Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [64]
Of Maucher’s complaint regarding the FDA, Mars wrote: “Again, I reiterate that we did not cause you problems with the FDA.” On the issue of gathering information: “We do collect information and read various reports available to us, not only about Nestlé, but all our major competitors. When a major competitor does something significant that changes the competitive scene, we immediately review all worldwide information, as I am sure you do with us and your other competitors. There seems to us to be nothing illegal or uncompetitive about this as all of it is published information and various amounts [of it] are obviously hearsay.” Most important, he insisted, Mars had never “declared war” on Nestlé.
As he put the fax down, Maucher must have known that much of what Forrest Mars had written was a lie. Maucher was no fool. He had fought his way up the corporate ranks for decades, rising to become the first non-Swiss executive to head Nestlé. The year before, he’d given up the title of chief executive officer, but he still clung to the role of chairman of the board. He knew that for the past several months Mars had been secretly stirring up trouble for Nestlé at the FDA—and that these efforts had succeeded in shutting down production of a profitable new chocolate product. He would have known that Mars’s competitive intelligence efforts went well beyond reading published information. And whether or not Forrest Mars—comfortable in his office in a Virginia suburb just outside Washington, D.C.—wanted to acknowledge it or not, Maucher knew that Mars and Nestlé were at war.
The chocolate war had already been raging for months.
How Maucher probably came to know all that information about Mars is the most intriguing part of the story. Even as he vociferously objected to Mars’s alleged information gathering, Maucher’s company had deployed its own intelligence assets in the chocolate war. It was one of the most sophisticated efforts of its time, bringing together veterans of the Secret Service, the CIA, and American law enforcement to obtain copies of internal Mars documents, place Mars executives under surveillance, and unmask the identities of Mars’s own secret operatives.
To understand this story, we have to leave the placid Swiss lake behind and travel thousands of miles to another body of water—Chesapeake Bay—and to another town: Easton, Maryland, which today holds some of the last remaining secrets of that war.
EASTON IS SITUATED on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, an enormous peninsula that separates Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean. About a ninety-minute drive from Washington, D.C., the Eastern Shore is an elegant weekend getaway for the capital’s moneyed elite. Former vice president Dick Cheney and former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld both own multimillion-dollar properties in the small Eastern Shore town of Saint Michaels. Many other Washington insiders—politicians, agency heads, lawyers, and lobbyists—spend weekends in the small waterfront towns that dot the pastoral Eastern Shore landscape.
Though connected to the mainland by the 4.3-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge, the Eastern Shore is still its own world. Indeed, the Maryland portions of this landmass have tried to secede from the state on several occasions. Long cut off from the outside world, the region thrived on agriculture and fishing. Oysters, crabs, and corn dominated the economy for hundreds of years. Today, tourism, sailing, and real estate speculation are included in the economic mix, but many parts of the area remain remarkably unchanged since the nineteenth century.
In short, this is a strange place to find the remnants of a once successful and secretive international corporate spying operation. But here they are.