Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [115]
Doctor Marisa Randazzo is an expert in assassins, stalkers, and school shooters. She spent ten years with the United States Secret Service as chief research psychologist at the National Threat Assessment Center, developing elaborate profiles of potential killers. Today, she heads Threat Assessment Resources International, a firm based in Sparks, Nevada, just outside Reno. It offers a threat assessment training package for companies to help protect themselves from internal threats. The training includes walking executives through case studies of workplace shootings and insider sabotage, showing them the basic principles of threat assessment in the workplace, and conducting a mock emergency drill to hone crisis-response skills.
Shaw and Randazzo describe several key traits of dangerous insiders. Many have a medical issue, such as a psychiatric problem, alcoholism, or a high level of anxiety. Others are on the extreme end of the personality spectrum—the office oddballs who are extremely shy, who require high maintenance, or who otherwise cause their colleagues to be uncomfortable around them. And many people who cause problems have a history of minor rule violations preceding a major incident. They may have broken rules regarding technology, or personnel. Many dangerous insiders are already on the radar screen of the human resources department even before they do major damage. And in about one-third of serious cases, a dangerous insider has a social network in place—other people who know in advance what the person is planning.
People who fit this pattern don’t always cause problems—they can do their jobs for years without trouble. It’s when people with these characteristics hit a problem in life that they start displaying what psychologists call “concerning behaviors.” They may have a personal or professional disappointment. A demotion, the death of a spouse, or a move to a new location can all trigger damaging behavior. And when that cycle starts, there’s no sure way to tell just how much damage will be done.
That’s why the services of intelligence specialists like Shaw and Randazzo can be so valuable: it’s much cheaper to head off a problem early than it is to pay to clean up the mess.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Is This a Great Country, or What?
In April 2008, about a dozen lawyers and investment bankers gathered over muffins and coffee in a small room on the third floor of the Princeton Club on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan to hear from a spy.
They were there for a briefing sponsored by Veracity Worldwide, a one-year-old corporate intelligence firm with close connections to the CIA. And although the people in the room represented some of the top American investment banks, they weren’t there for anything to do with the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ stock market. They were concerned about markets on the other side of the globe: the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Japan and the Korea Exchange in Pusan, South Korea.
The American corporate reps wanted to know what was going on in North Korea, the unpredictable communist enclave just across the Sea of Japan from the Tokyo market. The North Korean ruler Kim Jong Il had been acting increasingly erratically as his country’s economy collapsed and famine stalked his people. North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons was an open secret. No one knew how stable Kim Jong Il’s control over the country was.
For the western businesspeople, those weren’t just interesting political issues. They were important business concerns. A collapse of the North Korean government, a surprise nuclear test, or a mass famine could destabilize the region and cause capital to flee from the Japanese and South Korean stock exchanges. An adroit banker, though, would be well positioned to get his money out first. Or, better yet, he could bet