Prince aims to provide “end-to-end” services to companies in the “big extractive, big infrastructure and big energy” industries. Prince says “critics can throw stones all they want” but he is quick to point out that he has “a lot of experience in dealing in uncertainties in difficult places,” and says “this is a very rational decision-made, I guess, emotionless.” ERIK PRINCE SPY NETWORK HOW TOAsia, and especially China, “has the appetite to take frontier risk, that expeditionary risk of going to those less-certain, less-normal markets and figuring out how to make it happen.” Mr. “This is not a patriotic endeavor of ours-we’re here to build a great business and make some money doing it,” he says. Which brings him to Hong Kong and his new firm. Prince resigned as CEO in 2009 and now feels “absolutely total regret in every way, shape and form for ever saying ‘yes’ ” to a State Department contract. Prince, IRS auditors told his colleagues that they had “never been under so much pressure to get someone as to get Erik Prince,” and congressional staffers promised, “We’re going to ride you till you’re out of business.”Īmid several federal prosecutions involving Blackwater employees, most of which fizzled, Mr. He says Washington opted to “churn up the entire federal bureaucracy” and sic it on Blackwater “like a bunch of rabid dogs.” According to Mr. government, and especially the State Department. Prince, Blackwater was “completely thrown under the bus by a fickle customer”-the U.S. But the company gained a trigger-happy reputation, especially after a September 2007 shootout that left 17 civilians dead in Baghdad’s Nisour Square.Īt that point, charges Mr. Prince says he “kept saying ‘yes’ as the demand curve called-Columbine, the USS Cole and then 9/11.” In 100,000 missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, he says, Blackwater contractors never lost a U.S. Having launched Blackwater in 1997 as a rural North Carolina training facility for U.S. “I would rather deal with the vagaries of investing in Africa than in figuring out what the hell else Washington is going to do to the entrepreneur next,” says the crew-cut 44-year-old. With a public listing in Hong Kong, and with Citic as its second-largest shareholder (a 15% stake) and Citic executives sitting on its board, Frontier Services Group is a long way from Blackwater’s CIA ties and $2 billion in U.S. Beijing has titanic ambitions to tap Africa’s resources-including $1 trillion in planned spending on roads, railways and airports by 2025-and Mr. Now, sitting in a boardroom above Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, he explains his newest title, acquired this month: chairman of Frontier Services Group, an Africa-focused security and logistics company with intimate ties to China’s largest state-owned conglomerate, Citic Group. To admirers, he’s a patriot who has repeatedly answered America’s call with bravery and creativity. politics, he says, this time he’s working for Beijing.Įrik Prince -ex-Navy SEAL, ex-CIA spy, ex-CEO of private-security firm Blackwater -calls himself an “accidental tourist” whose modest business boomed after 9/11, expanded into Iraq and Afghanistan, and then was “blowtorched by politics.” To critics and conspiracy theorists, he is a mercenary war-profiteer. This from a 2014 Wall Street Journal piece: Erik Prince: Out of Blackwater and Into China The former CIA asset on his latest venture: After being ‘blowtorched’ by U.S. Some of you might not know who Eric Prince is. Eric Prince was on War Room with Steve Bannon this morning.
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