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By Root 1255 0

a century earlier, Kroll’s operatives were now conducting intelligence operations that benefited Washington in a time of crisis. Since the interests were so aligned, some observers began to wonder where Kroll ended and the U.S. intelligence community began. Indeed, one corporate intelligence professional with a long history in the industry has a pet theory about Kroll. It wasn’t Kroll’s efforts that helped U.S. intelligence, this person argues; it was U.S. intelligence that helped Kroll. The professional says that the accomplishments claimed by Kroll—tracing assets through a complicated series of international financial shells—can’t be done by the private sector. But the global wiretapping abilities of the National Security Agency and the CIA’s ability to track international banking transactions are just the types of tools that would have been invaluable in tracking global financial assets. Perhaps Kroll was secretly helped by American officials who wanted the information to become public, and wanted their own fingerprints kept far away from the disclosure. “What they’re claiming to have done just isn’t possible,” the professional says. “There’s no way they can do that without some intelligence help.”

Was Kroll used as a front by an American intelligence community that didn’t want to reveal the extent of its own capabilities? Kroll wouldn’t like the word “front,” but he acknowledges that his investigators routinely sought out the help of intelligence agencies—foreign and domestic. “We would frequently approach the relevant intelligence agencies to see if it was in their interest to cooperate with us,” says Kroll. “More frequently, we received that cooperation from foreign intelligence services than we did from U.S. intelligence.”

Kroll is wary of getting into specifics, but he offers one example in which his firm was hired by a foreign government to investigate a former head of state. Kroll asked the government to put out the word publicly that his firm was on the case. Private intelligence operatives have a long tradition: they always talk to “walk-ins,” or people who seek them out to deliver information. Most of those leads come up empty, because the walk-ins are ill informed, or even crazy, but sometimes the key evidence in a case walks in the front door. That’s what happened to Kroll during the investigation of the head of state. Soon after word got out that Kroll was on the case, the firm got a feeler from a law firm in a foreign country. The law firm had detailed information on the case, and offered it to Kroll’s team. The information was an intelligence bonanza: corrupt contracts, dollar amounts of bribes, and details of financial transactions. “We had reason to believe that it came from an intelligence agency,” Kroll says. Kroll concluded that the law firm was just a cutout for an intelligence agency to pass along the documents.

But Kroll minimizes his firm’s intelligence connections: “For the most part, intelligence services are a one-way street. They will take what you want to give them, but there’s very little coming back the other way.”

BY THE STANDARDS of its industry, Kroll has done a remarkable job of knowing where the legal and ethical lines begin and end. But the firm has had its share of improprieties, scandals, and controversy. According to one account, as early as 1985, the firm decided to investigate the sex life of Ivan Boesky.8 That invasion of privacy wasn’t going to uncover anything at all to do with Boesky’s alleged insider trading, but uncovering any of Boesky’s sex secrets may have given Kroll’s client, Drexel, valuable leverage over the disgraced arbitrageur.*

In another case, in 1989, Kroll and one of his star operatives clashed with congressional staffers in a dramatic showdown that threatened to destroy the entire company. The confrontation began with the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, then headed by the formidable Representative John D. Dingell, who was famous for using his investigative authority to dig into the dealings of companies