Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [73]
Each day, the Beckett Brown team paid members of the hotel’s janitorial staff to leave the trash collected from the Mars executives’ rooms off to the side of the Dumpster behind the hotel. They collected that trash, too, bringing it back to the Beckett Brown offices for analysis. One team member noted that the janitors did not look at all surprised when they were offered a bribe of about $20 to leave the trash for the snoopers to collect later. He wondered if the janitorial team took bribes like that often.
Pulling together the phone records, hotel surveillance, and documents from the trash, Beckett Brown began to develop a torrent of intelligence on developments within Mars. But much of it was haphazard information, each data point seemingly unrelated to the others. The hardest part wouldn’t be gathering the information; it would be making sense of the hundreds of disparate pieces of information the spies gathered about their adversary. In the first few months of the year, Beckett Brown noted the following pieces of information in briefing reports prepared for their client:
“Mars will donate $100K to the Moscow Tretyakov Gallery. Approved by Forrest Mars.”*
“The Mars Hackettown plant has switched to using Canadian dairy products at a savings of $85/tonne.”
“Mars may be developing a peanut butter plant in Mexico using Nicaraguan and Mexican peanuts.”
“Due to a redesign of the British 2 pound coin, Mars’ product dispensing machines in the UK have been rendered unusable.”
“Patton Boggs—Paid $2,597,916.70 for period ending 82097.”
One challenge that confronts any intelligence operation is how to separate the important information from the enormous volume of information churned out by any global company every day. Beckett Brown didn’t distinguish between the pieces of information. It passed them all along to the Dezenhall P.R. firm. Executives there would decide what was important, and what needed to be sent along to Nestlé.
It turned out that Beckett Brown had also pulled out of the Dumpster information vastly more important than the trivial details of day-to-day operations inside the rival chocolate company. The spies discovered that Forrest Mars had not been telling the entire truth in his dramatic fax to Nestlé’s Dr. Helmut Maucher. Although Forrest Mars wrote that he would not object to the $1 billion deal with Spillers, the spies found that his company had secretly put together an elaborate plan to derail the acquisition. For Nestlé, the spying effort was the corporate equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s famous line about the Soviet Union’s arms control commitments: “Trust, but verify.” They wanted to know whether Mars would keep its pledges. And they were willing to pay for the information.
Discovering this one document, Beckett Brown’s spies figured, would be worth about $100,000 in fees for the firm. But they didn’t plan to leak the documents all at once to their high-paying client. Instead, they’d string out the revelations, doling out nuggets of information every so often, to keep the client’s interest up and to preserve the illusion that this information was difficult to gather—and thus worth the high fees. Holding back some of the details also gave Beckett Brown a backlog of information that it could save to give the client at some future point when other investigations weren’t panning out.
As Nestlé discovered, Mars was mounting an operation very much like the operations companies around the world conduct when they calculate that it is easier to lobby governments to block their competitors than it is to compete in a free market. It was, of course, possible for Mars to undertake a free-market offensive against Nestlé, perhaps rolling out newer and better pet food products, or slashing prices on existing products. But that would require time and cost an enormous amount of money. It was far simpler and cheaper to manipulate European governments to think it was in their own interests to block Nestlé’s aspirations. Getting government help can be vastly more rewarding than anything many companies can do in the