Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [1]
I had stumbled across an entire hidden industry of spies for hire, and I was captivated.
For me, the industry I’d found represented a chance to cover something new. This was a heck of a lot more interesting than a congressional hearing, a lobbying fight, or even a corruption scandal. I began calling the spies, to see if they’d talk to me. To my surprise, most of them were happy to open up about their business—if not always on the record. I met with corporate intelligence operatives in Washington, New York, London, and Berlin, many of them veterans of the world’s most elite military forces and intelligence services. I studied the history of the corporate espionage industry and learned that private-sector spying had long been intertwined with the government’s own intelligence operations.
The result of that research is this book. In writing it, though, I struggled to answer the most important question about corporate spying: is it right or wrong? To be clear, corporate spying doesn’t necessarily involve anything illegal or even unethical. To call people spies simply means that they use intelligence techniques or are veterans of government intelligence services.
The question of right and wrong, though, has haunted private intelligence operatives and their clients since the dawn of the industry in the 1850s. In fact, Allan Pinkerton, the man acknowledged to be the inventor of the private intelligence business, set down the first industry code of conduct in the mid-nineteenth century in order to ensure that such work would remain the “high and honorable” calling he felt certain it was. Pinkerton outlined basic rules for his agents. They would not work for defendants in criminal cases, and they would not investigate jurors, public officials, or union members. They would not work for a political party against its opposition, they would not work for “vice crusaders,” and they would work only for flat fees, not for a percentage of the spoils. Moreover, they would never investigate the “morals of a woman” nor would they handle divorces or other cases of a “scandalous nature.”
As the 1860s dawned, that was the bright ethical line of the private intelligence industry. But the line didn’t hold. Many of Pinkerton’s modern-day counterparts routinely violate every one of his gentlemanly commandments. The ethical line vanished so quickly, in fact, that Pinkerton’s own agency became known as one of the best union-busting tools of America’s corporate elite. By then, Pinkerton’s sons controlled the company he had founded. Sons don’t bear the sins of their fathers, it’s true. But history teaches that sons don’t always bear their virtues, either.
As the world’s economies intertwine and different value systems collide, the ethical lines are shifting again. In London, corporate surveillance practitioners grumble about their eastern European competition. The British spies—who tail executives, eavesdrop on conversations, and obtain damaging information about their targets—complain that the eastern Europeans go too far. One British operative told me that she’d never spy on a target while he was with his children. To her, tailing an executive to his son’s soccer game feels unseemly. She won’t do it. But she acknowledges that there are others who will.
The way things are going in the private spy business worries some intelligence professionals. As one experienced industry operative told me, “We’re just one scandal away from a government crackdown.” He meant that with so much unsavory conduct going on, the industry is bound to explode into public view. The veteran CIA officer John Brennan, a deputy national security adviser in the White House,