Erik Dean Prince is an American businessman, philanthropist, and former U.S. Navy SEAL
officer. Prince was best known for founding the government services and security company
Blackwater USA. He served as its CEO until 2009 and later as chairman, until Blackwater
Worldwide was sold in 2010 to a group of investors. Prince currently heads the private equity
firm Frontier Resource Group and lives in both Virginia and the United Arab Emirates.
Early life and education Prince was born on June 6, 1969, in Holland,
Michigan, to Edgar D. Prince and Elsa Broekhuizen, the youngest of four children. Both his parents
share Dutch heritage. He graduated from Holland Christian High School.
Prince’s father had started as a salesman making 40 cents an hour, who founded a die
cast machine manufacturing firm, Prince Machine Corporation, in 1965, which became a supplier
to the automobile manufacturing industry and eventually a billion-dollar company; As business
“exploded” Prince began to invest some of the profit through the Prince Group into
other types of car parts and shopping malls, creating a network of companies and real estate
worth a billion dollars. In the early 1970s, Edgar Prince’s company patented a sun visor
that could light up and sold 5,000 to General Motors. In the ’90s, the company produced
20,000 a day. Prince and his father toured the world together, visiting the German concentration
camp Dachau, a divided Berlin, and Normandy. According to his mother, these trips “made
a big impression” on the young Prince. Prince was accepted into the United States
Naval Academy and attended it for three semesters before leaving, citing that he loved the Navy
but disliked the Academy. He went on to receive his B.A. in economics from Hillsdale College
in 1992. During his time at Hillsdale, Prince served as a volunteer firefighter and as a
cold-water diver for the Hillsdale County Sheriff’s Department. Prince eventually
became an emergency medical technician. In 1990, Prince secured a low-level internship
in the White House under George H.W. Bush, but soon left to intern for California congressman
Dana Rohrabacher, President Ronald Reagan’s former speechwriter. Rohrabacher described
Prince as “a bright, driven young man.” At the age of 21, Prince volunteered to search
for a mass grave in Nicaragua, to expose killings under President Daniel Ortega and later claimed
in an interview in Men’s Journal that he found “a mass grave: bones sticking out
of the ground, hands tied with wire at the wrists.”
After College, Prince was commissioned as an officer in the United States Navy via Officer
Candidate School in 1992. He went on to become a Navy SEAL and deployed with SEAL Team 8
to Haiti, the Middle East, and the Balkans. He credits the SEALs for being an outlet for
his entrepreneurial spirit. In his autobiography he states that it was during the Yugoslav
Wars of the early 1990s that he realized the need for private training facilities for special
operations. Prince ended his U.S. Navy service prematurely
in 1995 when his father died. Erik assumed control of daily operations at Prince Machine
Corporation for a year until 1996 when his mother sold the company for $1.35 billion
in cash to Johnson Controls. Prince moved to Virginia Beach and personally
financed the formation of Blackwater Worldwide in 1997. He bought 6,000 acres of the Great
Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and set up a school for special operations. The name
“Blackwater” comes from the peat-colored bogs in which the school is located.
Career Prince credits the 1994 Rwandan genocide with
his decision to start Blackwater. He told an audience in his native Holland, Michigan,
“It really bothered me. It made me realize you can’t sit back and pontificate. You
have to act.” From 1997 to 2010, Blackwater was awarded
$2 billion in government security contracts, more than $1.6 billion of which were unclassified
federal contracts and an unknown amount of classified work. From 2001 to 2010, the Central
Intelligence Agency awarded up to $600 million in classified contracts to Blackwater and
its affiliates. It became the largest of the State Department's three private security
companies, providing 987 guards for embassies and bases abroad. Prince built a shooting
range on his rural Virginia land to serve as a nearby training facility to CIA headquarters
in Langley, VA. In his memoir Prince says that he provided the CIA with links to Afghan
warlords who helped topple the Taliban and drive al Qaeda into hiding."
Blackwater came under increasing criticism after the Nisour Square shooting of 17 Iraqis
in September 2007, and after Barack Obama took office in 2008, but Prince believes that
much of this criticism stems from politics. “I put myself and my company at the CIA’s
disposal for some very risky missions,” Prince told Vanity Fair for its January 2010
issue. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.”
Nevertheless, in 2010 the Barack Obama administration awarded the company a $120 million United
States Department of State security contract and about $100 million in new CIA work .
Prince takes great pride in Blackwater’s work and points to its successes. According
to him, out of 40,000 personal security missions, only 200 involved guards discharging their
weapons. “No one under our care was ever killed or injured. We kept them safe, all
the while we had 30 of our men killed.” Prince, according to Robert Young Pelton reportedly
thinks of Blackwater’s relationship to the military as something similar to FedEx’s
relationship to the U.S. Post Office “an efficient, privatized solution to sclerotic
and wasteful government bureaucracy.” He credits his father’s competitive streak
in the automotive business with the inspiration to design a lighter, faster army.
Prince resigned as CEO of Blackwater on March 2, 2009, and remained chairman of the board
until he sold the company in late 2010 to a group of investors.
Disclosure as part of a covert CIA task force Prince was part of a CIA task force created
to kill terrorists. Allegedly, the House intelligence congressional committee leaked his name to
the press. Prince has said that he is convinced that former CIA director Leon Panetta outed
him as a CIA asset, after shutting down the covert CIA training operation in 2009. Prince
compared himself to the target of the similar government leak of Valerie Plame:
“Valerie Plame’s identity was compromised for political reasons. A special prosecutor
[was even] appointed. Well, what happened to me was worse. People acting for political
reasons disclosed not only the existence of a very sensitive program but my name along
with it.”
Private security for the United Arab Emirates After Blackwater faced mounting legal problems
in the United States, Prince was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and moved to
Abu Dhabi in 2010. His task was to assemble an 800-member troupe of foreign troops for
the U.A.E., which was planned months before the Arab Spring revolts He helped the UAE
found a new company Reflex Responses, or R2, with 51 percent local ownership, carefully
avoiding his name on corporate documents. He worked to oversee the effort and recruit
troops, among others from Executive Outcomes, a former South African mercenary firm hired
by several African governments during the 1990s to put down rebellions and protect oil
and diamond reserves. In January 2011, the Associated Press reported
that Prince was training a force of 2000 Somalis for antipiracy operations in the Gulf of Aden.
The program was reportedly funded by several Arab countries, including the United Arab
Emirates and backed by the United States. Prince’s spokesman, Mark Corallo, said that
Prince has “no financial role” in the project and declined to answer any questions
about Prince’s involvement. The Associated Press quotes John Burnett of
Maritime Underwater Security Consultants as saying, “There are 34 nations with naval
assets trying to stop piracy and it can only be stopped on land. With Prince’s background
and rather illustrious reputation, I think it’s quite possible that it might work.”.
Private equity investor in Africa As of 2013 Prince heads a private equity firm
called Frontier Resource Group, operating in more than a dozen African countries serving
as an adviser to Israeli and Chinese investors in Africa. He created an investment fund of
$100 million for this purpose. He “is building an oil refinery in South Sudan, owns a cement
factory in Congo, conducts aerial gas and oil surveys across the continent, and is looking
at taking over idle oil wells damaged by insurgents in Nigeria.”
Personal life Family
Prince is the brother of Betsy DeVos, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party
and wife of former Alticor president and gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos.
Prince has seven children from 2 marriages. His first wife, Joan, died of cancer in June
2003. His youngest child, Charles Donovan, was named
after William “Wild Bill” Donovan. Philanthropy and political views
Prince describes himself as a libertarian and practicing Roman Catholic. He describes
his political views as follows:
“I'm a very free market guy. I’m not a huge believer that government provides a whole
lot of solutions. Some think that government can solve society’s problems. I tend to
think private charities and private organizations are better solutions.”
Prince credits his time as a White House intern with some of his views. He said that “having
that White House internship responsibility and badges, I walked around some of these
other cavernous federal agencies, and you want to talk about depressing? Walk through
HHS or HUD or Commerce, you name it. Leviathan realized."
Prince serves as vice president of the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, which his family
founded. Prince has donated heavily to both Christian and Islamic causes, building mosques
at Blackwater’s overseas bases, and supporting a Muslim orphanage in Afghanistan. He financed
the film The Stoning of Soraya M. Salon reports that "between July 2003 and July 2006, the
foundation gave at least $670,000 to the Family Research Council and $531,000 to Focus on
the Family," headed by James Dobson. The foundation is a major donor to Calvin College, a Christian
institution in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Between 1998 and 2007, Prince donated over
$200,000 to Republican and third-party causes. In 2006 Prince contributed money to the Green
Party of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Prince has been an advocate of a leaner, more
efficient military. He suggests several ways to make the military more efficient without
compromising security. His suggestions are: greater accountability of costs, using appropriate
equipment for each job, reduction of overhead, and operational and procurement reform.
In a televised interview with Charlie Rose, Prince discussed his offer to George Clooney
of sending a humanitarian mission to Darfur. Prince expressed disdain over international
inaction in the face of the Rwandan genocide: Bibliography
Pelton, Robert Young. Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror. New York: Three
Rivers Press. ISBN 1400097819. Simons, Suzanne. Master of War: Blackwater
USA's Erik Prince and the Business of War. New York City: Harper. ISBN 978-0-06-165135-9.
Pelton, Robert Young. "An American Commando In Exile". Men's Journal. - Prince spends
his last two days in America with Pelton. Scahill, Jeremy. Blackwater: The Rise of the
World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. ISBN 978-1560259794. Prince, Erik. Inside Blackwater: The True
Story of the World's Most Controversial Company by the Man Who Founded It. Regnery Publishing.
ISBN 1596985577. Hardcover, 256 pages. Prince, Erik. Civilian Warriors: The Inside
Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror. Portfolio/Penguin. ISBN 978-1591847212. Hardcover,
416 pages. References
External links
Detailed public records of Prince's campaign contributions.
Time Magazine bio