Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  Then there was the time, on home leave, between assignments, when I decided it would be a good time to discuss my chosen line of work with my middle daughter, Amy, who was next in line to be briefed. It is always tricky deciding when to break cover and tell your children that you are a CIA officer. You want to catch them when they are old enough to handle it responsibly, but not after they have developed hardened misperceptions about the intelligence world. I tried to break the news to them in their early teens and while on assignment in the United States, where they were not likely to spread the news the next day to their schoolmates. One of my favorite techniques was to do it in a one-on-one trip from Washington to the Jersey Shore. I would wait until we crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which would give me about an hour to handle any of their questions but not allow so much time to overwork it. This ploy worked well until I tried it out on Amy, who was almost sixteen at the time, a bit older than I preferred. When I broke the news to her in the car, she let out a shriek: “You are an assassin?” Not the view that most parents would like their children to have of them. The response caught me by surprise and made me wonder what she was being told in high school. In any case, I used the next hour to walk her through her concerns and to set the record straight. By the time we arrived at the shore, she was back to normal and allowed that, in the end, it might be “cool” to be in the spy world. From then on, I tried not to make the same mistake with the others, namely catching them before they hit their late teens.

  My daughters’ relationships abroad were never uneventful. I’ll never forget my oldest daughter’s first date in the Caribbean. Christiane (Kee Kee) was invited to the movies by a very polite boy from her swim team. We thought nothing about it until we received a call from his mother inquiring who would be “chaperoning” them. We tried to explain that in America we no longer chaperoned teenagers. The mother was amazed and immediately volunteered to—or, more precisely, insisted that she—take care of it. Her son’s two aunts would accompany the two kids on the date. So, much like the scene in The Godfather, the aunts walked a few steps behind them and sat directly behind them in the movie theater. It seemed to be fun for Kee Kee nonetheless, and made us wonder if this tradition might not warrant a resurrection.

  * * *

  Leaving these family memories aside, it was time to go. There were people at the Agency whose emotional and family connections to the place were so intense that we literally had to walk them to the door of headquarters on their last day. Leaving the CIA isn’t like saying goodbye at a normal workplace, where you can go back for a visit later. Once you leave the Agency, unless you are under contract or have some specific reason to go back inside the building, you’re gone. All the people working inside must by necessity become circumspect when talking to you about their activities. It is unprofessional and imprudent to press them about their work. And if you call and you do not have a specific number, the operator will not put you through. In a very real way, when you retire from the Agency you are cut off from the elite team that you had been a part of for so many years. When I walked out the door, I left all my personal materials behind. I took secrecy seriously, and I walked out without a single piece of paper. It was emotional, but I was at peace with it. I felt pride and loss simultaneously. But it felt right.

  Initially, I believed that after three or four years I would not feel the same emotional attachment. But as time has gone by, I’ve remained more psychologically attached than ever to the Agency, and more concerned about it than I realized I would. I now have a thriving, interesting business, but I still feel the pull of the place. The Agency is critically important to our national security, to preserving our way of life and our system of government. And it’s very personal.

  In the late 1990s, there wasn’t the demand for ex-CIA people that there is today. The world was a more peaceful place, and the corporate intelligence business was in its early days. So job hunting was not easy. Today it is a different ball game. Virtually every large company is now interested in people who are knowledgeable about intelligence and who have a deep understanding of developments around the world. But back then, I was hardly a hot property; headhunters were not knocking down my door. The one thing I did know was what I did not want to do. I did not see myself entering a purely security-oriented field, as I wanted to try to put my intelligence expertise to more direct use. I wanted to see if all the years I had spent gathering intelligence and conducting operations could serve corporate clients who, in business deals and lawsuits, often found themselves confronting adversaries but lacked the ability to understand their motivations and tactics. What seemed like a good opportunity just happened to come my way when the former acting FBI director Larry Potts heard from John Deutch that I would be on the job market and asked if I would be interested in joining him at Investigations Group International.

  IGI was one of the early firms to enter the risk management market, and a position to run their New York office had just opened up with the departure of Ray Kelly, who later became the New York City police commissioner. Pat and I were quite enthused about going to New York City. We were urbanites at heart, and I wanted to leave Washington to break the circle of worrying about what was going on inside the CIA, or reminiscing with former colleagues on a daily basis about what used to be. I wanted to see if I could carve out a new existence and reinvent myself, which is sometimes easier to do in a new setting. This position would enable me to do that yet at the same time stay close to what I liked and knew best: intelligence.

  About a year after I left the Agency, I was back in Washington and had lunch again with Tenet, at an Italian restaurant in Georgetown. We spent much of the lunch talking about the increased Agency presence in Iraq. I told him I had concerns about our engagement there. Afterward, we had just come outside and were standing on the street when I gave him a warning. This is how he recounts the moment in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm:

  Jack Devine, a very able clandestine service officer who was acting deputy director of operations during the John Deutch era, once said to me, “George, somebody is going to fire a bullet today in northern Iraq, and you are going to find out where it landed two years from now.” As I was to learn, truer words were seldom spoken. So many things were going on in such disparate venues and coming at me from so many angles that it was impossible to keep track of everything.

  I’m not sure he got the quote exactly right, but he was close enough. What I was saying to George was, “You’re now in a high-political-risk environment. A bullet’s been fired [he got that right] and you didn’t hear the shot, but it’s headed in your direction, and whether it hits you in the shoulder or the head, it’s impossible to say, but it’s got your name on it, and I can’t tell you exactly how bad that hit is going to be. But Iraq was a good bet on where the shot was fired.” I know what I said had stunned him, because he stood there silent for a few seconds. The truth is no matter how close to the mark I was on Iraq, running the CIA is arguably one of the most difficult—and rewarding—jobs in Washington. The chances of getting out of the CIA as director without a hit are slim—look at everybody who has gone into the job in recent years, whether it’s Petraeus, Panetta, Hayden, Goss, Deutch, or Woolsey. At the end of lunch, we went our separate ways. As it happened, the bullet had not yet been fired at Tenet in Iraq, but it would be soon enough.

  In the private-sector intelligence business, a core service is anticipating where those hits might come from in the corporate arena. One important tool is pretransaction due diligence (searching for red flags associated with an acquisition target or its leadership). Other core areas of business intelligence and risk management include competitive intelligence (providing information on the market and on competitors) and programmatic intelligence (ongoing monitoring of an issue, region, or event). Inevitably, security issues, both physical and technological, enter the mix, as clients travel and work in dangerous places, and increasingly confront cyber threats. Many assignments fit into the category of tailore
d investigations and intelligence. For example, searching for specific information about an adversary to strengthen a litigation strategy; or verifying a company’s stated revenue, distribution network, or regulatory constraints to test an investment thesis. Finally, there is the ever-present catchall of fixing difficult problems—often involving overseas partners.

  Not too long after setting up in New York in early 2000, I found myself involved with David Copperfield, the magician. Copperfield had been performing in Moscow in December 1999 when he ran afoul of his local promoters, including the powerful Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, resulting in the seizure of his all-important show trucks. After his representatives’ efforts at intimidation and persuasion failed to impress the Russians, Copperfield used his ties to the White House, who in turn suggested that we might help him resolve his problem. Knowing how Russian politics works, I arranged to have a retired KGB officer intervene with his former colleagues, who freed the trucks and provided them with a KGB escort to Finland to boot. We did not trust the Russians, and they didn’t trust us, but at least we were all part of the intelligence brotherhood and had a common understanding of operations and human behavior. Later, Copperfield invited Pat and me to his show at the MGM in Las Vegas, where we had front-row seats to his amazing performance.

  Another case I was involved in dealt with the provenance of seven fifteenth- to seventeenth-century illuminated manuscripts, and required sleuthing skills not foreign to the CIA. The case dealt with the descendants of two Jewish Parisian art collectors, Georges Wildenstein and Alphonse Kann, who had their art collections confiscated by the Nazis during World War II and later petitioned the French government for their return. In 1996, Kann’s heirs claimed ownership of manuscripts on display at the Wildenstein Gallery in New York and sued the gallery. The gallery retained Stanley Arkin, the prominent New York criminal defense attorney and litigation strategist who had successfully defended the CIA officer Alan Fiers during the Iran-Contra investigation.

  Stanley wanted to find evidence that the disputed manuscripts had never belonged to Alphonse Kann, and he retained us to find records of the Kann family’s inventory. Based in part on our findings, Stanley was able to argue that a French statute of limitations applied in this case, and the New York Supreme Court justice Barbara Kapnick ruled that French law precluded a return of the manuscripts to Kann.

  Stanley was delighted with the outcome, but he could not keep from ribbing me about our business development skills.

  “Your company is so cheap, you never invite even a good client for lunch,” he said over the telephone one day.

  “Stanley, I’ll buy you lunch.”

  The last thing Stanley needed or wanted was a free lunch, but it set the stage for an extraordinary relationship.

  Soon afterward, Stanley and I went to Maloney & Porcelli, the steak house on Fiftieth Street, near St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Just as we were about to sit down, Stanley said, “I have an idea I hope you like. Let’s go into business together.” He certainly caught me by surprise, but it was an intriguing idea to say the least.

  I was growing restless at IGI, and the idea of starting a new firm as a full partner had great appeal. Being partners with Stanley represented just the type of opportunity I had been looking for. The waiter brought our menus, and Stanley wanted to split a steak. I don’t normally like the idea of splitting a steak, particularly since I had served in Argentina—the land of outstanding beef and huge steaks. But I was magnanimous. “If there’s a business opportunity, I’ll split a steak with you, Stanley,” I said. That’s how our corporate intelligence firm, The Arkin Group (TAG), got started in May 2000: nothing more complicated than a handshake over lunch. As it turned out, that shared steak marked the beginning of, in Stanley’s words, “a remarkable collaboration and a strong and supportive friendship.” In fact, our offices have been next to each other for the past fourteen years.

  Arkin’s law firm, Arkin Solbakken LLP, specializes in white-collar criminal defense, complex litigation, and problem solving. The firm has a tradition of zealous representation of individuals and companies in intricate cases. Stanley believes that a legal case, like any dispute, is substantially driven by human emotions, motivation, guile, and a self-interest that may not be readily apparent. A case is, in essence, a story. But the litigation process is also a war, and to do it most efficiently, it is necessary to understand what motivates the other side and to know your adversary. While some lawyers rely solely on the litigation discovery process to determine what happened, Stanley also tries where possible to nail it down the details methodically, through investigative work. Not surprisingly, he often turned to investigators to aggressively pursue key pieces of information, but found many of them to be uninspiring and unimaginative—more plodding than savvy. In fact, when I joined him in business, almost no one in this field had a genuine international reach or a well-developed network of international sources. There was a real need for a higher-end product more closely resembling the strategic intelligence and rigorous professional investigations that characterize government intelligence at its best.

  Unbeknownst to me, Stanley had long tinkered with the idea of starting an intelligence company. He recognized that there were very few people in the private sector with my intelligence experience, and that together we would make a formidable team. We realized that my Agency experience would differentiate us from competitors, making us more credible on the international stage and enhancing our marketability. Together we saw the potential to put together something unique, a corporate intelligence firm that married Stanley’s strategic legal advocacy with my three decades running complex CIA intelligence operations all over the globe. Although the use of intelligence to gain a business advantage is a pursuit as old as commerce itself, the world of global corporate intelligence as we know it today was in its formative days in the beginning of 2000, when we started together.

  Stanley grew up in Los Angeles and worked his way through Harvard Law School. After apprenticing and then partnering with a distinguished attorney, Harris B. Steinberg, at age twenty-nine he began his own practice. By the 1970s he was already a prominent New York criminal defense attorney. In one of his important early cases, he represented Vincent Chiarella, a financial printer convicted of insider trading after he scoured confidential documents to glean the names of corporate executives targeted in fraud investigations and used the information to trade stocks. Stanley argued Chiarella’s case before the U.S. Supreme Court and won. The Court reversed Chiarella’s conviction, finding that he lacked either a confidential relationship or a fiduciary duty to anyone else involved in the stocks he traded. Stanley’s prominence grew throughout the financial scandals of the early 1980s, fueled by his aggressive and artful representation of Wall Street executives charged by the SEC with insider trading.

  Stanley’s practice included difficult and sometimes exotic disputes, which reinforced his use of unconventional strategies alongside litigation. His representation of the international banker and philanthropist Edmond Safra was an example. In 1983, Safra sold his Geneva-based Trade Development Bank to American Express, only to split with AMEX the following year. Fearing that Safra was preparing to compete against them, individuals retained by AMEX executives proceeded to orchestrate a smear campaign against him in the press, peddling lies and misinformation to reporters in Europe and the United States.

  Safra retained Stanley to find out who was behind the misinformation campaign. Stanley assembled a team of operatives who tracked the media stories back to AMEX executives. Mounting a counterattack in the press, he published an article in the New York Law Journal that nailed AMEX. “Spreading false and malicious rumors or flat-out lies…” Stanley wrote, “in addition to likely violating the laws of defamation, may well amount to criminal fraud.” Within days, American Express was negotiating a settlement that included a public apology from its chairman, James D. Robinson III.

  The matter that brought Stanley into my orbit was his representation of
Alan Fiers, who led the CIA’s Central America Task Force and played a key role in the Iran-Contra scandal. In May 2000, when Stanley and I formed The Arkin Group, I got a call from Clair George.

  “You’ve gone with the enemy!!” George said without an introduction.

  His comment caught me off balance momentarily, especially since I had been focused on the future, not the past—and certainly not on Iran-Contra.

  “Clair, Stanley had a legal mission: help Alan, a fellow CIA officer,” I said. “He’s a highly successful and effective lawyer. He did what he had to do to save his client.” Clair went on laughingly to say that he understood but couldn’t resist pulling my chain, which he had done effectively. He was tough-minded and politically savvy and had no trouble understanding the realities of Washington politics and their legal ramifications.

  Stanley and I quickly got to work building our enterprise and developing a high-quality worldwide network of assets appropriate for business purposes. We were inhabiting a relatively new and poorly understood market space. For the most part, our clients had never used the services of an intelligence firm, and they did not fully appreciate the powerful influence that strategic intelligence could have on critical business and legal decisions. Over the past decade, of course, the corporate world has changed in dramatic ways that have created a robust demand for the type of capabilities we have at our disposal. A new concern about terrorist financing resulted in enhanced due diligence in many sectors, particularly financial. In addition, the Bush and Obama administrations have placed an emphasis on enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. More prosecutions have brought greater attention to the issue of corruption for companies doing business internationally. The truth is it’s very hard to keep your house in order when operating in many of these far-flung places with likely corrupt business practices.