Sleuths In Suits: Mission: Intelligence

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Still, the CIA regularly seeks to debrief business travelers and expatriates, especially those with access to countries such as Iraq and North Korea. During the days leading up to the Gulf War, Elder recalls, officials at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad would regularly debrief him and his colleagues in business intelligence. His security measures for Bechtel's work on the Bekhme Dam in the Kurdish region of Iraq covered every aspect of protection strategy, down to how many guards should be stationed and where. His work, he says, would have made it manageable to build the dam, had not the Gulf War intervened. The Iraqi government detained more than 100 Bechtel employees, and although it ultimately released them, the dam was never completed.

Some private security professionals, however, avoid government intelligence agents. If local sources believe that the information they provide to a business executive is going to be passed to the CIA, they may be more reluctant to help. One security-intelligence executive said, after emphasizing strongly that he did not cooperate with the CIA, "I don't want to get in the back of a cab in Bogota and have the guy in the front seat turn around and accuse me of doing something I don't do."

Competitive-intelligence work is far less dangerous but equally sophisticated. The vast majority of this work is legal and, with a few exceptions--like the private investigator working for Oracle, which in 2000 allegedly tried to pay a janitorial service for the trash of a pro-Microsoft advocacy group--completely ethical. A company's CI director is far more likely to find useful information in a competitor's SEC filing and annual report than with a spy camera.

More often than not, the trick to CI isn't in learning something new but in using the knowledge of a certain business to see the meaning in data that others can't. In the mid-'90s Amoco (now part of BP) prepared a series of personality profiles of top ENRON executives to determine how the company established its position in the natural-gas industry without any reserves. A tidbit that stood out was the number of top executives who were downhill skiers. The detail seemed to indicate that Enron execs had a greater comfort with high risk than did the golf-playing leadership of Amoco. This was not a competitor or partner, Amoco determined, on whom it could depend to play by the rules.

Businesses have been doing targeted research on competitors for decades. The international-intelligence operation John D. Rockefeller built for Standard Oil in the late 1800s penetrated competitors and governments alike and may have been rivaled only by that of the British government. "The next best thing to knowing all about your own business," Rockefeller said, "is to know all about the other fellow's business."