Erik Prince

Erik Dean Prince (born June 6, 1969) is an American businessman and former U.S. Navy SEAL, best known for founding the world’s largest private military company, Blackwater USA, in 1997. 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 lives in the United Arab Emirates. 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 (the family name, Prins, was at some point anglicized to Prince). He graduated from Holland Christian High School.

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. 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. Prince’s mother sold the Prince Corporation for $1.3 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 (24 square kilometers) 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.

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 (CIA) 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."

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. The battalion was to engage in intelligence gathering, urban combat, special operations “to destroy enemy personnel and equipment, crowd-control operations, response to terrorist attacks, to put down uprisings inside labor camps, and to secure nuclear and radioactive materials in planned nuclear power plants. The force, made up largely of former Colombian soldiers, failed.