Dangerous Enterprise

Warning shots are out. The road rules for State Department convoys in Iraq are different today from what they were in the first years of the Iraq war, when the security details operated by ­Blackwater USA (later Worldwide) guarded diplomats with aggressive tactics and Iraqis referred to any crew of speeding, heavily armed contractors as “Blackwaters.” That all changed after a September 2007 shootout in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, in which Blackwater guards—whose warning shots may have ignited the ­incident—and Iraqi security forces began firing at each other, leaving 17 civilians dead and opening the final chapter in the company’s short history.

In “Master of War,” Suzanne Simons, a CNN executive producer, details the story of how Erik Prince ­transformed a shoe-string security-training operation into a paramilitary entity with unmatched capabilities and boundless ­potential political liability. She gives ample voice to Mr. Prince but also delves back into his life for clues: She describes his well-to-do childhood in Holland, Mich.; his brief, unhappy stint at the Naval ­Academy; his undergraduate years at conservative Hillsdale College; his return to the Navy through its Officer Candidate School and his completion of Navy SEAL training; and even his two marriages.

Through interviews with Mr. Prince, who stepped down this spring as the company’s chief executive—and company executives as well as government officials and other players in the U.S. ­private-security industry—Ms. Simons seeks to understand the company through its founder. “Blackwater,” she writes, “in a lot of ways, reflects Prince’s own ­personality: ­stubborn, driven, and obsessed with finding ways to make things happen.”

Ms. Simons avoids polarizing politics and strives to strike a middle ground, and she largely succeeds, though in other ways she falls short. We know that Blackwater received lucrative contracts from the U.S. government after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but anyone looking for a close analysis of Blackwater’s ­profits will come away from “Master of War” still looking for ­answers. That is not entirely Ms. Simons’s fault; the ­privately held company guards its financials closely.

Master of War
By Suzanne Simons
(Harper, 279 pages, $27.99)

Mr. Prince framed his ambitions in an easily understandable way: “We’re trying to do for the national ­security apparatus what FedEx did for the postal ­service.” But “better, faster, and cheaper” is a mantra, not a business model. The ­company started in 1997, with money that Mr. Prince ­inherited—his father had made a fortune with the invention of illuminated mirrors for ­automobiles. Mr. Prince bought 6,000 acres of swampy land near Moyock, N.C.—hence the name Blackwater—to use as a training ground for security operators, military personnel and law-enforcement agencies.

Mr. Prince’s vision of developing a paramilitary ­version of FedEx got a major boost after the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, when the Navy hired Blackwater to teach sailors to better defend their ships from ­small-boat attacks. The company might have remained well below the radar without the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the parlous state of security that soon ­developed. Blackwater had already begun to prosper ­after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but it was in Iraq that the company flourished: Blackwater won contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars and hired hundreds of former members of the military to go to work providing protection to diplomats, government personnel and supply deliveries in the hottest of hot zones. Many Americans first became aware of ­Blackwater in 2004, when four company employees in Fallujah were killed in an ambush and their corpses ­desecrated. Faulty communications and tactics had left the guards vulnerable to attack—a sign that Blackwater may have been having trouble managing its rapid growth, sending guards into the field without sufficient ­preparation.

Throughout Blackwater’s rise, Mr. Prince kept a fairly low profile. But after the deadly firefight in Nisour Square, he made his debut as the public face of the ­company, across from Rep. Henry Waxman and the rest of the House Committee on Oversight and Government ­Reform. Ms. Simons takes us through the whole ­interrogation. Mr. Waxman clearly considered ­Blackwater a shoot-first, ask-questions-later operation that answered neither to military nor civilian authority. Mr. Prince maintained that the Nisour Square shooting was a case of his employees defending themselves against ambush in a crowded setting. The truth, as is ­often the case with scenes of violent chaos, will ­probably never be known.

Mr. Prince, ignoring a State Department prohibition on its contractors talking to the media, launched a ­public-relations campaign. He talked up Blackwater’s value as a cost-effective provider of essential services, leaving the military free to do its war-fighting. Critics of the Iraq war remained unmoved: Blackwater was vastly overpaid, they insisted, and its operations undermined the country’s military effectiveness and moral authority.

Mr. Prince’s PR campaign, on the evidence, failed. In January of this year, after long voicing its displeasure with Blackwater, the Iraqi government banned ­it. A ­couple of months later, Mr. Prince ­announced that he was leaving the company, as did ­former SEAL Gary ­Jackson, who—as Ms. Simons shows—was instrumental in helping launch and build Blackwater. Then Blackwater itself disappeared, its parent company now called Xe (pronounced “zee”). Even the sprawling training range in North Carolina, Blackwater’s spiritual home, goes by a new, innocuous-sounding name: U.S. Training Center.

These days, the State Department employs Triple Canopy Inc. and DynCorp International to protect its diplomats in Iraq. For Iraqis, though, it may be a long time before American security contractors are called anything but Blackwaters.

—Mr. Cole reports on the defense industry for the Journal.