Blackwater (Xe / Academi / Constellis) (Blackwater)

Background

Blackwater was founded in 1997 by Erik D. Prince, a former US Navy SEAL who had inherited a substantial portion of the Prince Manufacturing automotive-supplier fortune following the 1995 death of his father Edgar Prince. Prince incorporated the firm under the name Blackwater Lodge and Training Center and acquired a 7,000-acre tract of land in the Great Dismal Swamp area near Moyock, North Carolina, as the firm's principal training facility. The firm's original business model was the provision of marksmanship, tactical, and small-unit training to US military and law-enforcement personnel; the Moyock facility's range complex, urban-warfare training environment, and parachute drop zone became among the largest privately operated tactical-training infrastructure in the United States.¹

The firm's institutional pivot to operational contracting work followed the October 2000 USS Cole bombing in Aden, Yemen, after which the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security awarded Blackwater a contract to train US Navy personnel in force-protection techniques. The post-September-2001 expansion of US military and intelligence operations produced the subsequent rapid growth of the firm's operational portfolio: a 2002 contract with the CIA to provide security at the agency's Kabul station; a 2003 World Worldwide Personal Protective Services (WPPS) contract with the State Department covering protective-services work in Iraq; and a parallel substantial CIA paramilitary-contracting portfolio.²

Iraq operations

Blackwater's principal operational deployment was in Iraq from 2003 onward under the State Department's WPPS contract, which made the firm the largest single private security contractor protecting State Department personnel and visitors in occupied Iraq. The firm's contractors were deployed across the Green Zone and on protective-services details for senior State Department officials, visiting members of Congress, and the principal civilian leadership of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The post-2003 deployment grew across 2004–2007 to a peak of approximately 1,000 Blackwater contractors in Iraq.³

The institutional positioning of Blackwater in Iraq was substantively distinct from that of the conventional military and the Coalition Provisional Authority police: Blackwater contractors operated under contractor-employee terms, not under military discipline or under Iraqi law (which was excluded from application to occupation-personnel by Coalition Provisional Authority Order 17, issued June 2003 by L. Paul Bremer); the contractors carried military-grade weapons and operated armoured-vehicle convoys; and the institutional accountability for individual contractor conduct was substantively limited to the firm's internal disciplinary process and to the contracting officer's representative at the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security.⁴

The Fallujah incident

The first major public-attention event in Blackwater's Iraq deployment was the 31 March 2004 killing of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah — Scott Helvenston, Jerry Zovko, Wesley Batalona, and Michael Teague. The four contractors had been escorting a Eurest Support Services food-supply convoy through Fallujah when they were attacked by insurgents; their bodies were burned and two were hung from the Euphrates bridge. The photographs of the contractors' bodies, broadcast widely across international media, were the principal trigger for the subsequent April 2004 First Battle of Fallujah by US Marines.⁵

The institutional aftermath of the Fallujah killings included a subsequent civil suit by the contractors' families against Blackwater (Nordan v. Blackwater Security Consulting, filed January 2005), which was settled in 2012 on undisclosed terms after substantial appellate proceedings on the question of whether the firm's contractor-employment terms preempted the family's wrongful-death claims under North Carolina state law.⁶

Nisour Square

The principal documented institutional event in Blackwater's record is the 16 September 2007 Nisour Square shooting in Baghdad. A Blackwater Tactical Support Team — call sign Raven 23 — was escorting a US Embassy convoy through the al-Mansour district of Baghdad when the team stopped at the Nisour Square traffic circle. The shooting that followed killed 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded 20 others, including Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia'y (a 9-year-old boy travelling in his family's vehicle through the circle, killed in the initial fire) and Mahasin Mohssen Kadhum Al-Khazali (his mother, killed in the same vehicle).⁷

The institutional reconstruction of the Nisour Square shooting across the subsequent federal-court proceedings produced detailed findings on the sequence of events: the Blackwater team had stopped a Kia sedan that was approaching the circle in order to permit the embassy convoy to depart; the Kia driver did not stop at the contractors' signals; the contractors fired; and the subsequent escalation produced the 17 civilian deaths across the following several minutes. The Iraqi government's contemporaneous investigation, the FBI investigation that followed (initiated October 2007), and the Department of Justice prosecution that opened in 2008 each produced substantial documentary records on the institutional question of whether the contractors had operated within the rules of engagement applicable to State Department protective-services contractors in Iraq, and on the substantive criminal-law question of whether the killings had been lawful homicides under any applicable framework.⁸

The federal prosecution proceeded through approximately seven years of pre-trial proceedings, including substantial litigation on the Garrity-protected status of the contractors' post-incident statements to the State Department. The trial in United States v. Slough opened in June 2014 in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. The October 2014 jury verdict found Nicholas Slatten guilty of first-degree murder; Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, and Dustin Heard guilty of voluntary manslaughter and additional firearms offences. Slatten was retried in 2018 (after the DC Circuit ordered a retrial on a procedural ground) and reconvicted of first-degree murder on 19 December 2018. The four contractors received sentences ranging from twelve to thirty years in federal prison.⁹

The four Nisour Square contractors were pardoned by President Donald Trump on 22 December 2020 — among the pardons issued in the final weeks of the first Trump administration. The pardons were the subject of substantial international and domestic criticism, including formal protest from the United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries, which characterised the pardons as inconsistent with the obligations of the United States under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.¹⁰

Corporate succession

Blackwater has operated under successive corporate identities across the post-2007 period:

• Blackwater USA (1997–2007) — the original founding name through the Nisour Square period.
• Blackwater Worldwide (2007–2009) — rebrand following Nisour Square.
• Xe Services LLC (2009–2011) — second rebrand under successor ownership after Erik Prince's December 2010 sale of the firm.
• Academi (2011–2014) — third rebrand, after the December 2010 sale to USTC Holdings.
• Constellis Group (2014–present) — formed in June 2014 through the merger of Academi with Triple Canopy and other Apollo-owned security contractors. Constellis is the present corporate entity, headquartered in Reston, Virginia.¹¹

Erik Prince, after the December 2010 sale of the Xe Services firm, established the Frontier Resource Group (a subsequent African-focused operational-services company, with documented contracts in South Sudan, Somalia, and Mozambique) and later the Frontier Services Group (a Hong-Kong-listed logistics company with disclosed Chinese institutional shareholders, founded in 2014). Prince's subsequent post-2010 institutional activities have included substantial reporting on contracting work for the United Arab Emirates, including the documented role in establishing UAE special-forces capacity, and an October 2017 proposal — discussed in the first Trump administration but not adopted — for the substantial privatisation of the US military presence in Afghanistan.¹²

Sources and further reading

1. Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books, 2007); Erik Prince, Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror (Portfolio, 2013).
2. Scahill, Blackwater, op. cit., on the post-USS Cole and post-September-2001 contracting expansion; U.S. Government Accountability Office, Rebuilding Iraq: DOD and State Department Have Improved Oversight and Coordination of Private Security Contractors in Iraq, but Further Actions Are Needed to Sustain Improvements, GAO-08-966T, 24 July 2008.
3. Department of State Bureau of Diplomatic Security WPPS contracting documentation, partial declassifications and FOIA releases; T. Christian Miller, Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq (Little, Brown, 2006).
4. Coalition Provisional Authority Order 17 (Revised), 27 June 2004; Peter W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell University Press, 2003, revised 2008).
5. Subsequent reporting in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror (Crown, 2006), on the Fallujah killings.
6. Nordan v. Blackwater Security Consulting LLC, US District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, 5:05-cv-48-FL (2005–2012); subsequent appellate proceedings in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
7. U.S. Department of Justice, "Four Former Blackwater Employees Found Guilty of Charges in 2007 Shooting at Baghdad's Nisur Square," 22 October 2014; James Risen, "Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater," The New York Times, 29 June 2014.
8. FBI investigation case file on Nisour Square (partial FOIA releases); Iraqi Government investigation report, October 2007; United States v. Slough et al., US District Court for the District of Columbia, 1:08-cr-00360-RCL.
9. United States v. Slough et al., op. cit., trial proceedings June–October 2014, jury verdict 22 October 2014; United States v. Slatten, retrial 2018, verdict 19 December 2018; subsequent sentencing.
10. White House statement on December 2020 pardons of the Nisour Square defendants; United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries, statement of 30 December 2020 on the Trump pardons.
11. Successive Blackwater / Xe / Academi / Constellis SEC filings and corporate-history communications; Apollo Global Management documentation on the 2014 Constellis formation.
12. Suzanne Goldenberg and Spencer Ackerman reporting in The Guardian, 2012–2018, on the Erik Prince UAE and African contracting work; The New York Times and The Intercept reporting on the October 2017 Trump-administration Afghanistan privatisation proposal.