Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy (28 page)

For the American government, and by extension the CIA, Sheikh Mo isn’t just a billionaire with expensive tastes in yachts. He may be one of the very few men in the world who can keep the U.S. economy from disaster and its military from defeat. The CIA had a motive to help him in the case of the camel jockeys. But it’s not at all clear whether TDI’s involvement was sanctioned by the CIA itself to help protect a valued friend in the region from embarrassing and costly legal disclosures. The disclosure documents don’t detail motive, and TDI declined to respond to repeated requests for an interview.

That’s a frequent problem with asking questions in the world of global private intelligence. Sometimes it’s impossible to know the truth.

A
NOTHER FIRM THAT
shies away from publicity sits at the pinnacle of London’s corporate spies: Hakluyt and Company. This intelligence firm specializes in dealing with the global corporate elite—CEOs of multinational corporations and their boards of directors. Hakluyt cultivates a tony, upper-crust image derived from the days when English gentlemen sipped tea served from silver platters and divvied up the world’s resources over dinner. The company has a butler, a former Gurkha,
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who greets visitors at the door, and meetings are sometimes held alongside a crackling fireplace.

In 1995, Mike Reynolds and Christopher James—both veterans of the British intelligence agency MI6—combined forces to start the firm. Reynolds had served British intelligence in Berlin during the cold war, and James was a veteran of the British special forces as well as the intelligence agency. James—who has been described by a friend as “hale, hearty, and well met”—hit the London cocktail party circuit in the mid-1990s looking for connections to help launch his firm. He already had plenty of experience in the corporate world. As a spy for MI6, James headed the section of the agency in charge of liaisons with British companies. And now his contacts were about to get even better. At a cocktail party, he was introduced to Sir William Purves, then the group chairman of the global bank HSBC Holding, and a pillar of the City, London’s financial district.

Tapping into Purves’s Rolodex, James came to know almost everyone important in the industry, and put together the Hakluyt
Foundation, an advisory board of glittering corporate names. In time, a stint at the Hakluyt Foundation became known as an exit station for captains of British industry entering their retirement years. It soon included luminaries such as Sir Fitzroy Maclean,
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who many thought was Ian Fleming’s inspiration for the fictional spy James Bond; and Baroness Smith, who was married to the Labour Party leader John Smith. Also serving on the foundation was Sir Peter Holmes, a former chairman of Shell. Such contacts put Hakluyt in touch with the boards of directors of scores of multinational companies. All this was good for business.

To name their firm, James and Reynolds reached deep into British history, choosing as a namesake Richard Hakluyt, an author who specialized in navigation and exploration in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Hakluyt was more than just a mild man of letters. He was by turns a savvy businessman, persuasive government lobbyist, and daring undercover spy—a perfect role model for the international corporate spies of today.

Hired by the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, Hakluyt produced propaganda papers on the glory and fortunes to be made in America, hoping to persuade Queen Elizabeth I to support Raleigh’s expeditions there. During a stint in Paris as a secretary to the British ambassador, Hakluyt was asked to covertly gather information about French and Spanish activities, and their intentions and capabilities in the New World. For all this, Hakluyt was well compensated by his benefactors, accumulating a small fortune by the time he died in 1616.

Today, Hakluyt and Company’s Web site, www.hakluyt.co.uk, includes none of the traditional marketing boilerplate that other firms post on the Internet. The site has only the firm’s logo and
contact information, which convey a subtle message of discretion. But despite the firm’s secretive, upper-crust image, its executives have to hustle for clients just like everyone else.

In the summer of 2001, Christopher James made a rare mistake, approaching Enron—then one of America’s leading companies—with a business proposition. James’s sales effort would prove embarrassing for Hakluyt on several levels. First, this well-connected spy appears not to have known that Enron was only a few months from collapse. Second, the man Hakluyt approached, Jeff Skilling, was about to become a symbol of corporate bad behavior. At this time, Skilling was a few weeks away from leaving the company. Worst of all, Hakluyt’s sales pitch to Enron became public knowledge after the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission made public 200,000 of Enron’s internal e-mails from 1999 through 2002.

Buried within that mountain of communication was a letter of July 8, 2001, from Hakluyt’s Christopher James to Enron’s Jeff Skilling. A few months earlier, the two men had been introduced by a longtime oil industry executive, Phil Carroll, then the CEO of the giant engineering firm Flour Corporation.
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Carroll was a perfect point of contact: he was a former CEO of Shell Oil, and he lived in the same apartment building in Houston as Enron’s chairman, Ken Lay. Carroll, Lay, and their wives regularly dined together, sharing meals where the talk was more social than business. Now, James was following up with Lay’s man, Skilling, hoping to win Enron as a high-paying client:

The work is unattributable, that is, until the e-mails are revealed in a high-profile, years-long legal investigation.

In another e-mail, James told Skilling that Hakluyt had already done some low-level work for Enron, and he hinted that it was looking for a much bigger piece of Enron’s spying business. Enron had connections to former CIA officers, and wasn’t afraid to deploy their talents on its own behalf. Since Enron was using American CIA veterans operating out of London for its flights over European power plants, James may already have been aware of the extent of Enron’s interest in the spy game.

Hakluyt was already developing a reputation as a rough customer in the global economy. Earlier that year, the
Sunday Times
of London had broken an embarrassing story: Hakluyt had hired a German agent to spy on the environmental group Greenpeace. The plan had all the hallmarks of spy fiction, but it was real. Also, the spies didn’t work for queen and country battling evil empires, they worked for the oil companies Shell and British Petroleum, and they battled environmentalists.

The
Sunday Times
laid out the details. In 1996, Hakluyt’s cofounder Mike Reynolds had hired a German spy, Manfred Schlickenrieder. With his shoulder-length hair and impeccable liberal
credentials, Schlickenrieder was a natural infiltration agent. He’d once been a member of the German communist party, and he was a voracious reader of Marxist literature. Schlickenrieder had a documentary film company, Gruppe 2, that was based in Munich; and he was well-known in European activist circles for his work on sympathetic documentaries about leftist groups. He had already spent years on an unfinished documentary about the Red Army Faction, a left-wing German terrorist organization. Apparently, no one on the political left asked why Schlickenrieder’s documentaries never seemed to get finished and never seemed to appear on television.

Schlickenrieder billed heavily for his services, submitting one invoice to Hakluyt in June 1997 for more than 6,000 pounds, with the heading “Greenpeace research.” The money upgraded his lifestyle: Schlickenrieder drove a BMW, not generally the car of choice among communist activists.

At the time, the oil companies were concerned about firebombing at gas stations in Germany, which they suspected were masterminded by left-wing activists. They also worried about a protest by Greenpeace at the British Petroleum (BP) Stena Dee oil rig off the Shetland Islands. Reynolds told Schlickenrieder that he wanted to know what Greenpeace was doing to prepare for an expected lawsuit from the oil companies. Hakluyt also wanted inside information on the location of the ship
Greenpeace
, which the group often used for elaborate and embarrassing publicity stunts against companies.

Hakluyt gave Schlickenrieder the code name “Camus,” after the author of
The Stranger
. Using his cover as a documentary filmmaker, Schlickenrieder approached environmentalist groups and liberal activists, and tried to glean whatever information he could.

Greenpeace was snookered. Speaking to a reporter for the
Sunday Times
after the affair had come to light, the communications director of Greenpeace Germany said, “The bastard was good, I have to admit. He got information about our planner Arctic Frontier campaign to focus on the climate change issue and the responsibility of BP. BP knew everything. They were not taken by surprise.” The
spokesman added, “Manfred filmed and interviewed all the time, but now we realize we never saw anything.”

That was surprising enough. But Schlickenrieder had one other revelation left. After his cover was blown, another detail came to light. All the time that Schlickenrieder had been a paid spy for Hakluyt working for BP and Shell, he was also in the service of the German government. Schlickenrieder worked for the BND, the German counterpart of the CIA, which paid him the equivalent of more than 3,000 pounds per month in expenses, noted the
Times
.

So the corporate spy was also a government spy, and he was paid by both sides at the same time. It was the ultimate nexus between government intelligence and corporate spying.

I
N THE WORLD
of international corporate intelligence, such overlapping loyalties can be profitable, but they can also be dangerous.

In one little-known case, a partnership between an American veteran of the CIA and a former officer in the Soviet Union’s KGB ended when the KGB man—who had made enemies for himself in Putin’s Russia—vanished. What happened to him, and whether he’s alive or dead today, is uncertain. His partner is still trying to solve the mystery.

Today, Jack Platt lives in a small house in leafy Great Falls, Virginia, a suburb of Washington. During the cold war, he served as a CIA officer recruiting spies within the KGB to funnel information to the United States. He spent a large part of those years trying to lure Gennady Vasilenko, a KGB officer who worked in the Soviet Union’s embassy in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s and 1980s, to spy for the United States. Of course, Vasilenko was also trying to lure Platt to spy against the United States.

As Platt tells it, neither man succeeded, but the two spent a lot of time together. And although they worked for rival services, they became friendly. They went target shooting and fishing together, and once took in a Harlem Globetrotters game in Washington.

In 1980, they found a way to work together—which Vasilenko recalled years later in an interview with the
Atlanta Journal Constitution
. That year, the Olympic Games were being held in Moscow, and the Soviet Union was concerned about the prospect of terrorism at the games. The United States was boycotting the Olympics to protest against the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. But even so, the CIA had valuable intelligence the Russians needed: a rare photograph of an international terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal,” who was one of the world’s most wanted men. It could be of enormous value to Russian agents working to protect the Olympics. With approval from his bosses, Platt slipped his Russian friend a copy of the precious picture.

Being friends with a CIA officer wasn’t a good career move in the KGB during the Soviet era. Neither man could know it, but as their friendship was growing, a corrupt FBI agent, Robert Hanssen
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was passing tidbits of inside information along to his Russian handlers. One of those tidbits was the name of Gennady Vasilenko. Hanssen thought Vasilenko had been spying for the Americans, because he had seen CIA references to Vasilenko with the code name “Glazing.”

By 1988, the situation was coming to a head. Oblivious of Hanssen’s treachery, Vasilenko was ordered to Cuba for what he thought would be a run-of-the-mill meeting. But as he stepped onto the veranda of an apartment building in Havana, two men jumped him. “They beat the shit out of him,” Platt recalls. Vasilenko was packed off to the KGB’s Lefortovo prison in Moscow, where he was accused of being a traitor. He waited to be executed. But there was no evidence that he had passed any evidence to Platt—Platt says this is because he never passed any—and the Soviets let him out of prison after six months. “He talked his way out of there,” Platt says, with a note of pride.

When the cold war ended, Platt reconnected with his old friend
Vasilenko, who had been fired from the KGB and had struggled in his career since his arrest in Havana. They went into business together—this time as spies for hire to western businesses that wanted to operate in Moscow. Amid the rush toward privatization in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia in the mid-1990s, companies needed intelligence.
What’s going on? Who should we deal with? Where are the best deals?
Together, the two ex-spies profited, offering services ranging from investigations of global criminals to checking out the credentials of potential business partners for their clients.