BOOK REVIEW: Damned by ‘those in the know’?

BLACKWATER USA’S ERIK PRINCE AND THE BUSINESS OF WAR

By Suzanne Simons

Collins, $27.99, 288 pages

Reviewed by John Weisman

Reading CNN producer Suzanne Simons’ “Master of War: Blackwater USA’s Erik Prince and the Business of War,” it becomes apparent why the term “TV journalism” seems all too often to be an oxymoron.

Mrs. Simons sets out her goals early. They are ambitious. Former Navy SEAL officer and Blackwater founder Erik Prince, she writes, “controls a private army that could single-handedly win many small wars. Is he a business genius? A war profiteer? The lucky recipient of a Pentagon shell game? What makes him tick?”

Sadly, despite Mrs. Simons’ “eighteen months, more than one hundred hours of interviews, and access to Blackwater’s top offices and facilities around the world,” she successfully answers virtually none of those questions.

Mrs. Simons is most successful when she catalogs Mr. Prince’s background and formative years. Her narrative has the easy flow of a voice-over. We learn, for example, that by age 10, Mr. Prince “had seen firsthand the places where some of history’s worst atrocities had occurred, including a trip through Europe and a visit to one of the most notorious death camps of World War II.”

We learn that Mr. Prince’s conservative and religious values were reinforced through family friends, including James Dobson, “founder of the conservative advocacy group Focus on the Family”; Chuck Colson, the former Watergate figure who went on to found the Prison Fellowship and become one of Time magazine’s 25 “Most Influential Evangelicals in America” and Gary Bauer, “president of the conservative group American Values.”

We also learn that by the age of 17, Mr. Prince had his pilot’s license; that in high school, he ran track, played soccer and wrestled. Mr. Prince was admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy and then left abruptly, graduating from “the small conservative campus of Hillsdale College in rural southern Michigan” before enlisting in the Navy, going through Officer Candidate School and then on to the hellish Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL selection course. Mr. Prince and 33 others made it through BUD/S Class 188.

Even in these scene-setting sections, however, Mrs. Simons’ prose takes on a vaguely disapproving tone, as if there is something louche about being friends with evangelicals or accepting advice from Watergate-era conservatives. Her nattering negativity accelerates when she gets to the meat of her book: Blackwater’s rapid rise during the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001.

She describes in sweeping terms how Gen. Ricardo Sanchez “watched as the State Department brought on contractors [like Blackwater] to help with security, and he grew uneasy at the potential conflict with his own troops.” According to Mrs. Simons, Gen. Sanchez was worried about “quality control” and “oversight.”

This is the same Gen. Sanchez, by the way, on whose watch a similar lack of oversight and quality control took place at Abu Ghraib prison, where both military personnel and private contractors working for the U.S. military were largely unsupervised and did more damage to the reputation of the United States than Blackwater. However, Mrs. Simons never puts Gen. Sanchez’s comments in context of the larger problem: lack of proper oversight by the chain of command.

Because Gen. Sanchez is Mrs. Simons’ friendly witness, she never bothers to grill him about how his lack of proper oversight helped create the Abu Ghraib scandal. Instead, she writes only that Abu Ghraib “would eventually play a role in his leaving the military.” What convenient understatement!

Mrs. Simons writes that “in early February 2005, Prince stunned Washington by announcing that [CIA Counterterrorism Center director and later State Department anti-terrorism coordinator] Cofer Black was taking the position of vice chairman with the company.”

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