Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [9]
Even so, Baker and Day cut the meeting short. They didn’t see how the lobbying business, which was all about influencing the American government, meshed with what they were offering: global clandestine intelligence operations for corporate clients.
But Rick Burt did.
A few months later, Burt called Diligence, telling Day and Baker that his American lobbying firm wanted to buy a piece of their British spy firm. In his own career, Burt had seen how government experience could lead to lucrative business opportunities in lobbying and international finance. He’d gone from being a national security correspondent for the New York Times in the 1970s to a post at the State Department, leading to an appointment as ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany from 1985 to 1989. One person who has known him for a long time says that Burt’s career was helped tremendously by his second marriage, to Nancy Reagan’s social secretary, Gayle Burt. Burt sat a few chairs away from President Ronald Reagan on June 12, 1987, as Reagan delivered a famous speech in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
At the end of the Reagan administration, Burt became the chief U.S. negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) with the former Soviet Union, and then decamped for the private sector and a partnership at the consulting firm McKinsey and Company.
Barbour Griffith and Rogers invested in Diligence. Suddenly, the little shop became an intercontinental firm. Burt stepped in as Diligence’s chairman, although he kept his office at Barbour Griffith and Rogers. Burt’s connections provided an entrée to the top of Washington society, but that access came at a cost. His abrasive style was legendary in Washington, and his verbal blunders caused some heartache for the growing company, which needed all the goodwill it could get. On occasion, for example, Burt would burst into rages at the lobbying firm. One person familiar with him says, “Rick Burt could be a very nasty piece of work.”
Still, Diligence leveraged Burt’s connections to its own benefit, becoming wired into the uppermost echelon of British and American business, politics, and intelligence. Eventually, Diligence’s advisory board would include an astonishing array of heavy hitters:
Judge William Webster, a former director of both the CIA and the FBI
Michael Howard, a former leader of the Conservative Party in Britain
Lord Charles Powell, former foreign affairs and defense adviser to the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher
Ed Mathias, managing director of the enormous American private equity firm Carlyle Group, which specialized in buying and selling defense companies
Thomas “Mack” McLarty, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton
Ed Rogers, chairman of Barbour Griffith and Rogers, a protégé of Republican political consultant Lee Atwater, and a veteran of the Reagan and the first Bush administrations.
The weave of interconnections between these men can be complicated. For example: Diligence’s chairman Rick Burt has also served as a senior adviser to Ed Mathias’s Carlyle Group; as a senior adviser to Mack McLarty’s firm, Kissinger McLarty Associates; and as a senior advisory board member to Barbour Griffith and Rogers’ client Alfa Bank, in Moscow.2
The overlapping relationships created a constant stream of business referrals and mutual assistance to a group of executives whose business affiliations and loyalties extend across national borders and around the world. The group was poised to take advantage of the new opportunities available in the global economy. In the coming years, Barbour Griffith and Rogers would represent clients from all over the world, including the governments of Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Honduras, Serbia, and Qatar. The business would prove lucrative: Eritrea, a desperately poor country bordering Sudan in eastern Africa, for example, would sign a contract to pay the lobbying firm $65,000 per month for “strategic counsel and tactical planning” in Washington.3