Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (33 page)

Finally, living thirty miles outside Holland, Michigan, Vander Mey remembered that he had relatives who might know some of my relatives. Soon, we were on the phone together—and then I was on the phone to Kabul, Afghanistan. I would invade hell itself if my children’s lives were in danger, and my team at Blackwater was determined to help those families bring their children home. Richard Pere, our aviation head, called Ricky “C. T.” Chambers.

A former FBI special agent, “Chocolate Thunder”—he’s as imposing as the nickname suggests—had been the lead bureau investigator for the 1997 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. He knew the area well. By early 2008, C.T. was also Blackwater’s regional director of training in Afghanistan for our various narcotics interdiction contracts and border police training programs. Chambers immediately found a flight to Nairobi.

From there, he and a small team rented a tiny plane and organized a humanitarian snatch-and-grab mission. They flew themselves to a dirt airstrip outside of Kimilili, quickly snuck into the outpost, and hurried the women and other missionaries back to the plane—and then back to Nairobi.
Two days later, the girls’ commercial flight
touched down at the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids. I heard from friends back in Michigan when local news teams broadcast the girls racing hand in hand down the jet bridge, back into the arms of their waiting parents.

The girls’ families offered us money as thanks. We wouldn’t accept it. In fact, the only time cash came up was when Chambers called his boss and asked if it was all right to upgrade to first class for his flight back to Kabul. “It’s been a long week,” he said. We happily agreed.

•   •   •

A
ll of these incidents—Katrina, Ouagadougou, Potrero, the Kenya rescue—were deeply connected with my faith. For some reason, many people are aware of my embrace of Christianity but somehow can’t imagine me as being capable of charity. In reality, my faith has informed every aspect of my life. While I’ve made mistakes, I’ve also learned about grace—and one of the biggest lessons of grace involved an experience with my own growing family.

A year after Joan’s death, I married Joanna. It was the right thing to do, I felt, in spite of the wrong I had done during my first marriage. I wanted to be a father for our son Rafe, who was born shortly after Joan’s death. Soon after the wedding, our second son, Jack, was born. And finally, Joanna and I were blessed with a third boy, Charles Donovan Prince, in 2007. While I sensed God’s influence and grace in my life through all of our children, it was through Charlie that I really sensed his hand.

In late September 2008, little Charlie managed to wedge himself through the back door of our Virginia home. I was on a site visit in Afghanistan at the time; Joanna was out of the house at a shopping mall. Our nanny had just finished bathing Charlie in the kitchen, and she turned her head for a moment to check on the other children. Like that, the one-year-old slipped out the door and went to play by the pool. He tumbled in.

Charlie was floating there motionless when Christian, my oldest son, then twelve, found him a short time later. Christian dove and pulled him out, then performed the CPR he’d just learned through a Red Cross certification program at Blackwater. Sophia called 911 and family friends, somehow remaining calm amid the frantic scene until an ambulance arrived to take Charlie to the hospital.

My cell phone rang at two a.m. in Kabul. A crowd had gathered in the hospital; Joanna was beside herself. I scrapped my original travel plans, which had called for a stopover in Pakistan for the weekend,
and within minutes was on a plane home. I have virtually no recollection of that fifteen-hour flight—I was so consumed by the fear of losing my son, I hardly breathed.

And then, when I burst through the door of our home, I saw a strange thing: Charlie was smiling. He had his normal coloring back, and was alert, and generally looked exactly the way he had when I’d left for the trip a few days before. They’d discharged him from the hospital, and there was ultimately no residual damage from the accident whatsoever. “God was clearly never going to let Charlie die,” friends said. “But I suppose everything happens for a reason.”

Later, I flipped on the news—and nearly dropped the remote control: At eight p.m. Islamabad time, right when I had originally planned to be checking into the Marriott hotel there, terrorists had
driven a six-wheeled truck
loaded with thirteen hundred pounds of explosives up to its front gates. “The
biggest explosion in Pakistani history
,” as government investigators described it, destroyed the building, killing 53 and wounding more than 260 others. Christian had saved Charlie’s life. I believe Charlie saved mine.

Today, my face lights up when I tell people about the
Citizen Award
that Christian earned from the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department for his actions that day and about Sophia’s grace under pressure that reminds me so much of her mom.

I feel a similar pride in the way our Blackwater family was able to rescue others—everyone from soldiers to disaster victims to stranded aid workers. About 175 in all, if I had to guess. It’s not something we tracked. “Blackwater has been really wonderful,” Don Vander Mey, grandfather to Brittanie and Aubrie, told his local newspaper after the girls’ safe return to Michigan. “
They’ve been getting a lot of negative publicity
lately but they did something that no one else could.”

Dean Vander Mey described the whole situation slightly differently: “
It’s been a nightmare and a miracle
,” he said. I know the feeling.

2009–2010

As 2009 dawned, Blackwater felt more like a nightmare than a miracle, and the company’s end seemed almost inevitable.

On January 1 of that year, the new status of forces agreement between the United States and Iraq went into effect; in one of their inaugural acts of sovereignty, Iraqi officials declared they would not issue my company a license for our continued operation in the country. “
They presented their request
, and we rejected it,” Alaa al-Taia, an Interior Ministry official, told the
New York Times
.

Under State’s guidance, we hadn’t previously needed that license. But after the agreement, we were told by the department, Iraqi permission for us to be there was important. The Iraqis wouldn’t grant it. “There are
many marks against this company
, specifically that they have a bad history and have been involved in the killing of so many civilians.” With the new SOFA, Interior Ministry spokesman Major General Abdul-Karim Khalaf declared that military contractors “will be under the authority of the Iraqi government, and those
companies that don’t have licenses, such as Blackwater, should leave Iraq immediately.”

Considering compliance with State Department contract requirements was at the heart of so many of our troubles in Iraq, the department did conspicuously little to champion our cause. That part still burns, even today. Maybe it’s naive, or maybe just idealistic, but I’ve always believed in loyalty and dedication to a team. Clearly, our program managers at State didn’t feel the same way.

Our security work for the department, eligible for annual review under the WPPS II, was set to be reupped in early May 2009. But I learned two days after the Interior Ministry’s decision that State had made a decision of its own: Blackwater was done in Iraq. Triple Canopy would take over our work. Any question of us running further security missions in Baghdad, a senior U.S. official said at the time, was “
basically a moot point
because they were not going to be allowed to operate in Iraq anyway.”

With that, some 50 percent of my company’s revenue was about to vanish. I read about it on a blog before State had the courtesy to tell us personally.

It was the culmination of what had, over the past year, become an increasingly acrimonious relationship with the department. As Blackwater was publicly dragged through the mud, State couldn’t stay entirely clean. Rather than focus on our perfect success record, State dwelled on any negative press we generated, and how it might reflect on them. Department personnel were guilty by—or simply of—association with us, they felt, and in the months following my appearance on Capitol Hill, there was more mud than ever.

The IRS
, for instance, dug into our accounting practices for classifying our men on the ground as “independent contractors” instead of “employees”; Waxman promptly issued a press release, which would be distributed widely, accusing us of tax evasion. We were practically a test run for the left-wing bureaucracy siccing the IRS on opponents. (Our accounting practices were entirely within the law, though in our fourteen-page response to the accusations, one
note was ignored by the chairman: “
As Blackwater continues to cooperate
with the Committee’s review,” we wrote, “it respectfully requests that the Committee afford the attached [explanation] the same level of public attention and consideration that the Committee afforded the letter you released on October 22, 2007.”)

News from years earlier somehow shot back into the light. In 2005,
two employees in our armory
—Kenneth Cashwell and William “Max” Grumiaux—had been caught by Blackwater’s own internal investigators falsifying paperwork. They had been stealing guns intended for our overseas contractors and selling them on the black market.

At the time, we’d immediately called in the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to crack down on anyone in Moyock associated with the crime. But even that backfired: Facing as much as a decade in prison and fines up to $250,000,
Cashwell and Grumiaux bargained down
to three years’ probation and a thousand-dollar fine by agreeing to testify against us in any future firearms cases involving Blackwater. “
I’m sorry for what I’ve done
,” Grumiaux said of his crimes. “I feel like I’ve dishonored myself, having served in the military, and that’s a burden I’ll have to bear for the rest of my life.”

That two-year-old story somehow broke following my appearance on Capitol Hill; only at the very bottom of those news reports did sentences like this appear: “
Federal officials confirmed in 2005
, when the men were fired, that Blackwater came forward and asked authorities for help.”

By that point, even innocuous things about my company generated fanciful headlines. For instance, at one point
we purchased a single-propeller Embraer
EMB-314 Super Tucano attack plane designed mainly for border patrol and counterinsurgency operations. The Brazilian aircraft, which was built as a training device and subject to all the standard import regulations for that type of equipment, offered us a perfect way to expand our Moyock capabilities, in exactly the way that Navy “ship in a box” had years earlier. Almost
predictably, however, our buying a single fighter trainer was immediately trumpeted online as, “
Blackwater is building its own air force
of ‘ground attack planes’ and just bought a fleet of ‘Super Tucano light combat aircraft from the Brazilian manufacturer Embraer.’”

As if that wasn’t bizarre enough, one of our contractors in Baghdad then engaged in
another deadly shooting—this time of a dog
. Its name was apparently Hentish. It had been a mainstay at the housing of
New York Times
reporters. I was told the shooter, one of our K9 handlers, had been sweeping the newspaper’s area of the compound before a visit from U.S. embassy personnel, when Hentish—a feral canine that had come to rely on the table scraps reporters fed him—became territorial and attacked our bomb-sniffing dog. After several unsuccessful attempts to separate the animals, and not wanting to see an extremely valuable Blackwater asset hurt by what amounted to a wild animal, the handler had no choice but to use his pistol to eliminate the threat. “
Blackwater Shoots the
New York Times
’ Dog
,” read the next day’s headlines—and soon State was making multiple follow-up visits to the compound to investigate. “
They took the incident very seriously
,” the
New York Times
reported.

In the early part of 2009, I couldn’t go twenty-four hours without hearing some conspiracy theory about some evil thing my company was purportedly doing—and for many people, the theories seemed as plausible as the facts. At the very least, they further colored the interpretation of our work and the State Department’s objectives in Baghdad. It was exhausting.

In a climate one pro-Blackwater blogger described as “
a heady cocktail of fear, ignorance and paranoia
,” columnists such as Frank Rich of the
New York Times
piled on. When Charles D. Riechers, a head procurement officer in the Air Force, committed suicide after a reporter detailed his taking a phony position at contractor Commonwealth Research Institute for a little quick cash—“
I really didn’t do anything
for CRI,” Riechers admitted; “I got a paycheck from them”—Rich wrote: “As it happens, [Riechers] was
only about three
degrees of separation from Blackwater.” In reality, Riechers had no relationship whatsoever with my company—yet through efforts like that, the name Blackwater somehow became synonymous with corruption.

At the extreme end of the spectrum, one frequently updated blog that always provided me with a little gallows humor was called
All You Need Is a Crazy Rich Guy with a Private Army
. Created by New Zealander Evelyn Gilbert, the site wore its mission on its sleeve: “
The premise of this blog
[is] that Erik Prince, who started the mercenary firm called Blackwater, may very well have provided the crew responsible for the 9/11 attacks.”

It wasn’t exactly a surprise to me that State Department personnel weren’t thrilled with the realities inherent in the job they asked us to do. They didn’t like the aggressive driving. They didn’t like the shootings, or the idea that our department-mandated tactics had the potential to undermine their nation-building efforts. According to one report, Jessica Gans, a consultant to the department in Iraq during our time there, told the
Los Angeles Times
that she bristled at seeing “
heavily armed contract guards
frighten Iraqi civilians and destroy their property.”

I could handle those broadsides. But the hypocrisy of the situation grated on me when those same critics acknowledged what happened as soon as they left the Green Zone—at which point, as one U.S. official described it, “You want
the biggest, meanest guys
in the world protecting you.”

For years Blackwater’s ability to achieve its performance standards spoke louder to department administrators than news reports—the product of a simple philosophy I’d used to build our business: “Make yourself indispensable, and you’ll always have work.” Amid the fallout from Nisour Square, however, State clearly began to reassess things. “During the
late summer and fall of 2007
, actions by Blackwater WPPS management personnel . . . caused the program office to lose confidence in their credibility and management ability,” wrote Paul Isaac, the contracting officer for State’s
Overseas Protective Operations–High Threat Protective Division, in a July 2008 internal evaluation.

So in January 2009, days after Barack Obama was sworn in as president and Hillary Clinton was appointed the new secretary of state—both of whom had campaigned to end the use of private security contractors—the department came for Blackwater’s jugular by canceling our WPPS II work.

But as that contract was coming to a sudden halt, the new Democratic administration soon learned the same lesson as its predecessor: “Indispensable” means exactly that. In the years since we’d first won the major Baghdad component of the security work—job responsibilities technically known as Task Order 6—we’d picked up a pair of additional task orders: Task Order 8, for protective service details in Hillah, Najaf, and Karbala, south of Baghdad; and Task Order 10, State’s official adoption of our aerial support to include search and rescue capabilities, medevacs, and our quick reaction forces.

Our work for State in Baghdad might end in May 2009, but
Task Order 8 south of the city
wouldn’t expire until August, eight months after Iraq’s Interior Ministry told us to leave the country entirely. And State was so fearful of the sudden loss of our aircraft, they actually
renegotiated a new Task Order 10 contract
with us days after they dealt the devastating financial blow to my company. It was going to take the department the better part of a year, State told us, to find a new firm to provide Blackwater’s aviation capabilities. So under the new terms, our aviation specialists would remain in the country until September, and State would
pay us an additional $22.2 million
.

By late 2009, when Blackwater finally concluded four years of myriad WPPS II duties in Iraq, the State Department had
paid us more than one billion
dollars for our work.

•   •   •

T
he same month Iraq refused us an operating license, our
five contractors from Nisour Square pleaded not guilty
in court to
fourteen counts of manslaughter and twenty counts of attempted manslaughter. The court case made headlines everywhere—I knew the last thing we needed at that point was to give anyone anything
legitimate
to complain about. Then, just as Blackwater security teams on the ground pulled out of Baghdad, two of our contractors engaged in a new shooting incident in Afghanistan’s capital.

On May 5, 2009,
two men working
for one of our company subsidiaries, Paravant, got into a shoot-out as they escorted three Afghan interpreters through Kabul to a taxi stand a few miles from the contractors’ base. Soon, contractors
Christopher Drotleff and Justin Cannon were charged
under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act with numerous offenses, including involuntary manslaughter and attempted murder.

And then the anger hit me. I was aghast at the contractors’ recklessness—and furious about what it could mean back in Moyock. As if State’s ire in Iraq wasn’t damaging enough to everything we’d built at Blackwater, our team now had a new shooting to deal with in another major country of operation.

We’d put that Paravant offshoot in Afghanistan on a
subcontract with Raytheon
Technical Services Company. Even if our security work slowed in Iraq, I knew, the Afghan theater still offered ample business opportunities for us. It was the best chance we had to keep the company afloat. As part of rebuilding efforts aimed to allow coalition forces to withdraw from Afghanistan, NATO had set personnel benchmarks for the Afghan National Police (ANP) and Afghan National Army (ANA):
160,000 trained ANP members
, and
240,000 capable ANA soldiers
by the end of 2013. The United States was spearheading those training efforts,
preparing to spend more than $9 billion in 2010
alone to develop those forces. Making sure we were part of that was a key step to steadying my company’s footing.

Raytheon had been awarded
a ten-year, $11.2 billion contract from the U.S. Army “to
consolidate operations and maintenance
, systems integration and engineering support services for the Army’s live, virtual and constructive training systems” in Afghanistan. In
less convoluted terms, Raytheon had to make sure the ANA quickly got up to snuff. They came to us,
offering Paravant a subcontract worth $25 million
to put the actual training personnel on the ground in Kabul and to teach Afghanistan’s nascent army the basics.

When I say “basics,” I mean that many members of the ANA reported from tribal areas that had
never seen indoor plumbing or electricity
. Our instructors teaching “Intro to Toilet Use” isn’t a joke—and I certainly don’t mean it as a knock on the Afghans. Those men, and a handful of women who traded burkas for camouflage, took extraordinary pride in helping to stabilize their nation. In my site visits there, I saw a level of passion for the job that I’ve rarely witnessed elsewhere.