Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [91]
Although $124,000 sounds like a lot of money to most Americans, it is not much if we consider the amount of education, training, and valuable experience these people have. The private sector pays a lot better.
For relatively junior CIA officers making GS-10 to GS-12 wages of between $43,000 and $57,000 per year, a jump to business intelligence can be lucrative. One person familiar with the way CIA veterans are compensated in the private sector says CIA officers at the GS-10 to GS-12 levels can leap to $120,000 to $150,000 as a base salary, with the potential to rise well into the $200,000 range as they develop more corporate experience. Depending on when in their career they make the move to the private sector, veterans of the CIA may also bring with them a generous government pension that pays them a percentage of their highest salary for the rest of their lives. Most people cannot resist the opportunity to double or triple their wages, and the CIA’s veterans are no different.
Ironically, BIA is known as one of the stingier private-sector employers of CIA talent. Its former CEO Don Carlson recalls that CIA veterans at the firm topped out at roughly between $180,000 and $210,000 when he ran the operation in 2005. Not many of the CIA veterans there asked for or received equity in the firm, he recalls. For all their talent and training, Carlson says, “I think we dramatically underpaid people.”
One way for employees of the CIA to bolster their earnings is to moonlight for corporate intelligence firms like BIA. CIA officers routinely ask their bosses for permission to work at BIA on the side to boost their government incomes. According to a government official knowledgeable about the practice, to apply for permission for outside work CIA employees must fill out a form stating who they’re going to work for and what they’re doing. Permission must be granted by a group of vetters that includes the CIA’s ethics lawyers.
Indeed CIA employees must fill out a standard form to disclose any outside affiliations at all, whether it’s a summer job or volunteering for a local Boy Scout troop. One of the considerations the CIA uses to decide whether or not to grant permission to moonlight is whether the work will interfere with the officer’s responsibilities at the CIA. Permission is granted on a case-by-case basis.
The active-duty CIA part-timers became particularly helpful for BIA, says another person familiar with the firm, when the new crop of college graduates flooded into the big four accounting firms each year. BIA provides training in deception detection for all the firms, and the influx of new employees in the summers meant BIA, too, had to staff up. Typically, the firm did that by relying on moonlighting CIA officers who could train the new accountants in TBA and then return to the CIA. At one point before he arrived at BIA, Carlson says, the firm had twelve to fifteen active-duty CIA officers employed part-time as analysts.
Still, BIA is careful to make a distinction between itself and the CIA. In a brochure distributed to clients, “Strategic Information Collection for Investors,” BIA included this disclaimer on the first page: “This is to advise that Business Intelligence Advisors Inc.’s training is in no way connected to or endorsed by the United States government or any agency thereof, BIA’s instructors are acting solely in their capacity as private citizens and not as representatives of any federal governmental agency.”14
In later years, BIA began to bring in entry-level college graduates and train them in TBA. These young employees staffed a boiler room of sorts, where they listened in on corporate conference calls, pored over transcripts, and even looked at companies’ press releases and SEC filings, in order to spot clusters of indicators of deception for BIA’s many clients. At one point, BIA