Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [125]
At the time, the oil companies were concerned about firebombing at gas stations in Germany, which they suspected were masterminded by left-wing activists. They also worried about a protest by Greenpeace at the British Petroleum (BP) Stena Dee oil rig off the Shetland Islands. Reynolds told Schlickenrieder that he wanted to know what Greenpeace was doing to prepare for an expected lawsuit from the oil companies. Hakluyt also wanted inside information on the location of the ship Greenpeace, which the group often used for elaborate and embarrassing publicity stunts against companies.
Hakluyt gave Schlickenrieder the code name “Camus,” after the author of The Stranger. Using his cover as a documentary filmmaker, Schlickenrieder approached environmentalist groups and liberal activists, and tried to glean whatever information he could.
Greenpeace was snookered. Speaking to a reporter for the Sunday Times after the affair had come to light, the communications director of Greenpeace Germany said, “The bastard was good, I have to admit. He got information about our planner Arctic Frontier campaign to focus on the climate change issue and the responsibility of BP. BP knew everything. They were not taken by surprise.” The spokesman added, “Manfred filmed and interviewed all the time, but now we realize we never saw anything.”
That was surprising enough. But Schlickenrieder had one other revelation left. After his cover was blown, another detail came to light. All the time that Schlickenrieder had been a paid spy for Hakluyt working for BP and Shell, he was also in the service of the German government. Schlickenrieder worked for the BND, the German counterpart of the CIA, which paid him the equivalent of more than 3,000 pounds per month in expenses, noted the Times.
So the corporate spy was also a government spy, and he was paid by both sides at the same time. It was the ultimate nexus between government intelligence and corporate spying.
IN THE WORLD of international corporate intelligence, such overlapping loyalties can be profitable, but they can also be dangerous.
In one little-known case, a partnership between an American veteran of the CIA and a former officer in the Soviet Union’s KGB ended when the KGB man—who had made enemies for himself in Putin’s Russia—vanished. What happened to him, and whether he’s alive or dead today, is uncertain. His partner is still trying to solve the mystery.
Today, Jack Platt lives in a small house in leafy Great Falls, Virginia, a suburb of Washington. During the cold war, he served as a CIA officer recruiting spies within the KGB to funnel information to the United States. He spent a large part of those years trying to lure Gennady Vasilenko, a KGB officer who worked in the Soviet Union’s embassy in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s and 1980s, to spy for the United States. Of course, Vasilenko was also trying to lure Platt to spy against the United States.
As Platt tells it, neither man succeeded, but the two spent a lot of time together. And although they worked for rival services, they became friendly. They went target shooting and fishing together, and once took in a Harlem Globetrotters game in Washington.
In 1980, they found a way to work together—which Vasilenko recalled years later in an interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution. That year, the Olympic Games were being held in Moscow, and the Soviet Union was concerned about the prospect of terrorism at the games. The United States was boycotting the Olympics to protest against the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. But even so, the CIA had valuable intelligence the Russians needed: a rare photograph of an international terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal,” who was one of the world’s most wanted men. It could be of enormous value to Russian agents working