Prince of ‘terror’: Should Kenya be at all worried?

The suffocating afternoon heat and pervasive fear of suicide attacks usually combined to intensify the sense of unease on any ordinary day.

But even by Iraq’s brutal standards, September 16, 2007 gained notoriety after 17 innocent civilians, including women and children, were mowed down by an apparently unprovoked machine gun attack. To date it bears the chilling epithet of “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday”.

When the big guns fell silent at Nissour Square, there was outrage after it was revealed that the killers were neither US soldiers — who remained in the Gulf state after the 2003 invasion — nor insurgents fighting the Americans.

Instead, they were members of Blackwater, a private army contracted by the US government to provide security. Blackwater was in the news in subsequent weeks and, for once, its notoriously reclusive owner was unmasked.

Years later, the name of controversial American tycoon Erik Prince may not ring a bell for many Kenyans. But it should.

Mr Prince, 44, is a former US Navy Seal, who formed what became the largest private army in the world. Blackwater ended up becoming a powerful player in the “war on terror” by providing security services to US State Department officials in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Part of Mr Prince’s sensational notoriety — or achievements, depending on whether you talk to critics or admirers — is that he was a contractor for the CIA who executed covert missions. His relationships with the intelligence underworld would later be revealed by Washington politicians after years in the shadows — much to his displeasure.

Blackwater personnel on foreign soil were usually not held to the same high levels of accountability demanded of soldiers in a conventional army. They killed without fear of reprisal.

Last year, Mr Prince said in a TV interview that his men, all former servicemen in the US military, executed operations better than the conventional military.

“If we don’t convince our customers to hire us, if we don’t add value and save them money, then we’re done. So the private sector will always find a more innovated way to do things,” he said on RT television’s Sophie&Co show on February 4, adding that his mercenaries once took over an operation which the Navy had been carrying on with 35 men, and executed it with just eight men.

But Mr Prince has since moved on. He sold Blackwater after his fallout with the US government in 2010 and is today the executive chairman at DVN Holdings, a Hong Kong Stock Exchange-listed firm, to which he sold his other aviation and logistics firm Frontier Services Group in November last year.

Kenyan connection

“I sold all of the Blackwater-related businesses. I am now the chairman of a company based in Hong Kong. We’re building out the Navy Logistics capability to provide secure logistics for mining or energy companies, infrastructure companies doing business in Africa or in other frontier markets,” he told Sophie&Co.

And it is here that Mr Prince’s Kenyan connection comes in. DVN Holdings has now acquired a local aviation company to provide logistics services to Kenya’s nascent oil and gas industry.

He has bought a 49 per cent stake in Kilifi-based Kijipwa Aviation in hopes of getting a slice of Kenya’s “black gold” through provision of passenger and freight services to multinational oil and mining companies transporting staff to remote areas such as Lokichar and Lokichoggio and other locations in East Africa.

The transaction valued his stake at Kijipwa at Sh1.9 billion and was paid for in a cash and share swap deal that earned Mr Prince a 15.3 per cent stake in DVN Holdings and board chairmanship.

The former US Navy officer received Sh258 million ($3 million) in cash and a further 205.12 million shares at a price of HK$0.73 apiece, according to regulatory filings at the Hong Kong bourse.

Allan Herd, the founder and managing director of Kijipwa Aviation, has confirmed selling the firm to new owners who are keen to tap into Eastern Africa’s upstream oil sector.

The entry of Mr Prince points to just how much interest the discovery of oil in Kenya’s northern region and beyond is generating among big international investors.

But it is Mr Prince’s past links with Blackwater that should raise more than passing interest in Kenya and the rest of the continent.

Based at a vast ranch complex in North Carolina, the firm once described itself as “the most comprehensive professional military... company in the world.”

But award-winning investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill in his book on Blackwater refers to it as “the world’s most powerful mercenary army”. In Iraq, Blackwater gained prominence among private security contractors, some of which employed former Kenyan soldiers.

An incident in 2004 showed just how much Blackwater divided opinion after the burnt and mutilated bodies of four of its contractors were hung from a bridge across the Euphrates River in the Iraqi city of Falluja as an angry mob cheered.

In January 2008, the Iraqi government banned Blackwater for “premeditated murder” after an inquiry into “Bloody Sunday”.

The US Congress subsequently opened investigations while prosecutors charged at least five former staff of the firm.

In his book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Mr Scahill would later capture the dramatic turn of events, including the poignant moment in October 2007 when “the boy-faced” Mr Prince appeared in person before a Congressional hearing.

Mr Scahill wrote: “What put Prince in the hot seat was undoubtedly Nisour Square. But amazingly, Prince would face no questions about that incident.”

Congressman Henry Waxman, who chaired the committee investigating the incident and Blackwater government contracts, said the Justice Department had asked him not to take testimony on the shootings “to avoid tainting the investigation”. Critics suggested the George Bush administration was involved in a cover-up.

Despite all of Blackwater’s legal troubles, Mr Prince has never been charged with any criminal offence. He re-branded the firm as XE Services in 2009. Blackwater Worldwide, now known as Academi, is under new ownership with headquarters in Virginia.

Accidental tourist
Wall Street Journal’s David Feith interviewed Mr Prince in January this year over his new ventures in Africa.

“Erik Prince — ex-Navy SEAL, ex-CEO of private-security firm Blackwater — calls himself an ‘accidental tourist’ whose modest business boomed after 9/11, expanded into Iraq and Afghanistan, and then was ‘blow-torched by politics’,” wrote Mr Feith.

Mr Prince told his interviewer at his base in Hong Kong that his then new venture under the Frontier Services Group was an Africa-focused security and logistics company with intimate ties to China’s largest state-owned conglomerate, Citic Group. China is aggressively seeking to tap Africa’s resources and Mr Prince wants a piece of the pie.

“I would rather deal with the vagaries of investing in Africa than in figuring out what the hell else Washington is going to do to the entrepreneur next,” said Mr Prince.
In that interview, he played down his involvement in the security front, saying the deployment of armed security “would be the exception, certainly not the rule”.

“We don’t provide military training. We are not there to provide security per se. Most of that security — say, if an oil pipeline or mining camp needs protection — would be done by whatever local services are there, including police and private firms.

We don’t envision setting up a whole bunch of local guard services around the continent,” he added, perhaps aware of the history of mercenaries in Africa.

Last November, Mr Prince broke his long silence and published a book, Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror. The book sought to give his side of the story in the face of the stinging accusations he and Blackwater faced over their role in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Even then, the publisher said, the original manuscript was submitted to the CIA as part of a confidentiality agreement they struck when Mr Prince worked as the agency’s private contractor. Some sections were redacted.

In it, Mr Prince is unapologetic about the role his company played and turns his guns on former CIA director Leon Panetta. He argues that the government used him to execute unpopular policies.

Love or hate him, the controversial businessman and his venture in Kenya cannot be ignored. Observers will particularly be keen on whether he will revive his interest in the private security sector that earned him so much bad press through Blackwater.