Choice excerpts from Barry Meiers gutsy book, Spooked The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies Re: Jules Kroll. More to come with commentary but I'll just paste this all here for now.

 It soon became clear to me that in writing about private operatives I would need to examine another profession as well: my own, journalism. Reporters get leads or tips from all kinds of sources. Some of them, such as consumers or government whistleblowers, want to alert the public to what they see as a danger or a wrong. Journalists also have long gotten tips from hired operatives. But their relationship to private spies is different: it is a symbiotic and hidden one that benefits both sides. A reporter can obtain material from a private spy that they can’t legally or ethically acquire elsewhere, things like stolen emails or confidential financial records. A private operative uses a reporter to make information public that benefits a client or damages an adversary without leaving their fingerprints behind. The journalist gets a scoop and typically never reveals how they acquired sensitive information. Everyone is happy and the public—the reader or the viewer—is left in the dark without any idea of what took place behind the curtains

Soon companies were paying anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000 to Kroll Associates and other big corporate intelligence firms to do “due diligence” or background investigations of potential business partners, takeover targets, or investments. Initially, those reviews were only run on businesses or people with suspected baggage but in time it became standard business practice for companies to hire Kroll or another firm to do them as a hedge against potential legal liabilities if a deal or a business partnership went south. Law firms increasingly hired Kroll or one of its competitors to help prepare cases for litigation or investigate an opponent. The going daily rate for each operative was $1,000 a day, plus expenses. The New York Times dubbed Jules Kroll “Wall Street’s private eye,”

 By the late 1980s his firm had grown to more than two hundred employees and had offices in New York, London, Washington, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. Working as a corporate investigator became very lucrative and top executives at big firms such as Kroll made up to $300,000 annually. The job of private operative also acquired panache. When the San Francisco office of Kroll Associates announced openings for two entry-level positions, it received more than three hundred applications from college students. “Many of us are corporate misfits,” one attorney told a reporter, explaining why she had left a big law firm to join Kroll. “These are people who are more comfortable asking questions and think that making trouble is a good thing. They all think it is great fun.”

 At one time, the client roster of Kroll Associates included a future U.S. president, Donald J. Trump. The real estate developer hired the firm in the mid1980s to find out if organized crime figures were involved in an Atlantic City casino he wanted to buy. Trump became furious, Jules Kroll told a reporter, when he learned that the firm’s investigators had given the casino a clean bill of health. The developer wanted the report changed, Kroll remembered, because he believed that having gangsters involved in the casino—or at least having a report that said they were—would drive down the casino’s value and increase his negotiating leverage. “He wanted us to rewrite the report,” said Kroll, adding he refused to do so and fired Trump as a client. When told at the time about Kroll’s comments, the future president responded in a typical fashion. “That’s crazy,” he said. “Whoever heard of something like that!

” JULES KROLL BLAZED ANOTHER path that other hired operatives followed—he knew how to work the news media. Public relations firms typically acted as intermediaries who provided journalists with material that private investigators had gathered. But during the financial takeover boom of the 1980s, Jules Kroll developed a coterie of reporters to whom he regularly fed tips. One of his biggest marketing coups came in 1991 when 60 Minutes broadcast an episode about how his firm had been hired to track down the billions of dollars that Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s leader, had skimmed off from his country’s oil sales and hidden in banks or companies worldwide. “He has put together a network through some very clever colleagues that is extensive and farreaching and pernicious,” Kroll said. Kroll Associates and 60 Minutes did uncover key information about where Saddam had hidden his stolen assets. But an article in New York magazine that was published soon after the show aired pointed out that Kroll was claiming credit for discovering information about the Iraqi dictator’s holdings that others had already brought to light

. BY THE MID-1990S, THE industry that Jules Kroll had helped create was changing. Big accounting firms, seeing the profits that could be made, opened investigative divisions, and private operatives who had cut their teeth at Kroll Associates founded their own firms. Corporate intelligence companies promoted themselves using similar lingo. They offered “strategic intelligence,” “risk consulting,” “dispute resolution,” and other catchphrases. More significantly, intensifying competition had turned due diligence investigations and other common services into commodities, cutting the prices firms could charge. As computerization increased, some investigative companies offered bulk rates to screen the histories of potential employees, charging $10 to $50 a head. There was plenty of traditional investigative work still available but to keep profits high, private spies had options. They could work for oligarchs or other unsavory clients and adopt the more aggressive tactics those customers preferred. There were also new targets, including activists, nonprofit organizations, politicians, and members of the news media

AROUND THE TIME OF the HP scandal, Jules Kroll’s well-crafted reputation also started to spring holes. Once a lawsuit has started, private investigators aren’t supposed to misrepresent themselves to witnesses. But according to an account in The Wall Street Journal, Kroll operatives repeatedly did so in the 1990s while claiming they were government employees, book researchers, or consultants. A law firm fired Kroll Associates after one of those incidents came to light. Kroll officials described such episodes as unwitting mistakes and said the firm was opposed to the practice. More issues were to follow. In 2004, police officials in Brazil raided the offices of Kroll’s firm there and arrested several employees, charging them with wiretapping, bribery, and hacking. (Charges against most of those arrested were dropped.) For his part, Jules Kroll insisted his staffers had done nothing wrong and that the company his firm was investigating had bribed retired Brazilian police officials to conduct the raid. With rare exceptions, few journalists subjected Jules Kroll’s firm or its competitors to serious scrutiny. The reason was simple. Reporters knew that once they take on a corporate intelligence firm they could kiss it off as a future source for stories. The effect of this buddy-bonding was blindness.

 For years, executives of Kroll (which changed its name to Kroll Inc. in 2001) liked to boast to reporters about what they called their “Hall of Slime,” a kind of imaginary rogues’ gallery of the worst actors the firm had investigated. As it turned out, Jules Kroll’s company had counted one of the slimiest operators of the 2000s among its clientele. He was a financial con man and money launderer named R. Allen Stanford, who ran a massive Ponzi scheme that collapsed in 2009, costing investors hundreds of millions of dollars. The role played by Kroll Inc. in protecting Stanford from scrutiny would emerge in the scandal’s aftermath. 

One former FBI agent told Vanity Fair magazine that Kroll operatives acted as front men for Stanford, defending his reputation while law enforcement officials were trying to learn if his bank was laundering money. “Kroll [Associates] was essentially running a propaganda campaign in defense of Stanford’s good name,” that ex-FBI agent said. “They beat on me many times: ‘Hey you got this all wrong, he’s not a money launderer, he’s a great guy, leave him alone.’” Kroll operatives, acting on Stanford’s orders, also attacked those seeking to expose him. In one case, the businessman instructed a Kroll operative to go after a U.S. Senate committee staffer and lawyer who Stanford believed was the source of a negative magazine article about him. He “is a pure cockroach,” Stanford wrote about the lawyer, Jonathan Winer. “Go after him hard on as many fronts as possible.” Reporters disclosed that the Kroll executive began chasing rumors that Winer’s ex-wife had left him for another woman, a rumor Winer has called absurd. THE FIRM’S DEALING WITH R. Allen Stanford highlighted another troubling practice within the private spying industry related to due diligence reviews. Originally, a client hired corporate investigators to investigate a company or an individual. But by the 2000s, oligarchs and other wealthy business operators were getting ahead of the game by paying Kroll Inc. and other firms to perform reviews on them, that they then handed out as evidence of a clean bill of health. By their nature, self-due diligence reviews are riddled with all kinds of problems.

 A client might limit an investigative firm’s inspection to selected parts of its operations. It is also a potential minefield for conflicts of interest and Kroll Inc., while working for R. Allen Stanford, apparently blew straight past one of the investigative business’s few red lines: the unwritten rule that a firm has an obligation to notify a client if an assignment poses a conflict of interest. A construction industry trade group that wanted to invest money in Stanford’s bank hired Kroll Inc. to conduct a due diligence review of it. A Kroll executive allegedly never informed the group that Stanford was a client and sent it a glowing report attesting to his bank’s financial soundness. Two months later, Stanford’s Ponzi scheme collapsed, wiping out the group’s $2.5 million investment. It subsequently sued Kroll Inc., which denied liability, and the case was settled before trial. For his part, Jules Kroll later described the Stanford episode as “clearly a blemish.” 

BY THE LATE 2000S, Jules Kroll was a millionaire many times over. He had once hoped to turn his investigative firm into a diversified corporation that would offer consulting, investment banking, and other services. Between 1997 and 2008, he became involved in a series of business machinations. He merged Kroll with an armored car maker and brought the combined companies public, then ditched the car company and acquired a series of firms that offered various services. Then, in 2004, he sold Kroll to a big insurance company for a whopping $1.9 billion. Four years later, in 2008, the insurer, realizing it had overpaid, put Kroll up for sale. Jules Kroll retired from his namesake firm and launched an effort to buy it back. But he got outbid and the investigative firm called Kroll, while retaining his name, would no longer employ him or any other member of his family. K2 INTELLIGENCE, THE COMPANY founded by Jules Kroll and his son Jeremy, marketed itself as a top-tier corporate intelligence firm in the tradition of Kroll. Its motto reflected what the firm described as its professional and ethical philosophy: “Do no harm, do the right thing, and do what you promised to do. That’s the K2 difference.” Jeremy Kroll, who was about forty when K2 Intelligence was founded, was bright and well intentioned. But he struck people who worked with him as a kind of lost soul who lacked his father’s investigative instincts and had gone into the family business because he didn’t know what else to do. His brother, Nick Kroll, was a well-known successful comedian, and Jeremy had hoped for a career in art. He studied painting in college and the New York offices of K2 Intelligence were decorated with his work. “He told me that he wanted K2 Intelligence to be like an eclectic artist colony of creative types,” one former employee recalled. One of Jeremy Kroll’s paintings hung on his office wall. It was a large abstract portrait of a person whose face looked incomplete or unfinished

. DURING ITS FIRST YEARS of operation, K2 Intelligence’s profit center wasn’t in New York, where the Krolls were based, but in London. On paper, the executive who met with Rob Moore to discuss the asbestos case, Matteo Bigazzi, was its head. But the driving force behind the firm’s business there was an operative named Charlie Carr. He had roguish good looks and wore expensive clothing with the casual ease of a British private school graduate. Carr had worked for Jules Kroll for decades and had a reputation as a lady’s man. He also was known for pushing boundaries. He worked at Kroll’s offices in Brazil around the time it was raided by the police. He then went to the firm’s office in Milan, which Matteo Bigazzi was then running. He met the sister of Bigazzi’s wife and married her. After Bigazzi left Kroll Inc. to open K2 Intelligence’s London office, Carr joined him. Several years later, Carr made headlines when he stood up in a London courtroom, whipped out a camera from underneath his coat, and took a photograph of a witness while he was testifying, in a bid to unnerve him. Under British law, Carr could have been sent to prison but somehow dodged the bullet. In the early 2010s, K2 Intelligence’s profits in London were coming from clients who were oligarchs or multinational companies with operations in Africa or other developing regions. Carr worked closely with those free-spending oligarchs or their lawyers and the Russian aluminum magnate, Oleg Deripaska, was reportedly particularly fond of Carr and liked to use him. Carr treated the London office of K2 Intelligence as his fiefdom. Former officials of the firm said he didn’t discuss his cases with his colleagues in New York. He also had zero respect or patience, they said, for Jeremy Kroll. When he came to New York, Carr would walk into Jeremy Kroll’s office and plant his feet on his desk. He apparently liked to make it clear to the younger Kroll that K2 Intelligence couldn’t survive without the revenue he was generating in London and liked to trash-talk Jeremy Kroll behind his back. BEFORE ROB MOORE MET in 2012 with Matteo Bigazzi he had done one small job for K2 Intelligence. Now Bigazzi would offer him a big job, one that would last for the next four years. 

He explained to Moore that a new client had hired K2 Intelligence to find out if a coalition of activists campaigning to ban asbestos use worldwide was being secretly funded by lawyers in the United States. By 2012, the United States, Britain, and other Western countries had banned all types of asbestos. But in Southeast Asia and other developing regions, the use of one variety of the material known as chrysotile or “white” asbestos was continuing and, in some cases, growing. Moore said that Bigazzi told him that the public health advocates were exaggerating the dangers of chrysotile asbestos, adding that it was safe to use if it was handled properly. The firm’s client was particularly suspicious, Bigazzi added, of a tie between the activists and the plaintiff’s lawyers because the woman leading the coalition was the sister of an American attorney who specialized in suing asbestos companies. Typically, investigative firms don’t disclose the names of clients to operatives and Moore said that Bigazzi simply described its new client as a “U.S. investor” with holdings in the asbestos industry. Moore and Bigazzi soon hit on an investigative approach that seemed a perfect fit for the former television producer. K2 Intelligence would hire him to create another kind of prank show. He would approach the activists pretending to be a crusading filmmaker working on a documentary about the dangers of asbestos and, using that disguise, gain their confidence and infiltrate the group. Moore then would regularly report back to K2 Intelligence about the activists’ lobbying plans. TO SET THE OPERATION into motion, Moore turned to a technique long used by comedians and spies—misdirection. He knew that calling the activists to say he was making a film about asbestos might set off alarm bells because none of them would have heard of him. He was also worried about spooking the investigation’s target, the lawyer’s sister, Laurie Kazan-Allen. So instead of calling her directly, he decided to contact her fellow campaigners and get them to make an introduction. Moore introduced himself to the activists as a longtime investigative filmmaker who was developing a new television series about all kinds of dangerous industries and products—cigarettes, toxic chemicals, hazardous wastes, etc.—only throwing in asbestos at the end as an afterthought. “The advantage of going into this world with a bigger agenda than asbestos is that it might make my entry seem less deliberate,” Moore wrote Bigazzi in one note. As for Kazan-Allen, he told Bigazzi, he wanted to interact with her “in the most genuine and heartfelt way possible so that I can establish both an intellectual and emotional connection.” The strategy worked. Health experts associated with the coalition not only encouraged Moore to focus his attention on asbestos, they put him in touch with Kazan-Allen. The activist, who was in her mid-sixties, was so taken by Moore’s portrayal of a truth-seeking filmmaker she soon began to see him as a future leader of the ban-asbestos movement. “He was very polite, incredibly engaging, and completely believable,” she would say years later.

 Moore first got her to invite him to a meeting of anti-asbestos activists in Brussels. Kazan-Allen assumed he wanted to go there to make connections for his film. Instead, Moore went to find out whether her brother and other American lawyers were funding the event. Before long, he traveled to Thailand to attend an occupational health conference after Bigazzi told him that K2’s client wanted him to monitor the event because officials there were considering an asbestos ban. TO AVOID CREATING AN electronic paper trail, Rob Moore and Matteo Bigazzi communicated using an email technique known as “foldering.” To use the method, two or more people create a Gmail account to which they know the password. Then, instead of sending emails to each other, they write emails and store them in the account’s draft folder. Anyone with access to the account can read the draft email, delete it, and respond by writing another email and storing it as a draft. Over time, Moore and Bigazzi exchanged dozens of draft emails that way, many in which Moore described the progress of his spying. The Gmail account Moore created was called “benthiczonesolutions.com.” It was a reference to an ecologic region known as the benthic zone, that exists at the deepest level of a lake, an ocean, or another body of water. It is a place that is pitch-black, oxygen depleted, and inhabited by bottom feeders. ROB MOORE WOULD SAY he began questioning his assignment even before going to Thailand. He had found nothing to suggest that American lawyers were funding the coalition and he had concluded based on information the activists had shared with him that chrysotile asbestos was deadly and should be banned. “I don’t see the work of an arch mastermind who is unreasonably using disingenuous statistics,” he wrote Matteo Bigazzi. “I see the work of campaigners who have a good argument on their side.” At this point, most people would have parted ways with K2 Intelligence. Moore didn’t.

 It may have been the money he was making or the sense of power that comes from spying. He insisted that he remained in the firm’s employ for another reason—his Buddhist faith. Moore said he met with fellow Buddhists to discuss whether he should stay at K2 Intelligence or quit. They told him that if he quit, the firm would simply find someone else to replace him, but that if he stayed, he could potentially do something worthwhile by exposing the asbestos trade. “I could absolutely do this from a Buddhist perspective so long as I didn’t do any harm,” Moore said. Whatever his reasons, Moore kept collecting checks from K2 and misleading the activists. Soon he was also duping officials at the World Health Organization after Matteo Bigazzi told him that the firm’s client wanted to know if the agency planned new actions to promote an asbestos ban. Moore met with WHO officials and convinced them to help underwrite a short documentary he wanted to make about asbestos use in India. He traveled to Mumbai with a director friend from his time in television and they made a nine-minute-long film titled “Victims of Chrysotile Asbestos.” It was hardly an advertisement for the asbestos industry. The film featured portraits of people who were sick or dying from asbestos exposure. “I am saddened that asbestos continues to be used in Southeast Asia,” one expert says in the film. “When clearly alternative products are available.” When Moore showed the film to the activists, they loved it. Bigazzi had a different reaction. Halfway through the film he asked Moore to turn it off. “He said he had seen enough,” Moore said. Just what Bigazzi was telling K2 Intelligence’s client about Moore was anyone’s guess. But one day when Moore was leaving the firm’s offices, a K2 Intelligence operative pulled him aside. He told Moore that the firm worked for questionable people. And there was something else—its client in the asbestos case wasn’t a “U.S. investor.” Chapter 3