For many intelligence operatives and Secret Service officers, executing dirty tricks in the service of their country's national security is psychically wrenching; they would never engage in it for any lesser reason. But for a few, it becomes a skill that can make money for them in the private sector.
What is the effect on society when dirty tricks target its law-abiding members, undermining privacy, freedom of speech and the law itself? It's this question that makes the story of Beckett Brown International (later S2i), recently reported by James Ridgeway and others in Mother Jones, worth reading. Ex-Secret Service people, former CIA officers, and police worked for BBI, using tactics that ranged from legal records checks to garbage raids and infiltration of environmental groups to pass information about them to industries the groups were protesting.
BBI, based in Easton, Md., worked for PR firms employed by corporations (Dow Chemical, Kraft Foods and Browning Ferris Industries, among others) that had come into conflict with activist groups. One job pitted S2i against a food monitoring coalition, GE Food Alert, that was protesting the use by Taco Bell (a Kraft subsidiary) of a corn product containing elements not cleared for human consumption. Memos obtained by the reporters detail S2i's plans to raid trash from GE Food Alert and its allied groups with the help of a Washington cop on S2i's payroll.
The Washington, D. C. headquarters of Greenpeace was targeted by BBI more than once in the late 1990s; BBI operatives acquired financial reports, information about planned events, and security codes for that office. Local organizations, as well as high-profile international groups like Greenpeace, also came under BBI's surveillance if they threatened corporate clients with enough money to pay its fees. In 1996 and 1997, Browning Ferris Industries was fighting a group called the Northern Valley Coalition that objected to the expansion of a BFI landfill in California; Ridgeway and company found records of a payment of $198,881 from BFI to BBI for "covert monitoring."
Some of BBI's garbage-picking adventures – like the story of the woman who had to wait for an hour in a Washington alley while her date collected two sacks of Greenpeace's rubbish – would be funny if they didn't raise worrisome questions. How can underfunded grassroots groups protect themselves from highly paid espionage by corporations they oppose? What happens to the fabric of law and order when spying that verges on trespass and involves unauthorized seizure of private records, including Social Security numbers, becomes a "service" for those with enough money to pay for it?
