Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

by Jeremy Scahill

  Erik Prince adored his father and strived to follow in his footsteps from the time he was a child. Erik was an active youth, playing soccer, track, and basketball at the Holland Christian schools he attended as a primary and high schooler, and for which his family also provided financial support. Prince’s deeply religious high school featured pages upon pages of Bible quotations and incantations throughout its yearbooks. One year, the third page of his yearbook intoned: “In God’s Kingdom all of life is living out the meaning of the New Humanity in Christ. This takes all the inventiveness, creativity and discovering that we can do.” Gary Bauer recognized the special bond between Edgar and Erik: “Erik Prince, Ed and Elsa’s only son, and one of FRC’s first college interns, certainly did know him well.”74 In addition to his work with the Family Research Council, Erik spent his college years increasingly taking up his father’s mantle. He entered the Naval Academy after high school intending to be a Navy pilot but resigned after three semesters to attend Hillsdale College, a Michigan Christian liberal arts school that preaches libertarian economics. The campus was rated the most conservative in the country in a 2006 Princeton Review poll.

  “He was a smart guy, and pleasant to be around, and he’s well spoken,” said Erik’s professor Gary Wolfram. “What’s good about him, he understands the interrelationship between markets and the political system.”75 Prince also had a thirst for adrenaline-pumping action and initially satiated it by becoming the first college student to join the Hillsdale Volunteer Fire Department. “When you’ve been on a fire an hour and a half and the crowd’s gone, some of the guys want to sit on bumpers and have a soft drink,” recalled firefighter Kevin Pauken. “Other guys will be rolling hoses and picking up equipment so you can get out of there. That was Erik.”76

  As he grew older, Erik became increasingly active in right-wing politics, landing a six-month internship at George H. W. Bush’s White House. It was during this internship that the nineteen-year-old Prince made his first political contribution, giving $15,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Since then, Prince and his late wife, Joan, and current wife, Joanna, have given $244,800 in contributions to federal campaigns, not a dime of it to Democrats.77 He has supported Jesse Helms, Ollie North, Richard Pombo, Spencer Abraham, Dick Chrysler, Rick Santorum, Tom Coburn, Tom DeLay, Jim DeMint, Mike Pence, Duncan Hunter, and others.78 Prince also worked for a stint in the office of Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.79 In 1992, he became enthralled with the renegade presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan, who challenged President Bush for the GOP nomination, running on an extreme anti-immigrant, antiabortion, antigay platform. Erik Prince’s backing of Buchanan led the then twenty-two-year-old into a feud of his own with his sister Betsy, who was working for Bush’s reelection as chairwoman of a local Republican district. 80 Erik and Edgar, however, didn’t seem to care for Bush. “I interned with the Bush administration for six months,” Erik told the Grand Rapids Press in 1992. “I saw a lot of things I didn’t agree with—homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns.”81

  Erik began coordinating Buchanan’s campaign at Hillsdale, and Edgar contributed to it. But Erik’s foray into public politics would be short-lived. The next year, he went back into the military, joining SEAL Team 8 through Officer Candidate School in199282 and starting down the path that would bring him to Moyock, North Carolina. It was during his four years with SEAL Team 8 in Norfolk, Virginia, that he met many of the people who would found Blackwater.83 Erik seemed happy as a SEAL, and his family seemed proud to have him be one. “[Edgar] always wanted his children to do what they wanted to do, not just what he experienced,” Elsa Prince said months after her husband’s death. “He wanted them to go where their preferences and talents took them.”84

  But during the months after Edgar Prince’s death, the future of the Prince Corporation was anything but clear. More than four thousand employees depended on what had largely been the vision of Edgar Prince. The company and many in the family felt that only the Prince family itself could ensure that the reputation of Prince Corporation outlived its founder. Elsa became chairman of the company’s board, and Erik came home to help get the company’s affairs in order, and to help his family. His wife, Joan Nicole, had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Being a full-time SEAL was no longer an option.

  But the young Prince would not become the king of Prince Corporation. On July 22, 1996, little more than a year after Edgar’s death, the family, after much deliberation and many suitors, agreed to sell the corporation to Johnson Controls for $1.35 billion in cash. They sold under the condition that the Prince name would remain, as would the employees and the community atmosphere they had long fostered. The bevy of stories in the local press took on that same enthusiasm, liberally quoting Elsa Prince gushing over the deal: “The Lord opened the right doors at the right time in an answer to our prayer. His timing is always perfect.”85 Beyond that, Elsa said the buyout would enable her husband’s company to have “an influence well beyond the United States.”86 A few years later, that influence could really be felt in Holland, as hundreds of jobs started migrating to Mexico.87 Johnson Controls eventually stripped the name off the company and shuttered some of the local factories.88

  Though the influence of industrialist Edgar Prince has steadily receded in Holland, the religious beliefs and politics he promoted, as well as the downtown he created, continue to grow. When Edgar was alive, the Prince family largely shied away from overt political involvement, preferring to let its money do the talking. In the years after her husband’s death, Elsa Prince became notably outspoken on behalf of a number of right-wing political causes, including those favored by her late husband. In 2004 she was the single largest donor to the successful campaign to ban same-sex marriage in Michigan, kicking in $75,000 of her own money.89 She served on the boards of the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family and was active in the Council for National Policy and a host of other right-wing religious organizations.90 “My main thrust is to do things that Jesus would want you to do to further your knowledge of him and his ways,” she told the Holland Sentinel in 2003.91 Edgar, Elsa, and her new husband, Ren, cumulatively donated nearly $556,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees,92 along with untold millions to right-wing causes. Along with the DeVos family, the Princes remain major players in the conservative Christian movement in Michigan and nationally. One of their recent hard-fought but unsuccessful battles was to implement school vouchers in Michigan. The DeVos family itself spent upwards of $3 million in 2000 pushing the perennial conservative education ideal.93

  Erik Prince adopted his father’s behind-the-scenes demeanor, as well as his passion for right-wing religious causes, but with a twist. “Erik is a Roman Catholic,” said author Robert Young Pelton, who has had rare access to Prince. “A lot of people brand him in his father’s religion, but he converted to Roman Catholicism.”94 Indeed, many of the executives who would later form the core of Prince’s Blackwater empire are also Catholics, and when Prince’s first wife, Joan, died, Catholic Mass was celebrated for her both near her hometown outside Schenectady, New York, and near where the family lived in McLean, Virginia.95 In 1997, Lt. Erik Prince, U.S. Navy SEAL, blurbed a book called Christian Fatherhood: The Eight Commitments of St. Joseph’s Covenant Keepers, saying that it “provides men with the basic training they need to complete (their) mission.”96 At the time, Prince himself had two young children. The book’s author, Stephen Wood, is the founder of Family Life Center International, a Catholic apologist organization specializing in providing “moral media . . . geared toward deepening a family’s love and knowledge of their faith and thus hopes to impact today’s society. We place a special focus on fatherhood and providing resources which aid fathers in fulfilling their vocation.” The “moral media” include books with titles like A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexua
lity and Breast Cancer and the Pill, among many others.

  Taking a cue from his father’s funding of right-wing evangelical Protestant causes, Prince became a major funder of extremist, fringe Catholic organizations. In 1999 he contributed $25,000 to Catholic Answers, a San Diego-based Catholic evangelical organization founded by the Catholic fundamentalist Karl Keating. Keating dedicated his life to apologetics and defending Catholicism at all costs. During the 2004 and 2006 elections, the group promoted a “Voters Guide for Serious Catholics,” which listed five “non-negotiable” issues that it said are never morally acceptable under Catholic teaching: abortion, homosexual marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, and human cloning.97 Issues that were identified as “Not Non-Negotiable” included “the questions of when to go to war and when to apply the death penalty.”98 When Prince’s wife was dying of cancer, he e-mailed Keating, who in turn asked his followers to pray for the Princes.99 The following year, Prince provided funding to the right-wing Catholic monthly magazine Crisis.100 He also gave generously to several Michigan churches, including $50,000 to Holy Family Oratory, a Kalamazoo Catholic Church, and $100,000 to St. Isidore Catholic Church and school in Grand Rapids, as well as Catholic churches in Virginia.101

  But Erik Prince’s philanthropy has certainly not been limited to Catholic causes. The Prince family was deeply involved in the secretive Council for National Policy, described by the New York Times as “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country [which has] met behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for a confidential conference” three times a year “to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.”102 The Council was started in 1981 by the Rev. Tim LaHaye, one of the founders of the modern right-wing Christian movement in the United States and author of the apocalyptic Left Behind novels.103 The idea was to build a Christian conservative alternative to the Council on Foreign Relations, which LaHaye considered too liberal. CNP membership is kept secret, and members are instructed that “The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before or after a meeting.”104 While membership lists are not public, CNP meetings have been attended by a host of conservative luminaries like Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Gary Bauer, and Ralph Reed. Holland H. Coors of the beer dynasty and Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association, Richard and Dick DeVos, and the likes of Oliver North, Grover Norquist, and Frank Gaffney are also affiliated with CNP.105 Guests are allowed to attend “only with the unanimous approval of the executive committee.”106 George W. Bush addressed the group in 1999, seeking support for his bid for the presidency.107

  The group also has played host to powerful players in the Bush administration. Shortly after the Iraq invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attended CNP meetings; in 2004 John Bolton briefed the group on U.S. plans for Iran; John Ashcroft has attended meetings; as did Dan Senor, the top aide to Paul Bremer, the original head of the Iraq occupation.108 Former House majority leader Tom DeLay and several other prominent Republican politicians have also attended meetings.109 Then-Senate majority leader Bill Frist was given the CNP’s Thomas Jefferson Award. In his acceptance speech, he told the gathering, “The destiny of our nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement.”110 Edgar Prince served a stint as vice president of the CNP from 1988 to 1989 and was CNP vice president at the time of his death.111 Elsa Prince was also a member of the organization. The DeVos family has donated at least $100,000 to the CNP, and the Princes gave at least $20,000 over a two-year period in the 1990s.112 While the lack of public records on the group makes it impossible to confirm that Erik Prince is a member, as his father was, the younger Prince has donated money to the CNP113 and has close relationships with many of its key players.

  Erik Prince’s philanthropy and politics have also put him in bed with some of the most controversial political figures in recent U.S. history. Prince’s Freiheit Foundation, which is German for “liberty,” gave $500,000 to the Prison Fellowship in 2000.114 The Fellowship is a so-called prison reform organization that, among other things, advocates for “faith-based prisons.”115 It is the brainchild of Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man,” Watergate conspirator Charles Colson.116 In 1969, Colson was appointed Nixon’s Special Counsel; he was seen by many as the “evil genius” in the administration. 117 In 1971, Colson wrote what later became known as Nixon’s Enemies List, a catalogue of the President’s political opponents, who would be targeted by the White House.118 Colson was the first person sentenced in the Watergate scandal, after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in the investigation of the break-in to the psychiatrist’s office of Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.119 Colson also allegedly tried to hire Teamsters thugs to beat up antiwar demonstrators and plotted to raid or firebomb the Brookings Institution. 120 Colson became a born-again Christian before going to prison and after leaving wrote the bestseller Born Again about his conversion, the proceeds from which he used to found the Prison Fellowship.

  As of late 2006, some 22,308 Fellowship volunteers operated in more than eighteen hundred U.S. prison facilities, while upwards of 120,000 prisoners participated in its monthly Bible study and seminar programs.121 It boasted of “ministries” in more than one hundred countries.122 Colson’s Fellowship has become so widespread that it actually runs the daily lives of some prisoners, including two hundred in a Texas prison, courtesy of one George W. Bush. “I’ll never forget this,” Bush said at the First White House National Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. “When I was the Governor of Texas, one of the early initiatives in my governorship, one of the faith-based initiatives, was to turn over a part of the prison unit to a faith program, Chuck Colson’s program. He convinced me that this would be a great opportunity to change lives. And it would be—it would be better than stamping license plates.”123 Bush, whose administration held Colson’s work up numerous times as evidence of successful “faith-based initiatives,” went on to tell the story of a prisoner “whose life was changed and saved because of faith.”124 From the first week that Bush took office in 2001, Colson has been a regular adviser to the President. The Texas prison Colson ran was in Sugar Land125—the district represented by then-majority leader Tom DeLay.

  In 2002, Colson gave a speech at Calvin College about his Texas prison: “My friend Erik Prince, who is here tonight, traveled with me recently to a prison in Texas that has been under Prison Fellowship administration for the past eighteen months. This is an extraordinary program because it is not just that men are coming to Christ and being redeemed, as wonderful as that is. They are creating an entire culture!”126 A similar program at an Iowa prison was found unconstitutional in June 2006 because it used state funding, a judge said, for the indoctrination of “inmates into the Evangelical Christian belief system.” Colson has vowed to appeal the ruling all the way to the Supreme Court. He has suggested that his faith-based prison program is “the one really successful antidote” to what he termed “the largely unimpeded spread of radical Islam through our prisons.”127 Colson predicted, “If, God forbid, an attack by home-grown Islamist radicals occurs on American soil, many, if not most, of the perpetrators will have converted to Islam while in prison.”128 He suggested that opponents of his Prison Fellowship program are abetting terrorism and said the efforts to declare his program unconstitutional “leaves jihadists and other radical groups as the only game in town.”129 In October 2006, Colson was given the Faith & Freedom Award by the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, 130 an organization to which Prince has donated at least $200,000.131 The Grand Rapids-based organization has Prince’s stepfather, Ren Broekhuizen, on its board of directors, and its president and founder is the Rev. Robert Sirico, who presided over the funeral of Erik Prince’s first wife.132 “Islam has a monolithic worldview, which sees just one thing: the destruction of infidels and th
e recovery of territories they’ve lost,” Colson declared at the Acton dinner. “We’re in a hundred-year war and it’s time to sober up, and Christians understand it because we understand our history, and we understand what makes the religious mind tick, and secular America doesn’t get it.” Colson said when Mohammed wrote the Koran, “I think he’d had too many tamales the night before.”133

  A few years earlier, in the 2002 speech in which Colson praised Erik Prince, the former Watergate conspirator talked extensively about the historical foundation and current necessity of a political and religious alliance of Catholics and evangelicals. Colson talked about his work, beginning in the mid-1980s, with famed conservative evangelical Protestant minister turned Catholic priest Richard Neuhaus and others to build a unified movement. That work ultimately led in 1994 to the controversial document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.”134 The ECT document articulated the vision that would animate Blackwater’s corporate strategy and the politics practiced by Erik Prince—a marriage of the historical authority of the Catholic Church with the grassroots appeal of the modern conservative U.S. evangelical movement, bolstered by the cooperation of largely secular and Jewish neoconservatives. Author Damon Linker, who once edited Neuhaus’s journal, First Things, termed this phenomenon the rise of the “Theocons.”135