Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [68]
In the candy business, a victory for one company often comes at a direct cost to another. Suddenly, Nestlé Magic was making the Mars market share disappear. Nestlé suspected that Mars was behind the sudden flurry of complaints about the new candy. Perhaps Mars was using friendly consumer groups to start an ostensibly grassroots campaign against Nestlé. Mars reminded some people at Nestlé of the dark paranoia of the Nixon White House. Surely the secretive company was capable of orchestrating a dirty-tricks campaign?
Nestlé needed to know for sure, and quickly. It wasn’t clear that all the attacks were coming from Mars, but the charges were starting to sting:
A letter to the deputy commissioner of the FDA called the candy “extremely dangerous.”
An anonymous fax to columnists and food writers across the country called the idea of toys inside candy a “crazy gimmick,” and complained that “this lunacy proposed by Nestlé to the FDA today should be loudly branded a bad idea by anyone who loves children.”
And—going right to the top, or almost—someone sent a letter to Vice President Al Gore’s fax number at the White House, urging a ban on Nestlé Magic.
The chocolate war was raging in Washington. Soon, even odder things began to occur. In late 1997, a mysterious stranger stopped by the offices of the activist group US PIRG, which issues an annual report on toy safety. The mystery man chatted with the receptionist at the front desk—and left behind a package that included damning information about Nestlé Magic.
Over the next several months, the man continued to send packages to US PIRG, encouraging the group to take a stand on the issue. When the people at Nestlé found out about this anonymous source, they nicknamed him Deep Chocolate—a reference to the most famous secret source of all, Watergate’s Deep Throat.
Anxious to unmask Deep Chocolate, and eager to hear any information its allies could gather about him, Nestlé put out the word: Help us expose Deep Chocolate. One afternoon a lobbyist from Nestlé’s law firm, Hogan and Hartson, came to the offices of US PIRG for a meeting on an unrelated subject. She started asking questions about the mysterious stranger, and sent her impressions to other executives in a high-priority e-mail headed “Deep Chocolate Strikes Again”:
I met with Ed Mierzwinski, with US PIRG, today on another matter. At the conclusion of that meeting, I asked if he had been contacted by Deep Chocolate recently.
If Mierzwinski knew the true identity of the spy, he wasn’t going to reveal it to a corporate lobbyist. The e-mail continued:
Ed said he couldn’t remember whether the most recent package had been mailed or delivered by Deep Chocolate. A staffer with Ed reminded me that Deep Chocolate had delivered the first package in person and had chatted with the person at the front desk. However, the staffer became a little nervous when I asked him what Deep Chocolate looked like or how he sounded. Clearly, he didn’t want US PIRG to be the one that gives the guy away.
Mierzwinski did offer the lobbyist one clue: “Ed told me that he believes Deep Chocolate is being paid by or in league with Mars, probably working through a public relations firm,” she wrote. But who was he?
To unravel the mystery, Nestlé hired Kroll Associates, which investigated Mars’s Washington team, gathering background information, addresses, media clips, and in some cases Social Security numbers and children’s names. They researched the lobbying firms involved, pulled the records of campaign contributions from key officials, and noted which people involved in Mars’s effort had gone to the same schools, which ones were old family friends, and which were former colleagues.
Kroll’s investigator was James Bucknam. He had retired the year before from government service as a senior adviser to the FBI’s director Louis Freeh. At 11 A.M. on September 30, 1997, Bucknam sent a thirty-two-page fax to Christine Pfeiffer, a senior counsel in Nestlé’s legal department, laying out a strategy for Nestlé to fight back against