‘Mercenary Is a Slanderous Term’

Erik Prince made it clear he doesn't like talking to the press. But the Blackwater founder also tells NEWSWEEK's Mark Hosenball he doesn't want "what we do" to be "completely misrepresented." So he spoke—about himself and his controversial
company—in an at-times prickly hourlong interview in his offices in northern Virginia. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Rep. [Henry] Waxman has charts claiming that [from '01 to '06, your company got] more than $1 billion in contracts. Is that correct? [If so], how did you grow so rapidly?
Erik Prince: Our first big growth as a defense contractor started after the bombing of the [U.S.S.] Cole, October of 2000. You had two fanatics in a boat packed with explosives that blew up a billion-and-a-half-dollar ship while it was refueling.

To do what? To train Navy security to protect the ship?
Yes, sir. Exactly.

Is Waxman's figure correct?
Over that many years, it's possible they could add up to a billion.

Why did you get into [the military training business]?
I laid it out in a letter home to my wife in 1995, while I was deployed [as a Navy SEAL]. The Special Operations units had been going to private facilities since the late '70s—individual shooting schools—and no one had done it on a large, industrial scale. So I wanted to build a training facility that would be a state-of-the-art facility.

Explain why you don't like the word mercenary.
It's just not accurate to call us mercenaries, because you have Americans working for the American government. That in no way meets the definition of a mercenary. So I think mercenary is a slanderous term, kind of an inflammatory word [used] to malign us. Taking U.S. military or law-enforcement veterans and putting them back to work and using the skills that they have acquired over the years to teach other U.S. active-duty military, law-enforcement units, [is] just filling the gaps that exist in the U.S. military.