hired as an
on-air military analyst with cnn en Español, the network's Spanish-language
affiliate. It was there, in the cafeteria between shows, that he befriended a
former U.S. general, also working as an analyst, who helped him hatch the
idea of renting former Chilean soldiers to American private security
companies. "He explained to me how the opportunity to do business in the
Middle East was growing, that there was a need for private, professional
security forces in Iraq," Pizarro recalls. "I started showing up in
the cafeteria with pen and paper, taking notes, taking names. It took me
several weeks to form the idea." Before long, Pizarro was
cold-calling security contractors to pitch his commandos. It wasn't an easy
sell. "No one in any of the firms would even return his calls,"
says one industry expert Pizarro turned to for advice. Pizarro recalls his
first meeting with Blackwater president Gary Jackson: "He told me, 'This
is a respectable company, and we're going into a war zone. I need professional
commandos, not peasants with rifles.'" Not easily discouraged,
Pizarro scored an appointment with Prince, who signed on for an initial batch
of recruits to add to Blackwater's security operations in Iraq. Pizarro left
the meeting starstruck with his first paying customer. "He's my
hero," Pizarro says. "He's a patriot, a great Christian, and has
the balls that 250 million Americans would love to have." Back in Santiago, Pizarro
formed a new company called Grupo Táctico - incorporated in Uruguay to sidestep
Chilean laws prohibiting paramilitary activity - and posted an ad in a
Chilean newspaper offering recruits $3,000 per month. More than a thousand
men sent résumés, including some active-duty Chilean soldiers. Blackwater
reps traveled to Chile to review the applicants, and by February 2004,
Pizarro and about 75 of his top recruits - most of them former Chilean
special forces, marine commandos, and paratroopers - were brought to
Blackwater's compound in Moyock for training. Within weeks, they flew to
Iraq, where they found themselves working alongside a veritable United
Nations of security contractors: Nepalese and Indian Gurkhas, South Africans,
and Eastern Europeans, to name a few. They became known as the "Black
Penguins" because of the distinctive figures they cut on foot patrol,
weighed down by weapons and flak jackets. Pizarro took to the term and
designed a shoulder patch for his recruits: a penguin with an M-4 carbine
across its chest. To find their discount
soldiers, Blackwater, Greystone, and their competitors have built recruitment
networks reaching deep into the paramilitary milieus of the Third World. It
works like this: Blackwater, for example, will win a U.S. government
contract; it will then subcontract with itself - that is, with Greystone - to
do the job. From there, Greystone looks to its network of international
affiliates, firms like Pizarro's Grupo Táctico in Chile or ID Systems in
Colombia, which maintain informal relationships with what are known in the
trade as "briefcase recruiters" - individuals with connections to
the local paramilitary scene. These men find the recruits and funnel them
back up the chain until, finally, they are deployed alongside U.S. forces in
Iraq. The practice also serves as a convenient firewall, shielding U.S.-based
companies from direct liability for the actions of their subcontractors.
"If a court is looking at these issues, where the contract is signed is
a factor," explains Amnesty's Razook. "There is a lot there that
would take it out of a U.S. court's control." Briefcase recruiting is a
little-known niche of the private security business that has attracted some
less-than-savory characters. Take Julio (a.k.a. "George") Nayor, a
Cuban American currently serving an 11-year sentence at a federal prison in
Miami for drug trafficking. A one-time associate of Colombian drug lord Pablo
Escobar, Nayor escaped arrest in the United States in the early 1990s and
fled, by means of a fake passport and various false identities, to San
Salvador. There he reportedly opened a gym and several restaurants including
one he named Karaoke George, which was adjacent to an upscale shopping mall. In late 2004, Nayor placed
newspaper ads seeking men to work on contract in Iraq for an unspecified U.S.
security firm; recruits were to meet him at the karaoke bar. According to a
Washington Post reporter who witnessed the scene, men lined up outside for
weeks. "This is the future of global security," Nayor bragged to
the reporter, adding that he'd already accepted 300 Salvadorans and expected
to sign up many more, including veterans of the 380-man contingent that the
Salvadoran government had contributed to the Coalition of the Willing. As
soldiers in Iraq, they had earned a monthly salary of $280; as hired guns,
they expected to make as much as $2,400. Nayor disappeared as quickly
as he had emerged, but nine months later many of the men who had interviewed
with him were contacted by capros, a new company headed by two high-ranking
Salvadoran military officers that, according to a Salvadoran newspaper, was
recruiting for Greystone. In December 2005, Greystone representatives visited
El Salvador to review the recruits, although it's unclear whether they were
ever sent to Iraq. Some of the men later told the Salvadoran press that the company
had encouraged them to rack up credit-card purchases in preparation for their
deployment, then failed to reimburse them. Nayor's own career as a
briefcase recruiter was cut short in September 2006 by his arrest for
allegedly plotting to assassinate El Salvador's president by shooting down
his helicopter with a shoulder-fired missile. He was subsequently extradited
to the United States to face some of his old drug charges. By then, Greystone's search
for contractors had expanded far beyond Latin America. In 2005, a Croatian
newspaper reported that Greystone had dispatched a man named Marko
Radielovic, who once worked for the aid group Mercy Corps, to perform a
"feasibility study" on hiring former Croatian soldiers and police.
The following year, the Filipino press reported that a company called
Satelles Solutions had applied to lease land (about 25 acres) within the
former U.S. Navy base at Subic Bay. Satelles was a Greystone front; its
Filipino "owners" included a former high-ranking general and an attorney
at a major law firm that specialized in advising foreign investors. Each held
a few pennies' worth of Satelles stock, while Greystone controlled the rest. The firm had been courting
the Filipino government for some time; seven of its embassy employees were
invited to Greystone's unveiling ceremony in Washington, the largest
contingent by far of any foreign embassy. Greystone, according to Filipino
news reports, hoped to build a jungle-survival training facility capable of
processing up to 1,000 trainees a week. "It was merely a place to be
able to provide training to customers in that part of the world," says
Chris Taylor; it wasn't about creating a "third-country-national
offensive force." Nevertheless, after Filipino legislators called for an
investigation, the company withdrew its application. For a while, it seemed to
José Miguel Pizarro as if the private security boom might never end.
Following Erik Prince's example, he began to diversify - launching a Chilean
business intelligence firm catering to the defense industry, and a security
company that, like Blackwater, could provide guards, police and military
trainers, and even bomb-sniffing dogs. He also took on a new client,
Virginia-based Triple Canopy. But then, as quickly as his star had risen, it
fell as both Greystone and Triple Canopy canceled his contracts. Pizarro
blames corporate intrigue - Blackwater didn't like his doing business with
the competition, he claims - but the true reason may be far simpler. At the
height of his operation, Pizarro charged a monthly fee of $4,500 per recruit,
of which his men received $3,200. Recruits from other Latin American
countries, meanwhile, were willing to deploy to Iraq for as little as $700
per month. "You can get five Colombian rifles for one Chilean,"
Pizarro says. "Do the math." In January 2006, the last of
his 1,157 Chilean commandos left Iraq. By the time Erik Prince testified
before the House oversight committee last October, he acted as though he
didn't remember Pizarro: "He might have been a vendor to us," he
ventured when Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) asked him point-blank. But if Prince has lost all
memory of the Chilean recruiter, Pizarro hasn't forgotten his role model.
Having focused of late on the strategic-consulting side of his business, he
says he remains prepared to muster more than 1,200 Chilean commandos for
deployment anywhere in the world. "Privatization of certain security
services is a long-term trend with historical consequences," he says.
"The entire future of private military companies is being redesigned as
we speak." Indeed, the private security
industry could be heading toward a shake-up - though not necessarily in the
way Pizarro would like. Many of the new players could suffer the fate of any
startup, disappearing or being swallowed by larger firms. "The problem
these guys have is that they're not very profitable," says Larry
Johnson, a former cia officer who works as a consultant for Special Forces.
Johnson, who's part of an investment group that was offered a crack at purchasing
Triple Canopy when it went up for sale last year, says the firm clears, at
most, 5 percent on about $170 million in annual revenue. "They're like a
dollar wind machine," he says. "Dollars come in and dollars go out,
but I don't see how they stay in business doing that." Prince and his diversified
group of companies, though, are positioned to endure. The Greystone model
doesn't depend on America's wars: Whether the future of the business lies in
what the industry calls "peace and stability" work or in providing
"proactive" strike forces to private clients, some element of the
Prince network is in a position to deliver. "They're soldiers of
fortune," says the security director of a well-known humanitarian ngo.
"Today they are willing to do the bidding of the United States, because
the United States is willing to pay them. Who are they willing to work for
tomorrow?" Bruce Falconer is a reporter
in Mother Jones’ Washington, D.C., bureau; Daniel Schulman is Mother Jones’
Washington, D.C.-based associate editor. This article has been made
possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of
Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you. © 2008 The Foundation for
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