Master of War: Blackwater USA's Erik Prince and the Business of War

by Suzanne Simons

Overview

“Suzanne Simons is a masterful storyteller. But make no mistake—Master of War is not a work of fiction….A powerful and true account.”

—Wolf Blitzer, anchor, CNN’s The Situation Room

 

Master of War is the riveting true story of Eric Prince, the ex-Navy SEAL who founded Blackwater and built the world’s largest military contractor, privatizing war for client nations around the world. A CNN producer and anchor, Suzanne Simons is the first journalist to get deep inside Blackwater—and, as a result of her unprecedented access, Master of War provides the most complete and revelatory account of the rise of this powerful corporate army and the remarkable entrepreneur who brought it into being, while offering an eye-opening, behind-the-scenes look at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061672712
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/07/2010
Pages:	291
Sales rank:	706,327
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.68(d)

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 The Prince 7

2 Hell and High Water 27

3 The Blackwater Project 45

4 How to Rent a War 65

5 The Bridge in Iraq 83

6 Private Air, Private Eye 111

7 Under the Gun 141

8 September 16, 2007 175

9 The Secretary and the Prince 195

10 Mission in Afghanistan 215

11 The Blackwater Behemoth 233

12 The Cost of Business 249

Acknowledgments 279

Index 281

Editorial Reviews

CNN executive producer Simons balances private and public accounts of Erik Prince, founder and owner of the country's most notorious private military contractor. In this often glowing, mildly critical portrait, Prince is depicted as a fierce individualist, visionary entrepreneur and patriot, an upstanding guy's guy, albeit born into enormous privilege, right-wing values and Beltway ties. A determined overachiever, Prince trained as a navy SEAL until his father's death led him to an enterprising idea to provide the training facilities SEALs needed. Certain contradictions ensue: Prince is known to be deeply religious, so his affair while his first wife is dying of cancer surprised many friends. Likewise, Prince's free market faith denigrates government involvement in business, but his Blackwater project only survived by means of hefty government contracts. Simons's premise-that all questions arising from Blackwater's relevance go back to "one man"-justifies emphasis on the personal, but the book is most instructive when straying to include Dick Cheney's impact on Pentagon outsourcing or General Sanchez's frustration over boundary confusion in Iraq between U.S. soldiers and the State Department's veritable "private army." (July)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly