Sleuths In Suits: Mission: Intelligence

During his two decades in international corporate security, Bill Elder designed protection strategies in some of the most dangerous parts of the world, from Iraq to Colombia to Nigeria. Operating in countries where American intelligence was often weak, Elder had to rely on his own contacts. In the mid-1990s, while overseeing construction of an oil pipeline in northern Algeria, Elder learned from local sources of a series of killings committed by the rebel Groupe Islamique Armee. This intelligence scoop--the government didn't announce the killings for several days--allowed Elder to steer employees safely away from the danger zones and keep the project on schedule. Indeed, throughout his years as a corporate security manager for BECHTEL and as a consultant to other companies, Elder, now retired, says he never once recommended canceling a project. "My role was to determine what the risk was and how to overcome that risk," he says. "As far as I was concerned, if they were willing to pay for the appropriate security, they could work in hell."

With each day's news reminding executives of how hellish the world can be, more and more of them are deciding that traditional "cops and locks" security will no longer suffice. A growing number of businesses are emulating the CIA and FBI in the inexact art of intelligence collection and analysis to try to predict terror attacks or political instability. Even for a business whose biggest worry is not rebels attacking its employees but, say, MICROSOFT attacking its market niche, corporate sleuthing has become more valuable than ever. "The most fundamental importance of intelligence is to warn--specifically, to warn against surprise attack," says consultant William DeGenaro, a veteran of government intelligence and a former director of business research and analysis at 3M. "Take the same process and substitute another threat--a blindsiding alliance, a technology shift. It's all the same."

How much a business needs to rely on intelligence analysis depends less on where it operates than how. The more capital intensive a business is, the more its executives need to know how the future is likely to take shape. Energy companies, which have to make multibillion-dollar infrastructure investments before they can draw a penny's worth of fossil fuel out of the ground, have set the standard for security and political intelligence overseas. High-tech firms, which need to determine where their competitors are headed before beginning costly research and development, have led the way in what is known as competitive intelligence.

These two sides of corporate sleuthing are largely distinct: they ask different kinds of questions and rely on different kinds of specialists. The ranks of business security intelligence departments are filled with former government agents, while competitive intelligence, with a few notable exceptions, is collected and analyzed by professional researchers who resemble librarians more than shadowy spooks.