Blackwater Chief at Nexus of Military and Business

NYT, October 8
JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 — Erik D. Prince, the crew-cut, square-jawed founder of Blackwater USA, the security contractor now at the center of a political storm in both Washington and Baghdad, is a man seemingly born to play a leading role in the private sector side of the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He is both a former member of the Navy Seals and the scion of a fabulously wealthy, deeply religious family that is enmeshed in Republican Party politics. As a result, the 38-year-old Mr. Prince stands at the nexus between American Special Operations, which has played such a critical role in the war operations, and the nation’s political and business elite, who have won enormous government contracts as war operations have increasingly been outsourced.

Republican political connections ran deep in his family long before Mr. Prince founded Blackwater in 1997. When he was a teenager, religious conservative leaders like Gary Bauer, now the president of American Values, were house guests. James C. Dobson, the founder of the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, gave the eulogy at his father’s funeral in 1995. “Dr. and Mrs. Dobson are friends with Erik Prince and his mother, Elsa Broekhuizen,” Focus on the Family said in a statement.

Mr. Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, married into one of the most politically active conservative families in the Midwest. She has served as the chairwoman of the Republican Party of Michigan, and last year, her husband, Richard DeVos Jr., ran unsuccessfully for governor of Michigan as the Republican candidate. Mr. Prince and his family have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates and other conservative and religious causes, records show. One favorite: the prison ministry of Charles Colson, the former Watergate felon turned Christian prison evangelist.

“They are conservative Christians, and they have very strong views on the sanctity of human life and the defense of marriage and the role of faith in the public square,” Mr. Bauer said of the Prince family. “Those are issues I’ve been associated with, and so it was a natural relationship,” he said of his ties to Mr. Prince’s parents.

Unlike many other young men who inherit great wealth, Mr. Prince also struck out on his own and joined the Navy Seals at a time when few other men of his economic class were willing to serve in the military. After his father died and left him a fortune, Mr. Prince’s experience in Special Operations led him to found Blackwater, and he has made a point of hiring other former members of the Navy Seals, including some who now play prominent management roles.

But now that Blackwater is under scrutiny for its involvement in the Sept. 16 shootings of as many as 17 Iraqis in downtown Baghdad, some critics are questioning whether Mr. Prince’s political connections have propelled the company’s sudden rise.

“He is an ideological foot soldier, not only in the war on terror, but also in the broader Bush agenda,” said Jeremy Scahill, the author of a new book called “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” (Nation). “He is a visionary when it comes to military technology and asymmetric warfare. But he is also a bankroller of Republican and right-wing religious causes.”

Yet supporters say the image of Mr. Prince as a Republican carpetbagger and war profiteer is nothing more than an inaccurate cartoon. “Republican connections have nothing to do with Blackwater,” said Chris Taylor, a former Blackwater vice president.

“In the senior positions at Blackwater, there are Democrats,” he added. “If Erik is a conservative, I never heard anybody say that you have to be a conservative to be here. People need to know just how exceptional a guy he is. He’s very generous, and greatly respected in the company.”

Mr. Prince did not respond to a request for an interview. But during his Congressional testimony last week, when asked about his political connections, he responded by saying that he did not think his political contributions were “germane” to the lawmakers’ inquiry into Blackwater’s operations in Iraq.

Others who know him suggest that there is a more complicated dynamic tension between Erik Prince, the aggressive, no-holds-barred Navy Seals veteran, and Erik Prince, the well-mannered wealthy son, that explains the man and the corporation he has built in his image.

“I think that he thinks he is like Bruce Wayne in Batman,” said Robert Young Pelton, the author of “Licensed to Kill” (Crown Publishing Group), a book on contractors in Iraq, who is one of the few journalists to have interviewed Mr. Prince extensively. “Bruce Wayne lives in a mansion and then at night he is out in the bat cave with the Batmobile. And that is Erik. I think he is conflicted.”

Mr. Prince grew up in Holland, Mich., where his father, Edgar Prince, had founded the Prince Corporation, an automotive parts supplier to the major car makers based in Detroit. According to Mr. Scahill’s book, the trauma of suffering a serious heart attack in the 1970s deepened Edgar Prince’s religious faith, and by the 1980s he was helping to finance conservative religious groups like the Family Research Council.

Erik entered the Naval Academy, but later transferred to Hillsdale College, a small, conservative school in western Michigan. He also became politically active, working on campus for the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1992.

After college he made it into the Navy Seals following Officer Candidate School, and seemed eager to pursue a military career. But the death of his father, and the illness of Mr. Prince’s first wife, who later died of cancer, intervened, and he left the Navy. His family sold the Prince Corporation for more than $1 billion in 1996, a windfall that gave Erik Prince the financial freedom to create Blackwater.

Working with another former Seal, Al Clark, Mr. Prince sought to create a world-class training facility that could be used by American military and law enforcement personnel. They built their facility in 1997 on a rural site in North Carolina, just south of the Virginia border near Norfolk, which is home to a major Navy base and other military posts. But it was only after the Sept. 11 attacks that Blackwater began to emerge as a major security contractor in war zones.

Mr. Pelton said it would be wrong to assume that Mr. Prince’s political connections account for his success. “It is a mistake to characterize him as his father, or by the right-wing groups his father supported,” Mr. Pelton said. “Politically, I think he is more of a libertarian. He hates government sloth, even as his company gets most of its business from the government.”