[A-List] UK corporate state: Hakluyt

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Big Brother Incorporated
by Eveline Lubbers
PR Watch.org, Volume 9 Number 2, 2002
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2002Q2/bbi.html

For years, activist groups in Europe thought that Manfred Schlickenrieder
was a leftist sympathizer and filmmaker. He traveled around Europe,
interviewing a broad spectrum of activists, and even produced a documentary
video, titled Business As Usual: The Arrogance of Power, about human rights
groups and environmentalists campaigning against the Shell oil company.

In reality, Schlickenrieder was a spy, and Shell was one of his clients. His
film and his activist pretensions were merely cover designed to win the
confidence of activists so that he could infiltrate their organizations and
collect "inside information" about their goals and activities.

Schlickenrieder's cover was blown when the Swiss action group Revolutionaire
Aufbau began to distrust him. Its investigation uncovered a large pile of
documents, many of which were put online at the beginning of 2000
(www.aufbau.org).These documents proved that Schlickenrieder was on the
payroll of Hakluyt & Company Ltd., a London-based "business intelligence
bureau" linked closely to MI6, the British foreign intelligence service. In
addition to spying on behalf of multinational corporations, the documents
also indicate strongly that Schlickenrieder was working simultaneously for
more than one German state intelligence service.

Among the documents was detailed e-mail correspondence between
Schlickenrieder and Hakluyt. There was also a DM 20,000 (US$9,000) invoice
to Hakluyt for "Greenpeace research" including expenses, "to be paid
according to agreement in the usual manner." Confronted with this material,
Hakluyt reluctantly admitted that Schlickenrieder was an employee. When the
Sunday Times of London broke the story in July 2000, both BP and Shell
acknowledged having hired the firm, but claimed they had been unaware of its
tactics.

Schlickenrieder's exposure put the spotlight on a firm that prefers to
operate secretly in the shadowy area of former state intelligence
specialists-turned-private spies. Members of Parliament accused MI6 of using
the firm as a front to spy on green activists.

A freelance spy

Schlickenrieder had apparently built up spying experience during years of
working for Germany's domestic and foreign intelligence services, Landesamt
für Verfassungsschutz and Bundesnachrichtendienst. Documents found at his
home indicated he had had access to reports from them as well as the French
and Italian secret services. None of the spy agencies acknowledged publicly
that Schlickenrieder had been working for them, but informed sources agreed
that the agent's exposure had been a blow for the German intelligence
community, as several newspapers reported. Furthermore, the Schlickenrieder
case was discussed in the prime minister and parliamentary committee's
weekly meeting with the German secret services.

Though there is evidence that the government agencies paid Schlickenrieder,
it is not known whether he was actually on their payrolls; he may have been
a freelance spy. The fact that he wrote detailed proposals for the
government, suggesting new fields of research within the radical leftist
movement, points in this direction. Whichever it was, the rewards of
espionage seem to have included a spacious flat overlooking a park in Munich
and a BMW Z3, the model of sports car driven by James Bond in Goldeneye. His
monthly expenses were calculated at $4,500.

He got good at delivering different kinds of intelligence, from broad
overviews to assessments to insider mood reports. Taking advantage of
activists' trust, he developed a knack for piecing together bits and pieces
of information to compile a fairly accurate picture.

Schlickenrieder frequented meetings of radical leftist groups including the
Red Army Faction (RAF) from the early 1980s until his cover was blown, and
he made a documentary about violent resistance with solidarity groups and
relatives of convicted comrades which featured the RAF. He claimed to be
working on another film, about Italy's Red Brigades, which was never
finished. But stills from his video footage served as a photo database,
accompanied by personal details about everybody he had met.

Schlickenrieder's ways of working for state and business were similar. In
fact, there seemed to be no boundaries between the two. He sometimes
compiled reports for Hakluyt without being asked. For instance, in a
September 1997 e-mail to Hakluyt, he explained how he had "used the
opportunity of visiting Hamburg to talk to two separate people within
Greenpeace." In closing, he wrote: "That was your free 'mood report'
supplement from Hamburg."

The MI6 connection

Hakluyt, named after a 16th-century geographer and economic intelligence
specialist, started in a one-room office in 1995. Its founders, Christopher
James and Mike Reynolds, are both former members of the British foreign
service. The company's purpose, according to James, was "to do for industry
what we had done for the government." By 2001 its clients included
one-quarter of the companies listed in the United Kingdom's leading stock
market index, the FTSE 100.

Reynolds founded MI6's counterterrorism branch and was the foreign service's
head of station in Berlin. The newly appointed head of MI6, Richard
Dearlove, is a close friend of his.

James led a section of MI6 that liaised with British firms. Over his 20-year
career he got to know the heads of many of Britain's top companies. In
return for a few tips that helped them compete in the market, he persuaded
them to provide intelligence from their overseas operations.

Hakluyt's management board is a display case for the kind of reputation the
company is aiming for. One member was Ian Fleming's model for James Bond --
the former soldier, spy and diplomat Sir Fitzroy Maclean. And the company is
linked to the oil industry through Sir William Purves, CEO of Shell
Transport and chairman of Hakluyt; Sir Peter Holmes, former chairman of
Shell and current president of the Hakluyt foundation (a kind of supervisory
board); and Sir Peter Cazalet, the former deputy chairman of BP, who helped
to establish Hakluyt before he retired in 2000. BP itself has longstanding
ties to MI6: its director of government and public affairs, John Gerson, was
at one time a leading candidate to succeed Sir David Spedding as chief of
MI6.

A Hakluyt brochure promises to find information for clients that they "will
not receive by the usual government, media and commercial routes." The
company tries to distinguish itself from other business intelligence
consultants and clipping services. "We do not take anything off the shelf,
nothing off the Net--we assume that any company worth its salt has done all
of that," Hakluyt's Michael Maclay explained at a 1999 conference in the
Netherlands. "We go with the judgment of people who know the countries, the
elites, the industries, the local media, the local environmentalists, all
the factors that will feed into big decisions being made."

Manfred Schlickenrieder apparently was one of those people who "knew the
local environmentalists."

Spying on Greenpeace

Shell International turned to Hakluyt for help when the oil conglomerate's
reputation came under fire during the Brent Spar PR crisis and the Nigerian
government's execution of writer-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Using his cover as
a filmmaker, Schlickenrieder traveled around Europe, interviewing on film a
broad spectrum of people campaigning for Nigeria's Ogoni people. He spent
months questioning all sorts of groups and wrote to organizations ranging
from Friends of the Earth to the Body Shop, asking about their ongoing
campaigns, their future plans and the impact of their work.

In addition to Shell, oil companies were scared to death of becoming
Greenpeace's next target. BP turned to Hakluyt for help after it got wind
that Greenpeace was planning its Atlantic Frontier campaign to stop oil
drilling in a new part of the Atlantic. The company asked Schlickenrieder to
deliver details about what was going to happen.

Hakluyt used material from other sources to complement the information about
Greenpeace's plans Schlickenrieder provided. It claimed to have laid its
hands on a copy of "Putting the Lid on Fossil Fuels," the Greenpeace
brochure meant to kick off the campaign, even before the ink was dry. BP
used this inside information to polish its press and PR communications. "BP
countered the campaign in an unusually fast and smart way," Greenpeace
Germany spokesperson Stefan Krug told the German daily Die Tageszeitung.
Since BP knew what was coming in advance, it was never taken by surprise.

BP also used Hakluyt to plan a counterstrategic lawsuit against Greenpeace.
In a May 1997 e-mail message to Schlickenrieder, Hakluyt's Director Mike
Reynolds inquired about the possible impact of suing the environmentalists.
He asked his German spy for information on whether Greenpeace was taking
legal steps to protect its assets against seizure in the event it was sued
by an oil company. When Greenpeace subsequently occupied BP's Stena Dee oil
installation in the Atlantic Ocean, the company sued Greenpeace for DM4.2
million in damages (almost $2 million). BP got an injunction to block
Greenpeace UK's bank accounts, which caused the group serious financial
problems. This was one of the first times an injunction was used to threaten
activists with possible arrest. It has since become an increasingly popular
way to stop a campaign.

Oil activism was not Schlickenrieder's only field of activity. The Aufbau
group discovered leads about research he did for Hakluyt on banks and
financial takeovers. And in 1996 he started mapping resistance against Rio
Tinto, which calls itself the "world leader in finding, mining and
processing the Earth's mineral resources." He continued to bill Hakluyt for
this research until at least spring 1999.

A New Terrain for Intelligence

The massive 1999 demonstrations in Seattle were a watershed event for both
the growing anti-globalization movement and for the corporate and government
authorities that benefit from globalization. State and private security
agencies felt they were caught off guard in Seattle, where a large, diverse
group of demonstrators, using sophisticated methods and technology,
effectively shut down the World Trade Organization's Ministerial Conference.

Some governments now see anti-corporate activities as a serious threat to
social stability. And their intelligence services see securing that
stability as a primary task.

The first indication of this interest was a widely circulated secret report
by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, "Anti-Globalization--A
Spreading Phenomenon." The CSIS report used quotes from Naomi Klein's book,
No Logo, to assess the threat posed by anticorporate protests to the Summit
of the Americas in Quebec which was coming up in April 2001.

In May 2000, the France-based Intelligence Newsletter published a report,
based on information from sources close to the spy community, on the work of
state intelligence units to gather information on anti-globalization
militants. It noted that the US Army Intelligence and Security Command and
the Pentagon helped the police keep an eye on demonstrators during the April
16, 2000, World Bank protests in Washington, DC. Perhaps when the US
Attorney's office praised the DC police for their "unparalleled"
coordination with other police agencies during the spring 2000 IMF protests,
it was thinking of these bodies. The FBI reportedly had held seminars on the
lessons of Seattle for police in other protest cities to help them prepare
for demonstrations. Now it had paid off. "The FBI provided valuable
background on the individuals who were intent on committing criminal acts,"
the US Attorney's office declared, according to an article by Abby Scher in
the Nation.

Scher warned of an intensifying crackdown on opponents of corporate
globalization, pointing to unusually close collaboration between police and
intelligence services including the FBI before and during the DC protests.
This collaboration harks back to the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover and his
illegal Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Back then, the FBI relied
on local police and even private right-wing spy groups for information about
antiwar and other activists. The FBI used that information and its own
agents provocateurs to disrupt the activities of the Black Panthers,
Students for a Democratic Society, Puerto Rican nationalist groups and
others.

Targeting organizers and letting activists know they are under surveillance
are two time-honored tactics of local intelligence units and the FBI.
Preventive detention, spreading fear of infiltration, and disseminating
false stories to the press were also used during the dark days of
COINTELPRO. Now, the first reports have emerged documenting similar police
strategies aimed at protesters in 2000 and 2001.

In 2001 the FBI listed "anarchist and extremist socialist groups" such as
the Workers' World Party, Reclaim the Streets and Carnival Against
Capitalism as a "potential threat" to the United States. Reclaim the Streets
is actually more a tactic than a movement or organization. In 1996,
activists in England decided to hold the first RTS "street party," a daytime
rave with a political spin, complete with sound system, dancing, and party
games, in the middle of a busy intersection. The party aimed to temporarily
"reclaim" the street from cars and point out how capitalism and car culture
deprive people of public space and opportunities for festivals.

The fact that dancing in the street could become terrorism in the eyes of
the FBI can only be explained by the aftershock of Seattle, where, according
to the FBI, "anarchists, operating individually and in groups, caused much
of the damage." This statement, made on May 10, 2001, mentioned these groups
as part of "The Domestic Terrorism Threat," soon after a section on "The
International Terrorist Situation" featuring Osama bin Laden and individuals
affiliated with Al Qaeda. The attacks on the World Trade Center four months
later illustrate the enormous disproportion between the two "threats."

Categorizing "anarchist groups" like Reclaim the Streets as terrorist
organizations provides a legal pretext for the FBI's interest in the
antiglobalization movement. Although inclusion on such a list can be taken
to mean such groups are gaining influence, it also increases the likelihood
of government-sponsored involvement, such as infiltration or frame-ups based
on planted evidence.

Intelligence agencies in most Western countries already had broad powers to
track and surveil suspected activists and political organizations. The
events of Sept. 11, 2001, triggered further antiterrorist legislation
everywhere, encouraging repressive police and intelligence tactics. Only the
future can tell how these new laws will effect the maneuvering space for
anticorporate activism.

The Department of Dirty Tricks

Besides being spied upon, activists risk being manipulated or threatened,
too. Consulting companies like KPMG and security firms like Control Risks
Group have reasons to monitor NGOs, as an article in Intelligence Newsletter
stated: ostensibly, corporate clients want to be informed of destabilization
campaigns that could affect them well in advance. "But they also want to
fend off indirect attack," the magazine went on. "To be sure, some firms
feel a strong temptation to 'channel' the fury of NGOs like Export Credit
Agencies, Public Citizen or ATTAC towards some of their business
competitors," the magazine said. It quoted intelligence expert Roy Godson as
predicting that manipulating NGOs would become one of the most effective
means for companies to destabilize rivals and adversaries in the future.

Intelligence Newsletter hints at the endless time and effort NGOs spend in
the perpetual quest for "ideal" companies to take on. "Only by targeting a
known corporate name can they be sure to enhance their own profile,
distinguish from other NGOs and compete with them for media attention."
Apparently this early stage of campaigning is seen as the best moment to
intervene.

How? One possibility springs to mind: imagine your group gets a dedicated
new member with ideas for a new campaign against a company you haven't paid
much attention to so far. Perhaps he's been sent by another company you've
been successfully campaigning against for years, or are intending to target
in the near future.

NGOs' taste for media attention can be their Achilles' heel, which makes it
relatively easy to feed them disinformation they'll rush to publicize. The
East German secret service apparently understood this back in the 1970s:
Godson claimed it used this weakness for publicity against Amnesty
International during the Cold War. This is another kind of manipulation easy
to envision a company using.

Manipulating internal differences is another strategy to cripple an activist
coalition. For example, someone wishing to disrupt an organization, could
work to divide the "radicals" from the "moderates" or could attempt to
discredit the organization by using provocateurs to incite violence which
could then be blamed on activists. A number of reports suggest that this may
be what occurred during the anti-globalization protests that occurred in in
Genoa, Italy in July 2001.

It is not paranoid to suspect that corporations and governments will use
these sorts of tactics. They have been used in the past, and history
suggests that if the stakes are high enough, targeted companies resort to
"special operations."

-----

This story is adapted from Battling Big Business: Countering Greenwash,
Front Groups and Other Forms of Corporate Deception, edited by Eveline
Lubbers. To order, call 1-800-497-3207 or mail order to Common Courage
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