• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1236 0

is another concerned observer. “The problem is that you do things in the service of your country that are just not appropriate to do in the private sector,” Brennan told me in the months before he was tapped for his White House role by President Barack Obama. “I hope they’ve brought their ethics with them.” At the time, Brennan was between government jobs, and sitting in a bland office at the suburban Virginia company where he worked, which is called The Analysis Corporation. It, too, is a private intelligence firm, although it sells its services to the government, not to the private sector.

Even as it remains a largely hidden industry, the private spying business is becoming an integral part of the way companies do business around the world. The past several years have made it abundantly clear that there are far more hidden, and dangerous, secrets at work in the global economy than even many sophisticated businesspeople once thought. For nervous financiers and executives, ramping up private intelligence capability is an understandable response to the confusing and sometimes deadly situations that surround them. The global economy is a paranoid place.

What will a world shaped by that kind of corporate paranoia look like? To understand, we first need to see the private spies in the field.

Our story begins on a warm afternoon on the island of Bermuda.

CHAPTER ONE

Code Name: Yucca

The poor guy had no idea what he was getting himself into.

When KPMG’s accountant Guy Enright stepped into the Italian restaurant Little Venice in sunny downtown Hamilton, Bermuda, in the spring of 2005, all he knew was that he was there for a lunch meeting with a man who called himself Nick Hamilton.

To set up the lunch, Hamilton had called Enright’s cell phone days earlier, while the accountant was in London attending a KPMG meeting on conflict-of-interest rules. This is going to sound really weird, but I’ve got something sensitive to talk to you about. Could you come to the restaurant alone? Hamilton had told Enright he wanted to discuss important matters, and left the accountant with a vague impression that he was with one or another of the British intelligence services.

There was no way for Enright to know that Hamilton was not at all who he suggested he was. He couldn’t know that several clandestine operatives were right now following him from his office at KPMG Financial Advisory Services to the restaurant, working in an efficient tag-team relay to ensure that Enright wouldn’t spot anything unusual. And Enright certainly didn’t notice that, among the crowd of well-dressed international businesspeople and tourists dining at Little Venice, one woman watched as he took his seat. She, too, was working for Hamilton, and she was there to make sure Enright didn’t have backup of his own.

Enright did not. He was way out of his league. The British-born executive was just like millions of other mid-level white collar workers around the world. What did he know about espionage? But his position as a senior manager in corporate recovery gave him access to documents for which a wealthy client might pay millions of dollars. Might lie for. Might steal, if necessary. And that client hired the man who called himself Nick Hamilton. Hamilton’s team was a mix of American CIA veterans, former officers of the British MI5 security service, and young, adventure-seeking American college graduates.

They were corporate spies.

Over the next several months, the spies executed an extraordinary plan they code-named “Project Yucca.” The covert operation, as elaborate as it became, was just one piece of a global struggle between two corporate behemoths with Russian ties. The spies were working on behalf of Alfa Group Consortium, which is one of Russia’s biggest privately owned financial-industrial conglomerates, its vast holdings ranging from oil and gas to commercial and investment banking, insurance, and telecommunications. At the time Guy Enright showed up for lunch in Bermuda, Alfa Group was in a furious dispute with a mysterious Bermuda-based entity called