A new book, “Master of War: Blackwater USA’s Erik Prince and the Business of War,” puts this shadowy figure directly in the spotlight. Written by Suzanne Simons, a CNN executive producer, the book is clearly intended to tell the company’s side of the story — and to humanize Prince, who stepped down as CEO in March.

Simons asks in her introduction: “Is he a business genius? A war profiteer? The lucky recipient of a government shell game? What makes him tick? Over the course of 18 months, during which he granted more than 100 hours of interviews and access to Blackwater’s top offices and facilities around the world, he gave me the chance to find out.”

What she found isn’t always pretty. Among other things, Prince is presented as:

1. Independent-minded — to a fault.

Simons introduces Prince as a clean-cut, Christian conservative from Holland, Mich. His father, Edgar Prince, was a successful entrepreneur and a staunch conservative; Chuck Colson, James Dobson and Gary Bauer were friends of the family. Prince interned at the White House for George H.W. Bush. His sister Betsy De Vos served as chairwoman of the Republican Party in Michigan.

Fascinated by flying at an early age, he pursued a military education and wound up at the Naval Academy. While there, Prince was bothered by the way fellow midshipmen drank, and he eventually left the academy, frustrated with what he saw as an unfair application of the rules: The school refused to excuse him for being late when he was undergoing surgery for a minor injury. He married young and became a Navy SEAL. During his training, he cut short many a night out with the guys to go home to his wife and kids.

But there ends the princely tale. By 2003, when his wife, Joan, was dying of cancer, Prince couldn’t hide his affair with the family’s former nanny, Joanna Houck. She had moved from Michigan to work for Blackwater, at its Moyock, N.C., facilities and wound up pregnant with Prince’s child before Joan’s death. “At some point, Joan found out and, according to one person close to her, insisted that ‘that woman’ be kept away from her children,” Simons reports. Even so, Houck showed up at her funeral already pregnant — and married Prince a year later.

2. Rich enough to be a game-changer.

Blackwater began with a $6 million investment from Prince. The first major contract was with the Navy, which — shortly after the USS Cole bombing — came seeking a facility and trainers for a program designed to protect sailors.

After Sept. 11, business boomed: Revenue was about $3.4 million for 2002. By 2007, federal contracts written since Sept. 11 indicate that Blackwater brought in more than $1 billion. “With a roughly 10 percent profit margin, as Prince himself suggested before Congress, that would put him well over $100 million in profits,” Simons writes.

While the company’s most rapid growth came from Pentagon and State Department contracts, Blackwater made a steady income from the CIA. Just after Sept. 11, Prince scored an ongoing contract to provide security for the CIA station in Kabul and installations where the agency was holding detainees.

Citing a previously reported statistic, Simons puts Blackwater’s success in the context of what the intelligence community was spending. “Upwards of 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget was now being spent on private contractors, with no slowdown in sight. The business of contracting private workers to the government’s various intelligence agencies was well on its way to becoming a $50 billion-a-year industry.”

The then-Executive Director A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard and then-head of the counterterrorism unit, Cofer Black, later joined Prince’s efforts.

3. Really annoying to be in business with.

Simons dug up a State Department e-mail that reveals how hard it was to work with Blackwater. In an angry note, a senior contracting official complained about an interview that Blackwater’s vice president for strategic initiatives Chris Taylor gave to The Weekly Standard.

The comments indicated growing frustration with the company. The company had not asked State to approve the interview, which was required by contract. Further, the official complained in the e-mail that Blackwater had been talking too tough: “As for Mr. Prince, now the top man has insulted federal contracting officers and basically stated that Blackwater procurement personnel know so much more than the government contracting officers.” The official made his points by inserting his comments — in parentheses — into passages from the article. (Italics added.)

Blackwater is now one of the largest and most respected suppliers of “private military contractors” (What did I tell Blackwater about advertising themselves as a military/quasi-military organization!) in Iraq...

Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, the company’s founder, “believes to his core that this is his life’s work,” says Taylor. “If you’re not willing to drink the Blackwater Kool-aid and be committed to supporting humane democracy around the world, then there’s probably a better place” to go to work, “because that’s all we do.” (Do you have any idea the image this brings? “Blackwater Kool-aid”: what in the #F$%??/\ are you thinking.)

In January 2009, Iraq blocked Blackwater from working in the country, and State ended its contracts. Prince found out by reading a blog.