The Evolution of Blackwater: From Mercenaries to Global Security Firm

[00:00:00]they are an organization that's gone by many names but one stands out Above All the Rest ask them today and they'd call themselves constellis Holdings one of a patchwork of Acquisitions alongside fast food chains do Giants and Global retailers all happily nestled under the publicly traded corporate umbrella of Apollo Global Management asked them a little more than a decade ago after the departure of controversial CEO Eric Prince and they'd call themselves Academy a critical partner to the United States during its long running war on terror but asked them at the height of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and they would have called themselves by a name far more recognizable and one that cuts to the heart of both their organization's reputation and its operational history around the world that name is Blackwater but asking what this organization calls itself and asking what the organization actually is are two fundamentally different questions and what this organization is no matter what you call it is a mercenary company in fact during its years in operation the organization formerly known as Blackwater has been America's Premier private military contractor or PMC a position that earns the organization everything from a claim by the United States government to condemnation as instruments of American violent Interventional ISM around the world so today on war Graphics we're going to take a closer look at conell Holdings and it's complicated and often dark dark past as black water as well as its convoluted evolution in the years since and the role that it still plays today all across the world the Blackwater organization was founded in 1997 under the name Blackwater worldwide in a move that was at the time hardly a blip on the radar of the American defense industrial complex the brainchild of two veterans and former Navy Seals Eric Prince and Al Clark each of whom had an intimate knowledge of the American military's capabilities as well as the gaps in its architecture Prince had spent two years as an officer with the seals deploying to Haiti the Balkans and other hot zones around the world by his own accounts that experience plus an acute awareness of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 showed Prince that the United States needed private military training capabilities to prepare potential special operators for service in 1995 Prince quit the seals after the death of his father and after selling his family's auto parts company in a billion dooll deal he used much of that newly found wealth to personally Finance his new company his partner Al Clark had spent a decade with the seals and had even served as a Firearms instructor but had grown frustrated at the Navy's lack of firing ranges and independently come to the conclusion that the military would benefit from what he called One-Stop shopping for their training capabilities together Clark and Prince created their organizer ation with the goal as Prince has since explained it to provide training support and infrastructure to support military and law enforcement Professionals in their current positions instead of raising a private Army the goal was to support the military America already had or as Prince stated quoting in here do for the National Security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service in Prince's view that appeared to mean taking an unwieldly and rather blighted State organization and argumenting it with a private partner to that end the two purchas about 7,000 acres of land on the border between the US states of North Carolina and Virginia known as the Great Dismal Swamp according to most accounts the organization Drew its name from the black putrid water of the marshes that surrounded that original base of operations less frequently it's attributed to the Navy SEAL code for Black Ops that is to say covert or clandestine operations that are meant to be kept secret and meant to happen in a way that can't be tied back to the people responsible their logo a five clawed bear in the crossair of a scope was done as a reference to the Bears that roam the property on that land they built a massive Training Center featuring several indoor and outdoor shooting ranges simulated reproductions of urban environments a driving track and an artificial Lake alongside other amenities according to the company itself it's the largest combat training facility in America while the center for land use interpretations describes it as quote one of the largest and most sophisticated private security training sites in the country there Blackwater had the capacity to train their clients on everything from Mark workmanship to Tactical driving to Convoy protection to Maritime security operations to Urban peacekeeping and combat tactics that' welcome trainees sent from the seals and other American Special Operations groups alongside people sent courtesy of SWAT teams to expand their capabilities and for a while they were pretty successful said one local writer Jay Price then working for the nearby city of rallies the news and observer to the degree that Prince was thought of it was as this patriotic guy who had built this Hail Mary facility to help the seals and probably hope to break even the big contracts weren't on the horizon not even a glimmer Blackwater had found their Niche their clients responded well to the services they offered and they even managed to secure a US contract in the year 2000 at that time alaa had just bombed the USS coal in the port city of agan and Blackwater got the call to send trainers to Yemen in order to provide Navy sailors with counterterrorism training but then everything changed for Blackwater just as it changed for the rest of the world like many other companies throughout modern history Blackwater is an organization that happened to be in the right place at the right time to fill a need that the world didn't know about until catastrophe struck in this case of course that catastrophe was the terror Attacks of September the 11th 2001 in which alqaeda successfully targeted the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington Virginia once it became clear that the event was a massive organized Act of aggression against the United States the American Military kicked into gear but in a practic iCal sense the need for major unplanned military response meant that the United States had no time or advanced notice to shift onto a war footing America needed to fill the gaps quickly and Blackwater is going to figure massively into their solution blackwater's first contract as part of the war on terror came in early 2002 when high ranking CIA officials solicited the company's services for a protection job the CIA was looking for 20 men all with top secret security clearances and the ability to travel to Kabul Afghanistan who could protect the cia's headquarters in the country and keep an eye on a second more remote military base at that time American intervention in Afghanistan was still in its early stages with active CIA operators being the primary forces on the grounds who are hunting for Usama Bin Laden but then as now the American roster of top level operators isn't a particularly long list and blackwaters connections with experienced and highly trained operators like the seals meant that they were an ideal way to Outsource some of the lower priority needs of the agency put Eric Prince's guys on guard Duty and America's Black Ops best and brightest could do more with their limited numbers for an initial six-month contract in exchange for over 5 million Prince personally LED his team to Afghanistan by all accounts the mission was a success that first contract in Afghanistan was an eye-opening one for Blackwater and particularly for Eric Prince himself the cost Effectiveness with which black quar had provided security as Prince would later explain it had been good for everybody the individual men on the mission had made some very impressive earnings with daily wages equivalent to nearly $1,000 in today's money but for the United States the price of their services wouldn't have even made for a noticeable rounding error in the budget over the coming months blackw began hiring and restructuring itself to provide private security to the United States at a much larger scale all the while picking up more individual contracts for which the organization rarely suffered competitors and then Blackwater was in the right place at the right time on a second consecutive occasion this go around that optimized their services just in time for the United States to decide to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq on faulty intelligence that indicated the presence of weapons of mass destruction militarily the invasion was not a difficult one for the US during a surprise operation beginning on the 20th of March 2003 with no declaration of war an American Le Coalition stormed into Iraq and captured Baghdad within 3 weeks by April the the military offensive was all but wrapped up and a couple of weeks later US President George W bush declared mission accomplished of course anybody with even the most cursory awareness of how the Iraq War went knows that the mission was in fact not accomplished and before long America was dealing with a full-blown Insurgency that was going to be a particularly massive problem because now the US had pivoted toward the long hard slog of rebuilding American diplomats Intelligence Officers humanitarians and more were all pouring into Iraq just as the American government was realizing that much of the Iraqi population really really really didn't want them there to address that problem Black Water conferred three particularly helpful advantages to the US government when compared to the prospect of using its own troops for protection duties first it allowed the US to save their well-trained personnel for other more important and high-risk missions where their Manpower was badly needed second it provided a means to put more boots on the ground in Iraq and for more dangerous purposes without the US military having to actively send the American taxpayers Sons and Daughters into particularly dangerous assignments and third amend that if an operation went sideways whether by killing Blackwater contractors leading to the deaths of American VIPs or having Personnel act out some not so acceptable animosity toward local Iraqis then it would be Blackwater and not America itself who would take the blame Blackwater made its entrance to Iraq in the fall of 2003 when it was awarded a nearly $28 million contract to protect one Paul Bremer a longtime member of the US foreign service who'd cut his teeth as a prominent wingman to Henry Kissinger Bremer had been appointed as the leader of the Coalition provisional Authority the organization that the US had set up to basically run Iraq for a while in that post brema had the authority to rule by decree exercise control over an Iraqi interim governing Council and write whatever conditions he wanted into the new Iraqi Constitution all of that meant that brema had a massive Target on his back now that there was a full-blown inser emergency running a mark through the country Blackwater were the ones to provide a large security Detachment around brema relying on multiple helicopters and a highly visible contingent a very well-armed very scary looking American gunman to deter any attempts on bema's life they would oversee brema security up until the end of June 2004 when brema finished up his work and left Iraq in the hands of an interim government days later blackwat would receive its biggest military contract yet for nearly half a billion dollars in exchange for offering protection for US state department diplomats in Iraq Afghanistan and other nations during those same years Blackwater would be called upon to guard American military installations in Iraq and provide training for the new us-backed Iraqi Security Forces Blackwater would start picking up duties organizing and protecting convoys providing supplemental assistance to train Americans on the ground and guarding a wide range of Civilian VIPs they even had the resources to start running aerial surveillance operations during Hurrican Blackwater would dispatch a contingent of several hundred employees to the American South largely to guard the wealthier inhabitants of New Orleans from what was at the time portrayed as a lawless environment in the wake of the disaster wrote Jamie Wilson for the guardian quoting hundreds of mercenaries have descended on New Orleans to guard the property of the city's millionaires from lutters the heavily armed men employed by private military companies including black water and isi a part of the militarization of a city which had a reputation for being one of the most relaxed and easygoing in America the quote ends black water would work alongside other American and Israeli mercenary at that time guarding points and properties of Interest while a smaller Detachment from the group assisted directly in rescue efforts but by the time blackw forces deployed to assist in the aftermath of Huracan Katrina the organization had already been caught up in the first of many instance that would later come back to haunted the first such incident was one that prompted outrage at the time not against Blackwater contractors but to avenge them in an incident on March the 31st 2004 a Blackwater Convoy conducting a food delivery in the Iraqi city of Fallujah was attacked by Insurgent forces the four Blackwater contractors operating the Convoy Scott helvenston Jerry zco Wesley battle owner and Mike te were killed and their corpses were beaten desecrated burned dragged through city streets and eventually hung on a bridge over the Euphrates River the attack was a shock to the United States one that the US military would ultimately avenge during the Second Battle of fujia which by the way we published a separate episode on if you'd like to learn more about that but according to the families of the victims after the fact the black employees had been ill prepared to lead the Convoy that day according to Legal testimony from a former Navy SEAL who' known one of the killed contractors former seal Scott helvenston quite well people receiving training through Blackwater were trained largely to operate armored vehicles not the unarmored vehicles the contractors have been given in fujia they've been promised semi-automatic rifles belt fed machine guns and time to gather intelligence and prepare their Convoy routs in Iraq but when they arrived the weapons were nowhere to be found and the manager pushed them to run their Convoy routes without adequate preparation finally the men on the Convoy had expected to have three operators per vehicle instead there were only two meaning that nobody had been watching the rear of each vehicle a congressional investigation found in 2007 the Blackwater had sent the Convoy into an Insurgent stronghold unprepared and was directly responsible for not only their violent deaths but for creating the conditions in which not one but two battles for fuia became unavoidable all the while insisting its contractors were trained and ready to work Blackwater blasted the report after the fact but by then blackwater's track record was far worse than it had been at the time the four contractors were killed it was about this time in blackwater's history that what had at first been seen as relatively harmless Corner cutting during a free-for-all stage of American private Contracting started to become a pattern of questionable conduct inside Iraq in early 2005 Blackwater contractors working to protect a state department Convoy fired 70 rounds of ammunition into a car that had been perceived as a threat after it had refused an initial order to stop Blackwater would later be found not to have been justified in carrying out the shooting claims that the Convoy had been fired upon were later dismissed when it was found that a Blackwater contractor had actually fired his own gun into his own vehicle accidentally months later six Blackwater contractors were killed alongside five International contractors when the helicopter was shot down marking the first instance that a civilian helicopter had been felled from the sky during the us Leed intervention in early 2006 a Blackwater sniper killed three Iraqi guards while shooting down from the roof of Iraq's Justice Ministry in an incident that Iraqi Witnesses including an army commander and guards from the Justice Ministry called unprovoked the US state department would find that the ACT quote fell within approved rules governing the use of force that same year Blackwater contractors would crash their SUV into a US Army hanvey and rather than working with the soldiers on the scene the contractors disarmed them and forced them to lay prone a gunpoint until the situation was resolved toward the end of that year a Blackwater employee would shoot and kill a security guard working for the Iraqi vice president in an incident during which that employee was reported to have been drunk all the while the organization proved that it was too valuable to the United States for the US to risk severing ties in 2006 Blackwater would secure an even larger contract than it had done before landing a bid to provide security to the US Embassy in Iraq at that time Iraq hosted the largest American Embassy in the world making it a massive Target for insurgence at a time that American reconstruction efforts were at a high point and when anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 military contractors were believed to be at work in the country although no official figures have ever been established at the embassy and their other high-profile guard postings Blackwater employees would frequently fire on the Iraqi population including many instances in which Iraqi drivers of Blackwater checkpoints didn't comply quickly with Blackwater orders nonetheless they were a cheaper option than American soldiers they kept us Manpower set aside for more important tasks and they made sure that when incidents of violence occurred the Americans behind the trigger were not technically US military personnel and even worse was what came on September the 16th 2007 in an incident that would later become known as the nisour Square massacre on that day a 19-man team of Blackwater contractors in a four truck Convoy responded to an explosion of a car bomb at a site where us and Iraqi leaders were having a meeting the blackw team was supposed to secure an evacuation route but refusing orders the teens's leader decided instead to advance to a location called Nur Square there as contractors lock down a traffic circle the driver of a Kia car failed to stop when ordered and was shot once in the head by a Blackwater operator the car continued to roll forward the person in the passenger seat who was the mother of the driver was also shot and killed and the car was eventually incinerated by a grenade although it counts of the incident very sharply according to Iraq versus the US state department 15 additional Iraqis were k killed in the incident with an FBI investigation after the fact establishing that a minimum of 14 of them had been shot without cause it was a catastrophic event roundly condemned as a massacre carried out by us mercenaries and it would eventually lead not just to retaliatory action against Blackwater but to a series of decisions that would see the US pull up stakes in Iraq years later five Blackwater contractors would be convicted of serious crimes including first-degree murder for one and 14 counts of voluntary manslaughter by three others although the four who faced the most serious charges would be granted full presidential pardons by Donald Trump in the year 2020 and even the Nur Square massacre wasn't the full extent of the abuses that Blackwater was accused of even just in the Year 2007 alone also in that year Blackwater would be investigated for smuggling weapons into Iraq with those weapons then alleged to have passed into the hands of a US designated terrorist organization through the black market they'd be accused of instigating a standoff in Baghdad between themselves and Commandos from the Iraqi the interior Ministry a group that was ostensibly on the same side of the war that shoot a civilian who was said to have been quote driving too close to a state department Convoy then in August of that year a manager from Blackwater named Dan Carrol who was at the time the leader of blackwaters Iraq deployment threatened to kill a US state department investigator who had been working on and eventually who produced a fierce condemnation of blackwaters practices and lack of oversight wrote the investigator quoting here the management structures in place to manage and monitor our contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractors themselves Blackwater contractors saw themselves as above the law the contractors instead of Department officials are in command and control the quote ends in describing the incident in which the investigator was threatened the report reads that Carol stated quote that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq that report by the way was finalized just weeks before the nissar Square massacre said strategist Peter S about these years for Blackwater well after the fact quoting the Blackwater State Department relationship gave new meaning to the word dysfunctional it involved everything from catastrophic failures of supervision to short changing broader National Security goals at the expense of short-term desires investigators would soon find the Blackwater employees have been improperly storing automatic weapons in the same rooms where they'd get drunk and party with female visitors and often carried weapons for which they had no certification training or authorization Ro the New York times quoting the armored vehicles black water used to protect American diplomats were poorly maintained and deteriorating and the investigators found that four drunk guards had commandeered one heavily armored $180,000 vehicle to drive to a private party and crashed it into a concrete barrier Blackwater was also overbilling the state department by manipulating its Personnel records using guards assigned to the state department contract for other work and falsifying other Staffing data on the contract the investigators concluded the quote ends a firm affili ated to Blackwater enlisted yeni Pakistani and other foreign Nationals to guard blackwater's own compounds but provided them only quote squalid conditions sometimes three to a cramped room with no bed according to the report by the investigators an American journalist Jeremy scarel alleged that Blackwater operatives had worked alongside the CIA to perform snatch and grab operations in Pakistan where Blackwater claimed only to have a single employee in one other incident around this period as reported by the New York Times Eric Prince himself demanded the Blackwater employees at the company headquarters in North Carolina swear an oath of allegiance to the PMC itself and sign and return a copy of the oath which mirrored the oath that US military officials are supposed to take before beginning their service between mounting legal pressure increased frustration from the US government and a rising tide of disgust towards Blackwater on the American Home Front Blackwater began to face real scrutiny for its actions abroad Eric Prince would admit in testimony before Congress that Blackwater lacked legal mechanisms to deal with overreach or misconduct by their employees although he would refuse to provide Financial documentation on the PMC and would largely avoid questions about his own role in cultivating a permissive environment for the sorts of abuses that Blackwater was accused of the US House of Representatives began to issue fmer regulations on blackwat and the state department recommended in 2008 that Blackwater be dropped by the US government before announcing in 2009 that blackwat would not see its contracts renewed the following year in Iraq the PMC would have its blanket immunity reverse Ed by the Iraqi Le transitional government and a barrage of legal action following the event would result in lawsuits against a long list of Blackwater employees one American lawsuit filed in Alexandria Virginia would alleged that Blackwater employees murdered a fellow Blackwater staff member who intended to testify against the PMC encouraged the murder of Iraqi civilians laed money smuggled weapons and engaged in child prostitution while another filed by an American legal advocacy in nonprofit directly accused Blackwater of engaging in war crimes but even that withering legal Onslaught would only bring Blackwater down in name beginning in 2007 Blackwater had worked to change its image replacing its logo with a less threatening emblem and stating publicly that it would start to move away from security Contracting in 2009 the company changed its name to XY Services LLC and announced that it was restructuring its company with the goal being to move away from security operations for the most part and begin providing a broader range of services to its Global clients most important of all Eric Prince resigned leaving his post as CEO while maintaining his chairmanship of the company board prince made no secret of his displeasure at stepping down emphasizing that after what he claimed was 35,000 personal security missions to protect Blackwater clients quote no one under our care was ever killed or seriously injured a new roster of friendly looking faces was appointed in his stad people with far less of ATT tendency to cause PR nightmares and when it came to their legal troubles the company largely buckled down and shut up doing the long hard legal slog required dig them elves out from a quagar that only seemed to get worse from month to month but by 2010 the worst of the legal trouble was already out in the open and Blackwater now XE Services had done enough work on their Optics and their public relations that the crisis seemed somewhat navigable perhaps it was an effort for the state department and the American Military to save face perhaps it was a lack of will to prosecute XC services for black Waters overreach or perhaps it was because the government felt that the punishment XE Services was already weathering was enough regardless of the precise reason though exe Services would not be shut down and the bulk of their employees under Blackwater would either remain on staff or leave of their own valtion partway through 2010 exe Services went through another change being purchased by a group of investors called USC Holdings and Eric Prince fully left his leadership position in the company a new board was assembled including reputable figures from the US like former Attorney General John Ashcraft former price presidential Chief of Staff Jack Quinn and former director of the National Security Agency Bobby Ray Inman a new team was put at top the organization's operational structure and by 2011 the transformation was complete Black water's newest new name would be Academy and with the pain and hardship of Iraq now a relic of the past the organization set out toward the [Music] future by the time that the American Federal Government transitions into its second term under President Barack Obama the organization formerly known as blackwat was a very different organization from what it had once been no longer was it a somewhat haphazard mix of elite former special operators and a relative amateurs looking to take advantage of a lucrative opportunity now the organization was large and welldeveloped with a new compound in Illinois a much more robust training programs in their name and a well-developed menu of services that included everything from intelligence work to protection operations to large scale training to Maritime security to Consulting meanwhile employees who hadn't proven trustworthy during during the blackw days had been cut loose the organization completed a merger with another PMC an organization previously known as Triple Canopy that featured a much cleaner track record and a much stronger code of contact than Blackwater Revolt finally they passed into the hands of the company's current owners Apollo Global Management that company is an American asset management firm that does a little bit of everything also among their past and present Holdings are the photography company Shutterfly the video streaming and rental service Redbox the Mexican Star fast food chain could the for-profit University of Phoenix and Yahoo Incorporated under Apollo the newly merged PMC would be granted what is at the time of writing still its current name constellis it's a profoundly different experience to describe the constellis of today rather than the Blackwater Corporation of two decades ago a quick visit to the cones website tells of revenues far past the billion dollar Mark in 2023 and operations ongoing in over 50 countries with duties shared between a Workforce 14,000 strong it's so have a handful of other private military organizations and they proudly offer services as wide- ranging as executive protection disaster relief K9 training and even nuclear security they provide ships to practice boarding and defense airfields and Drop Zones for par jumping racetracks for tactical driving and several ranges set aside specifically to blow things up the company's exterior is smooth and corporate its management is beholden to shareholders and investors that have very little connection to the world of private military contractors and constellis has even flirted with bankruptcy in Rec recent years due to a relatively low demand for their services although the company has since made a financial recovery that's not to say that constellis has been without occasional controversy or that it's been without fatalities among its operators in 2015 several Colombian Nationals employed by the company then still called Academy or killed in Yemen while under the command of an Australian operative working for the UAE a year later missile strikes in Yemen killed numerous employees of the company most hailing from Sudan but some from a range of other nations including the US somewhat less common nowadays is the the quality of consulate operators to be called into question because of the company's history while the decision to solicit the services blackwater's descendant organization occasionally does raise eyebrows from country to Country the organization has been largely successful in making the overreaches and catastrophes of the past seem like a distant memory whatever constellis is whatever it does around the world it's gone to Great Lengths to ensure that the world understands that it is not blackwat and that grand initiative appears to have been successful