Virginia
Spring 2005
I tried the suburban white-collar worker thing, commuting into an office and clocking my nine-to-five before coming home to Carmen. It was a great opportunity with excellent compensation at a company that was growing and vibrant. After decades of dangerous missions, sleuthing under the noses of rival intelligence teams, and finding myself in tropical hellholes fighting Marxists, terrorists, drug, runners, and associated scum, I needed to experience a bit of domestic American middle-class normal. It was safe. It was routine, and I could knock it out in my sleep.
To be honest, my new normal quickly drove me crazy. Worse, I was driving Carmen bonkers, too.
As I was leaving the Agency, Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater Inc., had offered me a job. I’d turned him down, despite his generous offer. I wasn’t ready to jump from the Agency’s spy world to the world of military contracting. I needed to explore a tamer version of life while I recharged. He took my refusal personally, which saddened me. I liked Erik a lot. We’d met while I was working in the CTC, and I always found him to be a devoted patriot and a genuinely compassionate guy. We became friends. When his wife died of cancer in 2003, I attended her funeral.
In May of 2004, at Erik’s invitation, we attended the Virginia Gold Cup, a classic horse country event that culminates with a steeple chase. Carmen and I were eating lunch at the Blackwater tent when Erik dropped by our table. Carmen is normally a very shy, reserved person in social settings, but Erik had a way of setting her at ease. After pleasantries, Carmen spoke up and completely startled me.
“Erik, would you please give Ric a job? He’s bored and driving me crazy at home.”
Erik lit up. “Are you serious?” he asked, then looked at me.
I thought about it for maybe a tenth of a second. Calm, quiet, steady days. Commuting in a sensible car. Cubicle dwelling. Suburban barbecues and tranquil Sundays spent reading the paper in my gazebo.
I wanted to barf.
“Yeah, we should talk again,” I said, trying to play it cool.
Get me the fuck back into the fight, brother!
I started work at Blackwater a few weeks later.
While Erik and I came from very different worlds, we had one very strong common denominator: our love for God and country. Our friendship quickly grew from mutual respect. He was a former Navy SEAL who longed to be in the thick of the action. The founder and CEO of the most important contract security company of the war on terror would often stand right alongside his employees in harm’s way. During multiple deployments to Iraq from 2005 to 2006, we flew together as door gunners in Little Bird helicopters. We also helped pull security in South African Mamba armored personnel carriers (APCs) while escorting convoys through “IED Alley” in Iraq. He was definitely a man of great personal courage who wanted to strike devastating blows against the enemies of his beloved United States. I could identify with that.
He brought me on board to build new capabilities for Blackwater. The company excelled at personal security missions, kinetic operations in combat zones, and supporting the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Blackwater contractors also helped provide security along the Gulf Coast and in New Orleans after the devastation wrought to the region by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Blackwater’s frontline operators scored some notable successes—and lost good people. In 2007, Iraqi insurgents targeted the Polish ambassador and his entourage in an upscale, normally quiet Shia neighborhood. They hit his convoy with three roadside bombs, crippling his vehicle and wounding ten people. The survivors pulled the badly burned ambassador out of the wreckage but were soon pinned down as the insurgents hit them with small arms fire.
Outnumbered and surrounded, the Poles called for help. The nearest friendly force was a Blackwater team that had no security contract with the Polish government. Nevertheless, on their own initiative, the Blackwater guys sped to their rescue. They drove the insurgents off and extracted the Poles, saving the ambassador’s life.
Shortly after that incident, the Iraqi government made headlines complaining about Blackwater’s heavy-handedness in Baghdad. No good deed goes unpunished.
Another time, a friendly compound came under heavy attack by hundreds of Shia militia. Every time army and air force medevac choppers tried to get to the compound to pull the wounded out, heavy small arms fire drove them off. A Blackwater Little Bird crew decided to risk all to get ammunition to the beleaguered men while extracting a wounded marine. Under heavy fire, the Little Bird crew reached the compound, touched down on a rooftop even as bullets cracked around them, and offloaded crates of ammunition for the men. A moment later, they pulled the wounded marine aboard and got him safely to the Baghdad combat support hospital.
While I did some time in Iraq with Erik, gunning Little Birds and rolling in those South African APCs, my main role at the company was to build its black operations capabilities to support the intel community (but not for the CIA). In that role, I recruited operators, foreign and domestic, from my worldwide contacts stretching back decades.
As part of my duties in support of Blackwater’s business development, I recruited my dear friend Cofer Black and subsequently Rob Richer, a former Chief NE and ADDO. Both proved to be worth their weight in gold and brought the company plenty of high-end business. Erik never forgot that contribution (nor did Cofer let him forget: “We are here because of Prado”). For the first time in my life, I was making corporate money, doing what I loved best: “intel ninja team leader” work.
It is important to note that the support to the intel community that Blackwater provided was never a for-profit part of the company; our work in this realm was for the most part “at cost.” Among other things, our job included tracking terrorists and other hard targets. In return, the federal government paid our expenses. This was not a business venture for Erik, it was a vocation.
To showcase our capabilities to potential U.S. government “clients,” Erik personally funded several initiatives overseas designed to act as “proof of concept” for our new division in the company. I am comfortable speaking to this because it was a corporate venture and not a USG-connected effort. Basically, we wanted to showcase the remarkable capabilities we developed, thanks to our network of daring and inventive operators. In one notable instance, we created a completely fictitious persona for one of my foreign contacts so he could pose as a businessman from another country in his region. We carefully built an entire cover for him that included cover companies, bank accounts, addresses, telephone numbers—everything he would need to pass scrutiny should somebody want to see if he was legit.
Again, we did this totally on our own without any governmental involvement or knowledge, using Erik’s personal financial resources. It was an exceptional moment for us, because what followed succeeded far beyond our expectations.
Thus equipped, the “new persona” flew into a hostile nation known for being exceptionally difficult to penetrate. Our asset intended to exploit that nation’s interest in developing business ties with nations in his region. Sure enough, he was able to gain access to key governmental officials eager to foster financial connections with him. He collected business cards and later drew diagrams of every office and governmental building he was allowed into. If we could do this from a corporate platform, imagine the potential service we could provide the U.S. government!
After that unilateral operation, I’ll never forget briefing a group of officials from a U.S. government agency on what we’d accomplished. When I handed them some of the material our man on the ground brought back, they were thunderstruck. In thirty years, nobody had pulled off anything like that.
In truth, we were able to be more flexible, develop more capabilities, and do more damage to the enemy than we were allowed to do at the Agency. Why? We were lean, committed to the mission for the right reasons, and we didn’t have the competing tensions between safe career-protecting decisions and doing what it took to defend the American people. That was our greatest asset, and it opened the doors to operations we’d only dreamed of being able to conduct. We would put together an all-star group of experts, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Unfortunately, we have to leave the story there. Unlike the many stories that have subsequently leaked from our Agency days (none from me or mine), our post-Agency work remains secret, and we would have to obtain even more special dispensations to speak of these. Who knows, maybe in the future, they, too, will see some light of day. Much to be proud of, nothing to be ashamed of.
Nothing.
Through it all, I learned a key truth about America. Our nation does not lack warriors. Time and again, I saw the youngest of our brethren stepping onto the training ranges, eager to learn the skills that would make them a deadly threat to Bin Laden’s legions. They wanted to strike back, defend the nation they loved as we did. They were wartime volunteers.
It was our nation’s leadership that often failed to measure up. When you have pit bulls ready and willing to go after America’s enemies, only to be chained in the yard by career-obsessed managers, you cannot win a war. It only gets prolonged.
A year later, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX my phone rang. I glanced down and saw the 619 area code and knew at once who it was.
“Hello?” I said as I connected the call.
“Ric,” said Dewey Clarridge’s polished voice on the other end of the line, “I need you to come see me.”
I got on the next thing smoking to San Diego. Dewey and I had kept in touch long after he retired from the Agency in 1991. For years, he’d run his own company, contracting with the community as I was doing now. Back when I attended XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Navy SEAL training—BUD/S—to recertify on the specialized Draeger rebreathing system XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX While at Coronado among all the young eager guys, XXXXXXXX I stood out like a sore thumb.
At night, we’d go have dinner with Dewey. Always meticulously dressed, a perfect gentleman with a wicked sense of humor and a flair for drama, Dewey was the consummate host. He used to take us to a place in San Diego that we were convinced was run by the Russian mob. After all his Cold War battles, he loved the idea of sitting in a restaurant in the United States run by our former adversaries. The food was terrible, the waitresses hot. We’d sit outside in a usually empty patio, smoking cigars and drinking excellent hooch as Dewey regaled us with stories of his life overseas.
Later, I introduced Dewey to Erik Prince after he’d asked me what I was doing in my retirement. “Fucking with the bad guys,” I told him. He loved that, mainly because that’s exactly how he’d spent his retirement, too. So I invited him to come see our fledgling operation. He arrived at the Blackwater office dressed in a Buffalo Bill–style buckskin jacket, huge grin on his face, eyes filled with life. I swear, the guy was ageless.
This time, I rented a car at the airport and drove into the hills north of San Diego. Dewey lived atop a hill in a beautiful home, a C5 Corvette in his garage. To dissuade any would-be car thief from poaching his gray sports car, he’d emplaced a World War II–era howitzer next to his beloved ride, its muzzle pointed directly at the driver’s seat.
I parked the car in the driveway and walked over to the front door. A knock, and a moment later, Dewey was standing in front of me, wide grin, shaking my hand. He was casually dressed—for him, anyway—in a button-down dress shirt, khaki slacks, and expensive moccasins. Behind him, I saw one of his wife’s cats cleaning itself in the entryway.
He ushered me inside, and I glanced down the side hallway off the entryway. Yep. The machine gun was there. He’d mounted an M1917 liquid-cooled .30-caliber Browning at the end of the hallway, pointed right at the front door. Anyone raiding the house would get a burst of World War II firepower from their nine o’clock blind spot.
We walked through his living room, which was covered with awards and framed photographs that served as signposts of Dewey’s illustrious career. There he was with President Reagan. In another, he smiled alongside Ollie North. There were dozens of these moments immortalized on his wall with leaders from all over the globe.
We sat down on his back patio. The day was warm, but a gentle Southern California breeze took the edge off. The view was spectacular. Rolling hills, blue skies, California dreamin’ at its finest.
He poured me a drink as we made small talk, catching up on news of our kids and families. As we talked, I saw the agelessness in his face was gone. Every man faces it sooner or later—at least the ones lucky enough to get to that point in life. Dewey was never one to go gentle into that good night; he was a fighter all the way. But in the end, Time always wins.
He produced a bottle of red wine, poured me a glass.
“Cheers,” he said simply.
“Always a limey at heart,” I replied and clinked his glass with mine.
He smiled at that—he had a sly, the things you don’t know sort of smile that he often used when photographed.
This man was cut from the same cloth as Wild Bill Donovan. He was Bill Casey’s go-to guy. Aggressive, daring. Willing to hammer our adversaries and enemies throughout the shadow world, he would have made an excellent wartime DCI. He hated the pencil dicks, the politicians who equivocated and dithered. He was action-oriented and knew the underlying nature of the CIA better than anyone else. Our job was to break the laws of other nations without getting caught to defend ours. It is dark and murky work. The press is never on our side. But those of us who understand the measure of the menace lurking in those shadows know the dangers our people face every day, even as they go about their peaceful routines.
How many schemes have we foiled? How many terrorists captured before they could carry out their plans?
I feared the country would never know, because the Agency tells few tales.
We finished catching up, rounding out the small talk with where mutual friends were these days and how they, too, were still fucking with the bad guys.
“Listen, Ric, we need to talk,” Dewey said, all business now. “I have … certain very successful initiatives underway in Afghanistan and other parts of the world.”
He paused a beat, then added directly, “I’m getting older now. It’s time for me to get out of the game.”
I suppose I saw that coming, but hearing him accept it made my throat choke up.
His eyes bored into mine. “These are superb initiatives, Ric. I want you to take them over. Are you interested?”
“Hell yes.”
“Excellent. I knew you’d say that.”
In that moment, I realized Dewey had passed me his torch.