On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11, carrying ninety-two passengers from Boston to Los Angeles, abruptly turned course and headed straight toward New York City. At 8:46 a.m., the plane smashed directly into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Some seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. As fire and smoke burned from two of America’s most famous buildings, the attacks almost instantly accelerated an agenda of privatization and conquest long sought by many of the people who had just taken over the White House less than a year earlier. President Bush’s Secretary of the Army, Thomas White, a former Enron executive, oversaw the rapid implementation of the privatization agenda kick-started by Dick Cheney a decade earlier.71 The program would soon see the explosion of a $100 billion global for-profit military industry. Among the greatest beneficiaries of the administration’s newly declared “war on terror” would be Erik Prince’s Blackwater. As Al Clark put it, “Osama bin Laden turned Blackwater into what it is today.”72
“The bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, sent a ripple through the U.S. Navy, and then 9/11 happened and the ripple was worldwide,” Blackwater vice president Chris Taylor said in a 2005 speech at George Washington University Law School. “The Navy appropriately responded realizing that in order to combat today’s terrorist threat, all sailors would need substantial training in basic and advanced force protection techniques. The Navy moved swiftly to create a sound training program, the majority of which Blackwater now executes and manages all over the country. Sailors the world over are now better prepared to identify, appropriately engage, and defeat would-be attacks on naval vessels in port and underway. To date, Blackwater has trained some 30,000 sailors.”73 Blackwater was officially awarded the $35.7 million Navy contract for “force protection training that includes force protection fundamental training… armed sentry course training; and law enforcement training.”74 The bulk of the work was to be performed in Norfolk, with some in San Diego and San Antonio.75 A Blackwater trainer who oversaw the contract commented shortly after it started in 2002 that his instructors were shocked to find many sailors “have never held a firearm, except for at boot camp.”76
The post-9/11 environment provided Erik Prince and his Blackwater colleagues with a blank canvas on which to paint a profitable future for the company, seemingly limited only by imagination and personnel. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had come into office determined to dramatically expand the role private companies like Blackwater would play in U.S. wars, and 9/11 had put that agenda on the fastest of tracks. On September 27, two weeks after 9/11, Prince made a rare media appearance as a guest on Fox News’s flagship program, The O’Reilly Factor. “I’ve been operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security,” Prince said on the show. “The phone is ringing off the hook now.”77 The reason for Prince’s appearance on Fox was to discuss the air marshal program and the training that marshals would receive, some of it at Blackwater. That month, Blackwater inked contracts with the FBI worth at least $610,000.78 Soon it would be providing training for virtually every wing of the government, from the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administrative Service Center to the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crime Enforcement Network to the Department of Health and Human Services assistant secretary’s office.79
But while Blackwater raised its profit margin and profile with its training services in the aftermath of 9/11, its true fame and fortune would not be gained until it formed Blackwater Security Consulting in 2002 and burst into the world of soldiers-for-hire. As with Blackwater’s founding, Erik Prince would once again provide the medium for another’s idea. This time, it was the vision of former CIA operative Jamie Smith. Smith had been recruited by Al Clark to teach weapons classes while he was a law student at Regent University, “America’s preeminent Christian university,” in Virginia Beach, not far from Blackwater.80
In an interview, Smith said he first thought about the prospects for a private security company while working as a CIA operative during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. “I’m not trying to say that I was some sort of soothsayer a decade prior to all of this, but it was an infantile idea, it looked like it was just going to continue the trends of privatization,” Smith said. “There were already companies doing similar things. There wasn’t a lot of public knowledge surrounding that. DynCorp was working, there were other companies, SAIC, that were doing something along the same lines.” Smith said he realized that the military was beginning to use private forces to guard military facilities, a practice known as “force protection,” thus freeing up more forces for combat. It was a trend, and Smith said he “did not think it was something that could be arrested because of the nature of our military being a volunteer service. Do you really want to have your volunteer force standing guard out at the front gate when they could be doing things a lot more valuable for you? So I just didn’t see that it would change and that it would probably just continue.”81
Like Al Clark a few years earlier, Jamie Smith didn’t have the means at the time to start his own private security company, and while the demand was certainly there, it was not overwhelming. Then, after 9/11, Smith says Prince “called and said, ‘Hey, I’d like you to consider a full-time job and come back to work with us,’ and I told him that was interesting to me and that I would consider doing that with the caveat that we could create this security company.” Prince agreed. But, Smith contends, Prince didn’t see the payoff in what would shortly become Blackwater’s biggest moneymaker. “I was told, ‘You can’t devote all your time to this because it’s not going to work.’ They said, ‘You can devote about 20 percent of your total time to this, but no more than that—you need to stick to what you’re doing now,’” Smith said.82 Smith joined Blackwater full-time in December 2001, and Blackwater Security Consulting was incorporated in Delaware on January 22, 2002.83 Within months, as the U.S. occupied Afghanistan and began planning the Iraq invasion, Blackwater Security was already turning a profit, pulling in hundreds of thousands a month from a valuable CIA contract.84