Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [116]
All the participants that morning were Americans, but their business and intelligence interests spanned the globe. This multinational mind-set is increasingly the norm in the private-sector intelligence business. Today’s corporate intelligence industry has firms operating in nearly every country and finds clients all around the world. Old political enemies can find themselves working closely together in the private sector, and traditional allies sometimes become bitter rivals. The ethical question in this, as it always is for spies, is where true loyalty lies. Is it loyalty to a country? To a company? Or to any client that can pay the fee?
The stories of six corporate intelligence operations around the world show how intelligence is becoming increasingly interconnected with the global economy:
Veracity, which hosted the meeting in New York, does business for clients all over the world.
TD International, an intelligence firm that is run by several veterans of the CIA and is based in Washington, D.C., represents a sheikh who is based in Dubai.
Johann Benöhr is a private investigator in Berlin, where he deals with strict government regulations and the German public’s angst about spying of any sort.
Hakluyt, a firm based in London, once hired a German spy to penetrate Greenpeace on behalf of global oil companies.
Hamilton Trading Group is a small consultancy founded by a former CIA officer and a former KGB operative who ran into serious trouble with the Putin government in Russia.
Trident Group, based in Virginia, also has ties to Russia: it was founded by a former Soviet military intelligence officer. It works for some of the largest American companies and law firms.
In each case, the activities of the investigators span continents. And each operation has a “hall of mirrors” quality. Take the Russians, for example: can men who were loyal communists and rose through the ranks of the Soviet establishment truly embrace working for capitalist corporate titans? Or take the former CIA officers: how do patriotic spies who once served their country feel about working for an unelected hereditary billionaire? Such questions do not necessarily involve a conflict of interest, but they may involve a conflict of values. Do spies in the global economy ever feel a disconnect between who they are and who they work for? Does that question even matter?
ONE THING MOST of the people in this industry have in common is that they didn’t start their careers with the goal of becoming private spies. When they began their careers in government, most of them didn’t know there was an international corporate intelligence industry. They wanted to be soldiers, spies, or diplomats. But somewhere along the way, they became operatives for hire.
That’s the story of Steven Fox, who founded Veracity. Fox is thirty-nine, and with his slicked-over hair, aquiline nose and deep voice, he could pass for Hollywood’s version of a 1920s society man. The industry trade publication Intelligence Online reports that Fox is a veteran of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. And although a bio Fox once used in the private sector described him as having once worked “on counterterrorism in the U.S. intelligence community,” he denies he was ever in the CIA. As he tells it, he’s a veteran of the State Department, and he took some time off to be an Internet entrepreneur during the dot-com boom in the early 2000s. Still, in his private-sector career he has surrounded himself with lots of alumni of the CIA.
Fox’s description of his background—which may or may not be a cover story—goes this way. He is a native of Manhattan, speaks French, and graduated from Princeton University in 1991. He landed a job in the State Department and soon was as far from New York society as it gets—at Bujumbura, the capital city of Burundi in central Africa.
Situated along the Great Rift Valley on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, Bujumbura has, since Burundi’s independence in