Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [7]
Baker says that not all those who quit the CIA left for the money. Many of his contemporaries quit in the late 1990s because they thought the CIA had become too risk averse. It was a far cry from the CIA that just ten years earlier had been running a massive secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and managing other, smaller, anticommunist operations around the globe. After the Berlin wall came down, ennui plagued the spies and their bosses at Langley: What are we fighting for now?
In 1998, Baker went in search of something else to do. Living in London at the time, he met Nick Day through a mutual friend. Day, the son of a mathematics professor at Oxford University, had never gone to a university himself, instead opting for the military straight out of high school and then going into the British counterintelligence and security service MI5. The two men had a lot in common: Day, too, had just left the intelligence world and was looking for a place in the private sector. Over a long dinner, the two young spies got along like old friends. Soon, Baker and Day went to work together at a private intelligence firm called Maxima.
After their years in the CIA and MI5, Baker and Day had problem-solving skills, investigative talents, and street smarts that would prove to be extremely lucrative in the corporate setting. Most important, they were more aggressive than people who’d spent their careers inside the corporate cocoon. They—and the other spies then leaving government service for the private sector—approached business questions in a different way.
Say an investment firm wanted to know whether there were any problems with the rollout of a new product coming from a drug company—call it “BigPharma, Inc.” The investment firm would want to know when the product would be launched, whether there were any problems with the science behind the product, and whether the executives thought it would be a blockbuster. Traditional Wall Street investment analysts would be limited to standard ways of getting information: checking corporate filings, debriefing industry experts, conducting conference calls with management, and the like.
Spies think differently. To find out what was going on with BigPharma, they might roll out a host of intelligence techniques. In a variation on the technique used to case the KPMG office in Bermuda, they might call the biggest hotel near the pharmaceutical company’s headquarters, posing as potential customers, and check the dates when the hotel’s ballroom might be available for an event. Which dates were free? Was the ballroom booked for a specific evening? Turning on the charm, they’d ask who had reserved it—was it the nearby pharmaceutical company? Could the pharmaceutical company be planning a party to celebrate the launch of a new product? What’s that date again?
Then they might want to know what potential problems existed with the product. It’s easy to set up an account with a job seekers’ Web site like Monster.com. Posing as a potential employer, spies can set the software to show all the résumés available from people hoping to leave BigPharma. They can track how many employees of BigPharma put their résumés up on Monster.com every day. Over time, they can plot the results on a chart, and see when the number of people wanting to leave the company spikes. Are the employees looking to leave coming from the legal department? Or sales? If so, there might be a problem in that area.
To find out, the next step is to set up a dummy executive recruiting firm, and call the people