Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [129]
But as I sat at the tiny table at Starbucks sipping my latte, it struck me that Koshkin and his spying colleagues in the private sector represent something new in Washington. For they are extending the espionage culture of the cold war into the global economy. For good or ill, the heirs of Allen Dulles and his rivals at the KGB are hanging out their shingles and selling their services to clients around the world.
That’s the reason why Washington is a hub of their global private intelligence industry. The spy firm Diligence once had its headquarters here, and today it maintains an office just two blocks from the White House. Three blocks on the other side of the executive mansion is the headquarters of TD International, where several intelligence veterans offer what the firm blandly describes as “strategic advisory and risk management” consulting services. Kroll’s office is just outside Georgetown. From there, it’s a short walk to the offices of Investigative Group International, which is headed by Terry Lenzner, the man who became known as Bill Clinton’s private investigator during the scandal over Monica Lewinsky. There are more: Executive Action, Fairfax Group, and Corporate Risk International all have headquarters in this area, offering some combination of risk management, investigative, and intelligence services. The offices of Koshkin’s Trident Group are in Rosslyn, Virginia.
A fifteen-minute drive away in northern Virginia, the firm Total Intelligence Solutions operates what it calls a “global fusion center”—a data gathering operation—at its bland corporate offices. I toured the facility with Matthew Devost, who was the company’s president in 2008—an unassuming guy who on that day was wearing a blue polo shirt and khakis. Devost is something new in the intelligence world: he has spent his entire career in the private sector—not in the government. His career is a sign that the private-sector intelligence business has reached its next stage of evolution. The industry is now incubating the careers of intelligence professionals from entry level to executive rank.
Devost told me he’d worked on a dramatic intelligence operation in Lebanon in 2006. Total Intelligence Solutions worked frantically during that year’s thirty-four-day war between Israel and Hezbollah extremists. The corporate clients had employees trapped in Lebanon when the shooting started, and needed to get them out. Devost and his colleagues used real-time satellite images and a network of private informants on the ground to determine which bridges had been bombed, and where heavy fighting might block evacuation routes. It was the kind of work a CIA officer might once have done for Americans stranded during a coup in a banana republic. But this was a completely private-sector intelligence operation, with no government agents involved at all.
One level below such organized, corporate, and official spy firms is an enormous network of sole practitioners and small operators. These are private intelligence operatives who are available for hire on a case-by-case basis to anyone with the cash to pay for a few days—or a few hours—of work. They come from diverse backgrounds. I’ve met former FBI agents, former investigators for the SEC, and former investigative reporters who sell their services to clients. In March 2009, two reporters I admire greatly—Glenn Simpson and Sue Schmidt of the Wall Street Journal—announced their resignations. They formed SNS Global, LLC, a firm that will do what Simpson described as “some public interest work and some consulting.”2 Both are well known in the world of investigative reporting: Schmidt won a Pulitzer Prize after breaking the story of the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff; and Simpson has made a career out of probing the darker reaches of money laundering, financial crime, financing of terrorists, and all sorts of corporate misconduct. Now their skills are available