Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [146]
*Forrest Mars, the reclusive billionaire son of the company’s founder Frank Mars, was a famous figure in the industry for having invented M&Ms and the Mars bar. He died in 1999. This item probably refers to his son, Forrest, Jr., who was by that time in active control of the company, along with his brother. Tretyakov is Russia’s national gallery of fine art. At the time, Mars was becoming increasingly concerned with business opportunities in the former Soviet Union.
*Asked in the fall of 2008 to comment about the relationship with Beckett Brown, Nestlé’s spokeswoman Laurie MacDonald said Nestlé never paid any money directly to Beckett Brown. She declined to confirm Nestlé’s hiring of Nichols Dezenhall, citing a company policy against discussing outside vendors. And she said she could not offer any comment on the tactics applied by Beckett Brown, “because we have absolutely zero working knowledge about them.”
*Roald Dahl based much of his description of Wonka’s chocolate factory on corporate espionage he observed in the business during his own childhood in England in the early twentieth century, according to Joël Glenn Brenner on Slate.com in 2005. Dahl also had personal experience as a spy: he was a covert operative for the British government in Washington during World War II.
*The Washington Post ’s reporting team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had a term of their own for this sort of response when they spotted it during their Watergate investigation in the 1970s. They called it a non-denial denial.
*In September, GeoEye’s insurance company, Willis Inspace, paid $40 million on the insurance policy for the satellite. By the summer of 2008, GeoEye had begun negotiations to donate the busted satellite to the University of Colorado. After all, everything on the satellite except the camera worked perfectly. Engineers at GeoEye figured that the aeronautics students at the university would get a kick out of being able to maneuver their own satellite.
*The video game Hawx, released in September 2008 by Tom Clancy’s production company, features fighter jet dogfights over cities around the world. The cities themselves were created for the game using GeoEye 3-D images. So when a player is fighting over Brazil, for example, he sees real images of Brazil beneath his jet.
*Itasca is also about a thirty-minute drive from Allan Pinkerton’s hometown, Dundee, Illinois.
*In real life, the USDA does put out a crop report on orange juice. It’s titled Orange Juice: World Markets and Trade.
*Some people in the satellite community called this maneuver “checkbook shutter control,” since it accomplished the same result as banning the images outright would have.
*That’s not just an issue for the military. Google’s images are also disconcerting to advocates of privacy. Punch in almost any address in the United States, and you’ll see a satellite picture of it. Do you want your old college boyfriend to be able to see your house? What about that angry guy you fired at work last year?
*Although they have the same first name, this corporate spy and Nick Day, the CEO of Diligence, are not the same person.
*Two months after this briefing, in fact, the North Koreans got their second wish. The Bush administration removed North Korea from the list of enemy countries under