Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy Read Free

undeniable fact that pilfering phone records and digging through dumpsters are among the most benign tactics in the corporate espionage playbook. Espionage gets much, much dirtier than that.
    The scam Nick Day ran on Guy Enright in Bermuda was just one of 100 or more operations Diligence has launched since its founding in 2000 by Day and a fellow thirtysomething intelligence vet, Mike Baker, who had been a CIA officer for fourteen years. In this case, Diligence didn’t work directly for Alfa Group. Instead, it worked for one of Washington’s most prominent and well-connected lobbying firms, Barbour Griffith and Rogers. This lobbying firm paid Diligence $25,000 per month, plus expenses and, in at least one case, a bonus for obtaining a key document. The lobbyists, in turn, were working for Russia’s largest privately owned bank: Alfa Bank, a subsidiary of Alfa Group Consortium.
    The transcontinental struggle between the two Russian heavies was a bonanza for corporate spies, who were reaping hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees working for either IPOC or Alfa. But that meant Diligence had to move carefully—with so many spies on the case it would be hard to find sources, and harder still to determine each person’s true motives. First, a team of Washington operatives from Diligence reconnoitered at the KPMG offices, trying to establish who inside the firm would have access to the key documents.
    Many employees at Diligence believed they were on the right side in this battle. They felt that IPOC was the bad guy, nothing more than a convoluted set of shell companies and dummy entities that allowed Leonid Reiman to grab control of MegaFon. They couldn’t wait to expose what they saw as Reiman’s wrongdoing. *
    The mission would be tricky, but Nick Day, as always, brimmed over with confidence. “We have a good chance of success on this project,” Day wrote in an internal memo at Diligence. “We are doing it in a way which gives plausible deniability, and therefore virtually no chance of discovery.” Other, similar Diligence operations had been successful, Day noted.
    Staffers at Diligence began to work the phones, pretending to be organizers of a corporate conference on accounting soon to be held in Bermuda. To keep the story straight, they talked with local hotels to find out room rates and the prices for renting a conference center, gathering convincing details to drop into later conversations. They flew to Bermuda, and treated KPMG’s secretaries to rounds of drinks at local bars, probing them for information about who the key executives at KPMG were.
    Still posing as event organizers, they began calling senior-level KPMG accountants in Bermuda. They told the flattered accountants that they were organizing a major conference, and they were looking for speakers. You’re such an expert. What would you say in your speech to our attendees? What a fascinating job you have! Tell me about it. They were looking for people who would have access to documents regarding the investigation of IPOC. But not just anyone who had access to the papers would work as a source. The experienced hands at Diligence knew that only certain personality types might go along with the scheme they had in mind.
    The intelligence firm was looking for people who fit one of two personality profiles, according to a Project Yucca planning memo. One personality type was a “male in his mid-20s who is somewhat bored…has a propensity to party hard, needs cash, enjoys risk, likes sports, likes women, is disrespectful of his managers, fiddles his expenses, but is patriotic.” The memo described the second personality type as “a young female who is insecure, overweight, bitchy, not honest. Someone who spends money on her looks, clothes, gadgets. Has no boyfriend, and only superficial friends. Has a strong relationship with her mother.”
    Enright, the British-born accountant, didn’t quite fit either of these psychological profiles, but the firm