Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [0]
Inside the Secret World of Corporate Espionage
Eamon Javers
For Maureen, who promised me sixty-three years.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One Code Name: Yucca
Part I: From Bogus Island to Deep Chocolate
Chapter Two A High and Honorable Calling
Chapter Three For the Money
Chapter Four The Man Is Gone
Chapter Five Thug Busters
Chapter Six The Chocolate War
Part II: Techniques, Technologies, and Talent
Chapter Seven Tactical Behavior Assessment
Chapter Eight The Eddie Murphy Strategy
Chapter Nine Nick No-Name
Chapter Ten They’re All Kind of Crazy
Chapter Eleven Is This a Great Country, or What?
Epilogue In from the Cold
Acknowledgments
Notes
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
The first time I met a spy was in January 2007.
I had been a reporter in Washington, D.C., for more than twelve years by that time, and I’d met congressmen, senators, ambassadors, and a president of the United States. I wrote about good guys, meeting with officials from the American Red Cross, police forces, and religious orders. And I wrote about bad guys, visiting a federal prison to interview a convicted embezzler and chatting with the infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff at his restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue. I thought I’d seen pretty much everything the nation’s capital had to offer a reporter. But I’d never met a spy.
So I was excited as I walked up Connecticut Avenue toward Dupont Circle on that chilly afternoon. I quickened my pace, past Burberry, Brooks Brothers, and the other luxury stores that front the broad avenue. I stepped into the boxy, nondescript corporate office building that held the office of the man I was going to meet: Nick Day.
Day was in his late thirties, only a few years older than I was, but he was already a veteran of the British counterintelligence and security service MI5. He was the CEO of Diligence, LLC, a globe-spanning firm that sold intelligence services to private-sector clients. His cofounder at the firm was a fourteen-year veteran of the CIA. They had connections at the top of British and American business and intelligence, and they worked for some of the richest people in the world.
I’d spent nearly five months gathering information on Diligence at that point, and I’d been astonished at what I’d found. Day and his employees had run a months-long covert undercover operation designed to penetrate the offices of KPMG, the global accounting giant. They’d done it on behalf of a Washington lobbying firm that was in turn working for a company controlled by one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs. And they’d gotten caught.
I didn’t know what to expect. I’d never been to Langley, so I imagined that a spy headquarters would look something like a cross between the laboratory of James Bond’s “Q” and Batman’s cave. But when I arrived on Day’s floor, I walked into a reception area that looked much more like the offices of a 1990s dot-com company than a Hollywood set. Day’s receptionist offered me coffee, and soon Nick Day himself came striding out from the back office. He was of medium build, with dark hair and rolled-up shirtsleeves that revealed hairy forearms. He was charming and friendly, and didn’t seem the least bit fazed by the mess his company was in. I figured he’d seen worse. He led me past a row of analysts hunched over computer screens to an office that was cluttered with brown boxes. It looked as though he’d been packing files.
Day gave me a brief on-the-record interview in which he explained his company’s role in the world economy. Spies, he said, are sometimes the only people who can solve a company’s problems. That was intriguing enough, but I soon learned that Diligence wasn’t the only company in the corporate espionage business. There are probably hundreds of firms like it around the world. Corporations, financial institutions, and wealthy individuals can hire intelligence contractors in Britain, America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
In Washington alone, I discovered, potential clients