--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- [Sean Rameswaram introduces the topic]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I know it's summer, but I just can't help but think about Halloween. You know how else is thinking about Halloween? KiwiCo.
--:-- Matthew Cole: KiwiCo's got a chomping mechanical dinosaur, a glowing horn unicorn, a glowing wings costume pack, and a light-up alien spaceship, y'all. You gotta look it up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: KiwiCo's offering Today Explained listeners a chance to try them out for free. To redeem the offer and learn more about their projects for kids of all ages, head to kiwico.com slash explained.
--:-- [Sean Rameswaram transitions to the main topic]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Last week, I was in the middle of this interview about Libya when the guest said something about Eric Prince. Eric Prince. And I was like, Eric Prince? Betsy's baby brother? The Blackwater dude? I thought his career would have ended with all that bad business.
--:-- Matthew Cole: Blackwater, the secretive private army that, for critics, came to represent the ugliest face of American power.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was wrong. He's got nine lives. You know, if you've got enough money and enough political clout, you can convince anyone of how successful you are, even when you're not.
--:-- Matthew Cole: Matthew Cole writes for The Intercept. He's done a better job of keeping up with Eric Prince.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Turns out Blackwater was just the end of a chapter for Prince, and he's been busier than ever making friends in China and the Middle East.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And maybe some of this will start to sound familiar. Yeah, so about a week before the inauguration of Donald Trump, Eric Prince was invited to the Seychelles for what was a very private and very exclusive confab being held by Mohammed bin Zayed, who's the crown prince and the de facto ruler of Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates.
--:-- [Matthew Cole explains the context of the meeting]
--:-- Matthew Cole: And Eric Prince, he has sort of two purposes. One, the more overt purpose was to pitch MBZ, as he's known, on what can be done in the Middle East with a new administration. That's the overt. And then on the side, secretly, he's there to meet with Kirillov Dmitriev, who is a Russian banker tasked by Vladimir Putin to act as a back-channel emissary to the new incoming administration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a member of Mohammed bin Zayed's royal court had arranged this meeting selling the Russian banker on the notion that Eric Prince was Steve Bannon's guy and would represent the Trump administration and could be the facilitator of back-channel communications as the new administration was about to take office.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And it's not clear anyone other than Bannon knew that he was going to the Seychelles for this meeting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so you have this very dramatic and unique moment where Eric Prince is coming in to try to be the back channel for the Trump administration and Putin government.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And it's not clear who really knows or has authorized him to do it because he was never a member of the Trump campaign and there was at that time no indication that he was going to be anyone in a new Trump administration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that meeting, after it gets leaked and published in the Washington Post, becomes a very important clue in the Mueller investigation, in the Trump-Russia investigation, as to whether or not the secret meeting indicated some kind of coordination or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
--:-- Matthew Cole: Why was Mueller interested in you? Anyway, what do you think that relates to? Because I went to see an old friend, the leadership in the UAE, after the election, and there was a Russian there. So I had no contact with him before, no contact after.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What did you tell Mueller? I answered their questions and I haven't talked to me since. What did they ask you? What was I doing there?
--:-- Matthew Cole: Matthew, let's go back to the start. Eric Prince is actual Michigan royalty, right?
--:-- Matthew Cole: Yeah, Eric Prince is the only son of the Prince family. Their patriarch, Edgar Prince, was the founder of Prince Automotive Group, I think, who created a massive business.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And most people will know one element of what he created and is probably responsible for most of the wealth that the company generated during his lifetime, which is the light that switches on on the visor on a passenger or driver's seat in a car.
--:-- Matthew Cole: That was created by Edgar Prince and Prince Automotive. And when he died in the mid-90s, the company was sold for about $1.35 billion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They, along with the DeVos family, controlled a good portion of Western Michigan and were very reliable in bringing votes, including the Christian conservative movement, into the Republican Party.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And when Betsy Prince marries into the DeVos family, they merge. So Eric Prince grew up in a very wealthy family, a very politically active, very conservative family.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he ends up going to Hillsdale College in Michigan, which is a very conservative private university.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And so he eventually enlists and joins the Navy SEALs. And he is in the Navy SEALs for about three years, not a very long time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he never is engaged in active hostilities. And that's an important thing to understand him later.
--:-- Matthew Cole: People who know him best, I mean, it's actually sort of amazing is that everyone who has known him for decades will all reference the fact that he never heard a shot fired in anger and that he never saw any kind of battlefield experience is one of the most motivating factors for what he does later in his professional career.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does he get into mercenary work? Is it the fact that he never actually saw combat and he ended up with a ton of money and he was like, oh, maybe I can pursue active combat or was it something else?
--:-- Matthew Cole: Well, it's important to understand that Blackwater, as it was originally created, was not mercenary in the proper definition, which is that he wasn't selling soldiers or serving or acting as a fighter for some other country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was trying to provide training services for the U.S. Navy and local law enforcement and the CIA.
--:-- Matthew Cole: Did the U Navy and local law enforcement and the CIA need training from a third party? Yes, by all accounts absolutely.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Actually, one of the main events that occurred that demonstrated it actually was the 2000 bombing by al of the USS Cole October 12, 2000, the Cole was attacked as it ported in Yemen, the suicide mission using a small boat and hundreds of pounds of explosives.
--:-- Matthew Cole: 17 sailors died, 39 injured. After the coal, Blackwater got a contract to train the sailors on security, maritime security.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in that way, Prince is a visionary. He's a very bright guy, and he figures out where there's a business opportunity.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And in that regard, he's often ahead of the curve. And Blackwater was ahead of the curve.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ahead of the curve because, of course, 9-11 happens, and then the need for his particular service just skyrockets?
--:-- Matthew Cole: Yeah. I mean he really falls into a very – what actually should have been an incredibly successful business and it was in some regards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the first contract he gets is a small contract with the CIA to provide security guards for two facilities in Afghanistan after the US goes in to topple the Taliban.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And in a lot of ways, a lot of what Blackwater provided initially was pretty mundane stuff. I mean, it was, you know, former military personnel acting as security guards, static security guards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And after the war in Iraq starts to stumble in 2004, Blackwater just explodes.
--:-- Matthew Cole: They got basically close to a $500 million contract in 2004 for the State Department.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, at their height, they're over a thousand employees.
--:-- Matthew Cole: They're shuttling people by the plane loads into Iraq to serve as security guards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they, in a lot of ways, invented the private security contractor business or model.
--:-- Matthew Cole: How does the tide turn on Blackwater?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, there are sort of two big bookend incidents in Iraq for Blackwater.
--:-- Matthew Cole: The first was in 2004 when four of their Blackwater contractors who were doing a logistics run in Fallujah were ambushed and killed by locals.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And their bodies were burned and then dragged through the streets of Fallujah and then hung on a bridge in Fallujah.
--:-- Matthew Cole: For most people, it was the first that they've ever heard of private military contractors operating in Iraq.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, what happened to them was shocking.
--:-- Matthew Cole: That was the Mogadishu moment of the Iraq War.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In many ways, it was the day the war turned.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And that incident, which was displayed all over the world, shook then-President George Bush, who ordered the Marines to go in for the first siege of Fallujah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Easy. Oh, get up.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And then the war takes a new turn. It increases and the insurgency, it happens as the insurgency is growing and really explodes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then by 2007, Blackwater is a very permanent and important fixture in the constellation of U.S. government forces and personnel in the country.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And their security team is responsible for the Nisr Square massacre in Baghdad in 2007.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In which some trigger-happy security guards erroneously believe that they're under attack and... Fired into a crowded Baghdad intersection, killing 17.
--:-- Matthew Cole: The head of Blackwater appeared before the United States Congress soon after the attacks to testify under oath he believes his men acted responsibly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To the extent there is any loss of innocent life ever, let me be clear that I consider that tragic. Every life, whether American or Iraqi, is precious.
--:-- Matthew Cole: I stress the committee and to the American public, however, that I believe we acted appropriately at all times.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But even he understood the day after Nisser Square that the name of the company was going to have to change and he was probably going to have to sell the company, which ultimately he did.
--:-- Matthew Cole: The Nine Lives of Eric Prince, after the break.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For the uninitiated, KiwiCo offers a subscription.
--:-- Matthew Cole: Each month, the kid in your life will receive a fun, engaging new project, which will help develop their creativity and confidence.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If it helps, the projects were designed in-house in Mountain View, California, and rigorously tested by kids, hopefully also in Mountain View, California.
--:-- Matthew Cole: I hear they have great kids.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Every crate includes all the supplies needed for any month's given project, detailed instructions, and an educational magazine to learn even more about that crate's theme.
--:-- Matthew Cole: I called my boy Desmond up a few weeks ago to talk about KiwiCo, and he told me he was really stoked because he was hoping to get some Legos for his birthday, but also loved KiwiCo.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what I just found out now, poking around KiwiCo's website, KiwiCo has a Lego puzzle card crate.
--:-- Matthew Cole: You can find out more about KiwiCo's projects for kids and maybe hook it up for the kid in your life at KiwiCo.com slash explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right now, they're offering today explained listeners the chance to try them out for free.
--:-- Matthew Cole: What does Eric Prince do once he basically becomes a pariah in the U.S. defense world after these incidents with Blackwater?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Eric Prince is in the process of settling with the U.S. government for weapons violations, trafficking violations during their time working for the U.S. government.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And by 2009, the new administration wants nothing to do with Eric Prince, the CIA, which is where he had at that point his last significant contract with Blackwater, basically helping run an assassination program for the CIA.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, discovers that Blackwater is part of this program and he shuts the program down and he fires Blackwater and they make it very clear inside the administration that Blackwater will not be getting any new US government contracts outside of the State Department stuff that they do
--:-- Matthew Cole: And he moves to the United Arab Emirates where he starts a new gig which is trying to sell similar services to the Emirati royal family.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why the UAE? Why does he go there?
--:-- Matthew Cole: Well, the UAE is one of America's biggest importers of arms. They're an extremely wealthy country, very small.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they are very aggressive and at the time were becoming more aggressive in their regional foreign policy.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And theirs was very aligned with the U.S. positions in the Middle East, which was anti-Iranian, pro-Saudi, anti-Muslim brotherhood, and the de facto leader of the Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Eric Prince hit it off and he proposed a presidential guard, something like a Praetorian guard for Mohammed bin Zayed. and the Emirati government.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And so he sells the Emirati government on a $500 million program to create an army of foreigners.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now he gets into, for the first time, real mercenary work.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And he quickly builds a program of mostly Colombian, ex-Colombian soldiers and some South African trainers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that is the beginning of Act Two for Eric Prince that leads him down the road of trying to sell his services all over the world, almost exclusively in predominantly Muslim countries.
--:-- Matthew Cole: Because what he was really selling is, you know, he comes in and describes it as counterinsurgency.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what he's doing is he's selling counterterrorism against Islamists.
--:-- Matthew Cole: And, you know, wherever he could see a conflict, he saw a business opportunity.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Initially, he was in that he got the contracts he set up and the people that he hired set up this unit of Colombian soldiers for the Emiratis.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He sets up a anti-piracy force in Somalia.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: But ultimately, his involvement in them was not successful.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was rife with mismanagement with financial improprieties with questions about his own financial improprieties as well as the people that he managed or brought in.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And then later, especially in the case of the anti-piracy program in Somalia, total incompetence.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And with everything that Eric Prince does, because at that time in Act II he's toxic with the U.S. government, anything that he does becomes exposed and ends up on the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: On Sunday, the New York Times said it obtained documents showing that the crown prince of Abu Dhabi has hired the founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Eric Prince will set up an 800-member battalion of foreign troops there.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And the Emiratis in particular, who were his benefactors at that time, are completely allergic to public scrutiny.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so he is essentially forced out of the Emirates.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And so he sort of fumbles around as he's selling his ideas around the world, and he convinces the Chinese to invest about $110 million into a logistics and transportation company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You have a tough job. You need to get material to a worksite or goods to market.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And so in a lot of ways, Frontier Services Group, which is what that company becomes, and it becomes a publicly traded company based in Hong Kong, was a very straightforward trains and planes and automobiles company that was just hauling things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Frontier Services Group, FSG, is the solution. We are a different kind of logistics company.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Essentially, it had no security work. It didn't have any security clearances from the U.S. government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But as that company is doing sort of very vanilla stuff, Eric Prince is traveling all over Africa and the Middle East under the banner of Frontier Services Group secretly trying to sell paramilitary services, mercenary services to leaders in Africa and the Middle East, unbeknownst to most of the people in his legitimate company and the Chinese.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And at the time with the Obama administration, he had no ability to get the licenses he would need from the State Department to sell military services or military goods.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does he always get away with it? Is he like the Jeffrey Epstein of mercenary work? Is he just well-connected and really rich?
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Well, wealth helps because it buys you good lawyers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's the first thing. It is a gray area, but Eric Prince is a man with a lot of money who spends it on lawyers who help minimize his legal exposure to what would otherwise be considered illegal conduct.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: But secondly, everyone who has known him for a long time, who has worked with him or for him, inevitably says the same thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This guy has a richy-rich complex and that his personality is absolutely shaped by the fact that he grew up never hearing the word no.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And sometimes that can be beneficial, which is to say that he thinks of things that other people don't because he doesn't care that everyone else previously has been told no or tells him no.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's not possible. But that also runs true when things get into legal gray areas, which is he doesn't care and he will go and do it anyway and then ask lawyers afterwards to make it so that he can do it.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Does his toxicity in the United States defense apparatus and the United States government change with the rise of Donald Trump?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if so, how much does it change?
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Well, it certainly changes with the election of Donald Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of the interesting things that people like myself, there are a few reporters out here who are sort of on the Eric Prince beat, did not see or did not know was his relationship to the Trump campaign during the election.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: He was someone who had previously been on Steve Bannon's Breitbart radio show several times.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He became sort of close with Bannon.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And with the rise of Bannon into the Trump campaign, Eric Prince gets a place at the table.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And when Trump wins election that when Eric fortunes really change both politically and potentially you know his business fortunes
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And he becomes this sort of shadow player advising the Trump team certainly the transition team for sure and into the Trump administration once they take office on all things related to the Middle East and defense
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he immediately starts selling the White House on a new approach to Afghanistan.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: I reported in late 2017 his efforts to sell a private CIA service to the director of the CIA and to the president himself, which was eventually nixed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it was very real and very serious.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And it's really important to understand that the Prince family was a huge financial backer and supporter of Mike Pence when he was both in Congress and later as the governor of Indiana.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so coming into the election date in 2016, Eric Prince is on Breitbart Radio making claims about, you know, how the NYPD had evidence that Hillary Clinton had committed all of these awful crimes.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Bill Clinton went there more than 20 times.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Hillary Clinton went there at least six times.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And after the Mueller report was revealed, we learned that during that same period of time, Eric Prince was paying for an effort to authenticate emails, hacked emails, as the 30,000 emails that were missing from the Hillary Clinton private server.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And so we realize now, looking back, that he was working aggressively to try to help the campaign in areas that he had skills and expertise in using his wealth.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does this sort of cozy relationship with Pence, with even Trump, translate once Trump enters office into, I don't know, sort of like a welcome home to the Department of Defense for Eric Prince?
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: What I would say is that Eric Prince, with the election of Donald Trump, was allowed back in to the U.S. government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He became influential again.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: He was someone who was offering his ideas. They were getting in front of the president and the vice president directly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this is a man who still today can walk into the White House and get a meeting with John Bolton.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Any other administration would have given him no quarter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They would not have picked up the phone.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: But with this administration, Eric Prince really returns to the game and gets some kind of seat at the table.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, I wonder, you mentioned that he's currently working mostly with Muslim countries in the Middle East and Northeast Africa and, of course, China.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And is he just a guy who sells his services to the highest bidder or is there some sort of foundational belief system going on?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does he want to see the world move in a certain direction?
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Well, to be fair to Mr. Prince, I'll answer that question first by saying – describing what I think he would argue or defend himself with, which is that he has a very deep-rooted belief in freedom and democracy and progress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then the other part of Eric Prince that has to always be understood is that he is very religious, conservative religiously.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: He views the world in very stark terms in terms of what's going on in the Middle East as a battle between good and evil.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in that way, Eric Prince is a crusader beating back a rising caliphate.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And while being a crusader, despite years of incompetence and even legal trouble, there's still a market for what Eric Prince is peddling.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I mean as long as there's conflict in the world, there will be someone who is selling some kind of services, right?
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And one thing I would say after spending so much time reporting on Eric Prince is that there are a lot of similarities between Eric Prince and the current president of the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They both are the son of rich men who have failed upwards and who's, you know, maybe their greatest talent is selling the notion that they're a success.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And that is very much a defining attribute of Eric Prince.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's got nine lives.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And in that way, I think of Eric Prince as being a very American story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, if you've got enough money and enough political clout, you can convince anyone of how successful you are, even when you're not.
--:-- Matthew Cole: Matthew Cole is an investigative reporter at The Intercept.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you want a whole lot more detail on what Prince has been up to lately, look for Matthew's recent piece titled The Complete Mercenary.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: We reached out to Eric Prince via Frontier Services Group to ask if he wanted to weigh in on this episode, but once we got into the specifics, they sort of ghosted us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Before we go, I don't have a bubble wand.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Do you have a bubble wand?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: KiwiCo has bubble wands.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Your kid can build a bubble wand.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you don't have a kid, some kid around you that you know wants to build a bubble wand.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: KiwiCo is offering today's Explained listeners the chance to try them out for free.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To redeem the offer and learn more about their projects for kids of all ages, go to kiwico.com slash explained.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: And one more thing, one more thing thing, one more more thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a podcast out there. It's called Love It or Leave It, but Love It isn't like L-O-V-E-I-T.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: It's L-O-V-E-T-T because it's hosted by John Lovett, and that's his last name.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: John Lovett was a presidential speechwriter, not this president, the last one.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: He's a comedy writer, and he's also a co-host of Pod Save America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's a podcast about saving America.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Each week, he's joined by comedians, journalists, activists, elected officials, actors, musicians.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Every kind of person is on his show.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: They help him break down the latest news.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They quiz the audience.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: They have fun understanding the frustrations and absurdities of our politics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: New episodes drop every Saturday morning.
--:-- Aaron Ross Powell: Subscribe to Love It or Leave It Now on Apple Podcasts, on Stitcher, or on the app that you use to get your podcasts, if it's not Apple Podcasts or Stitcher.
--:-- [Theme music fades in]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks for listening to Today Explained.
