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In the summer of 2001, Christopher James made a rare mistake, approaching Enron—then one of America’s leading companies—with a business proposition. James’s sales effort would prove embarrassing for Hakluyt on several levels. First, this well-connected spy appears not to have known that Enron was only a few months from collapse. Second, the man Hakluyt approached, Jeff Skilling, was about to become a symbol of corporate bad behavior. At this time, Skilling was a few weeks away from leaving the company. Worst of all, Hakluyt’s sales pitch to Enron became public knowledge after the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made public 200,000 of Enron’s internal e-mails from 1999 through 2002.

Buried within that mountain of communication was a letter of July 8, 2001, from Hakluyt’s Christopher James to Enron’s Jeff Skilling. A few months earlier, the two men had been introduced by a longtime oil industry executive, Phil Carroll, then the CEO of the giant engineering firm Flour Corporation.* Carroll was a perfect point of contact: he was a former CEO of Shell Oil, and he lived in the same apartment building in Houston as Enron’s chairman, Ken Lay. Carroll, Lay, and their wives regularly dined together, sharing meals where the talk was more social than business. Now, James was following up with Lay’s man, Skilling, hoping to win Enron as a high-paying client:

Dear Mr. Skilling,

Your office has asked me to outline Hakluyt’s services…. I would say simply this; Hakluyt is what you make of it—it places an unparalleled private intelligence network at the personal disposal of senior commercial figures.

…Although we work for divisional directors on tactical issues, we have found our most rewarding work in personal dealings with CEOs who wish—for whatever reason—to have a confidential agency at their own disposal. It was this, which prompted Phil Carroll to write to you about us in April…. We look at people and the issues, which often drive them to make the decisions or act as they do. All our work is unattributable.3

The work is unattributable, that is, until the e-mails are revealed in a high-profile, years-long legal investigation.

In another e-mail, James told Skilling that Hakluyt had already done some low-level work for Enron, and he hinted that it was looking for a much bigger piece of Enron’s spying business. Enron had connections to former CIA officers, and wasn’t afraid to deploy their talents on its own behalf. Since Enron was using American CIA veterans operating out of London for its flights over European power plants, James may already have been aware of the extent of Enron’s interest in the spy game.

Hakluyt was already developing a reputation as a rough customer in the global economy. Earlier that year, the Sunday Times of London had broken an embarrassing story: Hakluyt had hired a German agent to spy on the environmental group Greenpeace. The plan had all the hallmarks of spy fiction, but it was real. Also, the spies didn’t work for queen and country battling evil empires, they worked for the oil companies Shell and British Petroleum, and they battled environmentalists.

The Sunday Times laid out the details. In 1996, Hakluyt’s cofounder Mike Reynolds had hired a German spy, Manfred Schlickenrieder. With his shoulder-length hair and impeccable liberal credentials, Schlickenrieder was a natural infiltration agent. He’d once been a member of the German communist party, and he was a voracious reader of Marxist literature. Schlickenrieder had a documentary film company, Gruppe 2, that was based in Munich; and he was well-known in European activist circles for his work on sympathetic documentaries about leftist groups. He had already spent years on an unfinished documentary about the Red Army Faction, a left-wing German terrorist organization. Apparently, no one on the political left asked why Schlickenrieder’s documentaries never seemed to get finished and never seemed to appear on television.

Schlickenrieder