by Eamon Javers
“They’re not looking at me,” he says. “I’m the little bloke eating ice cream with his girlfriend. When the bad guy pulls out a grenade, that’s when we move from surveillance to intervention. If it’s in Iraq or Afghanistan and we think it’s life threatening, we’ll work within our legal remit and take every action necessary.” In Iraq, the “legal remit” might include shooting an assailant dead at close range. In a corporate setting, it might mean slapping the hand of a menacing heckler.
When Nick retired from the military in the late 1990s, he returned to England to do the same kind of “close protection” work in the private sector, for private military contractors. It was a logical career move. “You’ve got all these skills, and not a lot of employment opportunity,” Nick explains. But he didn’t love the work. So he drifted into corporate intelligence, reaching out to a number of London’s biggest spy agencies. He says he was astonished by what he saw there. “Their surveillance capabilities were zero. They were sitting in cars taking pictures of people.”
Nick saw a market opportunity. There was demand for top-of-the-line espionage services offered by veterans of the British special forces. He began freelancing for the corporate intelligence firms, picking up surveillance work as needed. He found himself doing a lot of screening of new hires for large corporate clients. Before offering top management jobs to prospective recruits, the companies wanted to have them followed for a couple of days. Does this executive have any embarrassing problems the company ought to know about? Nick tailed them on weekends. Did they have a secret heroin habit? A weakness for hookers? Perverse sexual tendencies? Nick would find out. Sometimes, he says, he found that the executives did have problems, but the company hired them anyway. “Think of everything you can think of that goes on in society,” Nick says. “I’ve seen it. I’ve watched executives picking up transvestites in New York City. What we’re doing is the biggest reality TV show there is.”
It’s not clear how commonly companies conduct surveillance on their own hires. But Nick No-Name and other people involved in the business say it happens most often with a “marquee” corporate hire—any executive who is going to be paid an enormous amount of money or whose name will be linked to the company’s brand in the public imagination. Paying Nick’s steep fees can be worthwhile if he prevents millions of dollars of public relations damage months later. In some cases, preemployment surveillance seems to verge on entrapment. Nick recalls one case in which he tailed an executive to a midweek golf game. Nick alerted his client that he was observing the executive playing golf, and the client called the executive’s cell phone. After some initial chitchat, the client said, “So, what are you doing now?” Not wanting to appear as though he was slacking off, with a lucrative new career opportunity hanging in the balance, the job candidate said, “I’m just heading out to a meeting.” The client crossed him off the list for the job. What he minded wasn’t that the executive was playing a round of midweek golf—who doesn’t enjoy that once in a while?—but that the executive had lied to his future boss. “If he’ll lie about the little things,” the client later told Nick, “he’ll lie about the important things, too.”
Soon Nick had developed a network of like-minded surveillance experts who had formerly been in the military. “A couple of us got together and said, ‘We’ve got to make this a viable business.’” They banded together and incorporated a company. Nick will not reveal its name, except to say that it has a bland corporate title designed to give no hint of its real business—“You can call it ‘Harry’s Chocolate Factory,’” Nick says elusively. The firm does not have a Web site. It does not have a listing in the phone book. “We’re nowhere,” he says. But the top corporate intelligence firms in the world know his phone number when they need him.
Nick had stumbled on a key piece of the corporate intelligence business model. Most of the hundreds of firms in the world don’t have large staffs. Instead, they serve as a kind of facade that helps connect corporate clients with the netherworld of intelligence, the more shadowy “contractors” who do most of the actual work. Each time a client project comes up, the firms put together teams of subcontractors with the specialties needed for that situation. Need surveillance in London? Insert a contractor. Need linguistic help? Contractor. Need a forensic accountant? Ditto. The teams are assembled for each case and managed by the firm. Nick doesn’t need a Web site to publicize his business. The man who pays him already has one. Also, having pictures of himself and his team members on a Web site would devalue their service: “If my face and my operators’ faces are all over the Web, we’re a blown commodity,” he says. “We’re useless.”
The money’s good. Nick says high-end surveillance firms like his charge 1,200 to 1,600 pounds sterling per day per man, plus expenses, plus mileage, and plus the cost of any special equipment. Just to place surveillance on one unsurprising executive in London can cost upwards of 15,000 pounds per day. Nick says he has no idea what the intelligence firms he works for charge their clients for his services, but he suspects they mark up the bill by as much as 20 percent. That’s fair, he thinks. The intelligence firms don’t know how to do high-end surveillance, he says, but they’re charging the client for the one asset they do have: Nick’s phone number.
In a typical executive surveillance case, Nick turns over a written report with the details of every place the executive went, the times he went there, photos of him at each of those locations, and photos of anyone he met with while he was there. Nick’s team will also conduct audio surveillance, either with recording devices or by getting undercover operators close enough to hear the conversations in person. With modern equipment, he says, this work can be done almost anywhere.
Nick sometimes uses a laser microphone that can record conversations in a room as much as a kilometer away. Pointing the invisible laser at the glass window of the room in which a meeting is taking place, Nick can record every word that’s being said in the room—so long as he has a direct line of sight from his hiding place to the panes of glass in the meeting room’s window. The laser is so sensitive that it measures the tiny vibrations in the glass itself, and reassembles those into audible speech.
The downside of this technique is that the lasers don’t work as well, or at all, with double- or triple-paned windows, which are increasingly common. And it can be maddeningly difficult to get a good angle for the laser when eavesdropping is taking place on the upper floors of high-rise office buildings—from street level, the angle toward the windows of the higher floors can be so oblique that the devices become useless. With high-paying clients, the way to get around that problem is to rent an office or hotel room in a building across the street at about the same altitude. It’s expensive, but it puts the laser in position to record the meeting.
Nick and his team conduct surveillance all over the world, sometimes flying an entire team of nine or ten operators across continents to observe an important meeting or tail a high-value executive. Depending on the laws in the country they’re working in, Nick says they can do almost anything: “We’ll bug a house, bug cars, put locator devices on vehicles, conduct electronic intercepts of e-mails, whatever it takes,” he says. They use encrypted communications equipment to avoid being detected. “But we won’t break the law. We retain barristers here in London, and make sure we’re on the right side of the law wherever we’re operating. Otherwise, the information we collect is useless to our clients.” Illegally gathered material is inadmissible in court—and can’t be used in lawsuits. What’s more, any lawbreaking by Nick’s team could be used by the other side as leverage in the ongoing business dispute.
Because the skills required for surveillance are so rare, the industry isn’t huge. Nick estimates that even in spy-infested London, there are only enough crews to tail about twenty executives at any one time. Given the typical nine- or ten-man surveillance crew, this implies that there are somewhat fewer than 200 surveillance people working in London. (Another surveillance operative there gives a higher e
stimate: 100 executives could be tailed on any one day, she says. That implies a high-end range of something under 1,000 surveillance operators prowling London’s streets.) Clients, therefore, sometimes have to join waiting lists for surveillance on a given target, or they have to pay huge fees for an American or German team to be flown in during a busy time.
As manpower-intensive, and expensive, as professional surveillance can be, it doesn’t always work—or at least it doesn’t work as well as Hollywood movies would suggest. Nick and his team can spend an entire weekend sitting in front of an executive’s house, and the target, perhaps indulging in a DVD marathon, may not emerge once. One corporate spy recalls a time he hired a surveillance team to tail a subject, left the office, and went home. Around 10 P.M. he got a frantic call from the surveillance operatives in the field: “Do you have a tuxedo pressed?” they asked. He did. “Great. Then, quick—run down to this address; the subject has suddenly gone into a black-tie affair, and we don’t have anyone on the team wearing a tux to get into the event.” The spy rushed to the location, bluffed his way past the greeters at the entrance to the ball, and found the subject enjoying a drink at the bar with a number of colleagues. His tuxedo saved the surveillance effort. But the episode could just as easily have gone the other way, and the entire day’s effort, costing tens of thousands of dollars, could have been wasted.
Such unpredictability is inherent to surveillance, and it is why Nick says he encourages clients to consider surveillance only when there is no other way to get information. Clients attracted by the glamour of surveillance operations don’t always listen: they hire the team anyway. The clients themselves can be the biggest hurdle to a successful operation. Nick says that in one of the rare instances when he worked directly with a corporate client who had his cell phone number, the man called him forty-six times in one weekend with instructions. “I said, ‘All due respect to you, but let me get on with it,’” Nick recalls. In another case, a client wanted surveillance but wouldn’t say why. The team followed the subject but had no idea what they were supposed to be looking for. Sometimes business matters are so sensitive that clients are reluctant to share them with the surveillance operatives—who, after all, could leak the details to a competitor for a price. But without details, surveillance isn’t particularly effective. “We always need an aim,” Nick says. “That way, we can tell what’s important and what’s not.”
Often, clients assume that surveillance means simply hiring someone to tail the subject around town. But the professionals explain that it’s much more difficult to execute successful, undetected surveillance than many people think. When tailing someone who’s emerging from the London underground—the subway—a surveillance team will have a man behind him, carrying an encrypted radio, to tell the team at which Tube stop he’s exiting. As the target steps into the sunlight from the underground, he’s got several options for where to go next. He might hail a cab, in which case the team needs to have a motorcycle or car surveillance team ready to follow. Alternatively, the subject might cross the street and enter a hotel, in which case an operative on foot needs to go in right behind him, lest he slip into an elevator or a men’s room and vanish from sight. Or he might turn and walk up the sidewalk. A good surveillance team will have operatives stationed at each of the intersections the target might reach next. And each time the target reaches an intersection, the surveillance team leapfrogs ahead, keeping out of sight, with cars picking up the agents on foot and depositing them ahead of him. There, they reset into positions to cover each of the next set of travel options. Orchestrating all this on the fly without attracting notice, without losing the subject, and without getting into a car crash can be something of an art form.
The team must also consider appearance. The operatives themselves have to be able to fit into every environment. They rarely wear disguises in the Hollywood sense of the term, but they do wear clothes that blend into a variety of situations. If they’re tailing an executive at a high-end hotel, that means suits and ties for the men, and business attire for the women. But if they’re at a ball game, those suits would stand out. The last thing a surveillance operative wants to do is attract any notice at all. One rule: it’s always easier to dress down than it is to dress up. It’s easier for a male operative wearing a suit to whip off the tie and jacket and appear “office casual” than it is for an operative to go from shorts and a T-shirt into an executive outfit. Quick costume changes are part of the surveillance operative’s day.
At the highest end, where targets, such as executives, might be suspicious of surveillance or might have been themselves trained in counterespionage techniques, the operation becomes the proverbial game of cat and mouse. Take the example of the target getting off the London underground. If he suspects he’s under surveillance, he knows an operative will be in the same train car with him. But he doesn’t know who it is. Surveillance people are good at not looking as though they’re paying attention. The wary target needs to flush out the surveillance team.
One way to do that is to be alert as the train pulls into the station. London underground stops have “Way Out” signs that point toward the exits. The subject can spot the signs from the train as it slows down for the stop. Knowing that the direction of the arrows is the direction that foot traffic will move on the platform, a savvy target will move toward the rear of the train car, getting off through the last set of doors, and proceeding toward the subway exit, thus forcing any followers from the same train car ahead of him.
This maneuver puts the surveillance operative in a dilemma. A person can be observed, of course, from the front, but that means having to turn around to make sure the subject is still there. A huge part of defeating surveillance is maneuvering in various situations to place the “follower” in front of the subject. Then, the trick is to identify which person ahead is the surveillance operative.
Once the canny subject steps onto the train platform, he can walk with the crowd, not letting anyone from the same car with him fall behind, and make his way to the escalator. On escalators, people face in the direction they’re traveling. They almost never turn around and look behind—they’re in a rush to get somewhere, and most of them have traveled this route hundreds of times before. No need to be curious. But as the subject approaches the escalator, he knows two things: the surveillance operative is probably in front of him, already on the escalator, and the operative will turn around at about the time that the target steps on the first stair. Even though the operative doesn’t want to give himself away, he must watch and make sure the subject gets on the escalator instead of heading for a different exit.
Once spotted, the surveillance team has to scramble. Now they need to rush operatives to the other exit, cover the elevator, and replace an operative who has been compromised. The subject may not have eluded the team this time, but he’s made life a lot more complicated for the operatives. That’s why high-end surveillance can cost tens of thousands of dollars per day. Following a trained or canny subject can be complicated work; it requires hiring a number of highly trained operatives, and such operatives are hard to find.
Countersurveillance, too, is a good business for Nick, who is just as happy to be paid by a company trying to keep its executives from being spied on as by a company doing the spying. Because the surveillance scene in London is so small, he’s sometimes paid to spend his time trying to outwit the espionage activities of his competitors, men and women he knows well. “In that case, our job is to identify the surveillance, and neutralize it,” Nick says. He reverse-engineers everything he would do as a surveillance operative and scans the streets for people doing the same thing. It may be arrogance, but Nick says he almost always spots the rival teams in action. Generally, he says, a stern warning to the opposing surveillance team is enough to scare them off. “I walk up to them and say, ‘Hey, guys, I’m not being funny here, but my friend over there is getting bored with you following him.’”
Nick knows that a warning like this will c
ause a problem for the other surveillance team. After all, their cover has been blown. He also knows that the other company will send in a replacement crew—that’s the same thing Nick would do—but for the moment his client will be free of surveillance, and Nick will have earned his fee.
This game of corporate spy versus spy can get expensive for clients, and there’s plenty of room for abuse. Sometimes, Nick says, his company gets calls from corporate clients who want counter-surveillance on a subject that another company already had paid Nick to spy on. In those cases, he says, he can’t reveal that he’s the one doing surveillance. Instead, he’ll tell the prospective client that he’s busy on the date involved. But not everyone in the industry is as careful to avoid conflicts of interest as Nick seems to be. Some firms have been known to accept fees from one client to put surveillance on, say, an executive and fees from another client to conduct countersurveillance on the same person. In effect, these firms are getting paid to spy on themselves.
Why are all these spies lurking about the city? Nick says that the length to which companies go will depend on the amount of money involved. The more money is at stake in a given transaction, the more effort by all parties in the deal. Companies use surveillance when the enormous expense is justified by the even more enormous stakes involved. One expert says that in every transaction involving more than $1 billion anywhere in the world today at least one of the parties involved is using surveillance operators.
Nick sees all kinds of variations. “We were hired once when Bank One was doing a negotiation with Bank Two,” he says. “But Bank One suspected that Bank Two was secretly dealing with Bank Three and talking to Bank One only to drive down its deal price with Bank Three. So we put the top executives at Banks Two and Three under surveillance during the entire negotiation.”
