Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [104]
The downside of this technique is that the lasers don’t work as well, or at all, with double- or triple-paned windows, which are increasingly common. And it can be maddeningly difficult to get a good angle for the laser when eavesdropping is taking place on the upper floors of high-rise office buildings—from street level, the angle toward the windows of the higher floors can be so oblique that the devices become useless. With high-paying clients, the way to get around that problem is to rent an office or hotel room in a building across the street at about the same altitude. It’s expensive, but it puts the laser in position to record the meeting.
Nick and his team conduct surveillance all over the world, sometimes flying an entire team of nine or ten operators across continents to observe an important meeting or tail a high-value executive. Depending on the laws in the country they’re working in, Nick says they can do almost anything: “We’ll bug a house, bug cars, put locator devices on vehicles, conduct electronic intercepts of e-mails, whatever it takes,” he says. They use encrypted communications equipment to avoid being detected. “But we won’t break the law. We retain barristers here in London, and make sure we’re on the right side of the law wherever we’re operating. Otherwise, the information we collect is useless to our clients.” Illegally gathered material is inadmissible in court—and can’t be used in lawsuits. What’s more, any lawbreaking by Nick’s team could be used by the other side as leverage in the ongoing business dispute.
Because the skills required for surveillance are so rare, the industry isn’t huge. Nick estimates that even in spy-infested London, there are only enough crews to tail about twenty executives at any one time. Given the typical nine- or ten-man surveillance crew, this implies that there are somewhat fewer than 200 surveillance people working in London. (Another surveillance operative there gives a higher estimate: 100 executives could be tailed on any one day, she says. That implies a high-end range of something under 1,000 surveillance operators prowling London’s streets.) Clients, therefore, sometimes have to join waiting lists for surveillance on a given target, or they have to pay huge fees for an American or German team to be flown in during a busy time.
As manpower-intensive, and expensive, as professional surveillance can be, it doesn’t always work—or at least it doesn’t work as well as Hollywood movies would suggest. Nick and his team can spend an entire weekend sitting in front of an executive’s house, and the target, perhaps indulging in a DVD marathon, may not emerge once. One corporate spy recalls a time he hired a surveillance team to tail a subject, left the office, and went home. Around 10 P.M. he got a frantic call from the surveillance operatives in the field: “Do you have a tuxedo pressed?” they asked. He did. “Great. Then, quick—run down to this address; the subject has suddenly gone into a black-tie affair, and we don’t have anyone on the team wearing a tux to get into the event.” The spy rushed to the location, bluffed his way past the greeters at the entrance to the ball, and found the subject enjoying a drink at the bar with a number of colleagues. His tuxedo saved the surveillance effort. But the episode could just as easily have gone the other way, and the entire day’s effort, costing tens of thousands of dollars, could have been wasted.
Such unpredictability is inherent to surveillance, and it is why Nick says he encourages clients to consider surveillance only when there is no other way to get information. Clients attracted by the glamour of surveillance operations don’t always listen: they hire the team anyway. The clients themselves can be the biggest hurdle to a successful operation. Nick says that in one of the rare instances when he worked directly with a