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August 31 - September 3, 2025
Prince had relied on persistence and determination to grow Blackwater from little more than a training facility for military Special Operations and law enforcement personnel into a billion-dollar powerhouse, with the U.S. government as his largest client.
Prison Fellowship in 1976, reinventing himself as a man of God. The nonprofit organization counseled prisoners and ex-prisoners in finding a path to Jesus Christ, and later grew to become one of the largest prison ministries in the world. In 2005 Time magazine named Colson one of the Twenty-Five Most Influential Evangelicals in America.
It wasn’t long afterward that Blackwater was ready to officially present itself to the law enforcement and Special Forces communities.
The team did have some success with law enforcement, drawing an FBI SWAT team as an early client. They also opened up the property to civilians for firearms training as a stopgap measure to help raise some money and pay the bills.
Cheney became the CEO of Halliburton, the parent company of Brown & Root. According to the Center for Public Integrity, Cheney oversaw the near doubling of the company’s contracts with the U.S. government, reaching awards as high as $2.3 billion.
The International Peace Operations Organization (IPOA) was an industry-wide umbrella organization, part lobbying vehicle, part voluntary ethics regulator. Blackwater was a founding member, and the company had taken an active role in helping to define many of the standards the IPOA set for the industry. So Gary Jackson didn’t take it well when the IPOA tried to launch its own investigation into Blackwater after September 16. The IPOA called the company before its Standards and Ethics Committee. Jackson saw it as a slap in the face.
He also traveled on this particular trip with a professor from the Washington-based Institute of World Politics. The professor, Michael Waller, had met Prince years earlier through Representative Dana Rohrabacher. In the days after the Nisoor Square incident, Waller had approached Prince with a proposal: Prince should write a book. He would ghostwrite it for him. Waller also served as an editor for an online publication called Serviam. He was very industry-friendly and eager to work with Prince.
Chris Smith was another of the guards protecting Prince on his trip. A Blackwater veteran, he had started with the company on the State Department’s Worldwide Personal Protective Services contract in Baghdad three years earlier. With a background in law enforcement and narcotics, the Afghanistan mission seemed the perfect fit for his skills.
DRUGS WERE ANOTHER SERIOUS ISSUE in Afghanistan, and another opportunity for Prince. Months before Prince’s trip, the United Nations had estimated that more than 90 percent of the world’s opiate supply originated in Afghanistan. While there had been a brief drop in the cultivation of the poppy plant in 2005, production had come back with a vengeance and was generating revenues estimated in the billions of dollars.
The farmers continued to grow poppy across several regions, and not surprisingly, the areas where the security threat was the highest were the areas that seemed to produce the most poppy.
President Hamid Karzai had been quoted as saying, “Once we thought terrorism was Afghanistan’s biggest enemy; poppy, its cultivation, and drugs are Afghanistan’s major enemy.”
The fourth pillar was interdiction, efforts toward decreasing the trafficking and processing of the poppy into opium. For this, an alliance had been formed between the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Defense, and the Counter Narcotics Police of Afghanistan. But if the National Interdiction Unit (NIU) was to be functional, it would need a lot of training in firearms, raid execution, arrest procedures, interviewing suspects, and evidence collection. All of them were items that would be contracted out—many of them to Blackwater.
Nobody can accuse Blackwater of actively encouraging the drug trade in Afghanistan. Yet, as any economist can recognize, the company’s incentives were complicated: as
long as the drug trade continued, and as long as the company remained in the good graces of the Afghan and U.S. governments, it would have work.
Being a part of the Pentagon’s Narcoterrorism Technology program would also be profitable. Five companies stood to support the program, worth up to $15 billion. Blackwater had a K-9 unit back at Moyock that trained dogs in explosives and drug detection, and Prince knew the dogs could do the same work in Afghanistan. He would soon send over a dog and a handler to prove his point.
“I don’t protect Gary,” said Prince. “Gary does a great job. Every day he wakes up running, and this place is not a democracy. We take input from all kinds of people all the time, but ultimately somebody’s gotta make a decision.”
Blackwater had been named by Fast Company magazine as one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States, putting Gary Jackson’s name right up there with Bill Gates. The article touted Jackson’s “private army” as being essential to the continuing effort in Iraq. The article also named Bill Clinton for his foundation work. The magazine editors invited those who made the list to a party at Studio One in New York. Jackson, Prince, and then–company vice president Chris Taylor made the trip. The men made an awkward attempt to blend in.
The company eventually opened a 61,000-square-foot training facility in an industrial building near the U.S.–Mexico border, but it took a federal judge to declare that the training could begin, defeating attempts by local leaders to withhold permits and opposition from Congressman Bob Filner, who worried that the company was trying to get a foothold near the border, where it could then offer private migrant or drug interdiction services, much like what it was doing in Afghanistan.
Blackwater K-9 was based in Moyock, offering trained dogs for use by law enforcement, the military, and commercial businesses. Prince also purchased a video production company for cranking out a line of instructional DVDs aimed at law enforcement. The productions focused on everything from lifesaving medical techniques to emergency response measures.
The ATF raided the facility in June 2008 as part of an investigation into whether Blackwater had tried to get around federal laws that prohibited the private purchase of automatic assault rifles. Federal agents confiscated almost two dozen automatic weapons, including AK-47s. The company explained that the guns were owned by the Camden County sheriff’s department and that Blackwater stored them at the sheriff’s request.
Blackwater had entered talks months earlier with the equity fund Cerebus Capital Management, but Cerebus broke off negotiations after the talks were leaked to a news network. So Prince continued to search.
“The lion wakes up in the morning; he knows he has to outrun the gazelle, or he’s gonna starve,” said Prince. “The gazelle wakes up and knows he has to outrun the lion, or he’s gonna be eaten. The moral of the story is, whether you’re the lion or the gazelle, when you wake up, you’d better be running.”
Prince’s lawyers had tried to convince a judge that the lawsuit should be dismissed on the grounds that soldiers cannot sue the government, and his men were working as agents of the government. The judge refused. The company had also asked the Bush administration to provide information that might help them make their legal argument, but the court deadline came and went without a word of support from the White House.
Prince’s legal team introduced a new, and somewhat unexpected, argument. The crash had occurred in Afghanistan, a country ruled by Sharia law. Sharia was a combination of Muslim law and religious code based on the teachings of the Qur’an and the customs of the Prophet Muhammad. If the judge agreed that the case fell under the jurisdiction of Sharia law, it would mean the end of the lawsuit, as under Sharia law, a company is not responsible for the actions of its employees.
Prince was deeply angry at a State Department he considered ungrateful. From his perspective, he had built a machine to recruit, vet, train and deploy contractors in support of their mission, and that was the thanks he got. “Now I know how it feels to have your country turn on you” was how he put it.
There was no doubt: the name Blackwater had become bad for business. In February, Prince signed off on changing the Blackwater name to Xe (pronounced “Z”).
While some champions of the free
market system see him as a business genius, others see him as a man with more money than wisdom, more energy than experience, and more determination than is good for him.
Prince learned something very different: his appetite for risk could sometimes be costly and his ambitions could thrust him into positions where he would never be comfortable. Finally, he learned to loathe the media. It was the media that played a large role in the downfall of his company, and he would never forget it.
