Erik Prince

• 1. Introduction

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  Erik Prince, the founder of the private military contractor Blackwater, once defended his company with a line that has followed him ever since. "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 was born in 1969 into a wealthy Michigan family. He became a Navy SEAL officer, then built a security firm that the American government paid billions of dollars to protect diplomats and run covert work. Critics say the firm left a trail of deaths and legal trouble. This documentary asks what pushed a young man from small-town Michigan to start a private army for hire. It asks what happened in a Baghdad square that turned his company into a symbol. It also asks where he went when Washington stopped trusting him, and what he has been doing in the years since.

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• 2. Holland to Coronado

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  Holland, Michigan, was where Erik Dean Prince was born on the 6th of June 1969. He was the youngest of four children of the engineer and businessman Edgar Prince and his wife Elsa, whose maiden name was Zwiep. His sister is Betsy DeVos, who later served as United States secretary of education. Edgar took his son on trips around the world, to the Dachau concentration camp, to divided Berlin and to the battlefields of Normandy. His mother said these journeys "made a big impression" on the boy. Prince graduated from Holland Christian High School.

  The United States Naval Academy accepted Prince, and he stayed for three semesters. He later explained that he loved the Navy but disliked the academy. He went on to earn a B.A. in economics from Hillsdale College in 1992. There he volunteered as a firefighter and worked as a cold-water diver for the Hillsdale County Sheriff's Department. He eventually trained as an emergency medical technician.

  In 1990, Prince won an internship at the White House under President George H. W. Bush. He soon left it to work for the California congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. Rohrabacher called him "a bright, driven young man." At the age of 21, Prince volunteered to look for a mass grave in Nicaragua, hoping to expose killings carried out under President Daniel Ortega. He later said he had found it.

  In 1992, Prince became a Navy officer through Officer Candidate School. He then went to Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. After six months of training he graduated with BUD/S class 188 in 1993. He completed SEAL Tactical Training and a six-month probation, and earned the 1130 designator of a Naval Special Warfare Officer. With SEAL Team 8 he deployed to Haiti, the Middle East and the Balkans. Prince says the SEALs gave his entrepreneurial streak somewhere to go. In his autobiography he writes that the Yugoslav Wars of the early 1990s convinced him special operations forces needed private training facilities.

  Edgar Prince died in 1995, and his son left the Navy earlier than planned. A year later, Prince helped arrange the sale of his father's auto parts company to Johnson Controls for US$1.35 billion.

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• 3. Building Blackwater

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  Virginia Beach was where Prince moved in 1997 to launch Blackwater Worldwide, which he financed himself. He bought 6000 acres of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina and set up a school for special operations on the land. The company took its name from the peat-colored bogs that surround the grounds.

  The 1994 Rwandan genocide is the event Prince credits for the decision. "It really bothered me. It made me realize you can't sit back and pontificate. You have to act."

  Government money followed. Between 1997 and 2010, Blackwater was awarded $2 billion in security contracts. More than $1.6 billion of that came from unclassified federal contracts, and an unknown amount came from classified work. From 2001 to 2010, the Central Intelligence Agency awarded Blackwater and its affiliates up to $600 million in classified contracts. The company grew into the largest of the State Department's three private security firms, supplying 987 guards to embassies and bases abroad. Prince also built a shooting range on his rural Virginia land, close enough to CIA headquarters in Langley to serve as a convenient training site.

  According to the author Robert Young Pelton, Prince compares Blackwater's relationship with the military to that of FedEx with the Post Office. Prince sees it as "an efficient, privatized solution to sclerotic and wasteful government bureaucracy." He says his father's competitive streak in the auto parts business inspired him to design a lighter, faster army.

  Prince was also part of a CIA task force created to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists. He alleged that the House intelligence committee leaked his name to the press. He is convinced that the former CIA director Leon Panetta exposed him as a CIA asset, after shutting down the covert training operation in 2009.

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• 4. Nisour Square

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  In September 2007, Blackwater employees opened fire in Nisour Square, a crowded Baghdad intersection. Seventeen Iraqi civilians were killed and twenty more were seriously wounded. The company faced growing criticism afterward. In October 2014, three guards were convicted in a United States court of 14 manslaughter charges. A fourth was convicted of murder in 2019.

  Prince has pointed to a different set of numbers. Over the course of 40,000 personal security missions, he says, guards fired their weapons in only 200. He also gave a lasting reading of the criticism to Vanity Fair for its January 2010 issue. "I put myself and my company at the CIA's disposal for some very risky missions. But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus." He believes much of the criticism was political, and it did not fade after Barack Obama took office in 2009.

  The damage to the business was real. In 2009, Blackwater lost a $1 billion State Department contract to protect American diplomats, after the Iraqi government refused to renew the company's operating license. Yet in 2010 the Obama administration awarded the company a $120 million State Department security contract and about $100 million in new CIA work.

  Prince resigned as CEO on the 2nd of March 2009. He stayed on as chairman until he sold the company to a group of investors in late 2010. He also tried to answer the tragedy in other ways. He supported a Muslim orphanage in Afghanistan and built mosques at Blackwater bases.

  The legal consequences outlasted the sale. In 2012, Blackwater's successor company, Academi, paid a combined $49.5 million to settle arms trafficking charges. The violations dated back to the years when Prince was CEO and chairman.

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• 5. Contractor Abroad

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  Abu Dhabi became Prince's new base in 2010, after the crown prince hired him while legal problems mounted in the United States. His task was to assemble an 800-member force of foreign troops for the United Arab Emirates, a plan formed months before the Arab Spring. He helped the Emirates found a company called Reflex Responses, or R2, with 51 percent local ownership, and he kept his name off the corporate papers. Recruits came partly from Executive Outcomes, a former South African mercenary firm that several African governments had hired in the 1990s.

  By January 2011, Prince was training a force of 2,000 Somalis for anti-piracy work in the Gulf of Aden. Several Arab countries funded the program, which the United States backed. Prince's spokesman, Mark Corallo, said Prince had "no financial role" in it. John Burnett of Maritime Underwater Security Consultants offered an optimistic view. "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."

  Moscow invited Prince in 2011. The Russian Federation asked him to build "a Blackwater capability" in Russia. He trained and drank with Alpha Group, the special forces unit of the Federal Security Service.

  In 2012, Prince founded the private equity firm Frontier Resource Group. It invested his own capital in oil and mineral projects in countries including Guinea and South Sudan. It also took stakes in aviation companies, among them the Kenyan firms Kijipwa Aviation and Phoenix Aviation. Kijipwa lost its license renewal in 2014. Another stake was in the Austrian company Airborne Technologies, which modified Thrush 510G crop-duster aircraft with surveillance equipment, armor and mounts for weapons.

  A diesel refinery in South Sudan, backed by roughly US$10 million, was suspended in 2014 amid instability. Prince's firm also received reported contracts worth US$23.3 million from South Sudan's Ministry of Petroleum. To the same government he sold three Mi-24 attack helicopters, two L-39 jets and the services of Hungarian mercenary pilots, all for $43 million. One of those pilots drew notoriety by boasting about daily killings on Facebook.

  The Hong Kong-listed Frontier Services Group, which Prince co-founded, grew out of this earlier network. State-owned CITIC Group and the Hong Kong investor Johnson Chun Shun Ko backed it. Prince described it as a logistics and infrastructure firm for Chinese projects in difficult places, not a security company. In May 2017, it bought a 25% stake in the International Security Defense College in Beijing, which trains security personnel. Prince remained chairman until the 13th of April 2021.

  As the Afghan government collapsed in August 2021, Prince offered seats on a chartered evacuation flight for $6,500 per person.

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• 6. Project Opus

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  On the 14th of April 2019, Prince proposed an $80 million deal to the Libyan militia leader Khalifa Haftar. Code-named Project Opus, it would have supplied aircraft and other military equipment, including surplus helicopters bought from Jordan. The package was meant to bring intelligence surveillance aircraft, drones, armed assault helicopters, maritime interdiction and cyber intelligence and targeting to Haftar's forces. Haftar was then trying to overthrow Libya's UN-backed government. The project was aborted in June 2019.

  Three United Arab Emirates firms handled the planning, management and financing: Lancaster 6 DMCC, L-6 FZE and Opus Capital Asset Limited FZE. They operated through a web of shell companies. A UN report from March 2021 linked Lancaster 6 and Opus Capital Asset to a team of mercenaries and a Pilatus PC-6 surveillance aircraft deployed to Libya. L-6 FZE owned a LASA T-Bird crop duster, which had debuted at the Paris Air Show in 2017. It flew to Serbia for maintenance in August 2018. The UN said this "agricultural" plane had been modified to carry rocket pods and a gun pod with twin 23mm cannon.

  Jordan was central to the plan. Prince worked with a Jordanian royal, Faisal ibn al-Hussein, to organize the transfer of aircraft and other materiel. An Australian pilot, Christiaan Durrant, told Jordanian officials he had "clearances from everywhere" and that the work was approved "at the highest level." After Jordan rejected the deal, Prince called a meeting at the Army and Navy Club in the United States. Durrant and a member of Donald Trump's National Security Council attended. Durrant explained the Libyan campaign and asked for American support.

  The UN also tracked the transfer of three aircraft owned by Prince to a close associate for use in Libya. They were reportedly passed from his companies to a mercenary firm connected to him in the United Arab Emirates. In April 2020, The Intercept reported that Prince had offered to act as a subcontractor for the Russian Wagner group in Mozambique and Libya.

  The FBI investigated Prince over the alleged attempt to sell Jordanian arms to Haftar. In 2020, he was also the focus of an FBI inquiry into arms trafficking tied to converting crop dusters into military aircraft. Apart from these investigations, Prince was not charged with a crime.

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• 7. The Trump Orbit

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  In May 2018, The New York Times reported that Prince had arranged a meeting in Trump Tower in August 2016. Donald Trump Jr., George Nader and Joel Zamel attended. Nader reportedly said the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates wanted to help Trump win. Zamel pitched a social media manipulation campaign from his Israeli company, Psy-Group.

  Prince's own accounts shifted. In November 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, he said he had no formal contact and no unofficial role with the Trump campaign. In March 2019, he acknowledged attending the Trump Tower meeting, saying he was there to "talk about Iran policy." Asked about the contradiction, he replied, "I don't know if the Committee got the transcript wrong."

  Around the 11th of January 2017, Prince attended a meeting in the Seychelles convened by the Emirati crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Nader was there, along with Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and a figure close to Vladimir Putin. Emirati officials reportedly believed Prince spoke for the Trump transition. The Washington Post reported on the 3rd of April 2017 that officials saw the meeting as an apparent effort to open a back channel between Moscow and Trump. Prince denied that he represented the transition or that any back channel existed.

  The Mueller report found that Nader had introduced Prince to Dmitriev as "designated by Steve Bannon to meet you! I know him and he is very very well connected and trusted by the New Team." Prince acknowledged that Nader could fairly think he would pass information to the transition team. Bannon told investigators Prince had not told him about the meeting in advance. Prince had testified, "I didn't fly there to meet any Russian guy," yet the report found he and Nader prepared carefully to meet Dmitriev. A second meeting in a hotel bar, which Prince called a chance encounter, was actually pre-arranged. He wanted to convey that the United States would not accept Russian involvement in Libya, after Russia moved an aircraft carrier off the Libyan coast.

  On the 30th of April 2019, House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff sent the Justice Department a criminal referral alleging false testimony. On the 4th of February 2020, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd confirmed the department was opening an investigation. In December 2019, Prince was reported to have traveled to Venezuela to meet a top aide to Nicolas Maduro, and was referred to the Treasury Department over possible sanctions violations.

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• 8. Beliefs and New Contracts

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  Prince calls himself a libertarian. "I'm a very free market guy. I'm not a huge believer that government provides a whole lot of solutions." He traces some of these views to his White House internship, where he found federal agencies like HHS, HUD and Commerce depressing. Disenchanted, he backed Pat Buchanan for president. On a 2024 episode of his podcast, he said, "it's time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we're going to govern those countries." He applied the remark to much of Africa.

  Money has followed those views. Between 1998 and 2007, Prince gave more than $200,000 to Republican and third-party causes. In 2016, he gave $250,000 to Donald Trump's presidential campaign and $100,000 to Make America Number 1, a Trump-aligned super PAC led by Rebekah Mercer.

  In 2025, Politico reported that a group led by Prince had pitched the Trump administration on a private-sector deportation plan. In March 2025, he and Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa announced a deal to support government security forces. A security operation during the visit detained 63 people, who were released shortly after because no crimes were confirmed. Critics called it a political stunt. Prince also made claims against the presidential candidate Luisa González, which drew accusations of foreign interference.

  Haiti came next. In 2025, Prince reportedly claimed a 10-year contract with the Haitian government. In January 2026, Haitian authorities confirmed that his firm, operating as Vectus Global, was running anti-gang operations. One of them, on the 14th of January 2026, targeted the gang leader Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier.

  In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a 2023 UN Group of Experts report linked Prince to a plan for North Kivu. He allegedly intended to broker the deployment of over two thousand mercenaries from Colombia, Mexico and Argentina to halt troop advances and secure mining areas. Three South African mercenaries had scouted the region first. A Reuters report in February 2026 said Prince deployed an Israeli-trained private force to run drones and help the Congolese army secure the city of Uvira against Rwanda-backed AFC/M23 rebels.

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