Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [108]
Next assigned to Northern Ireland, she served in a garrison township outside Belfast in 1993 and 1994. There, she did undercover intelligence work, but she’s vague about what it entailed—saying only that it “related to the problems of the time.” And at that time there were problems aplenty for the British army in Northern Ireland. Shaw’s job was to support the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the largely Protestant police force that patrolled a land bitterly divided between Protestants and Catholics.
After Shaw had spent eight years in the army, MI5 recruited her. MI5 focuses on counterintelligence and domestic security. Shaw says she left the military on a Friday afternoon, and reported for duty at the intelligence agency on Monday. She worked on covert operations and intelligence gathering, then left the service toward the end of the 1990s. Like many retiring spies, Shaw saw the allure of the private sector—and wanted to leave the government before she was too old to make the transition to corporate work. “I wanted to go on and do other things,” she says. “To get out and get a second career.”
She soon went to work for a private company as a security manager, and before long turned to the private sector to find operatives she could trust. And like Nick No-Name, Emma Shaw found that the market lacked military-grade surveillance expertise, and executives had almost no knowledge of the state of the art in the trade. In 1998 she set up shop as a consultant advising companies on how to hire surveillance operatives. That business eventually developed into “esoteric,” which provides surveillance services to companies and to spy firms.
For a fee, her company tails executives, and provides covert, but legal, video and audio surveillance. It also helps discover and destroy the same devices planted by a company’s opponents. Shaw’s employees offer electronic sweeping services, searching out cameras and listening devices in offices, executives’ homes, and corporate jets and yachts. Esoteric says it can set up microwave-transmission cameras to watch specific locations for long periods of time, allowing the images to be monitored from a remote location. It advertises live vehicle tracking services, which are handy for companies that want to keep covert tabs on the whereabouts of their own sales staffs and vehicles. All her services, she says, are legal. And all of them are expensive. Electronic sweeps of a set of six offices costs between 4,000 and 5,000 pounds sterling. Surveillance costs 1,000 to 1,500 pounds per person per day—with teams that can be nine or ten strong. The costs add up.
Sitting at the conference table in her office, Shaw sounds more like a corporate marketer than a spy. “What we set out to do was provide our services to very high-end corporate organizations,” she explains. In fact, she herself is working on an MBA.
One of the few indications that there’s anything out of the typical corporate experience here is a small trapezoidal white box mounted on the ceiling, with a single blinking green light on the surface. The device, called E-room, was designed and built by Shaw’s team. It monitors radio frequencies inside the room. It sounds an alarm if it detects any unauthorized transmissions. E-Room can also send an e-mail to a designated computer, alerting the user of illicit eavesdropping attempts. Shaw says she knows there are no bugs in a visitor’s briefcase, because if there were any, the E-room system would have identified them already.
Shaw spends her day largely immersed in the ugliest side of the global economy, investigating theft, fraud, insider trading, breach of contract, and harassment on behalf of lawyers and corporate clients. She also handles straight competitive intelligence cases, in which her client is spying on another company to determine its secrets. Shaw says companies use surveillance for “anything where there is either a risk to