Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [114]
Ethelyne_orion and his pals don’t stand a chance, and that hasn’t escaped the notice of some very shrewd players around the world: As the value of their product rises, the political intelligence firms themselves are becoming fair game. Alperstein sold Washington Analysis in July 2005 to China’s Xinhua Finance, which is partly owned by an entity controlled by the communist government: Xinhua News Agency. Xinhua picked up Washington Analysis for an undisclosed amount just as the bidding war between Chevron and China’s CNOOC over the acquisition of Unocal was reaching its apogee in the summer of 2005. Chevron outmuscled CNOOC for that deal. The failure indicated that the Chinese didn’t fully understand life inside the Beltway.
Maybe that’s why the Chinese were interested in a savvy Washington firm. Years ago, foreign governments depended on their embassies and their networks of spies to obtain inside information on the latest maneuverings in the American political and economic scene. Today, they can hire a private firm to do the work.
THE MOST DANGEROUS people aren’t always the ones working for the other side. Sometimes, they’re the ones who are supposed to be on your side. Defending against them is called counterintelligence. Companies, too, are constantly looking within for signs of treachery from their own employees. To do that, they lean on counterintelligence experts fresh out of government agencies.
Doctor Eric Shaw was sitting in his office in Washington, D.C., when he got a call from a distraught client at a large oil company several years ago. An unbalanced executive at this company had begun making sinister comments to colleagues about his AK-47 assault rifle. The man’s wife was dying of cancer, and he was going on long drinking binges and getting into fistfights. The client was worried. Clearly, this man’s mental health presented a potentially explosive situation. The client reached out to Shaw, a clinical psychologist and a veteran of the CIA’s psychological profiling shop who now consults for a private investigative firm, Stroz Friedberg. Shaw specializes in finding internal threats to companies: leakers, drunks, disgruntled employees, and staffers on the verge of a violent outburst. The work gives him a cool, unemotional bearing, in stark contrast to the people he studies. “They’re all kind of crazy,” he says. “But I usually don’t get called unless they’re totally crazy.” Shaw’s work is the corporate equivalent of counterintelligence: the shoe leather that goes into spotting and stopping the threats coming a company’s way.
Shaw dug into the details, trying to discern just what type of dangerous personality this man had. As with any other kind of intelligence, the key to detecting a threat, Shaw says, is information. There are dozens of different kinds of threats, and each one calls for a different response. Act too soon, or on too little information, and a situation can spiral out of control. After talking to the unstable executive’s colleagues, and reviewing detailed reports of the incidents, Shaw concluded that the man was going through a temporary crisis. If handled correctly, he wouldn’t pose a long-term threat. In the end, Shaw’s advice to the oil company seemed counterintuitive. He told the company not to fire the man and not to go to law enforcement. Instead, the man’s bosses should tell him he couldn’t come back to work until he had completed a course of therapy, which the company would pay for.
As it turns out, the crisis passed and the executive went back to work, with no harm done to the company or its employees. Soon afterward, he landed a new job at a labor union working against the company—not a great situation for management, but a healthy channel for the man’s anger. It was a far better outcome than the violent outburst that might have ensued if the company had fired him. Shaw says most companies