While the families began to absorb the shock and horror of what had happened to their loved ones in Fallujah, the world—including many elected officials in Washington—was getting a window into just how privatized the war had become and how entrenched private contractors, like the dead Blackwater men, now were in the occupation. In the 1991 Gulf War, one in sixty people deployed by the coalition were contractors. With the 2003 occupation, the ratio had swelled to one in three.5 For Erik Prince, the Fallujah killings and the Najaf firefight provided an almost unthinkable opportunity—under the guise of doing damage control and briefings, Prince and his entourage would be able to meet with Washington’s power brokers and sell them on Blackwater’s vision of military privatization at the exact moment that those very senators and Congressmen were beginning to recognize the necessity of mercenaries in preserving the occupation of (and corporate profits in) Iraq. With timing that would have been impossible to create, Blackwater was thrust into the fortunate position of a drug rep offering a new painkiller to an ailing patient at the moment the worst pain was just kicking in.
Blackwater’s Lobbyists
The day after the Fallujah ambush, Erik Prince turned to his longtime friend Paul Behrends, a partner at the powerful Republican lobbying firm Alexander Strategy Group, founded by senior staffers of then-majority leader Tom DeLay.6 Behrends, a U.S. Marine Corps Reserve lieutenant colonel, had been a senior national security adviser to California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a onetime aide to President Reagan. Prince and Behrends had a long history—in 1990-1991, young Prince worked for Rohrabacher alongside Behrends.7 That marked the beginning of a close political, business, and religious partnership between the two men that would only strengthen as Blackwater grew.
Behrends first officially registered as a lobbyist for Blackwater in May 1998 and began advocating for the company in areas ranging from disaster planning to foreign relations.8 That month, Behrends’s firm Boland & Madigan “delivered” Representative Rohrabacher and another “staunch defender” of the Second Amendment, Representative John Doolittle, to Prince’s Moyock compound for Blackwater’s grand opening—at the company’s expense.9
While Prince—with Behrends’s lobbying assistance—built up his Blackwater empire, Behrends was simultaneously becoming deeply involved in areas of U.S. foreign policy that would become front lines in the war on terror and areas of revenue for Blackwater. Among these was a high-stakes Big Oil scheme, led by petrol giant Unocal, to run a pipeline through Taliban-governed Afghanistan. Behrends worked as a lobbyist for Delta Oil, Unocal’s partner in the scheme, pushing for the United States to officially recognize the Afghan government.10 Prince and Behrends’s former boss, Rohrabacher, had long been interested in Afghanistan, since his days working as a senior speechwriter in the Reagan White House, when the United States was aggressively backing the mujahedeen against the Soviet occupation of the country. Rohrabacher, known as a fan of various U.S.-backed “freedom fighters,” traveled to Afghanistan in 1988, personally joining the mujahedeen in the fighting against the Soviet forces before being officially sworn into Congress.11 It was not surprising when Blackwater became one of the first private military firms contracted to conduct operations inside Afghanistan after 9/11.
Prince and Behrends had long served together on the board of directors of Christian Freedom International, the evangelical missionary organization founded and run by veterans of the Reagan administration—several of them major players in the Iran-Contra scandal. Its founder and president, Jim Jacobson, cut his political teeth working under Erik Prince’s friend and beneficiary Gary Bauer, when Bauer served as the head of President Reagan’s Office of Policy Development. Jacobson also served in the George H. W. Bush administration. CFI passionately supported the Bush administration’s war on terror, faulting the White House’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan only for not doing enough to defend Christians.
At the time of the Fallujah ambush, there were few lobbying firms with more influence on Capitol Hill than Alexander Strategy, a centerpiece of the GOP’s “K Street Project,” under which lobbyists raised “enormous sums of money from their clients to ensure that Republicans remain the majority in Congress. For this fealty, the leadership grants the lobbyists access to the decision-makers and provides legislative favors for their clients,” according to the Congressional watchdog group Public Citizen.12 Behrends and his associates wasted no time in going to work for Prince and Blackwater. “[Blackwater] did not go out looking for the publicity and did not ask for everything that happened to them,” said Chris Bertelli, a spokesman for Alexander Strategy assigned to Blackwater after the Fallujah killings. “We want to do everything we can to educate [the media and Congress] about what Blackwater does.”13
A week to the day after the ambush, Erik Prince was sitting down with at least four senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including chairman John Warner.14 Former Navy SEAL turned Blackwater executive Patrick Toohey accompanied Prince to his Congressional meetings,15 as did Behrends. Senator Rick Santorum arranged the meeting, which included Warner and two other key Republican senators—Appropriations Committee chairman Ted Stevens of Alaska and Senator George Allen of Virginia.16 This meeting followed an earlier series of face-to-faces Prince had with powerful House Republicans who oversaw military contracts. Among them: Tom DeLay, the House majority leader and Alexander Strategy’s patron; Porter Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (and future CIA director); Duncan Hunter, chair of the House Armed Services Committee; and Representative Bill Young, chair of the House Appropriations Committee.17 What was discussed at these meetings remains a secret, as neither Blackwater nor the Congressmen have discussed them publicly. But there was no question: the company’s moment had arrived.