Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (38 page)

Soon after, Sierra Leone held its first democratic elections in more than two decades. And then the PMC’s impact was drawn into even starker relief: The U.S. State Department helped broker peace talks between the new government and RUF; as a condition of the talks and a show of good faith to the RUF, State insisted the contractor leave the country entirely. Executive Outcomes complied. Four months later,
rebels overthrew the new democratic government and began the killing
anew. The UN responded by sending thousands of peacekeepers, many of whom were taken hostage by the crazed rebels.

I understand that PMCs won’t ever replace our military, or UN peacekeeping forces—nor should they. But today, the outdated business approaches at those institutions simply cost American taxpayers too much. The United States has effectively priced itself out of the next war.

The common excuse to continue stiff-arming contractors is that the roles I’m describing aren’t “inherently governmental.” It’s time for politicians to come up with a better argument. I’ve watched that line in the sand shift far too much for it to act as any sort of standard. Forty years ago, for instance, no one would have imagined that NASA would now rely upon a private contractor, SpaceX—which developed,
built, and operates its own rocket and spacecraft—to resupply the International Space Station. But it does, and it’s time for the Pentagon to follow NASA’s lead. It’s time to embrace the beauty of private enterprise, which is specifically that it doesn’t behave like the government.

•   •   •

I
will be curious to see where ACADEMI goes from here. I haven’t set foot on the Moyock campus in years, yet I still pay close attention to the industry, and the news, just as I always have. Tragedies still unfold that have the potential to alter our thinking about diplomatic security, while simultaneously underscoring the quality of the work my company once did.

Unfortunately, the latest example came just after nine thirty p.m. on September 11, 2012, in eastern Libya, when a horde of militants swarmed the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

Perhaps because of its status as a temporary establishment, as opposed to an official embassy or consulate, there were no U.S. Marines stationed outside that mission. Instead, the security for the walled compound was provided by a small team of government-sanctioned Libyan militia members, along with a half dozen or so
hired guns from British security contractor
Blue Mountain Group. Inside the compound, the
protection of the diplomats was the responsibility of three members
of State’s long-standing Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS).

That bureau hadn’t seen any grand rise in its numbers since Blackwater was first called upon to help ease their workload a decade earlier, however, and getting by with only three DS agents in Benghazi felt awfully thin to some on the ground. Eric Nordstrom, State’s regional security officer in Libya until shortly before the Benghazi attack, later told Congress that he’d requested as many as a dozen DS personnel there but had been told by his superiors that he was “
asking for the sun, the moon, and the stars
.”

“It’s not the hardships; it’s not the gunfire; it’s not the threats. It’s
dealing and fighting against the people, programs, and personnel who are supposed to be supporting me,” a frustrated Nordstrom told Congress. “For me, the
Taliban is on the inside of the building
.”

For a frontier post like Libya, I find it unconscionable that those diplomats were dependent mostly upon local security services. Even before that night, security in the compound—which consisted of a rented villa and two outbuildings surrounded by vast orchards—had clearly been on the minds of the few diplomats stationed there. Benghazi had been a hotbed of rebellion in the uprising against dictator Muammar Gaddafi a year earlier, and by late 2012 Libya’s second largest city had become a safe haven for radical militias. They clearly knew the Americans were in their midst: The
State Department documented some fifty “security incidents
” at the Benghazi consulate between July 2011 and July 2012, and in June 2012 an attacker placed a bomb on the compound’s perimeter wall, blowing a twelve-foot-wide hole in it that was described as “
big enough for forty men to go through
.”

It turned out
there were five DS agents at the mission
in Benghazi on the night of September 11, because Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens had arrived from the U.S. embassy in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, along with his own pair of DS agents. He was there at the behest of Secretary Clinton, who, on the May 2012 day she swore Stevens in as ambassador, asked him to make Benghazi a permanent outpost. Stevens had to schedule his trip to Benghazi in mid-September, as he had to submit a report requesting the funds for carrying out Clinton’s directive before September 30, the end of the fiscal year.
Around nine p.m. on September 11
, he retired to his bedroom in the compound’s yellow-walled Villa C, which housed the living quarters and a small safe room in case of attack.

Less than an hour later, there was an explosion. Then Libyan guards manning the compound’s tactical operations center in one of the outbuildings
saw militants streaming through the compound’s main gates
with all manner of weapons.
Three of the five DS agents rushed to the outbuilding
to collect guns and other gear; a fourth DS agent was in the
TOC when the attack began; the final DS agent guided Stevens and State information officer Sean Smith to the safe room in Villa C.

One of those State security officers called over to a nearby government annex, located roughly a mile southeast of the consulate. “
The compound is under attack
,” he said. “People are moving through the gates.” The
CIA reportedly scrambled a six-man security team
, which
drove two vehicles to the firefight
.
They picked up an agency translator and three Libyan
volunteers en route.

The compound’s TOC was soon overrun by the attackers. It’s not clear whether the local guards did much of anything to stop them. I had a friend visit the compound the day after the incident, who reported a distinct lack of pockmarks and impact points on the walls or bullet casings on the ground. The fact that so few shots had been fired strongly suggests to me that the guards fled.

Being a rental property, the villa housing the ambassador had never been designed to withstand an assault by a militia. There were
no bulletproof windows or other advanced protections
. The only defensive positions outside it were two low walls of sandbags. Soon the rebels were inside that building, too, torching the furniture, and then the villa itself.

Smoke filled the bathroom where Stevens, Smith, and the DS agent, Scott Strickland, were taking cover—so Strickland improvised.
He forced his way out an emergency escape
window, and collapsed to the patio below. Realizing that Stevens and Smith had not followed him out, the agent made repeated trips back through the window to the safe soon in search of them,
until the heat and smoke shut him out entirely
.

Strickland scrambled up to the roof to radio the other agents. Three of them arrived back at Villa C in one of their armored cars, but as agents reentered the residence, they were able to locate only Smith. He was already dead of smoke inhalation.

Shortly before ten thirty p.m. those CIA
personnel arrived at the compound, opening fire upon the militants beyond the front gate. After clearing a path to Villa C, they, too, joined the search for
Ambassador Stevens, but were
repeatedly driven back by the inferno
and more small-arms fire from the attackers.

Soon, shooting at the compound slowed enough for State’s men to
load into the armored vehicle with Smith’s body and escape
the scene. The CIA personnel directed them to the government annex a mile away; then they made one last fruitless sweep for Stevens before
fighting their way out of the compound and back to the annex
themselves. There, they all ran into the second wave of the night’s plotted assault.

At the annex, some three dozen CIA and DS personnel came under mortar attack by militants who had lain in wait for them to return.
The Americans rushed to the rear building
of the compound farthest away from the roadway; there, two security contractors—Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who had just arrived as part of an agency backup team flown in from Tripoli—ran up to the roof to engage the attackers. Soon, a series of mortar rounds crashed down onto the building,
erupting on the rooftop and killing the two men
.

Finally, by five thirty a.m., the attack was over. Roughly thirty Americans from the annex
packed into vehicles and headed for the Benghazi airport
. Also by that time, looters had ransacked Villa C at the State Department complex, where they stumbled upon the body of the ambassador, who, it appears
in video evidence, was still alive
. Some of those
looters drove him to Benghazi Medical Center
, but doctors there found him unresponsive. He, too, had died of smoke inhalation.

Libyans brought his body to the airport
, where CIA personnel flew it back to Tripoli. The fifty-two-year-old was the first U.S. ambassador killed while on duty since 1979.

In the weeks after the killings, it was suggested that State had
some sort of agreement with the CIA personnel
down the road to provide manpower as a security fallback at State’s diplomatic mission. Confusion about those responsibilities may have played a part
in the security failures that night. One thing seems clear to me, however: The Obama administration’s view of threats, and the appropriate response to them, has prompted dangerously lax security at diplomatic outposts around the world—and because of that, four Americans came home in caskets. Say what you will about Blackwater’s operational tactics, but with our men on duty, no secretary of state ever had to appear at Dover or Andrews Air Force Base to receive the bodies of fallen diplomats.

•   •   •

I
n 2010, fed up with an endless drip of frivolous lawsuits and years of bad press, I relocated to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, with my four oldest children and our giant South African Boerboel, Ezra. Some speculated I was trying to escape the long arm of U.S. law. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky reportedly even told the UK’s
Independent
, “If Mr. Prince had not emigrated to the United Arab Emirates, which does not have an extradition agreement with the U.S.,
he too would now be facing prosecution
.”

That’s just more derogatory noise; and false. I remain a Virginia resident and taxpayer and do not fail to exercise my right to vote. I flew all the way back to vote in person at the Middleburg Town Hall last November. Maybe someday the voters will get it right again. I have a home in Abu Dhabi because it is convenient. I’m working now with a private equity start-up, financing agriculture, energy, and mining projects in Africa, the Middle East, and other difficult parts of the world. It harnesses the logistics coordination I’ve always done well, and I get to eat dinner with my family at night. Just the way my father tried so hard to do.

I still come back to the United States regularly, to ski in Colorado, and see my three youngest boys, who live with their mother. (My divorce from Joanna was perhaps inevitable.) And I always like being back at the farm in Virginia. The shooting range on the hill is still there, full of old Blackwater targets and one of Jim Dehart’s
mini-BEAR training systems. It all still works when we throw the switch on the circuit breaker box, though it’s used mostly by my teenagers now. Seeing it all set up is rather bittersweet for me. More bitter, I think, than sweet.

The brand name, however, lives on. As part of the sale of my company, I kept ownership of the Blackwater trademark and bear paw logo. It’s a polarizing brand, I know—but it’s still got a proud following in some quarters.

The ultimate irony there is that as I look forward, it’s possible I actually could build another training facility and explore more security work. I often hear from old friends who say, “Just do it again! Get the band back together, and we’ll make a new Blackwater!” There will never stop being a demand for that expertise, but I don’t know that I see it happening. That’s got nothing to do with business; it’s personal. The loss of my father rocked me; then, after Joan’s death, I put emotional walls up that probably haven’t ever fully come back down. Seeing the company I’d built torn down for no reason was almost too much to bear.

The way the Blackwater story ended still gnaws at me. I’m no hero. The world knows all too well about my mistakes. But I was never meant to play the villain.

I take some solace knowing that, in the end, history will judge me and all that we accomplished at Blackwater. Perhaps children someday will read about us the way I read about cowboys, and battling pirates on the high seas, and Claire Chennault leading those Flying Tigers. Maybe someday people will grasp that Blackwater’s legacy is far more than shootings—that it also includes the shelters we set up in Afghanistan to house orphans and widows driven from their homes. Maybe they’ll understand that it was precisely my deep faith that made me insist on building mosques at our bases overseas, so our neighbors would have a place to practice their own faith.

Perhaps something in my journey will inspire a child in the Heartland the way I’d been inspired, and he’ll also dedicate his life
to being a force for good in the world. I have to look no further than a village in upstate New York to know that I’ve achieved that.

There, in 2006, in a peaceful suburban neighborhood just north of Schenectady, I funded the Joan Nicole Prince Home. It’s a place where terminally ill patients without private housing can stay and find peace during their final days. There’s a stone path that circles a meditation garden outside the two-story home, and a collection of purple hydrangeas bloom by the back porch.

Today, that charitable organization has its own board of directors; I’m not attached to its operation in any discernible way. I don’t want to risk having my name affect the tremendous work the men and women there do. That part is hard, but regardless of how rarely I visit, I know that above the fireplace in the living room there’s a portrait of Joan smiling down. And beneath it on the mantel are small sculptures that remind me of the porcelain Lladró figurines I bought her for our first Christmas together—back before there was any inheritance, or cancer, or Blackwater.