Six years later, with Bush—the theocons’ President—in the White House, Chuck Colson was in Michigan with his buddy Erik Prince at Calvin College talking about his faith-based prisons. During the lecture, Colson played to the largely Protestant crowd’s heritage as he advocated his theoconservative movement based on Catholic/Evangelical unity. Colson quoted a nineteenth-century Calvinist scholar who said, “Rome is not an antagonist but stands on our side, inasmuch as she also recognizes and then maintains the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, the Cross as an atoning sacrifice, the Scriptures of the Word of God, and the Ten Commandments as a divinely imposed rule of life. Therefore, let me ask, if Roman Catholic theologians take up the sword to do valiant and skillful battle against the same tendency that we ourselves mean to fight to the death, is it not part of wisdom to accept their valuable help?”147 Erik Prince has been in the thick of this right-wing effort to unite conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and neoconservatives in a common theoconservative holy war—with Blackwater serving as a sort of armed wing of the movement. As Prince himself once envisioned the role of his mercenaries, “Everybody carries guns, just like Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel—a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other.”148
In addition to his support for extremist Catholic organizations, Prince has continued to contribute heavily to the evangelical Christian causes that his parents supported, including large donations to a slew of Protestant schools and colleges. Prince has also donated at least $200,000 to the Haggai Institute in Atlanta, Georgia (to go along with the hundreds of thousands more from the broader Prince family).149 Haggai, one of the leading Christian missionary organizations in the world, boasts that it has “trained” more than sixty thousand evangelical “leaders” around the globe, with a concentration on poor or developing countries.150 Prince has also served on the board of directors of and donated to Christian Freedom International, formerly Christian Solidarity International, a crusading missionary group active operating everywhere from Somalia to Sudan to Afghanistan and Iraq. Its mission statement reads: “More Christians have been martyred in the past 100 years than in all prior 1900 years combined. And the persecution of Christians is growing. Today more Christians are oppressed for their faith than ever. In many nations—right now—Christians are harassed, tortured, imprisoned, and even martyred for their faith in Jesus Christ.”151 Jim Jacobson, a former aide to Gary Bauer in Ronald Reagan’s White House, runs the group, which has taken public positions against the work of the United Nations, calling some of its agencies “merchants of misery,”152 and has protested that Iraqi self-determination could harm Christians.153 In calling for the United States to attack Afghanistan after 9/11, Jacobson declared, “Only unequivocal military strikes will express our commitment to world peace and the rule of law.”154 The board of directors included Blackwater lobbyist Paul Behrends, former Republican Senator Don Nickles, and former Voice of America director Robert Reilly, who began his career as a Reagan White House propagandist for the Nicaraguan Contras and worked briefly for war contractor SAIC on its ill-fated attempt to create a new Iraqi information ministry.155
In 2000 Erik Prince was on hand for a Michigan benefit to raise money for one of his family’s (and the theoconservative movement’s) pet causes—school vouchers. At the event, Prince spoke to the Wall Street Journal, saying both his family and the DeVos clan believe in conservative, Christian, free-market ideals, and that his beloved father’s business—the one responsible for building up Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council—“was an engine that generated cash that he could use to do good things.”156 He said his sister Betsy was using those “same energies.”157 By that time, the thirty-year-old Prince had his own small cash-generating engine, on the brink of becoming much, much bigger. While Erik continued the Prince family tradition of supporting the right-wing Christian movement, his Blackwater empire was steadily growing in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. How fast it would grow wouldn’t become clear until two planes smashed into the World Trade Center a year later, in a horrible tragedy that would fuel Erik Prince’s meteoric rise to become head of one of the most powerful private armies in the world. Prince would soon draw on his father’s ideals and money to build up an army of soldiers who would serve on the front lines of a global battle, waged largely on Muslim lands, that an evangelical President Prince helped put in the White House would boldly define as a “crusade.”158
CHAPTER THREE
BLACKWATER BEGINS
ARMY. NAVY. Air Force. Marines. Blackwater.
Erik Prince might now see his empire as the fifth branch of the U.S. military, but his designs for Blackwater started off much more modestly, and they weren’t really his own designs. While he served as the hands-on ATM for the creation of Blackwater, the location, plans, and virtually every detail of the new company came not from Prince but rather from one of his mentors in the Navy SEALs: Al Clark, who spent eleven years as one of the elite unit’s top firearms trainers. In an interview, Clark said that in 1993, when Prince was just beginning his military career, Clark had already “started drawing the sketches for Blackwater.”1 The concept grew out of Clark’s experiences as a Navy firearms trainer, when he recognized firsthand what he saw as an inadequate training infrastructure for what was one of the most vaunted forces in the U.S. military machine. “There were no facilities. We didn’t have anything. The Navy never owned ranges, they always had to borrow from the Marine Corps or the Army,” he said. “[Private] facilities were out there that had different pieces of the programs we needed, but no one had one-stop shopping.”2
But one essential element was missing from Clark’s plan: money. Little did Clark know that within a few years, one of the wealthiest men ever to serve in the U.S. military would be one of his pupils. In 1996, Clark was transferred to SEAL Team 8 to run its tactical training program. Lt. Erik Prince was in the first platoon that Clark trained there, but “I didn’t know he had a gazillion dollars,” Clark recalled.3 Prince went through Clark’s training, though the two never discussed any sort of business partnership. Eventually, Prince set off on a deployment with SEAL Team 8.4 Seven months later, Al Clark had learned not only that his former pupil was loaded with cash but that the two shared a common interest in the burgeoning world of privatized training. When Prince returned to the States after his SEAL deployment, “I hooked it up with him through the request of somebody else,” Clark recalled. “Basically, we just kind of started the dialogue from there.”5