Spies For Hire

Why would anyone want to be a government spy? The salary is modest compared to other whitecollar professions. Intelligence officers must be alert at all times, on or off-duty. Their lives may be at risk abroad, and even back home they can never regale neighbours with tales of their adventures in the field.

You might steal secrets from a hostile state, dodge bullets, terminate an enemy agent in a dark alley or recruit a seductive informant – perhaps even avert a nuclear attack. But none of this can be revealed outside the clandestine world; in this profession of secrets, loquacious attention-seekers need not apply.

Of course, secrecy is alluring and espionage has long been glamorized in books and films – sometimes by writers who have been spies. Ian Fleming saw wartime service in Naval Intelligence before he dreamt up the iconic James Bond. Bond was suave, sophisticated and macho, bedding beautiful women in exotic locations or sipping martinis at cocktail parties, having shucked off his wetsuit and changed into a tuxedo. Bond made espionage look sexy, cool and fun…

Others painted a darker picture. John Le Carre worked for MI6 in Germany during the Cold War and described a shabby world of backstabbing colleagues, institutional deceit and personal betrayals in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. His later novels featuring George Smiley, the cuckolded, morally anguished master-spy, reinforced the Miserablist view of spying as a “wilderness of mirrors” (as the CIA molehunter James Jesus Angleton once described his profession).

In film, think Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt. Bourne never knew his own identity; was deprived of sleep for days on end, forced to kill strangers, tortured and repeatedly shot at, while Ethan Hunt spent much of the Mission Impossible series on the run from assassins. It’s hardly conducive to getting a good night’s sleep – or encouraging people to become spies.

In reality, government spies are civil servants with pay-grades similar to the diplomatic service. In the US, which is open about such details, the CIA offers prospective “core collectors” (as it calls its operatives abroad) $52,000–72,000 a year, plus overseas living expenses. That’s peanuts compared to what a lawyer or a bonds trader can make. Intelligence analysts based at home start on lower pay scales, without living allowances; in Britain, a G-9 analyst gets about £25,000 before tax, which is less than many secretaries in London earn…

No wonder that government spies are defecting to the private sector for higher pay and cushier perks – especially in America. Under the Bush Administration, whole areas of intelligence work have been outsourced to contractors, as Tim Shorrock reveals in Spies for Hire: the Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, to be published by Simon & Schuster this May. Last year, Naomi Klein’s Shock and Awe showed how the privatization of disaster relief exacerbated the havoc wrought by Hurricane Katrina and how contractors and mercenaries have influenced or determined US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, it was the murder of four Blackwater security guards that precipitated the US assault on Fallujah, and contract interrogators who encouraged the dehumanisation and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Now Shorrock is about to blow the lid on the privatization of espionage…

The US government is reticent about its spending on intelligence, but at a 2007 conference sponsored by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency it revealed that 70 percent of its total budget went on private contracts. If outside estimates of its total budget at $48 billion are true, this amounts to a $34 billion windfall for private spies.

Elsewhere in the world, spies are also cashing in. At a venture capitalists convention in Silicon Valley in 2007, Oleg Shvartsman bragged that he managed a $3.6 billion dollar equity fund that served investors at “the top of the FSB and SVR”.

The FSB and SVR are the internal security and foreign intelligence agencies of the Russian Federation – the successors of the Soviet KGB. As the USSR fell apart, thousands of KGB officers went into business; today, former spies occupy senior positions throughout Russia’s economy and government, under the vertikal system created by Putin. In 2007 Russian Military Intelligence made an unprecedented public announcement that a US attack on Iran was imminent, causing a surge in oil prices and a fall on the Dow Jones – earning millions for investors forewarned about the scam…

Even for non-spies, espionage practices are a part of work. Walmart is notorious for union-busting, exploiting workers and putting local shops out of business – and in 2006, was found to have spied on its employees with the help of a former CIA agent, intercepting personal emails between two executives having an affair on company time. After the female executive involved sued Walmart, the company was obliged to disclose that its global security department employed many former CIA, FBI and cops.

A lawyer involved in the case, Sam Morgan, says spies in the corporate world are almost as sophisticated as spies for the state. “There is no right to privacy in the private-sector workforce”. Many large corporations such as General Electric and Viacom make employees consent to the company reading their emails or listening to their phone calls as a condition of employment.

Spies with surveillance or research expertise are always in demand. Optical, audio and cyber surveillance are incredibly sophisticated, and require sophisticated countermeasures if your company is being spied upon. Another skill-set is “pretexting” – being able to gather information without arousing suspicion or revealing the company’s involvement or intentions.

So while James Bond, Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt might hold our attention with their adventures, perhaps the next spy thriller will come from within the corporate world.