Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [127]
But there are always leaks—the corporate equivalent of Robert Hanssen—and a veteran spy like Platt knows this all too well. “At the top of every report that I send to somebody, I say ‘privileged and confidential.’ But the bottom line is that doesn’t mean shit,” Platt says.
Platt doesn’t want to discuss Vasilenko’s disappearance. He says publicity wouldn’t be good for Vasilenko’s chances of getting out of prison, but he is bitter about the way the Russian government is being run under the supervision of KGB veterans such as Putin. “These secret police guys have no fucking idea what an economy is,” Platt says dismissively. That’s going to prove disastrous for the Russian people in the long run, Platt believes. And with a government run by Putin—even if he’s officially now in Russia’s number-two political job—Platt knows he may never see his old friend and partner again.
NOT ALL STORIES about Russian corporate intelligence have such a grim ending. One example is the story of Yuri Koshkin, a former Soviet military intelligence officer who relocated to the United States when the cold war ended. Today, at age forty-nine, he operates a small intelligence firm, Trident Group, in Rosslyn, Virginia, not far from his former enemies at the Pentagon.5
On May 26, 2007, a Russian agent working for Trident slipped unnoticed into a movie theater in Moscow showing Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. He donned night-vision goggles, scanned the theater, and spotted his target. This maneuver was no cold war spy scenario: the agent was a former Russian cop, and he was searching for real-life pirates making illicit copies of the film. On the Internet, a single copy of this blockbuster film could cost Disney millions in lost sales. Disney wanted the pirates caught—and fast.
That day, the culprit was the projector operator. He was given away by a telltale stream of light seeping out of the projection room. Hey—what’s going on in here? As the agent burst into the room, the startled operator looked up and offered him a $1,000 bribe to keep quiet about what he’d seen. The agent turned the bribe down, and radioed Trident Group’s 24-7 operations center in downtown Moscow, an office staffed by former KGB officers, veterans of Soviet military intelligence, and ex-cops.
Founded in 1996, Trident specializes in helping American companies like Disney navigate the Russian market. Trident consulted with Disney about the bribe offered to its employee, and Disney authorized a $1,000 bonus to the agent for turning down the bribe. This was a successful clandestine operation, and typical of what’s going on in the global economy as spies help companies feel their way into tricky emerging markets around the world. It’s a sign of the urgency those companies feel that they’re overriding years of corporate history. In this instance, Walt Disney himself was a virulent anticommunist who testified before the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 that the Screen Animators Guild was dominated by communists. Today, his namesake company is working hand in glove with a firm founded by men who were educated as Soviet Marxists, some of whom spent the better part of their early careers spying on the United States. Says the former general counsel of the CIA, Robert M. McNamara, Jr.: “Is this a great country, or what?”
Yuri Koshkin was born in 1958 in Moscow, into what he describes as a “typical family of the Russian intelligentsia.” In 1975, he says, he enrolled in the Military Institute of the Soviet Ministry of Defense. He studied the English and Cambodian languages on his way to becoming an intelligence officer in the Red Army. “Cambodian was boring,” Koshkin recalls, “but