Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [119]
Next, Brown laid out his somewhat controversial vision for future relations between the United States and North Korea. Although the United States had up to that point focused on preventing North Korea from building a nuclear weapon, Brown said that either the North Koreans already have one, or it’s only a matter of time until they do. Continuing U.S. policies designed to stop that from happening would be pointless, he said. Instead, Brown argued, the United States should tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea. “My vision is we should just belly up to this,” he said. Then, tailoring his pitch to the audience in the room, Brown told the bankers and lawyers that even such a radical departure from U.S. policy wouldn’t have a shock effect on the stock market in Seoul. The market there has probably already priced in an expectation that North Korea would develop a nuclear bomb.†
The group then fired questions at the speakers. What’s the status of the relationship between China and North Korea? (Bosworth: Not as close as we think.) How does the North Korean leadership interact internally? (Brown: Kim Jong Il is not a madman, but no one on the outside really knows how the government there works.) How big is the gray market in consumer goods? (Brown: The gray market is bigger than the legitimate market.) And what about lifting those sanctions? (Brown: North Korea could have a lot to trade with the rest of the world, including seafood and minerals.)
The businesspeople were energized as they left the room, some still munching their breakfast. They’d gotten what they came for: business information and spy stories. Now they, and their hosts, would try to make money from what they’d learned.
THAT KIND OF business development takes place around the world in corporate intelligence, just like any other business. In Germany, though, the business of corporate intelligence is especially delicate.
On a warm fall afternoon in Berlin, Johann Benöhr sips a latte and smokes cigarette after cigarette at the Shan Rahimkhan Café, which overlooks a scenic cobblestone plaza, the Gendarmenmarkt. He’s there to offer a reporter a glimpse into life as a corporate investigator in Germany, speaking in nearly flawless English honed during a stint as a corporate investigator in London. With his shaved head, two-day stubble, and sleek suit, Benöhr could pass for a slimmer version of the actor Vin Diesel.
In this city, you’re never far from a reminder of its years as the center of cold war espionage. The café is just a short walk from Checkpoint Charlie, where East German and western troops faced off at one of the few passages through the Berlin Wall. That wall is long gone, and although Benöhr is sitting several blocks inside what used to be East Berlin, you’d hardly know it. The nearby boulevard Friedrichstrasse is now a fashionable shopping district, featuring luxury brands and a BMW Mini auto dealership. As the city has changed, so have its spies. Benöhr is a different kind of intelligence player: he gathers information for companies, not countries.
In recent years, Germany has been racked by corporate spying and bribery scandals: In 2005 and 2006, Deutsche Telecom hired a spy firm to obtain phone records of journalists covering it, and of the members of its own supervisory board. One of the firms Deutsche Telecom worked with was the German office of Control Risks Group, an investigative firm based in London. Control Risks in turn hired out some of the Deutsche Telecom work to Desa, a firm led by onetime informants for the East German secret police force, Stasi. When investigators from Germany’s Federal Office of Criminal Investigation decided to visit the Control Risks office in May 2008, they didn’t have to go far—the private intelligence firm is located in the same Berlin office building as the federal investigators.1 The list of German spying cases goes on: in