For Prince, that period was a bittersweet time. His father had died in 1995, and every indication suggests that Prince wanted to remain in the SEALs, instead of jumping head first into the family business. But the combination of his father’s death and the worsening condition of his first wife, Joan—then sick with cancer—and the needs of their four children left Prince little choice. “Just prior to a deployment, my dad unexpectedly died,” Prince recalled a decade later. “My family’s business had grown to great success and I left the Navy earlier than I had intended to assist with family matters.”6 In short order, however, the family sold Edgar Prince’s empire. The 1996 sale for $1.35 billion in cash allowed Erik Prince to begin building his own kingdom, one that would combine his various religious, political, and military passions.7 “I wanted to stay connected to the military, so I built a facility to provide a world-class venue for U.S. and friendly foreign military, law enforcement, commercial, and government organizations to prepare to go into harm’s way,” Prince claimed in 2006. “Many Special Operations guys I know had the same thoughts about the need for private advanced training facilities. A few of them joined me when I formed Blackwater. I was in the unusual position after the sale of the family business to self-fund this endeavor.”8
But Prince’s attempt to claim virtually sole credit for Blackwater’s founding spurs sharp reactions from some of his early Blackwater cohorts. According to several sources involved with Blackwater’s founding and early history, the story of the company’s genesis had never been in dispute until Blackwater rose to prominence after the 2003 Iraq occupation. That was when Erik Prince began peddling what appeared to be a bit of revisionist history. The company Web site boasted, “Our founder is a former U.S. Navy SEAL. He created Blackwater on the belief that both the military and law enforcement establishments would require additional capacity to train fully our brave men and women in and out of uniform to the standards required to keep our country secure.”9 Prince has claimed the Blackwater concept came to him during his time with SEAL Team 8, when he was deployed in Haiti, the Middle East, Bosnia, and the Mediterranean. “As I trained all over the world, I realized how difficult it was for units to get the cutting-edge training they needed to ensure success,” he said. “In a letter home while I was deployed, I outlined the vision that is today Blackwater.”10
Al Clark and other former Blackwater executives hotly dispute that version of Blackwater’s history. “[Clark] was the guy that came up with the idea for Blackwater as a training center in the beginning and mentioned it to Erik Prince,” says a former Blackwater executive. “Al was the idea [man] and Erik came up with the money. Erik gets the credit for it because he’s the owner, but it was actually Al’s idea.”11 Moreover, Prince’s claim that he laid out “the vision that is today Blackwater” in 1996 is dubious given how closely linked to the “war on terror” the company’s success has been. But because of his upbringing and the training he received at the hands of his father and the family’s conservative friends and allies, Erik Prince was a committed disciple of free-market economic theory and privatization; he clearly understood what led Al Clark to envision a “one-stop shopping” training facility for the federal government. In many ways, the Blackwater project couldn’t have come at a better time—converging as it did with the government’s embrace of some of the very policies the Prince family had long advocated.
Blackwater was born just as the military was in the midst of a massive, unprecedented privatization drive that had begun in force during Dick Cheney’s time as Defense Secretary, from 1989 to 1993, under George H. W. Bush. “In his first year in office, Cheney reduced military spending by $10 billion. He cancelled a number of complicated and expensive weapons systems, and reduced the number of troops from 2.2 million to 1.6 million. Year after year, from 1989 to 1993, the military budget shrank under Cheney,” wrote Dan Briody in his book The Halliburton Agenda. “The army depended very little on civilian contractors in the early 1990s and Cheney was inclined to change that. The idea was to free up the troops to do the fighting while private contractors handled the back-end logistics. It was also a tidy way of handling the public relations nightmare that ensued every time the United States committed troops overseas. More contractors meant fewer troops, and a much more politically palatable troop count.”12 At the end of his tenure, Cheney commissioned Halliburton subsidiary Brown and Root (later renamed KBR following a merger with engineering contractor M. W. Kellogg) to do a classified study on how the military could privatize the majority of support services—troop housing, food, laundry, etc.—for U.S. international military operations. 13 Brown and Root was paid $3.9 million to write a report that would effectively create a hugely profitable market for itself by greatly expanding the Pentagon’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP).14 Indeed, by late August 1992, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had selected Halliburton, soon to be run by Cheney himself, to do virtually all of the support work for the military over the next five years.15 That first Halliburton contract burst open the door for the rapid privatization that would culminate in the contracting bonanza in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere ushered in by the war on terror.
By the time Al Clark, Erik Prince, and a handful of others began serious planning for what would become Blackwater in the mid-1990s, the military had been downsizing for years, and training facilities were some of the casualties of that trend. Those facilities were also some of the most valuable components of the military machine. But the Base Realignment and Closure Act process that had begun during the Reagan/Bush era, ostensibly as a money-saving venture, had accelerated under Bill Clinton and had left the military with what many in the special forces community saw as an inadequate number of training venues. This downsizing would provide fertile ground for Blackwater to sprout and grow fast. “There was a need for training for military and for Special Operations units, because most of the ranges and facilities were World War II and they were antiquated,” said Bill Masciangelo, the first president of Blackwater, who now runs military and government sales for hotel giant Cendant. “Since they were running out of places to train, and nobody provided a modern military facility, that was the whole concept behind Blackwater when it was first conceived.”16 Al Clark said that at the time of Blackwater’s founding it was “not an original idea. Everybody knew for twenty years there needed to be a place like this built.”17 Not long after Clark pitched his idea to Prince in 1996, Clark says his former pupil told him, “Let’s do it.”18
At the time, the United States was in the midst of one of the darkest moments in recent history for the Republican Party and the religious right. Bill Clinton’s defeat of George H. W. Bush in the 1992 presidential election meant the end of a twelve-year golden era of conservative governance, molded in large part by the policies of Ronald Reagan’s White House. While the right-wing political apparatus in which Edgar Prince was a key player did succeed in propelling the 1994 Republican Revolution and Newt Gingrich’s rise to Speaker of the House, the Clinton administration was viewed by the theocons as a far-left “regime” that was forcing a proabortion, progay, antifamily, antireligious agenda on the country. In November 1996—the month Clinton crushed Bob Dole and won reelection—the main organ of the theoconservative movement, Richard Neuhaus’s journal First Things, published a “symposium” titled “The End of Democracy?” which bluntly questioned “whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.”19 A series of essays raised the prospect of a major confrontation between the church and the “regime,” at times seeming to predict a civil-war scenario or Christian insurrection against the government, exploring possibilities “ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.”20 Erik Prince’s close friend, political collaborator, and beneficiary Chuck Colson authored one of the five major essays of the issue, as did extremist Judge Robert Bork, whom Reagan had tried unsuccessfully to appoint to the Supreme Court in 1987. “Americans are not accustomed to speaking of a regime. Regimes are what other nations have,” asserted the symposium’s unsigned introduction. “This symposium asks whether we may be deceiving ourselves and, if we are, what are the implications of that self-deception. By the word ‘regime’ we mean the actual, existing system of government. The question that is the title of this symposium is in no way hyperbolic. The subject before us is the end of democracy.” It declared, “The government of the United States of America no longer governs by the consent of the governed…. What is happening now is the displacement of a constitutional order by a regime that does not have, will not obtain, and cannot command the consent of the people.”21 The editorial quoted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia saying, “A Christian should not support a government that suppresses the faith or one that sanctions the taking of an innocent human life.”22