Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [107]
Nick sees all kinds of variations. “We were hired once when Bank One was doing a negotiation with Bank Two,” he says. “But Bank One suspected that Bank Two was secretly dealing with Bank Three and talking to Bank One only to drive down its deal price with Bank Three. So we put the top executives at Banks Two and Three under surveillance during the entire negotiation.”
Although much of business life these days is conducted by phone and e-mail—which are not easy surveillance targets—Nick remains convinced that when a lot of money is changing hands, people still meet face-to-face. And when they do, he’s ready to document it all. “That’s the advantage we have as ex-military operators,” he says. In the case of the three banks, “We had a guy who was able to swim forty meters to the island where the subject’s house was and have a look.” Once there, Nick’s man dug a hole in the ground just outside the banker’s house—and lived in it for days while he watched everything that went on. In the end, Nick’s team discovered that Bank Two was conducting talks with Bank Three, and tipped the client off to the deception.
If such spying can save a company millions of dollars, executives reason, it more than justifies the tens of thousands of dollars paid to uncover the information. And if a banker on the other side of a deal objects to having former soldiers from the British special forces living in holes in his backyard, so what? It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.
NOT EVERYONE IN the surveillance industry is as low-profile as Nick No-Name. Another British operative, Emma Shaw, works in an unremarkable office complex in the bedroom community of Old Woking, in Surrey, about half an hour from London by fast train. The other tenants in the complex are small businesses, accountants, and one-man consulting shops. Emma Shaw’s office has the atmosphere of a suburban dentist’s office, and she herself doesn’t look anything like a secret agent—but that’s the point. A veteran intelligence operative, Shaw appears youthful, spending a casual Friday in her office clad in a pink Abercrombie and Fitch sweat top and fashionable jeans. Her blond hair has highlights, and she’s got high cheekbones, giving her an athletic appearance. She looks like a young mom on her way to football practice.
But Emma Shaw is the real deal, as well trained as Nick No-Name, though with a different business philosophy. Shaw feels that surveillance is a legitimate part of the business process and that surveillance operators like her shouldn’t hide in the shadows. Her office has a sign on the front door. Her company, “esoteric,” has a Web site (www.esotericltd.com), and she hands out slick marketing materials detailing her services, with the tagline: “A specialist security and covert investigations company.”
Shaw is a manager now, and doesn’t do much actual snooping herself, so she’s less concerned than Nick No-Name about her identity becoming public. It’s not bad for her career, and in the right context, publicity may even help. She lays down one condition, though: she won’t discuss the exact details of surveillance techniques she uses on behalf of her corporate clients. They’re by and large the same techniques used to this day by the British intelligence service MI5 and by British military intelligence. Providing too detailed a description, she fears, could give vital intelligence to the terrorists who are trying to elude British intelligence every day.
Emma Shaw was born in Yorkshire, the coastal county in northern England, and at age eighteen joined the army, where she was assigned to the military police. As a teenager in the army, she learned the basics of overt investigations, and then moved on to undercover missions, helping the top brass work against drug use among British forces. She tailed suspects, posed as a regular soldier, and helped support police investigations of soldiers suspected of smuggling or selling drugs. Shaw found