Three weeks after the October 7 massacre, Erik Prince arrived in Israel with a far-reaching idea: drill from the sea into the Gaza tunnels, flood them with water, and thus deny Hamas the ability to wage underground warfare. To this end, he met with senior officials at the Directorate of Defense Research & Development (DDR&D or MAFAT), the Yahalom special operations forces unit of the IDF Combat Engineering Corps, and Southern Command engineers. The IDF, for its part, began trying to implement the idea, but it was ultimately abandoned. IDF soldiers, as we know, returned to more conventional means of fighting, descending underground themselves.
For a frustrated Prince, it was further proof that regular armies and bureaucratic systems have difficulty thinking outside the box and operating creatively. It was also proof of his belief that Blackwater, the private army he founded that has carried out special missions for the Pentagon and CIA, was a trailblazer. "Flooding the tunnels could have neutralized entire areas without dropping a single bomb," Prince said in an exclusive interview during his visit to Israel last month. "It would have eliminated Hamas’ ability to maneuver through tunnels, helped destroy weapons caches, and also forced them to move hostages from place to place. After all, they don’t want them dead."
Did the Israeli defense establishment listen to you?
"The people on the ground liked the idea, but those who were closer to the decision-making at headquarters -- a little less so. I’ll never forget the phone call with an MAFAT expert with multiple PhDs, who said, 'We tried drilling five years ago and it didn't work so well.' So, I put our chief driller on the conference call and he said: 'Bro, last year I had to drill from one side of the Mississippi River to the other, and during the process, we also had contests to see who could aim for a small spot at the bottom of the river, and I did it successfully. Is that good enough for you?'
"It was a 'mic drop' moment for me. We’ve drilled in the worst places, we’ve been shot at, we’ve been blown up. We can handle it, and we don't need anything from you. Just give us a piece of land and let us work. I have 12,000 horsepower pumps that would help squeeze out the tunnels in Gaza like a tube of toothpaste."
There are various reasons why the flooding plan failed. First, it turned out that the ground was too soft and that it wasn’t possible to generate high atmospheric pressure, because the water would soak into the ground instead of flooding the tunnel. "The IDF tried, but used pipes that weren’t big enough, for financial reasons," Prince explains. "There was a great deal of pride, stubbornness and bureaucracy here." At an event held in Milwaukee last summer, Prince cited another reason: a ban imposed by the Pentagon during the Biden era on providing Israel with the technology. It is believed that this ban stemmed from, among other things, fears that the operation would damage Gaza's coastal aquifer.
An IDF spokesperson stated: "The allegations are not true. The process of developing the Atlantis method (the IDF plan pumping water into tunnels, A.G.) by the IDF and the defense establishment was a classified process in which Erik Prince and his company were not involved. The IDF and the defense establishment have been investing great efforts over the years in locating and developing operational means to deal with Hamas' underground infrastructure."
"What will happen to Gaza ?"
One way or another, ‘bureaucracy’ is a recurring term in Prince's lexicon. In the early 2000s, the former US Navy Seal lieutenant, who had stopped believing in big systems, founded Blackwater, a private security company that manages military missions, and the world's largest private army. In time, the company has become one of the three largest military companies and even owns its own fleet of helicopters and planes. Like many advocates of the private market, Prince is convinced that great successes come from great patience for private projects and at low costs.
Prince says that flooding the tunnels was not the only project that was halted because of bureaucratic failings. A few months after October 7, he was asked by the Catholic church to design a humanitarian aid system for Gaza, including ships, inspection and security facilities, and camps for food and medicine distribution. He came up with a plan that consisted of a 100 square meter raft, two container ships, and am inspection facility. The floating platform, in his opinion, could have been a winning solution, unlike the jetty built by the US army, which was dismantled after repeatedly failing in its mission. "I grew up around platforms in the Great Lakes of the northern United States, so I have some experience in the field. In the winter, it’s a limited solution, admittedly, that’s operational maybe half the time, but a solution that provides an 80% response and works well is better than a solution that provides a 100% response and doesn’t work ."
The solution, proposed by Pope Francis, could have been an efficient, safe supply-line to the Gaza Strip, at very low cost. The budget Prince proposed was no more than $12 million for the construction of the logistics, transport, and construction of the camp, but the answer he received from the US administration was, "No need, we'll take care of it ourselves." "The answer the administration provided was embarrassing, and the result was in line with that: the ships that did not arrive, the pier that washed away, even the American soldier who lost his life assembling the stupid floating facility, and all this at the high cost of $250 million.
"This is just more proof that big governments make stupid moves. There’s no real assessment of results or cost-benefit analysis. The pager attack, for example, was a small, innovative, niche operation by the Israeli security services. By contrast, there is the large, bloated conventional IDF or the Pentagon apparatus, which hasn’t shown similar achievements in this campaign."
Recently, the Israeli side has floated the idea of bringing in private security companies to be responsible for distributing aid in Gaza and, in doing so, weaken Hamas.
"In the past, I myself, might have wanted to take part in such an operation, but today there first has to be a political decision: what will happen to Gaza? There are groups in Israel that want to raze Gaza to the ground, and expel the Palestinians. But you have to understand that that means living next to a POW camp. Unfortunately, October 7 showed that when you deprive people of a future for a long time, eventually, they’ll figure out how to screw you."
The problem is that there is no external force interested in controlling Gaza.
"There is a reluctance on the part of the Gulf states to intervene because of faulty leadership on Washington’s part. After all, the Saudis were close to joining the Abraham Accords. All they asked for was to continue the same security relations with the US. But the Biden administration chose to change the nature of relations with the Saudis, so in response they began normalizing relations with the Iranians, and added the Chinese as mediators to poke the Americans in the eye. I don't know what will happen under the Trump administration, but I would say that the US's higher diplomatic priority now is to end the war in Ukraine, move Russia away from the Chinese embrace, and pull it back towards Europe."
The incident that changed everything
Prince (55) was born in the picturesque town of Holland, Michigan, founded by Dutch immigrants and retaining its traditional character to this day. His father, Edgar, was one of the wealthiest men in Michigan. He founded and ran a metal casting empire that manufactured industrial machinery and auto parts. Rather than join the family business, the young Prince chose to study flying privately and then enlist in the military as a pilot. He eventually found his calling in the Navy SEALs. He became an officer, but was discharged after his father died of a heart attack and his wife contracted cancer.
Prince then founded Blackwater as a private military training facility. He invested $5 million from his inheritance and managed the company like a factory: divided into divisions and treating recruitment and management process like a machine. The September 11 terrorist attacks and the Second Iraq War led Blackwater to become one of the three largest military companies, with contracts from the Department of Defense and the CIA. From 1997 to 2010, it had revenue of $2 billion, of which $1.6 billion was in unclassified projects.
At its peak, Blackwater had annual revenue of $850 million and employed about 3,500 former US Army soldiers on security missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in 2007, things began to become tangled.
A car bomb, which injured several Iraqi officials, drew a convoy of Blackwater vehicles to Nisour Square in western Baghdad. One of the Blackwater convoy teams made the decision to shoot at a white car, killing two civilians, after previously receiving a report of a suspected car bomb. The shooting brought additional gunmen into the fray, and 11 Iraqis were killed. US authorities investigated Blackwater, charging three crew members with manslaughter and one with murder.
In 2020, President Donald J. Trump pardoned all four. In interviews with foreign media, Prince accused the Obama- Biden administration, as well as "the Washington political swamp," of persecution and of sending every possible government authority to pursue him and Blackwater, claiming he had to pay $2.5 million in legal fees every month. In 2010, Prince sold the company for "a fraction of what it was worth a few years previously."
"Hell, we'll make our own phone"
In recent years, Prince has described himself in media interviews as the founder of an Israeli company called Unplugged, a manufacturer of telephones for users who want to guard their privacy from the establishment and technology giants. He has claimed that if IDF soldiers had carried such telephones at their bases, October 7 and its aftermath would not have happened, because information could not be collected so easily on the bases. The company, which is based in Yokneam, provides the device, operating system, and applications to prevent the flow of data collected by commercial companies, primarily Google and Meta, as well as by government entities.
Prince, a staunch advocate for privacy, stepped into the role of presenter for the device. The defining event that led him to start the company, he said, was the 2020 election campaign, alluding to Facebook’s decision to remove Donald Trump from the platform at the time. "I was shocked to see what Big Tech and governments were doing to suppress free speech," he says.
Prince also connects his sense of persecution from the days of the Nisour Square affair to his decision to join in founding Unplugged. "In my experience, the entire American bureaucracy and the media are after me because of the incident in Iraq. I felt the full weight of every possible federal agency. This phone allows me to feel like a fighter pilot with a very, very low radar signature."
He founded Unplugged with Eran Karpen, the company's CTO. Initially, Prince, Karpen, and a third founder named Michael Yudelson sought to develop a solution that would compete with Israel's Cellebrite Software - which enables law enforcement to physically hack into crime suspects’ phones - but decided to change direction and move on to manufacturing the telephones themselves. "Instead of competing with a company worth $5 billion, we decided to compete with two trillion-dollar companies. As they say, ‘Go big or go home.’"
This is not Prince's first foray into the tech world: he is an early investor in Wickr, a secure instant messaging app that is immune to surveillance by tech giants. He exited the company when it was sold to Amazon. "I've been using secure messaging apps since they were first introduced," he says. "Now that it's owned by Amazon, it's definitely part of the Big Tech game in the US. So, we decided, to hell with it - we're going to make our own phone, with our own operating system and our own apps. But with one difference: we're not going to participate in the invasive capitalism model. We're going to give people the ability to turn off their connection to this world, so they control what their device shares." The company claims that it has sold 10,000 devices so far, with prices starting at $989.
Users look for a quality camera, storage space, and an up-to-date operating system, before they would even think about a telephone that is disconnected from the major companies as a consideration that would induce them to buy a telephone.
"First, Samsung's camera is similar in quality to the one embedded in our devices. Second, I agree that it’s not for everyone. We believe 20-30% of the population want to control the data they release to large companies and will pay to prevent data leaks. We see our users coming from three sources: digital currency holders who are concerned about their crypto wallets being identified by hackers; business people such as lawyers, fund managers and senior executives in gas and oil companies who travel on business and want to maintain confidentiality; and anyone who values freedom of expression and privacy."
Criminals are usually the earliest adopters of secure devices. As a security expert, don't you mind if your telephone makes it harder for authorities to track down terrorists?
"We mustn’t assume there’s a tool for listening in on criminals, because the other side is always being creative and adapting to alternative means of communication. In Israel, the security services assumed they knew what was happening in Gaza and found out the hard way that they were mistaken. People will always find the means to communicate with each other somehow, whether they have good or bad intentions. If their electronics are being tapped, they will have face-to-face meetings or send carrier pigeons. I think the most important thing for a free society is to hold politicians accountable and allow private citizens to own their data, and communicate freely and securely."
Prince is a strong opponent of American funding for foreign countries, first and foremost Ukraine, but no less so, Israel. When asked about this, he answers without hesitation: "Israel can survive without American funding."
"I'm not saying the US should stop selling weapons to Israel - that's something else entirely. But I think Israel has become addicted to free funding from Washington, and much of this money also came with the condition that production should be in the US, and that the IDF should behave in a manner dictated by the Pentagon or the Biden administration. The substantial transfer of money from US taxpayers must end, and it will come to an end. We must take stock of the excess and inflation by government in all social and military spending. I'm not saying that cooperation between the militaries has ended, but there’s enough wealth among the Jewish diaspora in the world (to compensate - A.G.)."
The [previous] Trump administration did not change military aid to Israel. Will it be different now? Is American funding about to end?
"I wouldn't bet against it."
"Ineffective handling of the Houthis"
A year after leaving Blackwater, Prince decided to accept the UAE government's offer to set up a private army for various missions. He moved to Dubai with his family for several years, and later took on the task of eliminating Somali pirate activity in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea.
By 2009, piracy in Somalia had become a worrying phenomenon: between 80 and 90 ships were captured a year, and their owners were forced to pay ransoms ranging from $5 to $20 million per ship. Prince's force was established in 2011 and was based on about 2,000 Somali soldiers from the naval force of Puntland, a region in northeastern Somalia.
A year later, he says, the piracy problem had disappeared-not through aerial bombing, but through soldiers chasing the pirates to their bases and disrupting their supply chains. "We realized they were acting more like a cooperative," Prince recalls. "Each family or tribe contributed their own element to the overall operation-someone was responsible for the engine, someone was in charge of the food supply, and so on. We went after the logistical supply lines, and that eventually led to the piracy being stopped."
What can we learn from this about the Houthi problem in Yemen?
"There’s a difference between the Somalis and the Houthis, because the latter are pirates who have been given an upgrade with Shahed 136 drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles, made in Iran, disassembled into components, and sent to Yemen. But the way we’re currently handling the Houthis is not effective: we’re shooting at drones that cost $20,000 with missiles worth a billion dollars."
The way to deal with the Houthi threat, according to Prince, consists, of course, of a private army. As an example, he mentions the 1960s British operation in Yemen, when the Secret Service hired British special forces (SAS) founder David Stirling, who stationed dozens of British advisers in Yemen, employed through private company Watchguard. Through the airlift of Israeli supplies in operations "Rotev" ("Gravy") and "Dorban," ("Porcupine"), the British and the Yemeni royalist forces succeeded in ejecting Nasser and the forces that supported him.
So you're claiming there is no substitute for Western ground forces in Yemen?
"Stirling certainly understood there was no other option. After all, a military commander is responsible for only two factors: coordinating information and releasing energy - moving forces or firing weapons. The problem with the US military is that the cost of energy has become so cripplingly high. The argument in favor of a private force is that it can carry out missions at 1% of the cost of a regular army. The Houthi problem can be solved with just a few hundred million dollars."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 14, 2025.
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