Salacious Trump dossier forces business spies to break cover
"Survival", George Smiley said, "is an infinite capacity for suspicion."
Only, these days, suspicion has become a business in ways that Smiley, John le Carré's fictional spymaster extraordinaire, might have never imagined. Long before the world learnt this week of memos claiming Russia had compromising material on Donald Trump - memos believed to have been prepared by a former British intelligence officer - the business politely known as corporate intelligence had exploded into a multibillion-dollar industry. Today, private CIAs and MI6s are deeply entwined in business and politics, but their services don't come cheap. The going rate can run as high as $1,200 (about R16,200) an hour, on par with that of a white-shoe Wall Street lawyer. Worldwide, private spooks, sleuths and assorted security experts are expected to rake in $19.4-billion in revenue this year, according to the research firm Gartner. That does not include intelligence operations inside major corporations such as Exxon Mobil, whose CEO, Rex Tillerson, is Trump's choice for US secretary of st...
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