Private Espionage Is Booming The US Needs a Spy Registry
From Black Cube to Fusion GPS, the operatives-for-hire industry has recklessly exploded. Disclosure requirements could keep things in check.Years ago, while stationed in Moscow as the bureau chief for a major news magazine, I was approached by a representative of a multinational company and presented with a tantalizing offer. He said he had highly sensitive materials exposing possible criminal activity by a Russian competitor. The documents were mine with one condition: advance notice so he could be out of the country when any story was published.
I had every reason to think the materials came from a private intelligence operative hired by the companyâ€"there were many such operatives in Moscowâ€"but I didn’t ask my source for his source. Instead I embarked on a somewhat harrowing investigation of my own, and on corroborating the materials, I was able to publish a splashy story.
This episode came back to me while reading Barry Meier’s new book, Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies. A former New York Times investigative reporter, Meier casts a harsh light on both “private spies†and journalists who make frequent use of nuggets unearthed by these operatives. In the book’s afterword, he revives an idea for “a kind of ‘spy registry’ in which operatives for hire would have to disclose the names of their clients and assignments,†just as Congress now requires of lobbyists hired to influence legislators.
Is this truly a problem in need of a solution? Or would a spy registry create worse problems?
It’s tempting to conclude that there is really nothing new here and that private spies may even supply a public service. In the original, late-19th-century Gilded Age, the Pinkerton Detective Agency devoted itself to the art of subterfuge. In 1890, a Pinkerton man went undercover on behalf of his client, the governor of North Dakota, and confirmed from rigorous barroom investigation that a fair amount of “boodle,†bribe money, was being dispensed by advocates of a state lottery opposed by the governor. The governor revealed the dirty dealings to the public, and the lottery scheme failedâ€"all perhaps to the civic good.
Today’s circumstances are far different. Inexpensive, off-the-shelf technologies for surveillance, hacking, and spoofing make the spy game easier to play than ever before. What hired sleuth doesn’t now travel with one of those metallic-fabric bags that blocks cellphone GPS signals, like the GoDark Faraday model that sells online for $49.97? It’s an insignificant item on the expense report.
Digital-age tools of the trade, coupled with promiscuous media outlets happy to take receipt of purloined emails, say, that news organizations could not legally acquire on their own, made for a “perfect petri dish,†Meier writes in Spooked, “where the influence of the private spies would fester and breed, uncontrolled and unchecked.†Based on an estimate by the consulting firm ERG Partners, he guesses that revenues for the private investigative industry, at $2.5 billion in 2018, have doubled from 10 years before.
Meier stakes his indictment on two ethically fraught episodes, one concerning Black Cube. Founded in 2010, the global corporate intelligence firm touts its use of a “select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units†to deliver its product of “Creative Intelligence: Tailor-made solutions based on high-quality intelligence, cutting-edge technology, unique expertise and out-of-the box thinking,†as its website informs us.
“Out of the box†indeed. In 2016, in hopes of keeping the press from publishing sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, the law firm of superlawyer David Boies hired Black Cube to work on Weinstein’s behalf. The contract, Meier notes, specifically mentioned the intelligence firm’s use of “avatar operatorsâ€: experts in social media who specialized in creating fake Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles, and the like for field operatives. One such operative, a female Israeli military veteran given the cover of a women’s rights advocate employed at a London investment firm, befriended a Weinstein accuser, the actress Rose McGowan. The agent’s covert aim was to persuade McGowan to share an as-yet-unpublished memoir that dealt with Weinstein. All of this later came to light in Ronan Farrow’s 2017 expose of Black Cube. Asked whether Black Cube’s tactics involving fake identities constituted misrepresentation, Boies retreated to unconvincing legalese: “I think it may depend on how significant the misrepresentation is to the person receiving it.â€
Meier’s other linchpin example involves the Washington, DC, firm Fusion GPS, which advertises “premium research, strategic intelligence, and due diligence services to corporations, law firms, and investors worldwide.†The firm is led by a pair of ex-Wall Street Journal reporters, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, and not surprisingly makes enterprising use of its close personal ties to the journalism fraternity.
A law firm with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign as its client hired Fusion GPS to probe the nexus between Russia and Donald Trump. Fusion GPS, in turn, farmed out the job to Christopher Steele, a former operative for the M16 UK intelligence unit, who operated his own private-intelligence firm. Steele then tapped his network of Russian contacts to mine for compromising informationâ€"kompromatâ€"on Trump. Ten days before Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Buzzfeed published the full Steele Dossierâ€"35 pages of raw, uncorroborated musings collected from the mouths of Moscow hotel staff and similar chatty sources. So the world “learned,†courtesy of a leaked private-spy op, that Vladimir Putin’s security service just maybe possessed a secret tape of Trump-hired prostitutes peeing on a Ritz-Carlton bed once slept on by Barack and Michelle Obama. Never in history, probably, has a private-intelligence caper caused such a public ruckus.
No disclosure was required of Fusion GPS of its Trump/Russia assignment, and none was made. So it typically goes in the private-espionage shadowlands. So why not open the curtains and institute a mandatory disclosure regime?
Let’s not, a friend in journalism, Steve LeVine, editor of The Electric, at first pushed back: “I think the idea of a spy registry is crazy.†He noted that in a project for The New York Times he had made good use of private spies in gathering information on riches unaccountably piled up by a Central Asian dictator. “The folks carrying out this profession are, in the main, pretty normal and happen to have a skill in investigation,†he said. And suppose, he asked, that the proverbial suspicious husband hires a spy to look into a possibly cheating wife: Would that need to be disclosed?
No, I replied, that’s definitely not one for a federal spy registry. The scope should be limited to the landscapes of economic and political power on matters that clearly engage the public interest. As to the economic terrain, in his 2010 book Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage, Eamon Javers, currently senior Washington correspondent for CNBC, called for a spy registry maintained by the Securities and Exchange Commission. To the publicly available records already required by the SEC from investment advisers and many others, private spies prowling the corporate terrain could add their disclosures. That would cover a Black Cube hired by a Harvey Weinstein, as a film-industry baron.
An even stronger argument can be made for disclosure of private-spy work involving political campaigns. After all, the Federal Elections Commission, the logical place to keep a campaigns-related spy registry, already makes extensive reporting requirements of political parties and campaigns and their donors. To add a form from private spies to this list would not be much of a burden to the agency and would fit with its stated mission “to protect the integrity of the federal campaign finance process by providing transparency†for voters.
I shared this idea with the head of a New York-based strategic intelligence firm that gathers political and financial information for banks and other clients. “A disclosure requirement wouldn’t bother me personally,†he said, and could benefit the public as sunlight generally does. (He apologized for the “irony†of asking for his name not to be attached to this pro-disclosure declaration: “I’ve still got people threatening my life†over work that has aroused their ire.)
But a key issue, he continued, is just how detailed a disclosure would have to be. This is where it gets tricky, as there are legitimate privacy claims to protect. Let’s imagine that Fusion GPS was subject to a disclosure rule on taking on the Trump/Russia job. It probably would have been sufficient to know, in addition to the sought-for nature of the work, the name of the law firm that hired Fusion GPS to gather material on the Russia-Trump nexus, the name of the law firm’s client (the Clinton campaign) and the name of the operative, Christopher Steele, separately retained by Fusion GPS to do the field work. But Fusion GPS’ internal communications with the law firm and with Steele, its reach outs to journalists to share fruits of the investigation, these merit confidentiality. Letting people, even private spooks, go about without the government shining a flashlight in every nook of their labors, also is a primary value of a liberal society.
In the end, one need not embrace the assumption that pervades Meier’s Spooked, that the private spy business is inherently pernicious, to see the value of a balanced disclosure requirement. Though manyâ€"probably mostâ€"of the disclosures would likely induce collective yawns, they won’t all be snoozers.
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