Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [66]
At Easton’s Sidetrack Saloon and McGarvey’s Saloon and Oyster Bar in nearby Annapolis, the group pulled together a detailed business plan for the new company. Opportunities were everywhere for a company staffed by veterans of the Secret Service and the Maryland state police—Steve Forbes’s presidential campaign, then in its infancy, was a prime prospect as a client for protective services. And CSX Corporation, the railroad giant, might need help reviewing its security plans for its enormous real estate holdings.
But they had to act fast. One member, Joe Masonis, was under pressure to tell the Secret Service whether he’d be staying or going. The opportunities could go to another firm.
Under that time pressure, Dodd agreed to put up $120,000 in start-up funding, and the company was officially started as Beckett Brown International* in August 1995. His total investment in the firm, he says, would eventually grow to about $700,000.
BY THE SPRING of 1996, the new company had begun to get traction. Beckett Brown hooked up with Nichols Dezenhall, a little-known Washington public relations firm that began to feed it business. The PR outfit specialized in crisis communications, the delicate art of helping companies in the midst of various corporate disasters: scandals, lawsuits, environmental catastrophes, and the like. As a result, this firm was in close contact with companies whose executives were desperate for solutions. At the same time, Beckett Brown began adding big-name intelligence veterans to its ranks. It hired Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, as a consultant.* It also added David Bresett, a former chief of the Secret Service’s foreign intelligence branch, who had been a key liaison officer with the CIA while he was in government service. But it was the relationship with Nichols Dezenhall that kept Beckett Brown afloat as it struggled through its first year.
Nichols Dezenhall, having just landed its own first big project for Nestlé, put Beckett Brown to work for this lucrative client: Nestlé wanted all the information it could get on Mars.
The assignment wouldn’t be easy. Even though Mars is a global giant that produces well-known products such as Snickers and M&Ms, it has a secretive corporate culture and remains privately held by the reclusive founders, the Mars family. There’s no sign outside the company’s headquarters building at 6885 Elm Street in McLean, Virginia. All a passerby sees is what looks like a brick two-story suburban office building. The parking lot is unremarkable, and there’s no indication on the front door that you’re entering the offices of a global conglomerate; there are just white letters on tinted glass: “No Soliciting.” (Even the Central Intelligence Agency, which is situated two miles down the road, has a prominent sign visible to street traffic.) The e-mail addresses of Mars employees are cloaked, too. If you are e-mailing an executive at the company, you don’t send the message to name@mars.com; you send it to an address ending with the suffix@effem.com. That makes it much harder for outsiders to figure out how to get in touch with key Mars personnel.†
Penetrating this secrecy meant going beyond the typical competitive intelligence techniques. After all, as a private company, Mars produced no detailed filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and left almost no other paper trail for the public to peruse.
BECKETT BROWN HAD arrived on the scene just in time to become Nestlé’s own private intelligence agency in the chocolate war.
In late 1997, the candy giants were battling over a new product: Nestlé Magic, a two-inch chocolate candy ball encasing a plastic shell that in turn held a small Disney-themed toy. Nestlé planned to market the candy for children as young as age three. Given that age group, Nestlé knew safety would be a concern. What’s more, the FDA had