An intense article about Blackwater and its founder Erik Prince in the newly-remodeled version of Newsweek.
Prince’s casual mingling of his Christian faith with his “private security firm” has always struck me as just a little bit odd. I try and imagine him before going in to pitch clients on more business. Does he pray? Does he ask God to grant him bigger parts of a war? Weird at best.
I’ve met Erik a few times – I actually invited him to submit a proposal for security for some White House conferences in 2002. The president wasn’t going to be at the conferences and that meant Secret Service involvement would be minimal. And while we didn’t need much, we were told that we needed to have something because any conference bearing the “White House” name could be a target.
Prince arrived with someone he described as his head of business operations. My memory may be faulty but I recall the man never took off his sunglasses. They walked me through Blackwater and its “extraordinary force capacity”. I told him it wasn’t yet clear how much the Secret Service was going to be involved. “The Secret Service is a joke,” Prince boasted, “and It is only a matter of time till America realizes how much of a joke they really are.”
Suffice it to say Prince didn’t lack confidence in himself.
He didn’t get the contract though it seems the Iraq War has made up for it.