Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy

by Eamon Javers

  Sheikh Mo, as he’s known, has a firm staffed by CIA veterans on his payroll in Washington.

  That fact is buried in obscure U.S government filings, so it has not been discovered by the media and the public. If it were widely known, it could be controversial. In 2006, the effort by a company called Dubai Ports World to buy a company that managed six American ports caused an uproar throughout the United States, in the mainstream media, in the blogosphere, and among the political elite. How could a company from the United Arab Emirates—a federation to which several of the 9/11 terrorists had ties—be given access to the American shipping infrastructure? Republican congresswoman Sue Myrick sent an angry letter to President George W. Bush that read in part, “Hell no!” Would politicians like Myrick be pleased to learn that Sheikh Mo had hired—through several cutouts—some of the most sophisticated CIA-trained talent available in the private sector?

  It’s not clear what services these former CIA people offer to the ruler of Dubai, but their work on his behalf has left something of a paper trail in federal disclosure records. The documents are difficult to find, but they are the only clues in the mystery: the CIA veterans aren’t talking, and the embassy of the United Arab Emirates does not respond to an inquiry about the matter.

  This case is particularly interesting, since it illustrates the way many private intelligence firms are hired. The entire industry is hidden from public view through the clever application of attorney-client privilege, aggressive use of nondisclosure agreements, and creation of elaborate cutout schemes.

  Whenever an American company signs on to lobby the government on behalf of a foreign country, it has to file a document with the U.S. Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Unit. The law that gives the unit its authority was passed in 1938, and was designed to make life difficult for Nazi sympathizers working in the United States. In all the decades since, the Department of Justice has been accumulating registrations at its small facility in Washington.

  Its offices are tucked into the first floor of a nondescript building just a block or so from the White House on New York Avenue. After pressing a buzzer to be let in, visitors enter a filing room overflowing with years of old papers, books, and directories. Three worn-looking computers sit on a table, available to any member of the public for a search through electronic copies of the files. Invariably, young paralegals from some of Washington’s high-powered law firms occupy these computers, searching the records for details to support ongoing litigation.

  The documents they’re searching through typically include copies of any contracts signed by American companies working to advocate for foreign governments. They detail names of American officials the firms met with, and the dates and times of those contacts.

  The disclosure forms show that the government-owned Dubai Holding (which, because Dubai is a monarchy, thus belongs to Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum) hired the American law firm DLA Piper to work on its behalf. The law firm in turn hired the public relations firm Levick Strategic Communications. And the PR firm hired TD International (TDI), a private intelligence firm that is based in Washington, D.C., and employs a number of CIA veterans.

  The founder of TDI is William Green, who is described at the firm’s Web site as “a former U.S. diplomat specializing in multilateral affairs.” Several sources say he is a former CIA officer. A partner at the firm is Ron Slimp, who is described as a “former U.S. diplomat and trade negotiator,” and who once described himself in an e-mail to a colleague as a “former spy.”*

  The contract with Levick called for TDI and its stable of former spies and diplomats to receive $25,000 per month, after an initial start-up payment of $40,000. According to the filings of one of the firms involved, team members in Dubai were working on something they code-named “Project Voss.” The work involved building a document sharing system and a Web site that would serve as a public relations vehicle for the firm’s client in Dubai.

  The entire effort—lawyers, Web masters, and spies—was designed to fend off a class-action lawsuit against Sheikh Mo in south Florida. The suit was filed on September 7, 2006. In it, a group of parents alleged that their sons had been kidnapped and forced to work in the United Arab Emirates, as jockeys in camel races.

  Camel racing has been popular in the bedouin desert regions of Arabia for hundreds of years. The oil produced in the region in the twentieth century provided wealth for this sport, which grew ever more competitive and deployed ever more resources, as sheikhs battled for prize money and glory. The sheikhs realized that small boys—who weigh very little—made the best jockeys for these races. That fact, plus the oil money, quickly created a market for children to work in the growing camel-racing industry. Boys from as young as three up through adolescence worked in the racing circuit.

  But there may have been a dark underside: the lawsuit alleged that the boys riding the camels were not paid athletes but slaves:

  This Complaint seeks redress against individuals who abducted and trafficked thousands of small boys from South Asia and Africa to the United Arab Emirates and other Arab states and enslaved them to work as camel jockeys, camel trainers and camel tenders in the desolation and heat of the Arabian Peninsula. Boys as young as two years old were stolen from their parents, trafficked to foreign lands, and put under the watch of brutal overseers in camel camps throughout the region.

  This had the potential to embarrass Sheikh Mo. It also looked as though it might get expensive, even for a billionaire: the lawsuit didn’t specify an amount of money sought by the plaintiffs, but it asked for compensatory damages, punitive damages, and the cost of the lawsuit itself. And it listed as plaintiffs “Minors John Does 1–10,000, Mother Does 1–10,000, Father Does 1–10,000, along with Mother Roes 1–1,000 and Father Roes, Individually and as Survivors of Deceased Children.”

  That meant potentially tens of thousands of impoverished third-world parents suing one of the richest men on the planet and invoking the images of their enslaved, and in some cases dead, sons. Whatever the merits, it would be a tough case to defend. Sheikh Mo’s phalanx of Americans went to work to mitigate the damage.

  It’s possible that TDI became involved because executives there saw Sheikh Mo’s troubles as an opportunity for profit—that’s how the competitive intelligence industry works. There is also a possible hint of something more: for the United States, the lawsuit was extraordinarily sensitive. The United Arab Emirates is a crucial ally of the United States against Al Qaeda, and it borders the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic point separating the Persian Gulf from the Gulf of Oman. The twenty-one-mile-wide strait is the sole transit point for as much as 40 percent of the world’s oil, which is transported by tanker to the Indian Ocean and the rest of the world beyond. Across the strait is a hostile nation, Iran. The United States military has used the United Arab Emirates as a launching point for operations in Iraq and the Horn of Africa, where two volatile nations—Ethiopia and Somalia—are situated.

  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.

  ANOTHER 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,* 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,* 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.* 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:

  Dear Mr. Skilling,

  Your office has asked me to outline Hakluyt’s services…. I would say simply this; Hakluyt is what you make of it—it places an unparalleled private intelligence network at the personal disposal of senior commercial figures.

  …Although we work for divisional directors on tactical issues, we have found our most rewarding work in personal dealings with CEOs who wish—for whatever reason—to have a confidential agency at their own disposal. It was this, which prompted Phil Carroll to write to you about us in April…. We look at people and the issues, which often drive them to make the decisions or act as they do. All our work is unattributable.3

  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.

  IN 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.