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Erik Prince is the founder and chairman of Blackwater Worldwide—now known as Xe Services—a controversial private security firm whose activities in Iraq and elsewhere have led some observers to term it a modern-day “mercenary army.”[1] A major contributor to the Republican Party, Prince is also a prominent backer of numerous conservative causes and rightist groups.

In June 2010, after facing more than three years of scrutiny and criticism of his company, Prince put Blackwater up for sale. In a statement explaining the move, Prince said, “Performance doesn’t matter in Washington, just politics.”[2] More than a year before, in March 2009, Prince had announced he was stepping down as CEO of the company.[3]

Prince’s disdain for the politics of the federal government has been a growing part of his rhetoric in recent years. In May 2010, for example, Prince told an audience in his hometown, Holland, Michigan, “The greatest threat to our freedom and prosperity is not al-Qaida, the Taliban, Iran or even China. It's an idea, the idea that we can spend our way out of our problems without tightening our belt and paring down the very bloated government.”[4]

A few months later, after Blackwater was awarded more than $200 million in security contracts in Afghanistan, Prince claimed that he would be abandoning the U.S. government market completely. "After three-and-a-half years of an assault by some of the bureaucracy, a sort of proctology exam brought on by some in Congress, it's time to hang it up, because some in Washington view politics as more important than performance in the field," he said in an interview with cable news network CNBC.[5]

Scandals and Investigations

Blackwater’s rebranding as Xe Services (pronounced “z”) in February 2009 followed a series of controversies and indictments of Blackwater’s operating practices in Iraq and Afghanistan. In early 2009 the Iraqi government did not renew the company’s license to operate in Iraq after the December 2008 indictment of several former Blackwater guards for their role in the 2007 shooting of civilians in Baghdad.[6]

Then, in late 2009, the Justice Department opened an inquiry into whether Blackwater had offered bribes to Iraqi officials in an attempt to secure future operations.[7] In early 2010, Sen. Carl Levin, who advised the Pentagon to reconsider whether to renew a lucrative contract with the company to train Afghan police forces, spearheaded hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee into whether the company had engaged in reckless behavior during pervious training programs in Afghanistan.[8] That same month, Xe sold its aviation division to AAR Corp for $200 million.[9] And in April 2010, five former employees, including former company president Gary Jackson, were indicted on charges of conspiring to violate federal firearms laws.[10]

In the summer of 2010 Prince was also rumored to be considering a move to the United Arab Emirates, a country that does not have an extradition treaty with the United States. According to a June 2010 article by Jeremy Scahill, “former Blackwater employees claim they have provided federal prosecutors with testimony about what they allege is Prince's involvement in illegal activity.”[11]

Rumors of the move also emerged as new allegations of U.S. sanctions violations have been aimed at Prince and Blackwater. According to reports by McClatchy Newspapers, Prince sought to establish defense contracts with the government in southern Sudan while the country was still under U.S. economic sanctions.[12]

Prince also appears to have tried to expand his private security business by tapping into alarmist anti-Iran rhetoric. In a May 2010 report for the Nation, Scahill describes tapes he obtained of a private speech that Prince made to a friendly audience in January 2010. Writes Scahill, “Prince proposed that the U.S. government deploy armed private contractors to fight ‘terrorists’ in Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia, specifically to target Iranian influence.”[13]

In the tapes, Prince reveals the sort of mentality that could enable the type of alleged misconduct committed by Blackwater employees in Afghanistan and Iraq. When asked by an audience member about the Geneva Conventions, Prince responded:

“You know, people ask me that all the time, 'Aren't you concerned that you folks aren't covered under the Geneva Convention in [operating] in the likes of Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan? And I say, 'Absolutely not,' because these people, they crawled out of the sewer and they have a 1200 AD mentality. They're barbarians. They don't know where Geneva is, let alone that there was a convention there.”[14]

Trajectory

Prince was born into a prominent conservative family in Michigan, son of a self-made billionaire who invented illuminated automobile mirrors. He served as an intern in 1992 in the White House of President George H.W. Bush and, later, for Gary Bauer’s Family Research Council, an influential religious right organization that his father, Edgar Prince, helped found.[15]

Prince found his experience at the White House not altogether positive, saying later, "I saw a lot of things I didn't agree with—homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kinds of bills."[16]

In 1990, Prince worked at Representative Dana Rohrabacher’s (R-CA) office, where he met and worked with future Blackwater lobbyist Paul Behrends.[17]

A Naval Academy dropout, Prince eventually graduated from the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. In 1993, shortly after graduating, Prince “landed a spot with the Navy SEALs, performing secret missions in Haiti and Bosnia.”[18]

Blackwater History 

Shortly after Edgar’s death in 1995, the Prince family sold its lucrative automotive business for $1.3 billion, providing Erik with capital to found Blackwater, which he did in 1997 with Al Clark, another ex-SEAL. Clark and Prince “developed plans for a training center for police and military personnel. Prince later said the idea sprang from the lack of adequate facilities he experienced during his SEAL training. The men settled on a now-7,000-acre facility along swampland in North Carolina,” according to the Detroit Free Press.[19]

Prince recalled in 2007:

At that time … the special operations community had been using private facilities since the late ’70s, you know, individual shooting experts, schools, and no one had really done it on a grand scale. At the same time, there were a lot of government facilities that were maybe not the best maintained and not the most user-friendly. And so I started something like an individual shooting school, very relevant for operators, for SWAT teams, for military units on a much bigger scale, in close proximity to one of the largest concentrations of the military right there in the Norfolk, Virginia area.[20]

Business was initially slow, but the 2000 attack on the USS Cole “led the Navy to look for someone to train sailors to identify and respond to terrorist threats. Blackwater won a contract.

But business really soared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks—from about $200,000 in federal contracts in 2000 to $25 million in 2003 to nearly $600 million” in 2006.[21] By late 2007, Blackwater had received $1 billion in federal contracts.[22] The U.S. government outsourced jobs previously done by the army, and Blackwater began taking on contracts to protect diplomats in Iraq, among other things.

Prince told Charlie Rose:

We got into the security business because we had excellent trainers, we had a great curriculum, and we had big facilities that we could do large amounts of personnel that needed to be trained to a very high standard to do high-end security. So when the government demand came for a lot of extra security, especially after 9/11, in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, we competed for a lot of those. We were called, ‘Can you do this, can you do this fast?’ And we answered the call and we got it done.[23]

In the fall of 2007, Prince’s company came under intense scrutiny after its employees opened fire on and killed seventeen unarmed Iraqi civilians who were apparently trying to flee the scene of a car bombing. The Blackwater guards were under a State Department contract. In the outcry that followed, the House of Representatives held a hearing on Blackwater and the privatization of military work. In his prepared statement, Prince insisted that though any loss of innocent life was tragic, “based on everything we currently know, the Blackwater team acted appropriately.”[24]

In the aftermath of the killings, Blackwater claimed it had immunity from prosecution.[25] Some government officials, however, took a different view. "In my mind, the fundamental question that remains unanswered is this: Why have we come to rely on private contractors to provide combat or combat-related security training for our forces?" Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in a July 10, 2008, memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen. "Further, are we comfortable with this practice, and do we fully understand the implications in terms of quality, responsiveness and sustainability?"[26]

In December 2008, the Justice Department announced the indictments of six former Blackwater contractors for their roles in the 2007 killings. Responding to the indictments, Prince tried to describe his company’s work as patriotic, writing in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:

Last week the Department of Justice announced charges against six Blackwater security guards for a shooting incident in Baghdad in September 2007. But before the histories are written, it is crucial to understand the often mischaracterized role of security contractors in this unique war. … While some of our critics seize upon inaccurate labels, I doubt they have ever known one of our contractors personally or been protected by them. Our teams are not cooking meals or moving supplies. They are taking bullets. They are military veterans who have chosen to serve their country once again. Very few people know someone who would voluntarily go into a war zone to protect a person he has never met. I know 1,000 of them, and I am proud that they are part of our team.[27]

In July 2008, several months before the indictments and the company’s rechristening as Xe, Blackwater announced that it would pull back from the security business. The Associated Press (AP) reported, “Blackwater executives say they have unfairly become a symbol for all contractors in Iraq and thus the company is a target for those opposed to the war. It will continue guarding U.S. officials in Iraq but its future will be focused on training, aviation and logistics.”

Prince told the AP, "The experience we've had would certainly be a disincentive to any other companies that want to step in and put their entire business at risk."[28]  The AP reported that Blackwater  “has expanded its aviation division, which provides airplane and helicopter maintenance and also drops supplies into hard-to-reach military bases. A 6,000-foot runway is under construction and a large map in the company's hangar shows units based across the world, from Africa to the Middle East to Australia.”[29]

Commenting on Blackwater’s announcement, Josh Marshall of the Talking Points Memo blog wrote, “Come to think of it, 'training, aviation, and logistics' sounds a lot like military contracting. But who knows. Eric Kleefeld suggests another possibility. As a partisan Republican mercenary outfit, they may rightly anticipate slackening sales under a Democratic president.”[30] (For more on Blackwater, see Ali Gharib, “Blackwater: The Real 'Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy'?” Right Web, July 18, 2008.)

Political Connections, Family, and the Religious Right

In a 2007 exposé on Blackwater, Ben Van Heuvelen reported that Prince “is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives.”[31] Prince has donated more than $230,000 to the Republican Party since 1986; in 1989, at age 19, he gave $15,000.[32] The politicians he has funded include George W. Bush, the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), Oliver North, Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA), Rep. Dick Chrysler (R-MI), Rep. Rick Santorum (R-PA), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA).[33]

Observers have speculated that Blackwater’s success could be linked to Prince’s political connections. “[O]ne of Blackwater's earliest contracts in the national arena was a no-bid $5.4 million deal to provide security guards in Afghanistan, which came after Prince made a call to then CIA executive director Buzzy Krongard. What's more, Harper's Ken Silverstein has reported that Prince has a security pass for CIA headquarters and ‘meets with senior people’ inside the CIA. But Prince's most important benefactor was fellow conservative Roman Catholic convert L. Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government in Iraq. In August 2003, Blackwater won a $27.7 million contract to provide personal security for Bremer.”[34]

Prince, who converted to Roman Catholicism from the Calvinist Dutch Reform Church in 1992,[35] supports rightist Christian groups via the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, where he is vice president.[36] In fiscal 2006, the nonprofit foundation contributed nearly $8 million in grants to predominantly, if not exclusively, socially conservative groups, including $510,000 to the Family Research Council; $500,000 to the international proselytizing group Haggai Institute; $1,000,000 to the Alliance Defense Fund; and more than $1 million to the Christian Calvin College in Michigan.[37]

Prince’s own nonprofit, the Freiheit Foundation, which he ran with his first wife Joan, funded a smaller, but similar roster of conservative groups, including the Acton Institute, the Education Freedom Fund (where Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, is a board member), and Christian Freedom International.[38] In 2000 Prince’s Freiheit Foundation gave $500,000 to Prison Fellowship Ministries, a group run by notorious Nixon official Charles Colson, and contributed $30,000 to the American Enterprise Institute.[39] The Freiheit Foundation appears to have stopped operating after Joan’s death in 2003.

Prince served on the board of Christian Freedom International, which reporter Robert Weitzel described as “a crusading missionary organization operating in the overwhelmingly Islamic countries of Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq.”[40]

Prince’s family (late father Edgar, mother Elsa, and sister Betsy) has been deeply involved in conservative politics.[41] Edgar, who founded the family automotive business, was a major backer of right-wing political and Christian groups, and was eulogized by Gary Bauer, who referred to him as his "mentor."[42] Betsy married into a powerful Michigan Republican Party family, the DeVoses, and Elsa (now Elsa Prince Broekhuizen after remarrying) has served on the boards of right-wing groups including the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.[43]

In a 2006 study on funders of anti-same sex marriage groups, scholar Sue O’Connell wrote that Elsa Prince Broekhuizen was the top individual contributor in Michigan to causes supporting amendments to limit same-sex marriage in 2004, giving $75,000 to Citizens for the Protection of Marriage.[44] O’Connell further explained Elsa’s family and political ties:

Broekhuizen is the mother of Betsy DeVos, who was serving as chairman of the Michigan Republican Party in 2004. Betsy DeVos is married to Dick DeVos, currently a Republican candidate for governor of Michigan. Dick DeVos’ father is Amway co-founder Richard DeVos Sr., who gave $20,000 to the committee [Citizens for the Protection of Marriage]. Two other DeVos family members gave a combined $30,000.[45]

The Prince family also has strong ties to the Council for National Policy, a secretive right-wing nationalist group whose membership has included a number of high-profile conservatives, including Gary Bauer, Jeffrey Bell, Edwin Feulner, Jack Kemp, Edwin Meese, Tommy Thompson, and Paul Weyrich. Edgar Prince was a longtime board member; Prince Broekhuizen served as president for several years; and Erik Prince’s Freiheit Foundation has donated money to the group.[46]

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.