Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [59]
Others have noted the coincidence that Hachette is controlled by Jean-Luc Lagardère, who also controls the French arms company, Matra. Some have speculated that Iraq thought it could influence Matra’s arms sales to Iraq through Hachette holdings. Hachette denies knowing of a Saddam connection, and is prepared to buy back the stake if hidden ties emerge.5
Newsweek, impressed by Kroll’s revelations, dubbed the firm the “thug busters.”
Those thug busters were again walking the beat in early 1992, when Russia’s newly empowered leader Boris Yeltsin hired Kroll to track down the billions of dollars’ worth of national assets that had gone missing after the collapse of communism. The Russians estimated that they’d lost between $6 billion and $8 billion in 1991, as communist apparatchiks siphoned money out of the imploding Soviet empire into personal bank accounts around the world. The Russians wanted the money back, and they decided Kroll was the man for the job.6
Kroll assigned fifteen agents to the Russian project, including a former intelligence agent for the U.S. Treasury Department and the CIA’s former station chief in Kuwait. The firm reportedly billed $1,500 per agent per day. The Russians paid cash. “We’re going to be visiting and seeking records from Russia’s major suppliers,” Kroll told the New York Times that year, “particularly in the food area and in oil-field equipment. And we’ll also be looking at major foreign importers, again mostly of commodities. Outside Russia, commodities trading is highly computerized; records exist.”7 The record trail led Kroll to exotic locales like Cyprus and Monte Carlo, where many of the Russian assets had been hidden.
But Kroll ran into roadblock after roadblock. Among the most frustrating problems was that the Russian government assigned several former Russian intelligence officers to work alongside Kroll on the investigation. None of these officers would give Kroll their real names. They made it clear that they didn’t like and didn’t trust Kroll. The Americans concluded that the Russian officers were there not to help investigate the communists’ money laundering but to block the investigation from the inside. “We were interested in uncovering information, and they were interested in obfuscating,” Kroll says. “It didn’t make for a good arrangement.”
Russian politics made the situation worse. Yeltsin’s government was investigating money laundering that Kroll concluded in many cases had been undertaken by Russian intelligence leaders. But to stay in power, Yeltsin’s fragile democratic government depended on the former Soviet intelligence apparatus. Within six months, the investigation became untenable, and Kroll ended its work on the case. The firm turned over some of its leads to the Kremlin, but the American investigators were never sure what became of the information they passed along.
Although the former Russian officials were clearly uncomfortable with American investigators trolling through their finances, both the Kuwaiti and the Russian investigations dovetailed with the intelligence interests of the United States. America had already gone to war against Saddam Hussein once, and would do so again in the next decade. American officials had every incentive to learn how Hussein financed his regime, and where its weak points might be. It was the same in Russia: the CIA had been in a clandestine battle with the Soviet Union. As that nation dissolved, the CIA needed to keep watch on how the power and money centers were fragmenting. At the same time, Kroll was becoming closer and closer to U.S. intelligence, by hiring a number of prominent veteran CIA officers.
All that raises an important question: how much did Kroll work with American intelligence? Much like Pinkerton’s more than