Building Blackwater

A Field of Dreams

The organization most people think of as Blackwater is actually a collection of companies with Prince and his McLean-based holding company, the Prince Group, at the top. Prince, a former Navy Seal and heir to an industrial fortune, owns everything.

Blackwater Maritime has a 183-foot long ship for naval training. Two aviation-services businesses operate more than 50 planes and helicopters. Blackwater Manufacturing makes special armored cars the firm hopes to market to the military, as well as moving metal targets for training. Total Intelligence Solutions is led by former CIA officials, including Blackwater executive Cofer Black, who worked on counterterrorism at the CIA and State Department.

The most well-known company is Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, a subsidiary of Blackwater Worldwide, which until recently was known as Blackwater USA.

More than 100,000 people in the military and in local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, including those in Virginia and Maryland, have taken the center's courses. So have thousands of special operations personnel from the Navy, Army and other federal agencies. Before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the training center hosted up to 50 people a day. Now the number of students on a given day is 500, sometimes higher. The company has more than 550 full-time employees and 1,400 contractors, who operate in nine countries, including Jordan, Azerbaijan and Burkina Faso. Contractors in Iraq earn the equivalent of $115,000 a year, a company official said.

Federal government officials generally have declined to discuss contractual arrangements with the company. As a private corporation, Blackwater does not have to divulge such details. Public procurement data show that over the past six years, about half of Blackwater's federal contracts were awarded with little or no competition from other companies, according to a congressional report. Company officials dispute the data, claiming that the bulk of the awards were openly competed.

Prince said the increasingly large awards came as a result of good service and the word spreading among government officials. He said he has largely made good on his goal of doing a better job training special military and police forces than the government. He said he aims for a "country-club like experience" with tight schedules and good service.

Strolling on a garden path marked by 30 stones, each bearing the name of a Blackwater contractor who died on assignment in Iraq or elsewhere, he spoke about the success of his idea almost as an inevitability. He said the company has never reached out to Capitol Hill for help.

"This started as a field of dreams: Build it, and they will come," he said. "It was a little success that led to another success to another success."

A review of legal papers, contracting documents, company literature and news accounts, along with interviews with Blackwater and government officials, suggests the story is more complicated.

One factor fueling the company's ascent is the business savvy and deep pockets of Prince, 38, a zealous entrepreneur and heavy contributor to conservative and Christian causes.

Prince was a White House intern under President George H.W. Bush. His political donations over the past two decades total almost $263,000 to Pat Buchanan, Oliver North, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) and former senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, among others. His sister, Betsy DeVos, is former chairwoman of the Republican party in Michigan. She's married to Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway and a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan. After he was sued in 2005, Prince retained former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and current White House counsel Fred Fielding, who was then in private practice.

Prince has hired a stable of former officials from the Navy, State Department, CIA, FBI and other agencies. He also maintains a database of 40,000 contractor candidates, mostly former military and law enforcement officials, and their particular military, language, mechanical and other skills.