Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [82]
The women would put on a presentation that day that would dazzle the moneymen. In their intensity, they reminded one money manager of Clarice Starling, the no-nonsense FBI agent played by Jodie Foster in the movie The Silence of the Lambs: “You could tell they knew exactly what they were doing.”
First, they promised that they’d teach the hedge fund managers the CIA’s own foolproof techniques, crafted over decades of clandestine combat, to tell when someone’s lying. Then they said they’d teach the money managers to make money—lots of money—by spotting lies. Of course, it would also cost lots of money to get the training. Sessions with this crew cost as much as $30,000 per day.
By the time of the meeting at SAC in 2006, Boycan and Miritello were no longer working for the CIA. They both had the title “senior expert and instructor” with BIA. Since its founding in 2001, BIA has given its clients access to the same intelligence techniques the U.S. government uses and some of the same employees the government has hired.
BIA takes advantage of a little-known program inside the CIA that allows serving officers to moonlight in the private sector during their off hours and on weekends. A government official familiar with the plan explains it as an employee-retention effort by the CIA. In order to keep officers from decamping for the high-paying private sector, the CIA lets them earn money on the side. The official says that employees have to go through a detailed approval process before they’re allowed to take on outside work. It’s not clear whether companies other than BIA have hired serving CIA officers, and if so which ones, but some inside the CIA express surprise that the practice is allowed. Veterans familiar with the moonlighting say that it may be taking place only at BIA.
It’s more than just a personnel matter. If, as the government official says, the moonlighting program is in place to keep serving officers from jumping to the private sector for higher pay—during a time of war, no less—it’s an indication of the pressure that the rising private intelligence industry is placing on government. There’s no way the federal pay scale can keep pace with the sums available at large corporations, hedge funds, and the like. Some keen observers of the intelligence community say the brain drain to the private sector is chipping away at U.S. national security, as people whose training was financed by the taxpayers quit the government to sell those skills to private businesses.
The presence of so many current and former CIA personnel on the payroll at BIA causes confusion as to whether the intelligence firm is actually an extension of the agency itself. As a result, BIA places a disclaimer in some of its corporate marketing materials to clarify that it is not, in fact, controlled by Langley.
BIA WAS FOUNDED by a small group of CIA veterans, including Phil Houston, one of the CIA’s top interrogators. According to a former CEO of the company, the founding group left the CIA with a feeling of disgust over the Bush administration’s policy on torture after 9/11. The group of CIA veterans (some of whom had been with the CIA for more than 20 years) felt that the administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” betrayed everything they stood for as officers—not because torture was morally wrong, they told this former CEO, but because it produced bad intelligence. For a CIA officer who’s proud of his work, there’s nothing worse than an inferior product.
It seemed like a good time to start a private company designed to