Blackwater: Profitable Patriotism

Blackwater USA President Gary Jackson, a former SEAL, exudes a can-do spirit that radiates through the company. (Mort Fryman / The Virginian-Pilot)

By bill sizemore and joanne kimberlin
The Virginian-Pilot

Part 2 of 6

MOYOCK, N.C. — Not many companies can point to a 598-pound stuffed black bear in the lobby and say it was shot right on the corporate grounds.

Then again, not many have a 7,000-acre headquarters on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp.

Right paw raised high, jaws frozen open, the bear is the star attraction in “the lodge,” a rustic log building in the heart of the Blackwater USA complex. The bear was shot in 2000 by a worker hunting on the property.

That was a bad year for the bear, but a big one for Blackwater. The company had spent its first three years struggling for an identity, paying staff with an executive’s credit card and begging for customers.

But in 2000, in the fallout from the terrorist attack on the destroyer Cole, Blackwater found its future: providing security in an increasingly insecure world.

There is nothing humble about the company today. In March, Fast Company business magazine, under the heading “Private Army,” named Blackwater President Gary Jackson No. 11 in its annual “Fast 50” list of leaders who are “writing the history of the next 10 years.” It made special note of the company’s estimated 600 percent revenue growth between 2002 and 2005.

Blackwater has rocketed from obscurity to the big time in less than a decade. Peter Singer, author of “Corporate Warriors” and a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, says that although Blackwater might not be the biggest player in the private military industry, “they’ve certainly gained the biggest profile.”

They’ve done it with deep-pocket backing, high-powered political connections and an uncanny knack for capitalizing on the violent milestones of a turbulent time.

The way Jackson sees it, there are two kinds of people in the world:

“Talkers and doers,” he said, with a heavy emphasis on the D-word.

It’s easy to guess which one Jackson is – and, for that matter, just about everyone else at Blackwater.

“That’s what stands special operations out in the U.S. military,” said Jackson, a former Navy SEAL. “Those guys are doing stuff every single day. … And that’s where we come from. We are about doing.”

Special ops is most definitely where Blackwater comes from. The founders were all SEALs, including Al Clark, one of the first to envision the place.

In the early 1990s, Clark was a SEALs trainer based in Virginia Beach. He was frustrated by the lack of training sites for the elite sailors. The shortage forced the SEALs to borrow a patchwork of facilities from other military services.

Clark decided that once his Navy hitch was over, he wanted to open “a place where everything was together … kind of like one-stop shopping.”

In 1995, Clark mentioned his idea to a baby-faced sailor he was training at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base: Erik Prince.

Prince, it turned out, had been thinking along the same lines.

As his SEAL career took him to Haiti, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, Prince said, he realized the men were not getting “the cutting-edge training they needed to ensure success.”

“In a letter home while I was deployed, I outlined the vision that is today Blackwater,” the media-shy Prince said in a rare e-mail interview last week.

Prince and Clark mapped out plans for more than a year.

“Finally I asked him, 'Well, who’s going to pay for all this?’” Clark said. “He said, 'The Prince Group.’ I’m like, 'Who’s the Prince Group?’”

That’s when Clark discovered Prince was no ordinary SEAL. He was a SEAL with money – heir to a Michigan auto parts fortune.

Prince’s father had recently died. “I was in the unusual position after the sale of the family business to self-fund this endeavor,” Prince said.

Clark recalled asking Prince how much it would take.

“He said, 'Let’s start with a million and see where it takes us,’” Clark said. “All I could think was, 'Wow. Cool.’”

The two began scouting for a location, settling on northeastern North Carolina because it offered ample land relatively close to three major military centers: Hampton Roads, Washington and Fort Bragg, N.C.

As they zeroed in on specific parcels near the Great Dismal Swamp, Clark noticed something.

>> Story continued: ''All the water looked black" ...