Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy (35 page)

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In the winter, the Peloquins spend time at their condo in Plantation, Florida, situated just off the Lago Mar Country Club. And Peloquin still goes to Paradise Island sometimes. “I know people there who can get me a reservation,” he says with a laugh.

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This story made for great Hollywood fare: in 2007 it became a movie,
The Hoax
, starring Richard Gere as Irving.

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Vadja Kalombatovic had one other connection useful to Intertel. During World War II, he’d served in the army as a corporal. The sergeant he reported to was Henry Kissinger, later to become Nixon’s secretary of state. When the two men ran into each other in the deep-carpeted confines of Washington’s elite Metropolitan Club, they’d embrace like brothers. The relationship was yet another vector into the federal government for Intertel.

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The interests that intertwined Sir Ranulph and Peloquin are almost incomprehensibly complex. O’Toole writes that while Peloquin was still at the Department of Justice, he was already in contact with Crosby, of Paradise Island. (By Peloquin’s account, they met only after he had left Justice.) And according to O’Toole, Peloquin began an investigation at the department of alleged corruption among Bahamian gamblers—who also posed a threat to Crosby’s interests on the island. A Royal Commission of Inquiry was also formed to look into allegations of corruption among Crosby’s competitors. That commission was chaired by Bacon and received direct cooperation from Peloquin. It succeeded in driving away several potential competitors to Crosby. Later, Peloquin invited Bacon to join his board of directors at Intertel.

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During the Thanksgiving eve escape from the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, one of Hughes’s aides had the unpleasant duty of toting that saddle-shaped toilet seat down the stairs to load into the getaway car.

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A person listed in the directory lent a copy of the 2007 edition of
Trapline
to the author—on the condition that it be quickly returned. It was.

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Kroll says he doesn’t remember looking into Boesky’s sex life: “We investigated Ivan Boesky on several occasions, but I don’t remember any one occasion in which his sexuality was an issue,” he said.

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It was an ironic choice because the Mayflower Hotel had itself been the scene of so much corporate wiretapping in earlier decades.

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The “Brown” in the name was a reference to the lawyer who helped draw up the papers for the incorporation.

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Today, Cannistraro says he worked on only a few projects for the firm, and he thinks Beckett Brown wanted to hire him to use his name to generate business.

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The odd suffix “effem” is derived from the pronunciation of F. M., the initials of company founder Frank Mars.

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Nestlé Magic had such appeal that the toys are still available for sale on eBay—and have appreciated nicely in value. A box of twelve of the cheap plastic toys was offered for sale on eBay recently for $45, plus $8.75 for shipping.

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Watergate buffs may recognize the name Science Security Associates. In the months leading up to the infamous break-in, a New Zealander working for Science Security, James Woolston-Smith, learned of the plans being drawn up by the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP). The veteran CIA officer George O’Toole described what happened next in his 1978 book
The Private Sector
: Woolston-Smith passed the word to a former client, William Haddad, who in turn alerted the Democratic Party chairman, Larry O’Brien. The information passed to the Democrats even included the names of James McCord and G. Gordon Liddy. “It seems incredible,” wrote O’Toole, “but nearly two months before the arrest of McCord and the four Cubans inside the Watergate offices of the DNC, the Democrats had been fully briefed on the CREEP operational plans to bug them.” It never became clear how Woolston-Smith had gotten his intelligence.

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Forrest Mars, the reclusive billionaire son of the company’s founder Frank Mars, was a famous figure in the industry for having invented M&Ms and the Mars bar. He died in 1999. This item probably refers to his son, Forrest, Jr., who was by that time in active control of the company, along with his brother. Tretyakov is Russia’s national gallery of fine art. At the time, Mars was becoming increasingly concerned with business opportunities in the former Soviet Union.

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Asked in the fall of 2008 to comment about the relationship with Beckett Brown, Nestlé’s spokeswoman Laurie MacDonald said Nestlé never paid any money directly to Beckett Brown. She declined to confirm Nestlé’s hiring of Nichols Dezenhall, citing a company policy against discussing outside vendors. And she said she could not offer any comment on the tactics applied by Beckett Brown, “because we have absolutely zero working knowledge about them.”

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Roald Dahl based much of his description of Wonka’s chocolate factory on corporate espionage he observed in the business during his own childhood in England in the early twentieth century, according to Joël Glenn Brenner on Slate.com in 2005. Dahl also had personal experience as a spy: he was a covert operative for the British government in Washington during World War II.

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The
Washington Post
’s reporting team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had a term of their own for this sort of response when they spotted it during their Watergate investigation in the 1970s. They called it a non-denial denial.

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In September, GeoEye’s insurance company, Willis Inspace, paid $40 million on the insurance policy for the satellite. By the summer of 2008, GeoEye had begun negotiations to donate the busted satellite to the University of Colorado. After all, everything on the satellite except the camera worked perfectly. Engineers at GeoEye figured that the aeronautics students at the university would get a kick out of being able to maneuver their own satellite.

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The video game
Hawx
, released in September 2008 by Tom Clancy’s production company, features fighter jet dogfights over cities around the world. The cities themselves were created for the game using GeoEye 3-D images. So when a player is fighting over Brazil, for example, he sees real images of Brazil beneath his jet.

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Itasca is also about a thirty-minute drive from Allan Pinkerton’s hometown, Dundee, Illinois.

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In real life, the USDA does put out a crop report on orange juice. It’s titled
Orange Juice: World Markets and Trade
.

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Some people in the satellite community called this maneuver “checkbook shutter control,” since it accomplished the same result as banning the images outright would have.

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That’s not just an issue for the military. Google’s images are also disconcerting to advocates of privacy. Punch in almost any address in the United States, and you’ll see a satellite picture of it. Do you want your old college boyfriend to be able to see your house? What about that angry guy you fired at work last year?

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Although they have the same first name, this corporate spy and Nick Day, the CEO of Diligence, are not the same person.

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Two months after this briefing, in fact, the North Koreans got their second wish. The Bush administration removed North Korea from the list of enemy countries under the law, leaving Cuba as the only nation in the world still subject to the Trading with the Enemy Act.

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Brown was right: in May of 2009 the North Koreans detonated a bomb as powerful as the atomic weapon that destroyed Hiroshima.

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Slimp also worked for a time in the London office of Enron before its spectacular collapse in late 2001. On October 16, 2001—this was shortly after 9/11 and three months before Enron filed for bankruptcy—Slimp sent an e-mail to a colleague at Enron in Houston, looking for a new job. “I’d appreciate any ideas you may have on where things are going,” Slimp wrote. “And where a former spy/bandwidth trader might want to position himself.”

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Gurkhas are the tenacious Nepalese soldiers who have fought alongside the British army since the 1800s.

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During World War II, Maclean parachuted behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia with orders from Winston Churchill to link up with Tito’s communist partisans and “find out who’s killing the most Germans, and how we can help them kill more.” Years after Maclean’s death in 1996, his widow, Lady Veronica Maclean of Dunconnel, denied to
The Scotsman
—a newspaper in Edinburgh—that Maclean had ever been a spy, but admitted that he had loved the rumors that he was the inspiration for James Bond. And, she noted, “we always had a travelling vodka set wherever we went, and that was very Bond-like.”

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Carroll’s Flour Corporation would later receive billions of dollars in contracts for reconstruction in Iraq from the U.S. government. In 2003, Carroll himself was named chairman of the U.S. effort to rehabilitate the post-invasion Iraqi oil industry. In Iraq, he got caught in a struggle between neoconservatives in the U.S. government and American oil companies over what to do with the Iraqi oil industry. Carroll sided with the oil companies. In 2005, he made this revealing comment to the BBC: “Many neoconservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this, that, and the other. International oil companies, without exception, are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don’t have a theology.”

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Hanssen spied against the United States for the Soviets for more than two decades. The story of his capture was told in the movie
Breach
in 2007.