attempts.”11 Prince’s long string of failures appears to end at the dawn of the Trump era, however, as he finds in Trump and his aides, allies, and associates willing compatriots in some of his most audacious schemes.
In the late aughts, Prince’s sudden resurgence on the global stage was still well in the future, however. At the time, he was reeling from September 2007 allegations that mercenaries in his employ had murdered seventeen Iraqis in Baghdad, a federal criminal investigation in which Prince had been, the Nation wrote in 2009, “implicated.”12 As Prince licked his wounds and considered his next moves, he was developing close ties to the Israeli government as well as to strongmen across the Middle East, with Haaretz reporting that Prince’s “deep Israeli connections” came to include a long-standing business relationship with Ari Harow—former bureau chief and chief of staff to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—and another with Dorian Barak, Harow’s onetime business partner.13 By 2018, Harow will have been convicted of fraud and breach of trust and be working with Israeli prosecutors to testify against Netanyahu—who in 2019 becomes the first-ever sitting Israeli prime minister to face charges of bribery and breach of trust—but when Prince first entered Harow’s milieu the latter was a well-connected businessman, and being linked to him put Prince in good stead in Israeli political circles.14
From 2012 on, Prince will hold an investment stake in a company co-managed by Harow and Barak, and by dint of his association with the two men he begins investing in Israeli security companies as well.15 Barak also tries—it isn’t known whether successfully or not—to get Prince to join billionaire Vincent Tchenguiz as a major investor in a new investment project: SCL Group, the parent company of the Trump campaign’s data firm, Cambridge Analytica. Tchenguiz is known as well for being a close business associate of Dmitry Firtash, who is himself a business associate of 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.16 Tchenguiz is also an investor in Black Cube and Terrogence, two Israeli intelligence companies that will intersect consequentially with the Trump campaign, transition, and administration (see chapters 3, 4, and 8).17 Black Cube, in particular, has ties to the Israeli government through many employees who are former members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and its advertising “openly” features its “ties to Israeli spy agencies, including Mossad,” according to the New Yorker.18
By 2018, Prince will be notorious in the United States for misleading Congress and the public on the subject of his activities in the Middle East—including a key January 2017 meeting in the Seychelles with a Kremlin agent that Nader successfully set up for Prince on behalf of MBZ and the Trump transition team (see chapter 6).19
Given his history of dealings with Nader, and Nader’s history of dealings with men to whom Prince is also connected, the mercenary’s mid-aughts account of Nader’s incompetence in the midst of sensitive Middle Eastern negotiations seems to be at odds both with Prince’s continued association with him and with an observation by a veteran State Department negotiator for the Middle East, Aaron David Miller, who will tell Politico in 2018 that Nader had “an absolutely amazing degree of contact with the people we [at the State Department] were talking to” in the Middle East.20 Al-Monitor, an American media outlet covering the Middle East, says that at the time Prince claims Nader was ineffectual at making deals in the Middle East, he was in fact “a deal broker in Iraq.”21 The outlet adds that “in Iraq in the mid-2000s, [Nader was] looking to translate his Rolodex of connections from his Middle East Insight days into work advising various Iraqi political clients, including some of Iraq’s new Shiite political leaders, as well as Kurdish officials.” According to Iraqi sources, Nader “helped arrange meetings for the 2005 visit to Washington of leading members of an Iraqi Shiite political party with close ties to Iran, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.”22
After his wide-ranging high-level work in Iraq, however, Nader falls off the grid again. Reached by CNN in 2018, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East center will call Nader a “man of mystery” whose name he hadn’t heard mentioned by anyone in the field of Middle East studies for a dozen years, while another Middle East expert will express surprise “at finding out Nader was still alive” when contacted for comment about Nader’s reemergence into the American news cycle.23
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As Erik Prince is providing private security services in