Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy (24 page)

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 cause 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.”

Although much of business life these days is conducted by phone and e-mail—which are not easy surveillance targets—Nick remains convinced that when a lot of money is changing hands, people still meet face-to-face. And when they do, he’s ready to document it all. “That’s the advantage we have as ex-military operators,” he says. In the case of the three banks, “We had a guy who was able to swim forty meters to the island where the subject’s house was and have a look.” Once there, Nick’s man dug a hole in the ground just outside the banker’s house—and lived in it for days while he watched everything that went on. In the end, Nick’s team discovered that Bank Two was conducting talks with Bank Three, and tipped the client off to the deception.

If such spying can save a company millions of dollars, executives reason, it more than justifies the tens of thousands of dollars paid to uncover the information. And if a banker on the other side of a deal objects to having former soldiers from the British special forces living in holes in his backyard, so what? It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.

N
OT EVERYONE IN
the surveillance industry is as low-profile as Nick No-Name. Another British operative, Emma Shaw, works in an unremarkable office complex in the bedroom community of Old Woking, in Surrey, about half an hour from London by fast train. The other tenants in the complex are small businesses, accountants, and one-man consulting shops. Emma Shaw’s office has the
atmosphere of a suburban dentist’s office, and she herself doesn’t look anything like a secret agent—but that’s the point. A veteran intelligence operative, Shaw appears youthful, spending a casual Friday in her office clad in a pink Abercrombie and Fitch sweat top and fashionable jeans. Her blond hair has highlights, and she’s got high cheekbones, giving her an athletic appearance. She looks like a young mom on her way to football practice.

But Emma Shaw is the real deal, as well trained as Nick No-Name, though with a different business philosophy. Shaw feels that surveillance is a legitimate part of the business process and that surveillance operators like her shouldn’t hide in the shadows. Her office has a sign on the front door. Her company, “esoteric,” has a Web site (www.esotericltd.com), and she hands out slick marketing materials detailing her services, with the tagline: “A specialist security and covert investigations company.”

Shaw is a manager now, and doesn’t do much actual snooping herself, so she’s less concerned than Nick No-Name about her identity becoming public. It’s not bad for her career, and in the right context, publicity may even help. She lays down one condition, though: she won’t discuss the exact details of surveillance techniques she uses on behalf of her corporate clients. They’re by and large the same techniques used to this day by the British intelligence service MI5 and by British military intelligence. Providing too detailed a description, she fears, could give vital intelligence to the terrorists who are trying to elude British intelligence every day.

Emma Shaw was born in Yorkshire, the coastal county in northern England, and at age eighteen joined the army, where she was assigned to the military police. As a teenager in the army, she learned the basics of overt investigations, and then moved on to undercover missions, helping the top brass work against drug use among British forces. She tailed suspects, posed as a regular soldier, and helped support police investigations of soldiers suspected of smuggling or selling drugs. Shaw found her picture on the front pages
of newspapers across Britain. But by that time she’d left the unit, so her undercover status wasn’t compromised by the publicity.

Next assigned to Northern Ireland, she served in a garrison township outside Belfast in 1993 and 1994. There, she did undercover intelligence work, but she’s vague about what it entailed—saying only that it “related to the problems of the time.” And at that time there were problems aplenty for the British army in Northern Ireland. Shaw’s job was to support the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the largely Protestant police force that patrolled a land bitterly divided between Protestants and Catholics.

After Shaw had spent eight years in the army, MI5 recruited her. MI5 focuses on counterintelligence and domestic security. Shaw says she left the military on a Friday afternoon, and reported for duty at the intelligence agency on Monday. She worked on covert operations and intelligence gathering, then left the service toward the end of the 1990s. Like many retiring spies, Shaw saw the allure of the private sector—and wanted to leave the government before she was too old to make the transition to corporate work. “I wanted to go on and do other things,” she says. “To get out and get a second career.”