Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [102]
Nick won’t say what theaters of combat he served in, but he notes, “I was in the British military. And we’ve only gone a certain number of places in the past fifteen to twenty years.” It’s likely that his résumé includes stints in Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East. Nick says he was often assigned to security details, where he learned the basics of what the British call “close protection” and Americans call bodyguarding.
Generally, special forces units protecting a dignitary or some other high-value target include several bodyguards who stand within two or three feet, each monitoring a different area to the front, side, or rear. You often see them on television. They are mostly big men, unsmiling in the midst of cheerful crowds greeting a president or prime minister. They seldom look up. They are watching people’s hands. Nick calls them “big, hairy-assed monsters.” But that’s not a description of Nick. He was typically assigned to the perimeter of security, working undercover. Dressed as normal members of the public, Nick and the others on his undercover team watched the crowd from outside the security area around the subject.
Under his jacket, Nick kept a Heckler and Koch MP5 nine-millimeter submachine gun, a lightweight, air-cooled weapon favored by more than forty military forces around the world. With its stock tucked under his armpit and its barrel pointing down toward his waist, the 26.8-inch MP5 barely made a bulge in Nick’s street clothes.
In theory, anyone who wanted to attack Nick’s subject would be watching the target and the highly visible big men near him. The members of Nick’s undercover team—positioned well back from any would-be assailant—could watch without themselves being spotted.
“They’re not looking at me,” he says. “I’m the little bloke eating ice cream with his girlfriend. When the bad guy pulls out a grenade, that’s when we move from surveillance to intervention. If it’s in Iraq or Afghanistan and we think it’s life threatening, we’ll work within our legal remit and take every action necessary.” In Iraq, the “legal remit” might include shooting an assailant dead at close range. In a corporate setting, it might mean slapping the hand of a menacing heckler.
When Nick retired from the military in the late 1990s, he returned to England to do the same kind of “close protection” work in the private sector, for private military contractors. It was a logical career move. “You’ve got all these skills, and not a lot of employment opportunity,” Nick explains. But he didn’t love the work. So he drifted into corporate intelligence, reaching out to a number of London’s biggest spy agencies. He says he was astonished by what he saw there. “Their surveillance capabilities were zero. They were sitting in cars taking pictures of people.”
Nick saw a market opportunity. There was demand for top-of-the-line espionage services offered by veterans of the British special forces. He began freelancing for the corporate intelligence firms, picking up surveillance work as needed. He found himself doing a lot of screening of new hires for large corporate clients. Before offering top management jobs to prospective recruits, the companies wanted to have them followed for a couple of days. Does this executive have any embarrassing problems the company ought to know about? Nick tailed them on weekends. Did they have a secret heroin habit? A weakness for hookers? Perverse sexual tendencies? Nick would find out. Sometimes, he says, he found that the executives did have problems, but the company hired them anyway. “Think of everything you can think of that goes on in society,” Nick says. “I’ve seen it. I’ve watched executives picking up transvestites in New York City. What we’re doing is the biggest reality TV show there is.”
It’s not clear how commonly companies conduct surveillance on their own hires. But Nick No-Name and other people involved in the business say it happens most often with a “marquee” corporate hire—any executive who is going to be paid an enormous