Blackwater (company)

• 1. Introduction

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  Erik Prince once explained his company, Blackwater, with a comparison to package delivery. "We are trying to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service," he said. Blackwater became an American private military contractor that worked for the United States government in war zones and at home. Its guards, trainers and pilots were valued by some officials and condemned by many others.

  Blackwater began in North Carolina swampland, but the questions it raises reach far beyond that state. How did a private training ground become part of the machinery of American power? What did the government gain by hiring a company to handle danger, and what did it pay for that choice? What happens when a private guard fires on civilians in a foreign city, and who answers for it? And why did the company keep changing its name?

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• 2. Swamp Training Ground

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  Erik Prince bought roughly 7000 acres of the Great Dismal Swamp, a vast wetland on the North Carolina-Virginia border. The land is now mostly a national wildlife refuge. Prince told reporter Robert Young Pelton why he wanted so much: "We needed 3,000 acres to make it safe." The company took its name from the peat-colored water of the swamp.

  Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, Inc. was formed on the 26th of December 1996 by Al Clark and Prince, a former Navy SEAL officer. Its purpose was to give training support to military and law enforcement organizations. The center officially opened on the 15th of May 1998. The facility covered 6000 acres, cost $6.5 million, and was headed by Robert Anderson. It held indoor and outdoor ranges, urban reproductions, an artificial lake and a driving track in Camden and Currituck counties. The company called it the largest training facility in the country.

  The training idea did not make money on its own. A sister company, Blackwater Target Systems, kept the business solvent. Managed by Jim Dehart, it supplied a shoot house system and the BEAR multi-target training system, which the company patented.

  Gulmurod Khalimov, an officer and sniper in Tajikistan's OMON special forces, trained with Blackwater and the U.S. Army five times between 2003 and 2015. He is described as a former war minister of the Islamic State. The United States Department of State confirmed the training in 2015. In a statement in Russian, Khalimov angrily accused his American trainers of teaching soldiers to attack and exterminate Muslims.

  The swamp school stayed a modest business until the attacks of 2001 changed what Washington needed.

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• 3. After September 11

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  In December 2001, Blackwater formed a security arm as a Delaware LLC, based in Moyock, North Carolina. It was known as Blackwater Security Consulting. The company was started to help train SEALs for combat, but the September 11 attacks changed that purpose.

  Before 2001, the government hired contractors from a small pool of applicants, mostly former members of elite special forces units. Cofer Black, the former head of counter terrorism at the CIA, then asked the federal government to hire more. The CIA concluded that a large number of civilian contractors would be needed overseas, and the government turned to Blackwater.

  Jamie Smith and his deputy David Phillips recruited, vetted and hired a team of 21 men. The team was trained for a Top Secret project protecting CIA personnel and facilities in Afghanistan. Smith and Prince deployed with it. The two then moved to the Pakistani border as a two-man element, in what the account calls one of the most dangerous places in the country at the time. Prince stayed there for one week and spent two weeks in Afghanistan in total. In 2002, the company received a $5.4 million contract to guard the CIA station in Kabul.

  Smith's role is disputed. Jeremy Scahill has claimed that Smith dreamed up the security company. Prince and Blackwater executive Gary Jackson deny this. They say Smith was a low-level administrator fired for "non-performance" after a thirty-day contract. Smith has also been accused of embellishing his military and contracting record to defraud investors at SCG International Risk.

  By 2003, the ground war in Iraq had become a diplomatic mission that needed hundreds of diplomats and State Department employees. The government usually handles its own security but lacked staff for high-risk protection details. In August 2003, Blackwater won its first Iraq contract, a $21 million no-bid deal to guard L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. It covered a personal security detachment and two helicopters.

  Prince later said that "not one State Department employee was killed while we were protecting them." The years that followed would test how complete that record really was.

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• 4. Price of Protection

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  In July 2004, the State Department authorized Blackwater to carry out orders under its Worldwide Personal Protective Services umbrella contract, known as WPPS I. The first mission was security for the provisional U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Triple Canopy and DynCorp International also qualified, but Blackwater received most of the diplomatic security task orders. It was cleared to deploy 482 personnel in Iraq over two years.

  Between the 1st of July 2004 and the 6th of June 2006, Blackwater received $488 million under WPPS I. The entire five-year contract had a set maximum of about $332 million. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform investigated the cost. The result was a competitive bidding system in the revised contract, WPPS II.

  In July 2005, the State Department awarded WPPS II with a strict maximum of $1.2 billion per contractor. Task orders began in Iraq in May 2006 and allowed Blackwater to deploy 1,020 staff, including at the United States embassy in Baghdad. Blackwater was privately held and published little about its internal affairs. It was disclosed that the company was paid over $832 million for Iraq work under both contracts through 2006. Across all work, it collected over $1 billion in United States government contracts.

  On the 1st of September 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, Blackwater sent a rescue team and a helicopter. About 200 of its personnel moved into the stricken area. Most of them, 164 employees, were guarding government facilities under contract, and some served private clients. The company's presence cost the federal government $240,000 per day.

  A House Oversight staff report prepared for Representative Henry Waxman put the daily charge at $1,222 per guard. That equals $445,000 per year, which the report said was six times the cost of an equivalent soldier. Prince disputed the comparison in his testimony, saying a sergeant "doesn't show up naked and untrained." He added that Blackwater's people were trained in special operations and exceeded the average soldier.

  The firm drew on a database of 21,000 former Special Forces operatives, soldiers and retired law enforcement agents. Jackson confirmed that Bosnians, Filipinos and Chileans were hired for work from airport security to personal protection. U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker told the Senate: "There is simply no way at all that the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security could ever have enough full-time personnel to staff the security function in Iraq. There is no alternative except through contracts."

  The Pentagon and company representatives estimated 20,000 to 30,000 armed security contractors in Iraq, and some estimates reached 100,000. No official figures exist.

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• 5. Ambush and Siege

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  On the 31st of March 2004, Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah ambushed two SUVs and killed the four armed Blackwater contractors inside. Local residents hung the charred bodies above a bridge across the Euphrates. U.S. Marines responded with Operation Vigilant Resolve, which became the first Battle of Fallujah.

  In the fall of 2007, a House Oversight Committee report found that Blackwater intentionally "delayed and impeded" investigations into the deaths. The report also said members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps led the team into the ambush, helped block its escape, and then disappeared. Intelligence reports named Ahmad Hashim Abd al-Isawi as the mastermind. A Navy SEAL operation captured him in 2009. He was handed to Iraqi authorities and executed by hanging before November 2013.

  In April 2004, hundreds of Shiite militia fighters barraged the U.S. government headquarters in Najaf for hours with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 fire. Blackwater contractors, four military police and a Marine gunner held the compound until U.S. Special Forces arrived. As supplies and ammunition ran low, a Blackwater team 70 miles away flew in to resupply them. The team also carried an injured Marine out of the city.

  On the 21st of April 2005, a Mil Mi-8 Hip helicopter was shot down in Iraq. Six Blackwater contractors died, along with three Bulgarian crewmembers and two Fijian gunners. On the 23rd of January 2007, five more Blackwater contractors died when their Hughes H-6 helicopter was shot down on Baghdad's Haifa Street. A U.S. defense official confirmed that four of the five were shot execution style in the back of the head.

  On the 27th of November 2004, a CASA 212 aircraft operated by Presidential Airways crashed in Afghanistan on a contract flight for the United States Air Force. Three soldiers and three civilian crew members died. Relatives filed a wrongful death lawsuit in October 2005.

  The families of the four men killed in Fallujah sued in the case Helvenston et al. v. Blackwater Security. They said they wanted the details of the deaths rather than money. Blackwater countersued their lawyer for $10 million, arguing that the contract barred the lawsuit. In January 2011, U.S. district judge James C. Fox dismissed the countersuit.

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• 6. Shots on the Road

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  Between 2005 and September 2007, Blackwater security staff were involved in 195 shooting incidents in Iraq. In 163 of them, Blackwater personnel fired first. Prince replied that his men followed the orders of United States government officials, who often put them in harm's way. He noted that many shootings followed drivers failing to stop when ordered.

  On the 16th of February 2005, four Blackwater guards escorting a State Department convoy fired 70 rounds into a car. The driver had ignored orders to stop. The State Department's Diplomatic Security Service found the shooting unjustified and found that the guards gave false statements. One guard had actually fired into his own vehicle by accident. John Frese, the embassy's top security official, declined to punish anyone because he thought discipline would lower contractor morale.

  On the 6th of February 2006, a Blackwater sniper on the roof of the Iraqi Justice Ministry killed three guards working for the state-funded Iraqi Media Network. Iraqis at the scene said the guards had not fired. The State Department said the sniper's actions fell within approved rules on the use of force.

  On Christmas Eve 2006, a guard of Iraqi vice president Adel Abdul Mahdi was shot dead outside the prime minister's compound. The Iraqi government accused Andrew J. Moonen, a Blackwater employee, of killing him while drunk. Blackwater fired Moonen and he flew to the United States within days. In 2010, the Department of Justice declined to prosecute him.

  In late May 2007, Blackwater contractors opened fire on Baghdad streets twice in two days. One incident led to a standoff with Iraqi Interior Ministry commandos.

  On the 21st of August 2007, Blackwater manager Daniel Carroll threatened to kill State Department investigator Jean Richter. A New York Times investigation later reported this from an internal memo. Richter wrote a scathing review of the lax standards applied to Blackwater only two weeks before the shooting that followed.

  On the 16th of September 2007, a Blackwater detail escorting State Department vehicles to a meeting with U.S. Agency for International Development officials opened fire in Nisour Square, Baghdad. Seventeen Iraqi civilians were killed and 20 were injured. The Iraqi government revoked Blackwater's license the next day. The American government reinstated it in April 2008, and in early 2009 Iraq refused to extend it.

  In 2009, FBI investigators could not match the bullets from the scene to the guns Blackwater contractors carried. That left open the possibility that insurgents also fired at the victims. In a 2010 interview, Prince dismissed the accusations against his company as baseless, including smuggling weapons into Iraq in dog-food containers. Some describe the shooting as a watershed that helped lead Iraq to refuse to let U.S. troops stay beyond 2011.

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• 7. Reckoning

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  On the 2nd of October 2007, Erik Prince testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The company had hired the public relations firm BKSH & Associates Worldwide to help him prepare. Asked why Andrew Moonen had been whisked out of Iraq, Prince said, "We can't flog him, we can't incarcerate him." He declined to hand over financial documents, noting that Blackwater was a private company and that "private" was the key word. When lawmakers called his employees mercenaries, he objected and called them "loyal Americans."

  That October, the U.S. House amended the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act through H.R.2740. The law now covered all security contractors overseas, not only those working for the Department of Defense. Later prosecutions in U.S. courts followed, though only for incidents involving attacks on U.S. nationals. On the 5th of October 2007, the State Department announced new rules. Its security agents would accompany Blackwater units around Baghdad, and video cameras would be installed in the armored vehicles. Radio communications would be recorded.

  Iraqi authority over the guards had been limited. Two days before leaving Iraq, L. Paul Bremer signed Order 17, which gave Americans tied to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the American government immunity from Iraqi law. On the 29th of October 2007, the State Department granted immunity from prosecution to the Nisour Square guards. Iraq then approved a draft law ending immunity for foreign contractors. The Department of Justice said the immunity deals were invalid because the department that issued them had no authority.

  On the 11th of October 2007, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed Abtan v. Blackwater on behalf of an injured Iraqi and families of three of the 17 people killed. The suit alleged war crimes and a "culture of lawlessness." It was settled confidentially in 2010, with the plaintiffs accepting cash payments.

  In December 2008, a State Department panel recommended dropping the company, by then called Xe, as main security contractor for diplomats in Iraq. On the 30th of January 2009, the department said it would not renew the Iraq contract. A $100 million CIA contract still came in 2010. In August 2010, the company agreed to a $42 million fine to settle claims it unlawfully provided armaments and military equipment overseas. A Justice Department bribery inquiry into efforts to keep its Iraq work was closed in 2012 without charges.

  In August 2012, the company agreed to pay $7.5 million, without admitting guilt, over charges involving pre-Academi personnel. In February 2013, most remaining charges were dropped after it was shown that employees often acted under government orders.

  Five guards were charged over Nisour Square. One pleaded guilty to a lesser offense in exchange for testimony. In October 2014, three were convicted of 14 manslaughter charges, and in April 2015 they were sentenced to 30 years plus one day. On appeal the sentences were deemed unfair and the three awaited resentencing. A fourth guard, convicted of murder and sentenced to life, saw that verdict overturned in August 2017.

  On the 22nd of December 2020, President Donald Trump pardoned four former Blackwater contractors: Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard. The pardons do not establish innocence. Critics in both the United States and Iraq said they condoned the killing of innocent civilians.

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• 8. Many Names

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  In October 2007, the month after the Nisour Square shooting, Blackwater USA began changing its name to Blackwater Worldwide and unveiled a new logo. The redesign softened the cross hair reticle theme and simplified it slightly.

  On the 21st of July 2008, the company said it would shift resources away from security contracting because of the risks. Prince said: "The experience we've had would certainly be a disincentive to any other companies that want to step in and put their entire business at risk."

  In February 2009, the company announced another name, Xe Services LLC. The restructuring aimed to refocus it on logistics, aviation and training rather than security. On the 2nd of March 2009, Prince resigned as CEO but stayed on as chairman, no longer involved in daily operations. Joseph Yorio became president and CEO, and Danielle Esposito became chief operating officer.

  In 2010, an investor consortium called USTC Holdings acquired Xe, which formally ended Prince's operational and management role. The firm was renamed Academi in 2011. Its board included former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former White House Counsel Jack Quinn, retired Admiral and former NSA Director Bobby Ray Inman, and Texas businessman Red McCombs as chairman. Ted Wright became CEO in May 2011, and retired Brigadier General Craig Nixon took the job in 2012.

  The company's other units went separate ways. Aviation Worldwide Services, which Blackwater had bought in April 2003, was purchased for $200 million in 2010 by AAR Corp. Greystone, a protective services provider registered in Barbados, was acquired by its management that year. Prince had intended Greystone for peacekeeping missions in places like Darfur.

  In 2014, Academi merged with Triple Canopy, and the pair joined several other firms under the Constellis Holdings umbrella. In 2015, six Colombian mercenaries reportedly employed by Constellis were killed in Yemen. In September 2016, Apollo Global Management acquired Constellis. In early 2020, Constellis entered debt restructuring talks after missing a $1 billion debt payment and agreeing to a forbearance with creditors. It moved its headquarters to Herndon, Virginia in February 2020.

  In December 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracted Constellis to provide skiptracing services.

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