Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

Blackwater’s original five-year GSA contract value (i.e., the government’s projection of how much business Blackwater would do with federal agencies) was estimated at a meager $125,000. 62When it was extended by five years in 2005, the estimate was pushed to $6 million. 63But all of those projections were far shy of the actual business Blackwater would win under the GSA. As of 2006, Blackwater had already been paid $111 million under the schedule. “This is a multiple-award schedule, indefinite quantity, indefinite delivery contract,” said GSA spokesman Jon Anderson. “When the contract is first awarded, we do not know whether or not agencies are going to place orders with the contractor as the contractor has to compete with other… contractors for task orders, so we set the estimated dollar value of the contract at $125,000. Blackwater was obviously very successful in their endeavors and was able to build their sales to $111 million over a six-year period.” 64By 2008, the number would reach more than a billion dollars.

In 2000, as business was picking up for Blackwater, all was not well at the Moyock compound. Al Clark, the man many credit with dreaming up the company, found himself at odds with Prince and others at the company. “As time went on, some things took place there that I didn’t really agree with, so I left to start another business,” recalled Clark, who founded Special Tactical Systems with former Blackwater employee and fellow SEAL Dale McClellan in 2000. “One of the things that started happening was Erik wanted it to be a playground for his rich friends. And I was questioned on why would I train your standard Army guy on the same level that I’d train a SEAL. And my rebuttal was, ‘Why would you base the value of someone’s life on the uniform they’re wearing, because once the bullets start flying they don’t discriminate,’ and I was basically told my standards were too high.” 65

Clark says during training sessions he “gave everybody everything I had when I had them,” but he said company executives “thought there was no incentive for [clients] to come back if I gave them everything, and my argument was, they may not get a chance to come back, so while we’ve got them, we should give them everything we have. A lot of cops were paying out of their own pocket, taking their vacation time away from their families, to go to a school they thought would give them something their departments wouldn’t.” Clark was reluctant to expand much on his split with Prince, but he summed up his feelings about leaving Blackwater: “Let’s put it this way: I wanted it to be a place built by professionals for professionals, and I wanted it to be professional, and it didn’t feel to me like it was being that way.” 66Blackwater had already started down the path to success when Clark left in 2000, having landed a couple of hundred thousand dollars in payments on its GSA contract and other awards, but it wasn’t until more than a year later that the business really began to boom. That would come courtesy of two terror attacks attributed to Osama bin Laden.

Shortly after 11:00 a.m. on the morning of October 12, 2000, in the Yemeni port of Aden, a small boat approached the U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer the USS Cole, which had just finished up a routine fuel stop. As the boat neared the ship’s port side, it exploded, ripping a forty-by-forty-foot hole in the massive ship. Osama bin Laden would later take responsibility for the suicide attack that killed seventeen U.S. sailors and injured thirty-nine others. The second annual tragedy, following 1999’s Columbine massacre, that would benefit Blackwater resulted in a $35.7 million contract with the Navy, Blackwater’s ancestral branch of the military, to conduct “force protection” training. 67Traditionally, the average Navy midshipman didn’t train for a combat role, but with increased threats to the fleet, that began to change. “The attack on the USS Cole was a terrible tragedy and dramatic example of the type of threat our military forces face worldwide on a day-to-day basis, emphasizing the importance of force protection both today and in the future,” Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of Naval operations, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May 2001. “The Navy has taken action at home and abroad to meet this challenge, undergoing a sea change in the way we plan and execute self-defense. We have enhanced the manning, training, and equipping of naval forces to better realize a war fighter’s approach to physical security, with AT/FP serving as a primary focus of every mission, activity, and event. Additionally, we are dedicated to ensuring this mindset is instilled in every one of our sailors.” 68At the time, the Navy had already committed itself to incorporating “a comprehensive plan to reduce infrastructure costs through competition, privatization, and outsourcing.” 69Among its projects was a review of some 80,500 full-time equivalent positions for outsourcing. 70While the bombing of the USS Cole significantly boosted Blackwater’s business, it would pale in comparison to the jackpot that would come courtesy of the greatest act of terror ever carried out on U.S. soil.

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. 71The 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.” 73Blackwater 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.” 74The bulk of the work was to be performed in Norfolk, with some in San Diego and San Antonio. 75A 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.” 77The 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. 78Soon 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