Licensed to Kill by Robert Young Pelton Page A

unseen, amorphous enemy made the job more difficult for the mental endurance it required. Erik and Jamie learned immediately that the locals were not to be trusted, nothing was to be taken for granted, and they were never to let their guard down, since events could turn in a second. Shortly before they had arrived at Shkin, a convoy of SF had been been ambushed and one communications officer killed. The group had obviously been sold out by their duplicitous Afghan guide, since the lead vehicle in the convoy—the one in which the guide was riding—escaped unscathed while the rest were peppered with AK fire.
    This environment of suspicion and paranoia kept them constantly on edge and may have played tricks on their minds. As Jamie recalls, one day while out doing recon for a meeting spot, “We drove up the dustiest road on the earth. It was like talcum powder and was so thick that I had to stop at times because I simply could not see the road in front of the truck. As we drove on the older road, I spotted three Toyotas filled with armed men gaining on us and using a new road that paralleled ours. We rounded a corner covered by a building and they were nowhere to be found.” They weren’t phantoms, and they couldn’t have just disappeared, but it made no sense that they didn’t attack. Nothing in Afghanistan made sense.
    Smith served out the term of the six-month contract, with two months at Shkin and the rest in Kabul. Though Erik’s stay had been brief, the experience energized him. He loved the intrigue and excitement so much that the thirtysomething head of the Prince family empire decided he wanted to join the CIA’s Special Activities Division and enter the world of covert operations as a paramilitary.
    Joining the CIA can take months, but the normally arduous and lengthy interview process must have been expedited for Prince’s benefit. By July he was asking Smith for advice on how to pass the polygraph—the last hurdle required before a CIA recruit can accept a job offer. Erik’s first test had been “inconclusive,” so he had to take it again. Smith advised him that any number of factors could have led to that result and suggested it may have just been nerves. Though Prince had already effectively worked for the CIA in a covert capacity as a contractor, he would be ultimately barred from becoming a “Blue Badger” because he lacked certain hard skills. Erik just had to refocus himself on growing the Blackwater empire.
    Prince’s first contract was not renewed after the initial six months. The official reason given was that Blackwater had never managed to stay fully staffed up to the required terms of the contract, though rumors have circulated throughout the security industry that the CIA had discovered a conflict of interest relating to Buzzy Krongard. That loss didn’t seem to have any long-term impact on the business, though, since according to current president Gary Jackson, Blackwater has settled in to a pattern of doing about 15 percent “black” contracts—assumedly CIA—which these days would add up to nearly $100 million in annual revenue for the company.
    That first CIA/Blackwater contract could be considered one of the early watershed events indicating where the private security business was heading, or perhaps it would be more correct to say where the War on Terror was leading the industry. The abrupt state of war that began on 9/11 had stretched the U.S. government’s resources beyond what could have been realistically anticipated on September 10, 2001, creating an opportunity for private industry to supplement the government’s security resources. In another example of how the industry is exploding, Jamie Smith has since left Blackwater to try and ride the current wave of opportunity by founding his own successful security start-up, SCG International Risk in Virginia Beach.
    The two most important long-term