Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (36 page)

The settlement stood, however. Two years after that, a
settlement was reached with families of six other Nisour Square victims
in a separate suit, for similarly modest amounts. Gradually, we hoped, Blackwater might be putting its darkest days behind it.

•   •   •

U
nfortunately, by that time, every business process we conducted was placed under a microscope, from our contractor hiring process to the second-guessing of our compliance process. In Moyock, we understood that saving the company meant taking even more drastic measures than changing our name and settling lawsuits. As part of those measures, Gary Jackson, my dear friend and the man who built Blackwater with me, decided it was best for him to retire.

Jackson and I had always shared a singular focus for growing the company—I had vision; he was a natural at putting together business plans. He did that so well, his leadership was championed in the
Harvard Business Review
alongside the CEO of Nokia, executives at Coca-Cola, Ernst & Young, and more: “
I constantly push for the 80 percent solution
that is executable now over the 100 percent solution we might be able to devise in another three weeks,” he said. Under his management, Blackwater grew so fast that in 2006
Fast Company
magazine
named him one of their “Fast 50
,” a collection of the “people in business, technology, government, the arts, and beyond
who are writing the history of the next 10 years.” “
Blackwater, based in the tiny town
of Moyock, North Carolina, has become one of the largest private-security companies in Iraq and the world,” they wrote. “Given the statistics . . . on military privatization, president Gary Jackson is in for a very strong (and long) decade.” My friend was joined on that list by Bill Gates of Microsoft, DuPont CEO Charles Holliday, Bill Clinton, and other luminaries.

Together, Jackson and I were relentless, a pair of former Navy SEALs building an empire contract by contract. Any disagreements we had were always respectful. He once instituted a “fifteen-minute pissed-off rule” that I loved: Employees—and executives, for that matter—were allowed fifteen minutes to be furious about some company decision they disagreed with, and then it was back to work. Jackson and I were a perfect business fit, but it grew to be more than that. We’d become family. He’d been there for me during Joan’s illness, and my marriage to Joanna, and together we’d weathered the storms from Fallujah and Nisour Square and the hearings on Capitol Hill. Blackwater never would have become the company it did without his guidance. He loved it as much as I did, even as it grew ever larger, plowing forward and picking up steam and becoming harder and harder to control. In order for Xe to forge a new path, the company needed someone who could fill his large shoes.

Shortly after changing our company’s name, I hired Joseph Yorio to be its new president. The Jeannette, Pennsylvania, native had an elite military background, having served ten years with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, the 1st Ranger Battalion, and the 7th and 11th Special Forces Groups. But he also brought with him equally valuable experience in multinational corporations, having been an executive at paper distributor Unisource Worldwide, the office products firm Corporate Express, and shipping company DHL. That was experience neither Jackson nor I had ever been able to fall back on.

Yorio was joined at the top by Xe’s new chief operating officer and executive vice president, Danielle Esposito. She had been with the company for nearly a decade, and I knew she had the talent and
familiarity with our operations to help smooth what was going to be a major transition. Together, Esposito and Yorio tightened down the internal procedures to make the company more acceptable to those in Washington.

In a matter of months, nine vice presidents—half of the total—and sixteen directors left the company. Some were asked to go; others resigned because they didn’t agree with Yorio’s vision for the company or because they’d had enough of the public inquisitions. Yorio and Esposito expanded certification and compliance programs, acknowledging, “
In previous years, the company export compliance program
was inadequate to address the regulatory requirements for exports of equipment in support of U.S. Government missions.” They brought on a new general counsel, Christian Bonat, who had during the first Obama administration been senior counsel to the Defense Department’s General Counsel, providing policy advice on matters of litigation and legislation. They introduced an anonymous, worldwide whistle-blower hotline operated by an independent third party in multiple languages, including various Afghan dialects.

Then the new team instituted a new governance structure at Xe that included a board of directors. It was a far different approach from the way I’d always done things, though I knew “Blackwater” had entered a new era and I begrudgingly endorsed the change. “
The company must work to address past
, and to prevent future, errors in order to move forward,” the management team said.

Finally, I knew there was one last Blackwater holdover who had to go. Me.

It remains difficult to describe how hard that decision was for me, and what leaving the company, under those circumstances, truly felt like. For all the incredible things we accomplished, I can’t help but reflect on all that Blackwater never got to do on my watch: the humanitarian and peacekeeping work we could have revolutionized if only we’d been granted the authority to match the funding and the willpower that we brought to the table. I’d wanted to privatize
firefighting, and then I wanted to create a national sort of talent agency for police forces to draw upon in times of crisis. We were never at a lack for ideas. Walking away from people who felt like family was hard enough; walking away when what we were building together seemed only half done was heartbreaking.

Twelve years after carving the foundation of my company in the North Carolina swampland, I resigned as Blackwater’s CEO, taking on the honorary title of chairman of the new board of directors. I no longer had any involvement in day-to-day operations. “It is with pride in our many accomplishments and confidence in Xe’s future that
I announce my resignation
as the company’s Chief Executive Officer,” I wrote in an internal email to the staff. “I feel like a proud parent. I have looked after this company since its infancy and I am now sending it off to college.” I was effectively done with Blackwater.

It soon became clear, however, that the Justice Department wasn’t done with us.

In April 2010,
a fifteen-count indictment was issued against Jackson
, former executive vice president William Mathews, former general counsel Andrew Howell, former firearms manager Ronald Slezak, and former vice president Ana Bundy, alleging the employees falsified paperwork and gave false statements while improperly possessing and distributing firearms. The charges were especially galling because the factual bases for the prosecution arose from Blackwater’s use of the very weapons that were destined for use in overseas missions on behalf of the agency.

The
allegations largely revolved around seventeen AK-47s and seventeen Bushmaster M4
machine guns registered to the Camden County Sheriff’s Office—yet purchased by, and stored at, Blackwater’s armory—and five guns we gifted to Jordan’s King Abdullah II at the CIA’s request during a royal visit to our Moyock campus in March 2005. Justice then added a damning catchall count asserting the combined allegations showed my employees “
did knowingly
combine, conspire, confederate and agree to commit offenses against the United States.”

The individual charges brought with them potential prison sentences
that lasted decades apiece, along with fines up to $250,000. The government strong-armed our senior executives in hopes they might cough up something illegal about the man those investigators were really after. The Justice Department surely hoped one of them would say something to implicate me directly. To the prosecutors’ disappointment, there was nothing of the sort to be said.

However, some courageous former government officials did come forward, exposing the government’s role in all the conduct of the indictment. After almost three years of wondering whether they were going to spend decades in jail, the five former Blackwater employees were basically exonerated. Soon after defense counsel had provided declarations by former government officials stating that the CIA had asked Blackwater to do the very acts its employees were being prosecuted for, the government dismissed the case against the three of them, and allowed the other two to plead to a one count bookkeeping misdemeanor, resulting in no prison time.

What’s more, I was impressed by the way everyone on Blackwater’s team stuck to the confidentiality requirements in our government contracts, even when it would have benefited them personally not to. In one interview with the Raleigh
News & Observer
, for instance, Jackson was asked why the sheriff and his nineteen deputies in sleepy Camden County would hatch an agreement with Blackwater to procure seventeen “
primitive military rifles
,” as the indictment described them, which “have little or no application for law enforcement agencies within the United States.” Jackson equivocated. “
Because they needed guns, I imagine
,” he finally said.

The pretty obvious truth was that the deputies didn’t need AK-47s—we did. But we couldn’t publicly explain what was happening behind the scenes. The same was true for King Abdullah’s visit to Moyock, and for Blackwater’s many shadowy missions that have
only been hinted at in the press or speculated about online. Beyond the Defense Department work that launched our company and the State Department work that made us famous, we had for years filled contracts for the organization known in military circles as the “OGA”—the Other Government Agency. The CIA. We never talked about that work—and unfortunately still can’t.

2011–Present

On the morning of my forty-second birthday, I got a call from my mother. “Happy birthday,” she said. “Remember, your dad was forty-two when he had his first attack.” The men in my family don’t tend to grow old.

I think about that sometimes, when I see my teenage kids dig through the refrigerator in the kitchen, or hear them talk about summer plans, or even joke about the latest boy to approach one of my daughters at the beach. (“
Please
don’t be scary!” my daughters tell me whenever a boy comes to the house to pick them up. “Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll just sit over there and clean a few guns.”) I wonder about the future whenever there’s tightness in my chest when I deal with lawyers and legacy problems from my time with Blackwater. It reminds me of the last time I saw my father, at Sophia’s baptism, and about sitting at her mother’s bedside when she died at the age of thirty-three.

It makes me think about my life’s work. Because when it comes to Blackwater, if I had it all to do over again, I’m not sure I would. At the
very least, I’d be more selective in the federal departments I worked for. Otherwise, I might just send a note back to 1998 and tell myself to go start my own manufacturing business. Or do something else entirely in a different part of the world—anything, anyplace.

I’m still haunted by an incident that involved my accountant: As he escorted a veteran IRS agent around my farm during yet another tax audit, the officer mentioned how in twenty-five years of handling high-profile tax cases, he had “never been under so much pressure to
get
someone as to
get
Erik Prince.” I’m just not sure what good I gained from the path I chose, or what part of America it is that craves that sort of relentless political persecution.

In March 2010, I sold Aviation Worldwide Services—including subsidiary Presidential Airways—to AAR Corporation, a multipurpose logistics provider based outside Chicago that was looking to increase its services for the defense industry. Our fleet had grown to include seventy-three aircraft and some seven hundred men.
The deal was for $200 million
. “Since 2005,” AAR said in a press release at the time, “
Presidential had flown more
than 70,000 missions worldwide, transported 270,000 personnel, and delivered 50 million pounds of cargo and mail.

Then, soon after, I put Blackwater—or, officially, Xe Services—up for sale. I could barely tell the executives in Moyock without choking up. “After three and a half years of an assault by some of the bureaucracy, a sort of proctology exam brought on by some in Congress,” I said then, “
it’s time to hang it up
.” It felt like losing a loved one yet again.

In a little over a decade, my company had risen from a soggy patch of Carolina swamp ground to gross some $2 billion. I personally earned only a typical executive salary from the work, and pushed all the company earnings right back into helping Blackwater grow, expanding its facilities and capabilities to better serve future clients. At the height of its influence, in 2007, Blackwater had nearly twenty-five hundred contractors deployed in almost a dozen countries, and a database of some fifty thousand former special forces troops,
soldiers, and retired law enforcement agents we could call upon for training and security contracts. Thanks to the relentless assault by politicians and parasitic trial lawyers, the business was valued at less than it had been worth in 2004.

Critics may have questioned my company’s tactics, but to this day no one has ever doubted our results: In some fifty thousand completed personal security detail missions, we never suffered a single loss of life or serious injury to those in our care.

Sadly, the same can’t be said of our contractors, forty-one of whom gave their lives serving a mission they believed in, helping the United States advance its interests abroad. Other Blackwater contractors sustained life-changing injuries while on the job. To say that they came away from the fight far worse off than I have is almost to trivialize what those words mean.

I check in periodically to a
Facebook page called “Small Victories
.” The posts there are written by Derrick Wright, a former Army Ranger, then wilderness survival instructor, then Blackwater team leader for a high-threat protective detail in Baghdad. He’s always been an overachiever, and today that page is a poignant chronicle of his latest mission: Wright’s recovery from a traumatic brain injury suffered during a rocket attack on Blackwater’s Green Zone housing in April 2007.

With telltale dry wit that made it through the blast unscathed, Wright says simply: “
I got my brains blown out
.” He’s open about how the shrapnel from the explosion that night shattered his skull, and riddled his left knee, back, and neck with shards of metal that ripped through his bedroom wall. Blackwater team members sweeping the complex after the blast found him collapsed on the floor of his room in a puddle of blood and cerebral fluid that was leaking from the gaping wound near his forehead. “
That’s what I’ve heard, anyway
,” he says. “The last thing I remember about that night is getting one shoe on before the rocket hit. There’s a full month of my memory that’s just gone.”

Within minutes of the attack, word of the damage had made it back to our offices in Virginia. I’d been told Wright was effectively brain-dead.

As Blackwater medics in Baghdad stabilized him and loaded Wright into a transport plane, back in the States we sent an employee to Austin, Texas, to pick up his wife, Cindy, and accompany her to the Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where Derrick was flown in hopes of saving his life. Her itinerary brought Cindy through Virginia, and I remember meeting her in our offices there. I thought about Joan, and losing my own spouse; Cindy and I cried together. We prayed.

And miraculously, those surgeons did save him. Soon enough, Derrick was awake and alert; everyone at Blackwater celebrated when we heard that he’d squeezed Cindy’s hand. Soon, he was flown back to a hospital in San Antonio, and ultimately headed home—to a house he could no longer navigate in a wheelchair, seemingly endless rehabilitation, and a lifetime of
learning how to be the “new Derrick
,” as he calls it: a former high-threat specialist who now has double vision; a former Ranger who says he struggles cognitively to keep up when there’s too much happening around him; a former wilderness survival guide who speaks eloquently about his more recent satisfaction in deciphering his hometown bus map.

When the initial whirlwind of recovery had subsided, I was proud to hire Wright again, and bring him back to Blackwater to work in our Moyock documents department. It was important to me to help the Wrights however I could, from paying to remodel their home to offering a little professional stability. Unfortunately, Wright was not going to be kept on after the sale of the company, although he soon landed a position at a local museum back in Texas, where he can be closer to home, and his wife and three children. He hopes to become a motivational speaker, and there’s no doubt he has much wisdom to impart.

“
I look back at ‘the event’ as sort of a do-over
,” Wright says now.
“It forced me to step back and look at my priorities. It really opened my eyes to the friends and family I’ve got around me.” I’m incredibly moved that with all he’s been through, Wright freely volunteers, “I will always think of being a Blackwater protective team leader in Baghdad as
the best job I’ve ever had
.”

I’m inspired when I think about the dedication of the men and women who came to work at my company. I loved collaborating with them in Moyock, and visiting our teams in the field. Together, we accomplished more than any of us could have ever anticipated. I remember opening the newspaper one morning and seeing a photo of a U.S. soldier sitting alone on a desolate Afghan mountain ridgeline. He was reading his mail. I loved that Blackwater had delivered it to him. That single image seemed to sum up so much about what my company was capable of.

Today, people ask me what happened—when it felt like things started to come apart. It began, I suppose, with the explosive growth. As the contracts rolled in and the requests kept coming, all of us ran hard to help our customers accomplish their missions. Not just to fulfill our contract, I kept reminding our contractors, but to accomplish the mission. There’s a difference.

For those customers, delivery time was perhaps the most crucial metric, so the 80 percent solutions Jackson championed, involving repurposed aircraft, and used armored vehicles, and most any other choice that avoided the military’s overwrought supersolutions, were absolutely the right ones. Doing our jobs at home meant that our men in dangerous places could do theirs. That meant people stayed alive. We got unlucky with a few bad hires, but perspective is important: We oversaw thousands of human beings, not machines. Even turbine engines, with only a handful of moving parts, break down now and then. And this is war. Blackwater’s men didn’t exactly operate in a place where people tracked the days since the last accident.

Then Nisour Square happened. The damage Blackwater sustained after losing four men in Fallujah, as wide ranging as it was, was surmountable. But that shoot-out in the square was the blasting cap
that sent a shock wave through the company, through the judicial system, and, most important, through a Democratic Party hell-bent on attacking the Bush administration over an unpopular war. There, it detonated the media’s massive secondary attack.

Most members of Congress didn’t know very much about security contracting or the realities of armed conflict, but they did know Blackwater was owned by a religious military man from a prominent conservative family. They knew my company was wildly successful thanks to hard work, not any sort of earmarked federal funds. For the politicians and their bureaucratic henchmen, performance doesn’t matter at the end of the day, just politics, and I represented everything Democrats loathed. So they tore the company down, and they burned their witch. “This isn’t just about broken laws or wasted tax revenues,” then presidential contender Barack Obama announced at a 2007 campaign stop in Iowa City. “
This is about our claims to moral leadership
in the world. We cannot win a fight for hearts and minds when we outsource critical missions to unaccountable contractors.”

Of course, within our government’s bureaucracy, only the names on the office doors ever really change. Since his election, President Obama’s embrace of contractors has flown directly in the face of his campaign rhetoric.

After early token gestures toward reforming transparency and oversight in the PMC industry, he promptly flooded Iraq with more hired guns in order to bring U.S. men and women in uniform home. “
The last American soldier[s] will cross the border out of Iraq
with their heads held high, proud of their success,” President Obama said in October 2011. “That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.” What he neglected to mention was that in their place the U.S. government left a contractor footprint the size of an Army division, which will remain for the foreseeable future. The United States hasn’t left Iraq; only the troops have. “The Obama administration is
about to see a major surge of contractors
there in Iraq . . . as the military goes away,” Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, said at a 2011 hearing of the Committee on Oversight and
Government Reform. “Are we just playing a little bit of a shell game here?”

I remember reading about the last of those roughly 40,000 U.S. troops being withdrawn on December 18, 2011, when a caravan of a hundred military vehicles wound across southern Iraq into Kuwait in the dead of night. I knew it was the State Department that was truly left hanging by their departure; by 2011, State relied upon military personnel for fourteen critical security-related functions, as well as “
logistical support, food and fuel
, and about 1,000 other detailed tasks,” according to the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Looking ahead, the State Department’s
total manpower in Iraq is soon expected
to reach 17,000 people spread throughout Embassy Baghdad, and nearly a dozen consulates and branch offices in the country. All but about 1,750 of whom will be contractors. (
Roughly 5,500 of them will do the private security work
Blackwater perfected.)

I can’t help but note the irony that when facing that prospect, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proved just as unwilling as President Obama to back up her campaign promises to curtail contractor use. I also find it interesting that the public has heard very little about the new “war profiteers” who took Blackwater’s place, and how intentional that decision seems to be.

After theatrically exploding its relationship with Blackwater in 2009, Clinton’s State Department handed our security work in Baghdad over to
Triple Canopy, in a five-year contract worth $977 million
. My company bore the brunt of public negativity in Baghdad, but make no mistake: Triple Canopy, which had some two thousand men in Iraq during the height of the war working for a range of clients, was hardly beyond reproach.

Triple Canopy’s contractors bartered alcohol for guns
and other gear from U.S. troops, according to a former company manager, then added to their personal arsenals with weapons purchased on the Iraqi black market, which may well have funded the exact people they were in Iraq to protect against. (“
Who are we [financially] supporting
in doing that?” Ronald Boline, the former Triple Canopy manager,
said in a lawsuit deposition in June 2007. “We’re supporting people who are trying to kill Americans, is the logical conclusion.”) Triple Canopy officials denied that the company had done anything wrong.

In another ugly, disputed incident from 2007, three Triple Canopy contractors in Baghdad said their team leader wrapped up an airport run mission briefing with the off-hand comment, “
I want to kill somebody today
.” When asked by a team member why, he allegedly replied, “
Because I’m going on vacation tomorrow
. That’s a long time, buddy.” A few hours later, according to the contractors on that mission, their team leader sprayed bullets into the windshields of two Iraqi vehicles on Route Irish. The contractors remember him saying, “
That didn’t happen, understand
?” (The team leader denied the allegations.) But Triple Canopy wasn’t Blackwater; the general public never heard very much about those stories.