Greenpeace

We all know that corporate America has a history of using some incredibly dirty tricks to protect its profits, but it's not often that details of corporate espionage are dragged out into the light of day. Thanks to Mother Jones, that venerable publication of progressive news and investigative journalism, we have new documented evidence of just how low they will go. MJ has just published an exclusive exposé about a private firm that ran Black Ops on Green Groups. The firm, originally known as Beckett Brown International but later called S2i, apparently was hired to target Greenpeace on more than one occasion. 

Because of the work we do, Greenpeace has been targeted by various companies in the past. We've had spies pose as students seeking internships, we've been burgled -- we've seen our share. But apparently in the mid- to late-90s, we were the target of an extensive campaign orchestrated by S2i, which employed former Secret Service agents and active duty police officers who weren't afraid to dumpster dive in the hopes of uncovering something their clients could use. The companies that employed S2i included: Allied Waste, the Carlyle Group, Wal-Mart, Halliburton, Dow Chemicals, Kraft and Monsanto. MJ has the internal S2i documents detailing the intelligence gathered on Greenpeace available for viewing  online, if you're interested.

According to the MJ article:

Greenpeace was the target of one of BBI's more elaborate—and cinematic—intelligence-gathering efforts, according to company documents and an interview with an eyewitness. Jennifer Trapnell, who was dating Ward in the late 1990s, recalls an evening when she accompanied Ward on a job in Washington D.C. "He said they were trying to get some stuff on Greenpeace," she says. Ward wore black clothes and had told her to dress all in black, too: "It was Mission Impossible-like."

In Washington, Ward parked his truck in an alley, she remembers, and told her to stay in the truck and keep a lookout. In the alley, he met a couple of other men, whose faces Trapnell did not see clearly. Ward was talking on a walkie-talkie with others, and they all walked off. About an hour later, the men came back and placed two trash bags in Ward's car. Trapnell says she didn't know what they did with the bags—and Ward never explained. In addition to Ward's work, on several occasions in 2000, Jim Daron, the Washington cop who also worked for BBI, submitted reports to BBI for surveillance of Greenpeace's offices.

BBI gathered numerous internal Greenpeace documents, including financial reports. It also obtained the instructions for using the security system at Greenpeace's offices. And the Greenpeace files at BBI included a handwritten document that appears to record attempts to crack the security codes on entry doors with notations such as "codes do not match" and "open."

BBI prepared reports on Greenpeace—based on "confidential sources"—for Ketchum. In at least one case, according to Rick Hind, legislative director for Greenpeace (who reviewed these reports at Mother Jones' request), a BBI report written for Ketchum contained information tightly held within the group about planned upcoming events. And a December 2, 1999 BBI report (which does not mention Ketchum) noted that Greenpeace had chosen Kellogg's, Kraft, and Quaker as "their main targets in the GE campaign," that it was developing a campaign tactic called "Food-Aid Expose" (which would highlight the export of genetically-modified foods to other countries), and that it was helping a Wall Street Journal reporter track food companies involved in the debate over genetically-engineered foods.

We were, of course, not alone in being targeted. Check out the whole article, it's pretty fascinating in a morbidly bizarre kind of way. The upshot of it all, of course, being that while BBI/S2i has gone out of business, its various chief officers and operatives may still be out there. So be careful. And shred sensitive documents before you throw them away. Greenpeace does.