Amid reports that special counsel Robert Mueller had taken an interest in his activities, Erik Prince decided to host a fundraiser. On March 18, more than 100 people flocked to Prince’s sprawling farm in Middleburg, Virginia, for an afternoon of pistol shooting in support of Putin’s favourite congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, who the FBI reportedly found had his own Kremlin code name. As the day progressed, the group headed to the barn, where, over sandwiches, they heard from Oliver North, the central figure in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, and Matt Gaetz, a member of the House who’s big on Deep State “cabal” conspiracy theories.
Even among this motley bunch, Prince has enough notoriety to trump them all. The founder of Blackwater — the military contractor infamous for the 2007 massacre in Iraq in which a convoy of his mercenaries gunned down 14 unarmed civilians — he’s kept a lower profile since he sold the company in 2010. But that doesn’t mean he’s been idle. Since then, he’s pursued projects across the globe, from the United Arab Emirates to Somalia to Hong Kong.
But as the Rohrabacher event underscores, the so-called “Merchant of Death” again feels comfortable flexing his domestic muscles. The Trump administration “inherited a world on fire,” Prince says. “And I think some out-of-the-box thinking can help put those fires out.”
Following a decade in the wilderness, Prince has the White House access that will allow him to spread those ideas. He spent $250,000 to help get Trump elected; his sister Betsy DeVos now serves as Trump’s secretary of education; and when Prince pitched a plan to privatise the war in Afghanistan last year, the White House took him seriously. “He actually had the most cogent argument, much more than the guys who were ‘stay the course,’” Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon tells Forbes.
One major impediment to his privatisation concept was national security adviser HR McMaster, a lieutenant general and war scholar adamantly opposed to the idea of replacing American soldiers with mercenaries. Nor did the Prince plan seem to fit the worldview of then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson. But now that McMaster will be replaced by neocon favourite John Bolton, and Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo,  the dynamics have changed. Bolton’s selection, particularly, is “going to take us in a really positive direction,” a source close to Prince tells Forbes. “Do the math.” The assumption, of course: Prince would reap a big cut of the action.
As he planned his comeback, Prince met with Forbes at length, across two interviews, in the summer and fall of 2017. He stopped speaking to us after the Washington Post reported that a grand jury in the Mueller investigation heard evidence that Prince travelled to the remote Seychelles to try to establish a back channel between Trump and Russia. But Prince, still in muscular military shape at 48, had already laid out his grand strategy and provided a window into his temperament, one that mixes a belief in destiny, rooted in religion, with a warrior’s calm in the heat of battle.
After his father Edgar Prince died in 1995, the family quickly sold Prince Corporation’s automotive unit to Johnson Controls for $1.35bn. Erik, then 26, walked away with at least $50mn. Around the same time, he left the SEALs when his first wife, Joan, was diagnosed with breast cancer. (She died in 2003.)
Flush and underemployed, Prince used a piece of his inheritance to build a training centre for special forces in Moyock, North Carolina, which he called Blackwater, after the region’s murky swamps. A series of domestic tragedies fuelled the business’ ascent. The shooting at Columbine High School brought police contracts. The USS Cole bombing beckoned the United States Navy. And after 9/11, Blackwater became the Pentagon’s mercenary army of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq. Through 2006, Prince’s firm generated $1bn in government work.
But as public support for the conflicts waned, things began to unravel. Tension boiled over in September 2007, when a convoy of Blackwater contractors shot 31 people in Iraq’s Nisur Square, killing 14. The contractors said they had been ambushed; Justice Department prosecutors thought otherwise. One Blackwater guard pleaded guilty to manslaughter, three others were also convicted of manslaughter and one of first-degree murder in 2014. (The murder conviction was vacated last August; prosecutors have appealed to the Supreme Court for a retrial.) The event — hardly Blackwater’s first deadly incident — was viewed in much of the world as an indiscriminate massacre.
Prince was summoned to Congress for questioning. Government officials, many of whom had sanctioned Blackwater’s aggressive tactics — even if tacitly — condemned him. Prince thinks he was singled out unfairly. Blackwater “was the perfect bogeyman for them to make up,” he says. “I was a sole owner, my guys carried weapons [and] I came from a conservative family.”
Whatever the reason, Prince’s name became toxic, and the new Obama administration wanted nothing to do with him. Blackwater rebranded as Xe Services, and in 2010 Prince sold the company to an investment group led by two private equity firms, Forte Capital Advisors and Manhattan Growth Partners, for over $100mn.
Prince is still not over the loss. “I’ve stuck it all out there for America. The previous administration was extremely abusive of us, and I don’t forget that,” he fumes with an unflinching stare. “That means I’m very cautious about sticking it out there for any government.”
To most of America, that chapter spelled the end of Erik Prince. But it’s not in Prince’s nature to slow down, much less concede defeat, and he quietly took his gambits offshore. He moved to Abu Dhabi in 2010, where, he says, he worked on his energy-and-mining investment firm, Frontier Resource Group. But according to a New York Times report he was also helping assemble a “secret army” for the UAE. (His spokesman denies the story.)
At the same time, he zigzagged around the globe on similar projects. Using Emirati funding, he helped create an antipiracy force in Somalia in 2010. The outfit targeted criminals on land rather than waiting for them to attack boats, “the way the US or Nato or the EU was trying to do it,” he says. “If you have a wasp problem, you deal with the nest.”
To Prince, that endeavour offers proof of concept for his Afghanistan privatisation proposal. “It worked,” he says. “Have you heard of Somali piracy anytime recently? And that programme cost less than the pirates were taking in ransom.” But a 2012 UN report called the project “the most brazen violation of the [Somali] arms embargo by a private security company.” Others say Prince deserves little credit for the pirates’ demise. “It was ultimately the intensity of international naval patrolling, combined with the defences that ships developed,” says Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Prince next shifted to Asia. In 2014 he cofounded Frontier Services Group, a logistics and security business that trades on the Hong Kong stock exchange.  
By all appearances, FSG is an incredibly dry business. “We deliver groceries,” Prince told students at Oxford last April. Intuitively, that makes little sense. The muckraking site The Intercept, cofounded by a longtime Prince critic, journalist Jeremy Scahill, reported that he was secretly planning to build armed aircraft in Europe, may have worked with Chinese intelligence and was under investigation for “attempting to broker military services to foreign governments.” Prince again denies the allegations, terming them “fantasy.”
Either way, Prince’s years in exile demonstrate one underlying fact: Blackwater was only the start for this young, ambitious tycoon. And the current political climate gives him a window to get back in the game in America.
On a dewy morning in Washington, DC, last year, Erik Prince shared the early framework of his Afghanistan proposal. It revolves around a private force of 6,000 contractors, supplemented by 2,000 US special operations troops and support personnel, who would embed with local Afghan units. Air power would be led by Afghan pilots, paired with contractors. All would be overseen by a “viceroy” who ultimately reports to the president.
Prince thinks his plan, which includes an overall drawdown, could save more than $40bn a year. The current approach, he says, focuses on cycling in soldiers, who never fully adapt to the local climate. “How stupid is that?”
Prince first aired his full proposal last year via an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. According to Prince, Trump took notice. “He liked it very much,” Prince says.
It’s a relationship years in the making. Prince displayed early devotion to Trump, a president famously obsessed with loyalty. He donated $250,000 to entities supporting Trump’s candidacy even when he looked like a general-election long shot and unofficially shilled for the campaign. “If you actually want to change things, and take power away from a centralised, bloated and elite-serving government, vote for Donald Trump,” he told the alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in a podcast interview. “It’s a pretty clear choice.”
The trust is allegedly mutual. Prince travelled to the Seychelles prior to the inauguration, according to a Washington Post report, to meet a “Russian close to President Vladimir Putin.” The purported goal: arranging a “back channel” between the Kremlin and the incoming administration. The Post recently reported that George Nader, an adviser to the UAE who reputedly helped arrange the summit, confirmed the meeting to a grand jury.
Prince had previously testified to the House Intelligence Committee that the Seychelles encounter was a coincidence. He said he was there to talk business with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. After a discussion focused on terrorism and mining, a member of the Emirati entourage suggested he meet “an interesting guy from Russia” who, like Prince, did “business in the commodity space.” Did he contribute to or know about any sort of Trump-Russia collusion? “Zero.”
Prince stands by his testimony, according to his spokesman.
The Seychelles blowback likely eliminated any thought of a primary race that Prince had been considering against Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming (his family owns real estate there). No matter. The recent White House shakeup has buoyed the prospects for his Afghanistan plan, which Prince claims had momentum last year. “If it was not for the debacle of Charlottesville,” he says, “and the lady that got killed and all the political blowback that fell on the president... I’m almost sure he would not have made the decision [against it] today.”
McMaster’s departure removes one obstacle, though top military brass and think-tank eggheads revile the idea. Pompeo could be the wild card. The secretary of state travelled to Afghanistan last year in part to evaluate Prince’s ideas, according to the Financial Times. He also pitched an Afghanistan proposal at Camp David in August 2017 that included elements of Prince’s plan, a source familiar with the events tells Forbes. A CIA spokesperson, however, disputes those claims, telling Forbes, “You have been provided wildly inaccurate information.”
Steve Bannon sees things differently: “Prince’s voice is only going to get stronger, not weaker, because everything he said was going to happen [in Afghanistan] has happened.”
Prince seems fine either way. Ever the SEAL, with Mueller potentially circling, he has backup plans. Libya could use a police force to choke off migrants; Somalia would benefit from armed boats patrolling its fisheries. Prince follows opportunity. And no matter how bad his PR, he always seems to find new backers. “If people think it gets to me,” he says, “they have sorely misunderstood.” (Courtesy Forbes)