Security

Blackwater Takes Our Advice, Adopts Inscrutable, Opaque Name

They never picked up on our Hello Kitty-style logos. But finally, after a godawful year and a half, the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide is taking Danger Room’s advice, and changing its name to something opaque and hard-to-pronounce. So, goodbye Blackwater. Hello, Xe. No, seriously. Xe — "pronounced like the letter ‘z,’" the Associated Press […]

Blackwater3
They never picked up on our Hello Kitty-style logos. But finally, after a godawful year and a half, the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide is taking Danger Room's advice, and changing its name to something opaque and hard-to-pronounce.

So, goodbye Blackwater. Hello, Xe. No, seriously. Xe -- "pronounced like the letter 'z,'" the Associated Press reports.

Back in September 2007, shortly after Blackwater guns-for-hire killed 17 Iraqis in Baghdad's Nissour Square, our own Sharon Weinberger suggested a number of PR moves, to help the embattled firm's already-crumbling image. At the top of the list:

1) New name, preferably with indecipherable acronym.

It took decades before anyone run an "expose" about SAIC. And most people have already forgotten about it. When was the last time you saw a major article about CSC, or Computer Sciences Corporation (hmm, never). DynCorp and prostitutes? A distant memory.

Let's face it: Does your typical American know (or care) what ARINC stands for?

Heck no.

The point here is if you want to be a shadowy, low-profile sort of company, start acting like one.

For the last year or so, Blackwater Xe has been moving away from its core business of diplomat protection, and into -- well, just about everything else, it seems. Firm CEO Erik Prince has put together teams of spies-for-hire. The company is pushing ahead with plans to protect commercial ships, traveling through pirate-packed seas. And in case that doesn't work out, the company is making custom rifles, marketing spy blimps, assembling a fleet of light attack aicraft, and billing itself as experts in everything from cargo handling to dog training to construction management. It's even training pro athletes.

Firm president Gary Jackson says in a memo to employees that the new name (and the renaming of its firing range as "U.S. Training Center
Inc.") are just reflections of that diversification. "The volume of changes over the past half-year have taken the company to an exciting place and we are now ready for two of the final, and most obvious changes," he writes.

Let's see if Xe now follows the rest of Sharon's advice. Pehraps the company will "hire a likable former Pentagon official/high-ranking military officer... as the 'public face of Blackwater.'" Or maybe, when execs now speak at conferences, they'll "talk a lot about network centric warfare, performance-based logistics and systems engineering solutions."

"This will put the press to sleep in no time," Sharon noted. "No one will file a story."

[Name-dropper: JM]

ALSO: