Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [3]
But the battle was much more than just a legal tussle between companies: it was a personal grudge match between two of Russia’s most powerful men, and it had deep implications for the relationship between the government and the private sector in Russia. And the convoluted battle showed the world how the struggle for power inside Russia could spill over into courtrooms—and board rooms—throughout the global economy. On one side was Mikhail Fridman, one of the youngest Russian oligarchs, who is said to be worth more than $20 billion. Fridman controls Alfa Group, and he was at loggerheads with Leonid Reiman, a former Soviet Army officer who served in Russia’s government under Putin as minister of communications. Fridman and Alfa were convinced that Reiman was the real owner of IPOC, and that the company’s attempt to control the MegaFon shares was a conflict of interest with Reiman’s government position. IPOC, meanwhile, maintained that it was owned by a Danish lawyer, Jeffrey Galmond, who just happened to be Reiman’s attorney. With powerful, and angry, men set against each other, it seemed that almost anything could happen. A former high-ranking American official involved in the affair told a reporter looking into the saga: “Be careful on this one. People get killed over stuff like this in Russia.”*
The goal of the spy operation Project Yucca, then, was to help Alfa untangle the intricate global legal structure of IPOC.1 At the time, the accounting firm KPMG was conducting an investigation on behalf of the government of Bermuda into exactly that question. Alfa’s spies desperately wanted access to the investigation—what nuggets of new information had it uncovered about Alfa’s bitter rival? That’s why the spies targeted Guy Enright: they wanted him to turn over confidential documents at the heart of the investigation.
The spies—veterans of western intelligence services now working in the private sector on behalf of a Russian oligarch—developed a cynical plan: they would appeal to Enright’s patriotism as a British subject. They convinced Enright that they were working for the crown. They mentioned the sinister dealings of the Russian mafia. And before long, Enright would find himself entering the secret world of spies, hiding confidential documents under rocks in a Bermuda field for Hamilton and his team to retrieve, terrified of being caught, and believing all the while that he was helping his country.
He wouldn’t find out until much later that it was all a lie.
COMPLEX LOGISTICS WENT into setting up the lunch at Little Venice in Bermuda. The man posing as Nick Hamilton was Nick Day, the charming, dark-haired, thirty-eight-year-old cofounder of the private intelligence firm Diligence, LLC, based in Washington, D.C. Years earlier, Day had started his career in the British military as part of the Special Boat Service (SBS), which operates much like the U.S. Navy SEALs. For years, the SBS motto was: “Not by strength, by guile.”
His firm, Diligence, uses guile, too. And it uses the strength of an advisory board that includes some of the biggest names in global intelligence, business, and politics. Diligence boasts of its advisers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Michael Howard, a former leader of the Conservative party in Britain; Ed Mathias, the managing director of the mammoth American private equity firm Carlyle Group; and, most prominently, William Webster, a former director of both the CIA and the FBI.
Diligence’s operations in Bermuda took place just a few months before the events of a far more prominent case of corporate espionage: the spying scandal at Hewlett-Packard (HP). Executives of HP hired agents to obtain illicit phone records of its board members and rummage through the household trash of reporters covering the company. The revelation of that bit of dirty trickery generated headlines worldwide, sparked confrontational congressional