Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [8]
This information exchange can run up against insider-trading laws, which prohibit trading securities based on material, nonpublic information. But many spies say that’s not much of a problem: the employees talking to the fake executive recruiters are sometimes unaware of how much they’re passing along. And later, while still employed by the company, they’re unlikely to admit their disloyalty. What’s more, the interviews are two or three steps removed from the Wall Street trader who buys or sells on the basis of the information. The trader himself may have no idea where the information came from.
Another way a spy can use a dummy corporation is to set up a fake documentary film company and call BigPharma’s CEO for an interview. Many documentary films are produced by obscure firms and don’t see the light of day for months, or even years, after filming. Both aspects of the process are handy for a spy: BigPharma’s media relations people won’t be surprised to be contacted by a small firm they’ve never heard of before. They might agree to the interview, and allow the phony film crew on company grounds, where the spies can film everything within camera range—labs, sales offices, documents, and more. And when the CEO sits for an interview, the makeup, bright lights, and flattering interviewer might put him off his guard. With cameras rolling, he may give far more information than he’d ever wanted to about the new product and its rollout date. Months later, the company’s media representatives will have moved on to other projects, and may not stop to wonder why they never heard of that documentary film again.
It turns out that government-trained spies have all sorts of skills that are handy in the corporate arena, including surveillance, undercover operations, and the ability to blend in on the streets of a foreign country. Spies sell their services to investment firms, companies checking up on their competitors, lawyers engaged in high-stakes litigation, corporate raiders trying to buy companies, and more.
Setting up shop in London, Baker was the only American among a crowd of former Scotland Yard investigators, former customs inspectors, and former intelligence agents like Day, all of whom were now in the private sector. Maxima’s CEO played an avuncular role, schooling the two younger men on how to run a business. But after a few years, Baker and Day began to grow restless. Both men wanted to earn money—far more than their salaries at the time—and they knew that the only way to do that was to own their own firm. At the end of 2000, they quit Maxima to launch a new intelligence outfit: Diligence.
At first, Baker and Day scrambled to buy mobile phones and generate clients. They didn’t have any start-up capital, but Baker recruited a former CIA colleague and Latin American specialist who had some family money to put into the nascent company. The little firm grew, soon hiring a hardworking researcher and a Russian investigator.
A few months after launching the firm, Day and Baker flew to Washington, D.C., trolling for high-powered lobbying and financial clients. Working their international intelligence contacts, they landed a meeting with the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Burt, who was then affiliated with the influential Republican lobbying firm Barbour Griffith and Rogers. Nursing a severe migraine headache that morning, Baker had to drag himself to a meeting at the firm’s elegant headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. At the time, Barbour Griffith and Rogers represented some of the biggest companies in the world in scores of different industries, including Delta Airlines, GlaxoSmithKline, and Lockheed Martin. The automotive giant DaimlerChrysler alone was paying the firm $200,000 per year to steer it through the intricate