Kitbag Conversations - Episode 12: Butterfly Effect

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

How did Columbine lead to the creation of Wagner PMC? In this episode, Cody goes down the rabbit hole to talk about mercenaries and two of the most effective ones in recent history: Blackwater and Wagner.

Music I wouldn't do it I guess because it's getting kind of hard to find people post on the Instagram, keep the Patreon going, do game nights, do all that stuff. So it's just gonna be me today and I've got a special little thing for you. A lot of people come into the Patreon, they come into the Discord and they want to know about a lot of gray area things, right? Like special forces, they want to know about mercenaries, they want to know about spies and stuff like that and I don't know how much or remember how much me and Matt have talked about our past

lives in the intelligence sphere but we did deal with a lot of this stuff. Matt in the Marines did Marine recon support, intel support for them and I did intel support for special forces and if you listen to episode 10 I talk about the times that I worked with my dad in those gray areas and so I'm not saying I'm an expert, I'm not saying that I'm a doctor in special operations in gray matter area but I have a very good understanding of what happens in that area. So today is the 24th of May and Bakhmut has fallen and I wanted to talk about mercenaries. The title of this episode is called Columbine Blackwater

Wagner and or mercenaries and why they all relate. Essentially Columbine allowed Blackwater to get its first contracts, Blackwater inspired Russia and Russia used that framework from what they did in Iraq and Afghanistan to create Wagner and I'm gonna get into that so it's just gonna be me and you and we're gonna talk about mercenaries and a lot of people when you talk about mercenaries and when you talk about what these types of things are like it immediately is just greeted with like all mercenaries are bad right like there's no such thing as a good mercenary there's you know they're just war profiteers and all this

other shit it just it's way more complex than that and the media and the West we like to sit there and we like to just throw labels on things and so I highly advise you to read the book civilian warriors by Eric Prince Eric Prince is the founder of Blackwater it's his side of the story a lot of people sit there they hear the word Blackwater and they're like oh they were in Iraq and they kill a bunch of innocent people that is not what happened if you don't know that you can't even name where it happened wait can you know it's called Nazar Square oh okay and the guys that were involved in that their code

name was Raven 2 3 if you go to Sean Ryan's interviews he has Eric Prince he has the guys from Raven 2 3 there all right many people don't even know this but like if you're into the firearms community Haley strategic or Travis Haley he is a well-known Blackwater sniper so you may hear me sniffle I'm getting over like allergies and a cold so I'll try to keep it away from the microphone but yeah a lot of people don't even know what Blackwater did how they came about and stuff like that and I want to talk about that so that you have an understanding when we talk about Wagner when we talk about mercenaries

when we talk about third-party individuals in a battle space you can at least appreciate them you don't have to like them you don't have to love them or whatever you just have to understand what's going on another great book is the modern mercenary by Sean McFate I think he's a PhD now he's a former Army infantry officer and he worked for Dincor Dincor is a huge contracting firm they provide guards they provide military know-how they provide trainers I think they have the thing called train advice assist it's just like TAA it's what mercenaries can and can't do as like contractors to avoid the Geneva

conventions but yeah highly recommend if you don't want to read the books if you don't want to do anything I highly recommend you at least check out Sean Ryan's Eric Prince interview it'll give you an understanding where for what happened with Blackwater and how Eric Prince a kind of like an oligarch his dad sold a billion-dollar company and I'll get into that but like his sister and his family were so entwined to Republican politicians and politics that Betsy DeVos the former Secretary of Education under Trump that's his sister Trump hired Eric Prince's sister who had no background in education it

was just a political appointment because the Prince family has donated so much money to the Republican fan party and so yeah but the thing we need to understand first is like sorry for the sniffles you need to understand like how mercenaries and history right like it goes all the way back to ancient Greece the sacred band of thieves the gay mercenary group that beat the shit out of the Spartans and went around you know beating up anybody who they got paid for we're just a bunch of gay dudes gay lovers who decided to get together and have orgies and fight everybody and make a ton of money right and then you have

the word condottieri which means contractor the Italian contractors all of this is covered in the modern mercenary and by Eric Prince to kind of make you understand that in the West we have this idea that the government has a monopoly on violence that only the government can give you a license to kill and that the right to declare a war go to war and do any of those things comes from the government and it's never ever but like the last hundred years maybe they've started to stifle that I would actually go as far as to say 50 because 1977 is when the Geneva Protocols one and two went into effect you

know because you still had things like privateers the Hessians that fought in the Revolutionary War the East India trading company was bigger than any government at its time right even mercenaries were used in the Revolutionary War Baron von Stuben he created a thing called the Blue Book it's something we still use to this day it's like the standards for being an American soldier comes from Baron von Stuben Lafayette another one even John Paul Jones who I think is the founder of the Navy he died fighting for Russia he was buried in a casket filled with vodka we had to tell the Russians we wanted him back because

he's like one of our founding fathers and so like not only are mercenaries prevalent all throughout history all through you know the flying tigers who went from America to go fight with the Chinese against the Japanese in the late 1930s I believe there was also the Americans that went and volunteered for the British Army and fought with the British military at Dunkirk they fought in North Africa against Rommel as British soldiers but they were from America so we're even seeing it today with like the Ukrainian foreign legion like technically those guys are not Ukrainian citizens they're American

citizens British citizens fighting for Ukraine and they're getting paid and it's a workaround the foreign legion to create a mercenary outfit and so the reason why mercenaries quote-unquote don't exist is because of the Geneva Protocols 1 and 2 and I'm not gonna go down the road I'm not gonna look that up for you and go down into international law so but it's it was created in 1977 and the reason is if you look at that time sorry I'm also like drinking a bang while I do this because this is a lot and if it goes to an hour guess what it's gonna be on the Patriot so the reason why they're banned so 1977 you had this thing

called executive outcomes you had another guy by the name of mad my core who was in the Congo and then you have Radesha in South Africa right so this guy named Henry Kissinger who will go down in history as the biggest piece of shit to ever walk God's green earth thought it in his head that after America passed the American Civil Rights Movement and I think 1964 we he got this idea that everybody else should just automatically include civil rights now keep in mind that I'm not saying this is bad but how long did it take America to get civil rights get rid of Jim Crow everybody's equal right it took us

almost a hundred years after the Civil War it over a hundred years and then before that and so Henry Kissinger goes to the United States president and he's like we need to let Rhodesia in South Africa fall because they're not playing fair they're not good for the international stage and how we look we look racist and the Rhodesians and South Africans who were racist there's no going around that fell they fought very hard and a lot of people still have a sort of like chubb for how Rhodesia and South Africa fought I mean I do I appreciate their soldiers they fought very hard and very well but they still

lost right and so those soldiers who were very good at what they did didn't have anywhere to go you couldn't be a Rhodesian or South African and be proud of who you were or go somewhere else to someone else's military the British had a kind of system where they would accept South Africans and Rhodesians in but they were still frowned upon so you've got two countries worth of dudes who are at the same level if not better than American and British military personnel and they have nothing to do right and so what do you think they do they join up with Mad Mike whore and try to stamp out the Congo they try to join and create

executive outcomes they create mercenary outfits all over Africa fighting for a country that'll take them and it gets into this kind of like self-defeating loop right because they make a bunch of money they get their gear they buy their places they spend it all they have fun they go fighting and they need more money and so they have to go to the next country because you can't bring your gun internationally everywhere right and so it's just this problem where you have a bunch of guys running around with guns changing the political sphere however anybody with money sees fit and so you just have this this huge

problem of what are we going to do to stop this and that's what the Geneva protocols one and two did is they stripped the mercenaries of their protections under the rule of law for war like so they didn't have to be taken prisoners they don't get any extra treatment they're literally if you see a mercenary you shoot them on site which is why when you see Russia in Ukraine they're always calling the foreign fighters mercenaries and then they just shoot them because it does two things one they don't have to take care of the prisoners and then two it dissuades everybody from going right it's also

why you see Wagner was accepted into the Russian army recently so that's why they were banned right is you had all these guys running around creating problems and anybody with money could change to the geopolitical sphere of Africa but the problem is is they're still alive today right we had Blackwater which is now it went to XE then it went to Academy and then you have Dynkor triple canopy a ton of personal security detail people you have Wack Wagner you have khaki you have khaki Wexford you have BAE these are mostly guys that hang out in Detra which is the defense threat reduction agency and so the point

I'm trying to make is they didn't just they didn't get rid of mercenaries they changed what the the protections they had so if you're gonna be a mercenary you're screwed you're on your own and the other thing that goes with that is that you just change the verbiage surrounding them they're not mercenaries the private military contractors or security contractors or intelligence contractors and so your modern mercenary doesn't really fill those slots right that they used to like frontline soldiers like the Hessians and stuff like that now they're mostly gate guards and tell guys they can be teachers they can

teach languages they can go over and train people on how to use certain fire arms EOD they could be laundry people they could be working behind the counter at like an overseas PX they could be truck drivers you know when I was in Afghanistan there were three contractors per green suitor which meant like there are 15,000 troops in Afghanistan when I was there which means there was like 45,000 contractors and essentially what this did is because we had these guys that we could just pay and fill these like no-name slots like these are actual military jobs right like gate guards and Intel guys it stopped the

draft and so you kind of have to like look at it from both angles where we're like okay the military industrial complex is really powerful but on the other hand it became powerful because no politician wanted to be the one that said you know hey we got to do a draft and so it's it's not always Wagner or Blackwater or dudes and souped up fucking kit going out there and shooting people in the face and doing convoys and stuff like that the vast majority of private military contractors or mercenaries fill logistics roles and support roles or combat support roles which are combat support being

intelligence and signal and radio and yeah it's it's the jobs that nobody wants and they're the hardest to fill because in America we can just find some we could go to the trailer park and we can find a Marine or a soldier to be an infantryman so it's these jobs that we fill the most of and so if we want to get into it like where where did this all reincarnate like where did this all come back right like Wagner where did all these other groups and I think a gas problem which is Russia's their oil and gas company now has a mercenary group and why that matters right like why are these guys

all of a sudden going into the weeds of standing up mercenaries are they profitable and it's yes they are profitable Wagner has created a system in which they create a lot of revenue and money by absorbing commodities and assets that they help capture and guard and I'll get into that but first we have to understand that background and where it comes from and it starts with Eric Prince in Blackwater so Eric Prince right a lot of people don't get Eric Prince right and I mean that by saying like the biggest thing they do is like oh Eric Prince was a war profiteer he didn't care about Americans or civilian

deaths he didn't do his due diligence and like that last part's true Eric Prince is the son of Edgar Prince his father was the creator of the Sun Visor and he owned a company that created die casts so when Edgar Prince died he left behind a 1.35 billion dollar company and that's important for a second here but the biggest thing about Edgar Prince Eric Prince's father was that he kind of instilled Eric Prince with this love of country and this idea that you need to be a good conservative businessman who donates to charity has employees that are top-notch quality and take care of them one of the stories that goes with

this is uh Edgar Prince once hired a janitorial worker who was kind of I want to guess he was like mentally handicapped not in a sense of like Down syndrome or autism just like had a slow time learning and so he was having trouble cleaning the shop floors and he told Edgar Prince he was gonna quit and Edgar told him no you can't like we're gonna pull through this together and so he eventually did but he and Edgar invested in this guy and he gave him stock options as being part of an employee all of them got stock options so that when Eric finally sold the company he made millions of dollars

that janitor and so Edgar always kind of had this thing for hiring and investing in top quality personnel which comes into how Eric Prince ran Blackwater in the beginning he raised his son outside of Michigan Eric would go on many adventures through the USSR he went on something called the politic tour where he went through Poland Lithuania Latvia and Estonia and you got to see all that right before the ball came crumbling down Eric did three semesters at the Naval Academy and hated it he didn't like that a senior or junior at the Naval Academy got to yell at a freshman or a sophomore right so if you could imagine

like it being like a fraternity where like the guys who have been in college longer than you think they know more about leadership it's absolutely freaking stupid I've always said that we should get rid of military academies for that because how is a senior cadet supposed to teach a junior cadet how to lead he doesn't know anything about leadership right he has no experience outside of the Naval Academy so Eric Prince leaves and he goes to Hill Stale College where he it's a libertarian college they don't accept federal income right because with federal incomes cubs federal federal

regulation and federal standards and so this Hill Stale College doesn't want anything to do with that and so he was instilled libertarian ideas even more and he became a volunteer firefighter so you know he got to learn leadership through that and so that's kind of who Eric Prince is he's a Catholic he's a conservative man who believes in hard work and getting the job done and hates communism right and so at getting the job done at a cheap reasonable rate and so Eric Prince goes on he graduates he attends Navy OCS and then he passes Buds his first time so he goes on and become a Navy SEAL oh god sorry I'm

burping and trying to like finish this bang so 1995 Eric Prince leaves the SEALs his dad died leaving behind a vast fortune and then the next year his wife gets cancer and he's got three kids so it's just kind of this like bang bang one after the other where Eric who he doesn't get to see combat as a Navy SEAL but he will as a Blackwater contractor but the thing he did see was when he was a Navy SEAL he was sent all over America to go train all right and so this has a profound impact on him because he had to go to like Airborne school at Fort Benning and he got to see that the 82nd who is stationed in Fort Bragg has to go

to Benning and so they send their dudes PC or TDY down there he has to go to Mid-South and Tennessee which is where they send all their operators in the American military to go get some more trigger time and then he's going Halo school dive school on the west coast east coast he's flying all over America and it's pissing him off because it's wasting millions and millions of dollars and he's like why can't we just go to one place right and so dad dies wife gets cancer he has to leave the SEAL teams and so in 1996 he sells his dad his dad's business uses the money from the sale that was given to him and he

creates the Blackwater training training not security training facility okay and so he goes and he creates this huge 100-plus acre training facility and his idea is that he's going to make a one-stop shop for all the training you could ever need and from 97 to 99 Air Prince is barely keeping the lights on right so he's got all his Navy SEAL buddies there he's got all the training and the ranges and it's not really picking up right like people come for a gun course here or there but nobody's really coming in the Blackwater for anything and so they're barely keeping the lights on because they're selling

targets they're selling targets to like the FBI and stuff and I think it was like right in I want to say like 98 they got an order just in time for their taxes so that they didn't have to go bankrupt but in 99 Columbine happens Eric Prince sees this and has a profound impact on him once again and so he sees for those of you that don't know Columbine was like the first ever mass shooting in a school could have been worse there was a pressured bomb in the cafeteria that didn't go off but it was made absolutely terrible by the fact that the cop like you Valde the cops were sitting at the outside with you

know armored cars guns shotguns hundreds of dudes and two kids were just keeping them at bay because they didn't know what to do so Eric Prince sees this he sees this as an opportunity to grow his business and help solve a problem and he creates are you ready high school and he helps train police departments on the East Coast at this new shoot house with Navy SEAL instructors and former DevGrew guys teaching and it's a hit right so like huge huge huge contracts from like police departments come in and guys are flying in from all over the United States to come get training at are you ready high and it

worked I mean it I think it worked for a long time and the problem is is that we forget this I mean was what 20 years ago and so it's even funnier because this next thing the USS coal bombing there was a ship in Yemen that got attacked and the Navy didn't know what to do that's right a bunch of Navy sailors didn't know how to shoot their M14s gun like this is this is during the assault weapons ban right so like even the Navy is sitting there thinking like guns are bad and they didn't even get to fire their M14 rifles in basic training they used laser simulators and so they had these sailors who didn't have any small

arms training live fire training they didn't know what to do with any of this stuff and so when these terrorists attack the ship they were actually just huge liabilities and so the US Navy couldn't go back and retrain all these guys right because you're constantly losing people people are coming in you can't send every sailor back to basic training to go get live fire training and they don't have the ranges to support all these sailors right like yeah there's some marine bases but how are they gonna train all these dudes I mean they've still got rotations going on so what do they do they hire blackwater and I find

this funny because it's like we're almost at this stage right like history is repeating itself for like 20 years ago the Army and the Navy were so incompetent that they couldn't even prevent somebody from attacking a ship because guns are bad guns are scary and now we're starting to see the seeds of that be planted and the military all over again it's just like history is fucking repeating itself and so these two contracts Columbine and the USS Cole they save blackwater and so when 2001 hits and 9-11 happens blackwater helps the CIA and begins operations on CIA security bases and helps with logistics and

training but the big one comes in 2003 August of 2003 blackwater wins a 21 million dollar personal security detail contract now at this time blackwater has great operatives they're all former SEALs the pilots are 160th special operations aviation regiment for those who don't know they're the premier helicopter guys for the US Army my personal opinion it's kind of over inflated they just get more training never really was impressed but not that's to say that during peacetime they get way more training so I'm just pointing out that in August blackwater was ready they did the deed they got and they they hopped on it and

so they were doing personal security details and they had great guys doing it I remember being a kid and I actually had a blackwater shirt around 2003 or between 2003 and 2005 like my dad was a pretty big fan of those guys because most of them were retired or former soft and because Eric Prince was a former SEAL so he had access to those those guys and those systems and so July 2004 2006 the US Department State Department hires blackwater to run around Irish now we need to go and we need to talk to a guy called Greg Smith because in the books Eric makes it sound like he makes it sound like he just makes the mission

happen right like he's just a good Navy SEAL and really simple bang he just makes it sound like you know by any means meet the mission but Greg Smith is another board member for he's another board member for blackwater and he says and this is what's funny because they Eric and Greg both talk about this contract in the sense that it's stupid the US State Department needs protective bodyguards to guard diplomats going down and around the green zone so for those who don't know the green zone is a space in Baghdad where everything is fine hunky dory there's like literally a Burger King in Baghdad because they are it's just so

safe like it's so there's walls there's gate guards there's barbed wire like it's just a fortress nobody's getting into the green zone right and so when they leave they need guards they can't have like DoD guys or soldiers or Marines guarding State Department personnel leaving and going all the time because they're doing things all the time and so they hire blackwater and blackwater jumps on the contract because you know it's multi-million dollar contract but the problem is is the fucking stipulations are stupid okay they want them to ride around an up armored Cadillac fucking SUVs and they want

Humvees up armored and tons of machine guns and they want to establish a presence right they're not gonna hide and blend in and try to you know talk to the locals when they drive by they want everybody to know that is the US State Department and part of the contract is that no State Department official can have an injury not get killed have an injury now think about that for a minute because this is fucking Iraq right like Iran not only are they making IEDs and suicide bombers but Iran is supplying EFPs which is explosive projectile explosively formed projectiles basically just copper plates that when they

explode they turn into a cannonball they literally shred up armored Humvees and you can't even get an injury for your client and the blackwater jumps on this and Greg Smith who was on the board was like nobody wanted to touch that contract not Dincor not triple canopy nobody wanted it because it was so stupid but blackwater did it anyway and so this is actually where Eric Prince and the team kind of fuck up because the State Department makes them sign non-disclosure agreements they can't talk about anything there's no cameras in the cars so like if I don't know if blackwater gets in a shootout they can't

go to the gun tapes on the dash cams and look over it and be like oh yeah blackwater was innocent and so this was between 2004 2006 nothing happens may 2006 they made the whole contract for two years made 2006 it's up for renewal and they get it again and that was the problem and the thing that's going on in the background right now is that in the beginning blackwater was awesome because they had all these contractors doing all these things and those contractors were Navy SEALs Green Berets in 160th it's been three years since that now anybody who was like just a regular marine infantryman or whatever

could get in on the action because they just needed bodies to fill these contracts out now the guys doing the State Department stuff they're top notch but at the same time like blackwater has to protect food they have to protect convoys that to protect fuel for other trucks and so three key events happen between 04 and 07 the first one is the blackwater or the blackwater guys that died in Fallujah that quote-unquote started the battle of Fallujah if you look up blackwater Fallujah you're gonna see four dead bodies hanging from a bridge charred corpses and all right and it was because the thing about blackwater is they were top notch

and so when they went into places everyone knew not to mess with blackwater because they were former SEALs Green Berets Rangers Marine Recon and they were gonna win you didn't mess with a blackwater convoy dinecore sure go ahead blow that up they're not gonna do anything blackwater no and so the Iranians who were helping the Iraqi resistance fight America hated blackwater so whenever they got a chance they would mess with blackwater now March 31st 2004 there's a lot of what may or may not have happened but essentially the route for the blackwater convoy that was escorting for a food delivery these guys aren't these guys are good but they're not the top notch tier one dudes the route got disclosed

they were going down Fallujah and the area they were in was a retirement center for like the republican guard so Saddam's former special forces and like tier one dudes all have this like retirement community and blackwater was trying to sneak through there at one point and it was already known that they were coming and so they got pulled out of the cars they got in a fight they were hanged on the bridge and this started the first battle of Fallujah now the problem is here again is people like to sit there and say oh the battle of Fallujah was started by blackwater we had not cleared Fallujah all right the thunder run for those of you that don't know we just went straight to Baghdad and toppled the Iraqi government took out the bath party hunted down

its leaders and basically said America's here screw off and so Fallujah hadn't been cleared like this is March 2004 it's it's been a year right so somebody's got to go in there and somebody's got to get all those bath party guys all those republican guard dudes and we got to round them up and we got to get rid of them so this starts the first battle of Fallujah I say first because we didn't really get in all the way we had to come back in a second time with the Marines and finish that shit so that's a really significant event this kind of leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth with blackwater because the idea being like oh you started the battle of Fallujah like bro it was gonna happen anyways then there's the Najaf Iraq incident

April 2004 or 444 as Travis Haley this one was a good one um Blackwater kind of saves the day I won't go too much into detail on this but essentially what happened is a bunch of Blackwater contractors who were assigned to Ambassador Bremer security detail heard over the radio that a bunch of Marines and soldiers were getting attacked by Sadaq Sader's army Sader look up Sader City it's a whole fucking thing um episode 10 chief we talk about Sader City it's a significant emotional event for a lot of people because it was a fight from hell but the point I'm trying to make here is that Blackwater was in a position where they didn't actually really need to help these guys and they did they went out of their way to use their little birds distinguish mark the ship

rifles and saws and do kazavaks for Marines they did ammo runs they provided support by fire like they defended the objective and it's a huge deal um this left a very like this is probably the reason why I had a Blackwater shirt as a kid is because like those guys really saved the day and it was one of those things where in Iraq if you had a problem like if your convoy or whatever was under fire or you were a SEAL team or a bunch of green berets that needed help you had the Blackwater frequencies like you knew who to call ghostbusters um but yeah so it's like those little birds and Blackwater and those guys kind of earned a reputation for being like hey you need a reserve parachute we're always here

and so that's 444 or the battle in Jaff now we're going to get into Nizzar Square this is really weird um I'm not going to go too much into detail um it's it's called Raven 2 3 was the call sign for this convoy they go really into depth with the four guys who were involved in this scenario on the Sean Ryan show if you ever want to get into it um the book civilian warriors talks about it this is basically what kick starts the fall of Blackwater so Greg Smith the former board member gonna take another sip of bang hang on here oh good um so Greg Smith talks about it he's a board member for Blackwater and he says that after Nizzar Square everything kind of came undone for Blackwater because

he says from behind the scenes and I believe him is that you had all these navy SEALs running around and they were just being navy SEALs right like they just kept winning government contracts but like Eric Prince would still get butt hurt if he lost on a range like here he is the CEO of a multi-million dollar company with like his own personal fucking army right and he's getting butt hurt that he lost like a pistol shooting competition on his own thing but Greg Smith is talking about this because he's like bro we had hundreds and hundreds of acres tons of shooting ranges we had a CIA shooting range that was down the hill that nobody could go down to like basically they rented this section of Blackwater off to the CIA they had little birds they had

airborne operations going on like they were training dudes how to do like airborne stuff um what else did he say yeah he said they had lawyers and compliance guys who were just out the window and then they had sent com bases airstrips being made like Eric Prince basically owned a military fort and here he is like being with the bros lifting weights and doing dumb shit right and so when deserved square happens it's like you know your first big bad bad black eye not like Fallujah like this is really bad because the the psyops that was done by Iran and everybody was phenomenal to take out Eric Prince right because keep in mind he's a multi-million almost billionaire supporting the republican party like and winning in Iraq right and so he's made

enemies in the democratic party he's made enemies in other business owners he's made enemies in Iran and so when Azor Square happens essentially it's a bunch of Blackwater contractors taking a U.S. embassy convoy down the road and there's reports coming up on the radio that the IP which is the Iraqi police have gone off the wall and they're starting to do things um and attack convoys so it's already coming up hey the Iraqi police are uprising they're shooting at convoys watch out one of the guys sees the Iraqi police pick up his gun and start looking at him and he brings it up to fire and it's kind of one of those Han Solo shop first type deals right so instead of being the victim Blackwater preemptively strikes and they get in a shootout and I'll keep in mind there's

already shootouts going around Baghdad right now uh with the Iraqi police and then Azor Square happens and the truck gets shot up it has to get towed out um they get in a shootout they kill 17 they injure 20 tons of civilians I mean it's a square but the point that happens is like so in my opinion the story is Iraqi police go uprise they hear about it they look at the Iraqi police surrounding them they're like oh fuck are they gonna do it and then they start to do it and instead of being a victim they shoot first on the other hand the story goes that the Blackwater guys heard that come over the radio and they just started shooting people their border shut they they basically did like a cover up the Iraqis and the Iranians where they took all the shell casings

from where like the AKs were and they just left like 556 so when the investigation was done it looked like only M4s were shot and then on top of that uh how do I phrase this like all the people were saying Blackwater shot first Blackwater did this blah blah blah and it made it look like Blackwater was just on a killing spree and that no no Iraqi police would never betray and so it would be years later until it was determined that yes the Iraqi police did shoot um the lack of cameras you know because it's a state department contract there's no cameras on the dashboard the lack of cameras came back to bite them in the ass and so also the state department didn't care you're just a contractor right they don't have to do anything with you um they they also signed non-disclosure agreements

the agreements was like they don't care what happens as long as their guys are safe but we want you to be at an up armor procedure so it was kind of like Blackwater was set up to fail they were running around doing whatever they wanted um Erik Prince kind of got a little bit of full of himself maybe uh not sure on that one um but my assessment is yeah they were just put all the things were in a bad situation and they they shot first and so but they were definitely shot at and they were the Iraqi police were doing an uprising at that time and so it was it's just all bad but that's what happened in Azor Square and I highly recommend like I said go check out Raven 2 3 I may be getting some of the details a little murky because I'm trying to like

condense it but you really need to know what happened and this is what people actually mentioned right they mentioned Fallujah where Blackwater was hanged and then started the battle of Fallujah quotes and then Azor Square or the Blackwater massacre neither of them are anywhere close and Erik Prince has a really good point when he says because they were kicked out of Iraq for this and Iran couldn't be happier because you know Blackwater is really good at their job and so log story short they're they're gone so now shitty contractors defending convoys and Iran can get their kill on but Erik Prince brings up a good point when he says a bunch of American soldiers could have done this and nobody would have blinked an eye but because it was contractors

and therefore Blackwater contractors at that it was a huge problem and they were under a higher microbes bigger microscope than the military was and so it's just it's just a shit show and all the cards were stacked against them and they didn't really get their fair time right and then right uh let's hit a bang hang on here we go oh it's almost gone god damn it anyway um this all happened in 2007 and so Obama gets elected in 2008 we know Erik Prince is a huge donor to the conservative party so they they don't care they want him out of there stop making money stop supporting the republican party i mean Hillary Clinton became the secretary of state i mean it's the prince family versus the clitons and so you have Obama elected uh XC then they have to change the name to XC

services in 2009 2010 Erik Prince sells Blackwater uh it it it doesn't really ever get better from here right like they go through a ton of name changes and they become constellous and then they get traded again um i think at many many points within this Erik Prince was called to testify before congress and then he was brought to testify again in 2014 because he was allegedly working with Putin and i'll get to that in a second but it just goes all the way downhill from here and it's it's just i i believe Greg Smith when he says that the navy seals were just being navy seals and they weren't thinking and they weren't building that base up right and so on the flip side though right is Blackwater to Wagner and

you need to understand what's going on on the other side of the hill they so to speak on the Russian side uh General Gorissimov who would become the chief of the general staff he was watching this entire thing right and the book Three Dangerous Men it does a really good job of putting you in the perspective of General Gorissimov right so you're a Russian general you see 1991 happen where we beat the snot we beat the crap out of Saddam in Kuwait we beat up the entire republican gardens and then back into Iraq and then we had we had a slip up in Somalia if you want to call it that Mogadishu Black Hawk down but then we come back in 2001 and we take out the Taliban with just a couple SF dudes the CIA and some bombers and then in

2003 we toppled the Iraqi regime right and so it's just this imagine being this Russian general and you see the like the seventh or sixth largest army just get absolutely decimated in the first Gulf War and then in 03 a country is taken down in 30 days and then in 01 oh the Taliban are beaten and toppled from power in like a matter of months and yeah we had some peacekeeping missions after that and the book talks about that about how we we screwed up in the book Three Dangerous Men but Gorissimov also gets to see us in Libya take out Gaddafi with just some Psyops and some bombers and restricting the airspace like we are just out there handing out biscuits to countries all over the Middle East and Russia's just watching we they're watching us just lay down

the law as far as he is concerned and so there's this idea and Gorissimov's like okay we gotta redo the entire army right like because they try in 2008 to invade Georgia and take over but they only get a little bit of land and they do good but they didn't take out the country in like 30 days like there was a ton of problems and so I'm trying to find the words for this because it's weird like they did good but not as good as they wanted to like not as good as America and so Gorissimov is a general at this time he's not the deputy chief of staff but he is a general and he's just like what's going on like this new form of guerrilla warfare where there's like this gray matter and there's these mercenaries taking up like a big about a third of the fighting uh it's it's crazy

right like a third of the the burden and so they need this they need a black water they need a dying core because they can't recruit every Russian I mean we're seeing it right now in Ukraine they they can't they they need mercenaries because their civilians suck and they don't want to use conscripts right and also during this time is Chechnya in Dagestan like two islamic states within southern Russia that are causing problems alpha group during this time is doing like 300 raids a year and they're nowhere close to like fifth group or the CIA or any of the intelligence agencies in Iraq where we're just once again we're handing out biscuits we're winning baby and they they're there like they can't even within Russia control their own anti-terror do

anti-terrorism efficiently but we're halfway across we're on the other side of the world winning and taking down these terrorist organizations we did not win when it came to state building but yeah and so 2010 is when general Grisimov becomes deputy chief of the general staff 2010 is also when black water was sold in 2011 the next year Eric Prince who's in Dubai now because he you know America just shit all over him Eric Prince goes to Dubai or Qatar or Abu Dhabi wherever he's hanging out there now he still lives there he's on LinkedIn if you if you want after this episode go on LinkedIn and follow Eric Prince I do he's always yelling at people for spending too much and enjoying the military

industrial complex like Eric Prince is always about like saving money for the government the taxpayer so follow Eric Prince on LinkedIn but 2011 sorry uh Eric Prince gets invited to Russia one year after Grisimov takes charge he gets invited to shoot and talk with Alpha Group and so he hangs out with Alpha Group you know Navy SEAL to Russian counterpart and they're talking and they say hey we want you to create a in their own words Blackwater Russia and so Eric Prince who's a stern American who's a mercenary only for America says no but this was 2011 one year after Grisimov took power and so this puts a they they're they're bummed but they they know how it works right everybody knows they've seen Blackwater in Iraq they've seen

Dying Corn Triple Canopy but they wanted the man Eric Prince they didn't get him 2012 next year Grisimov becomes chief of the general staff 2013 so you're seeing I want you to make sure like you understand that like Grisimov is the key to all this he was the one who saw Eric Prince he tried to get Eric Prince to come over and create Blackwater Russia Wagner and they couldn't get him the next year Grisimov becomes the chief of the general staff and he's got this in his hot head like we need our own type of Blackwater so 2013 I'm gonna kill this bang God I'm dying um so 2013 uh Syria is kicking off Alasad who is a friend of the Russian Putin regime needs help

so Grisimov is trying to figure all this out right he's got to move the FSB he's got to move Spetsnaz he's got to move Iran like they get Iran in there the Quds Force and Hezbollah the book Three Dangerous Men is talking about this I'm not going to go into much detail there we're we're cutting it close if we get to an hour or like wherever I feel like stopping I'm gonna stop and then you're gonna have to go to the patreon um so 2013 October there's a thing called the Slavonic Corps all right and it is a little mercenary group that goes out to it's run by these two losers and they go out to Syria and they fool all these dudes who are in the Slavonic Corps into thinking like they were

gonna have weapons and all this equipment and they didn't they had to actually like mosey around and fight like rebel groups and with rusty AKs they didn't have any gear and when they get back because they told the guys in the Slavonic Corps you're gonna have to fight in order for us to come back to Syria or come back to Russia your that's how you get your plane ticket out of here so they do they do fight through and there's a guy by the name of Dimitri Utkin you probably know him his call sign because he's got these ss lightning bolts on his collarbone and he's like infatuated with the third Reich he's like a wearaboo his call sign is Wagner he is a lieutenant colonel he was in the GRU he was Spetsnaz he did 20 years in the Russian army received a pension

and he was in the Slavonic Corps and he helped them fight back to the airport at Syria they went back to Russia and waiting for them was the FSB and the FSB grabbed them up the two guys who were leading this and sent them to jail because article 359 of the Russian constitution makes it illegal to run a mercenary group and so now there are 265 guys of the Slavonic Corps Dimitri Utkin is part of them and it's October 2013 does anybody know what happened this three months later Wagner shows up in Ukraine in 2014 of February so the little green men my theory here is that Dimitri Utkin is kind of like a semi-leader of this group or because it takes over this group and he leads them in Ukraine you have 265 guys that technically should be in prison but three

months later they show up in Ukraine now three months is about the time you need to do like army or marine basic training and if you had the money you could do it right three month train up and then you go and you invade Ukraine I mean you were just in Syria you all did just fight in 2013 so like hey lessons learned AAR we need gear we need guns we need proper training as a team we have a lieutenant colonel from the GRU and Spetsnaz here who's going to help us out right yeah and we just need money so this is where like dudes when they sit there and they say like oh I want to go be a mercenary I want to go do all these things I want to do like cool shit it's like yeah bro but you need money okay you can't just the logistics of it and we'll talk about it at the

end I'll show you like what I think you need in order to start like your own little green men thing or like if you and your friends want to do something stupid for educational purposes only I can I'll talk about it I'll show you how these groups get involved and stuff but they need anyway the Slavonic Corps needs money Grisimov needs a mercenary force or wants one it's only 2012 Grisimov's general chief of staff right next year Slavonic Corps goes out they don't do a good job but they do a drop and then the little green men show up two years later in Ukraine but here's the thing that nobody talks about Dmitry Ukin actually shows up in the business paperwork of a guy who has a lot of money and he's also known to be the head of the security for some

the same guy and it wouldn't be until like five years later that Yevgeny Pergosian would admit that Dmitry Ukin worked for him during this time as like the head of his security and in his chef company you know the name Yevgeny Pergosian may sound familiar because that is the guy who keeps screaming at Putin that's the new head of Wagner and we're gonna have to talk about Yevgeny Pergosian so that you get a kind of understanding for who he is as a person but in like a three-year time period Grisimov becomes chief of staff mercenary group the Slavonic Corps shows up in Syria fails three months later it's in Ukraine and it's kicking ass and then the next year

Yevgeny Pergosian admits that he is a leader or patron of Wagner and then Dmitry Ukin slowly steps to the side so you can see now it started with Eric Prince it started with an idea they tried it didn't work first time always a failure and then take the lessons learn take your boo-boos get back on the horse train up get some money from multi-millionaire Pergosian and then they're kicking ass and taking names in 2015 is Wagner and then for the next seven years they're in the Donbass they're in the Luhansk region they're near Mariupol and they're doing that they're doing the war right they're 2014 to 2022 they're learning they're adapting and they're getting money and they're doing other things besides Ukraine I'm gonna go into the weeds

actually about how Wagner is a multi-billion not million billion dollar company throw throw Eric Prince out the window Blackwater is a joke compared to Wagner because they figured it out and it was because Yevgeny Pergosian and you need to learn about him went into this thinking like a businessman so yeah you can be a Navy Seal and create your own little security training corporation but we've already determined that like that's probably not the best way to go about creating a business you know you'll end up being a Navy Seal on your own 100 acre farm having shooting competitions not worried about compliance business spreadsheets all that stuff right but Yevgeny Pergosian is a businessman and so that is where we're going to stop

because it's been almost an hour and we we we have a Patreon I'm going to make it so that you could have access to the Patreon for about three dollars a month right now the recon tier which is a ten dollar tier on sale for four dollars a month it's almost out I think there's like 20 slots left but with it you get not only the Patreon and all the content in there but you also get the discord I'm always in the discord Matt's not here for probably another couple weeks but he'll be in the discord as well you get all of the content in there and the bonus episodes and our writings that can't be posted on Instagram and so yeah go ahead head over to the Patreon tell your friends about us come make some friends with us and the

rest of episode 12 will be on there so thanks for listening and I'm yeah I'm gonna have to end up giving you blue balls