Private Security Firm Spied on Environmental Groups for Corporate Clients

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted April 15, 2008.

AMY GOODMAN: A private security firm spied on Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and several other environmental organizations from the late 1990s until at least 2000. That's according to a comprehensive new investigation by Mother Jones magazine.

The security firm was run by former Secret Service officers. The operatives infiltrated environmental groups, collected their phone records and confidential internal documents, and even went through their trash. The information was then passed on to public relations firms and corporations involved in environmental controversies.The security firm was called Beckett Brown International, later changed its name to S2i. It dissolved in 2001, but its officials went on to other security firms that remain active today.

Among its clients in the late '90s was public relations company Ketchum, that worked for Dow Chemical and Kraft Foods, that owns Taco Bell. Another client included PR outfit Nichols-Dezenhall, which was working with Condea Vista, the chemical manufacturing firm that in 1994 leaked up to forty-seven million pounds of ethylene dichloride, a suspected carcinogen, into the Calcasieu River in Louisiana.

James Ridgeway is the senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones magazine. He is the primary author of the report, which is available at motherjones.com. It's called "Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups."

James Ridgeway joins us now from our firehouse studios in New York. Welcome, Jim, from Seattle, Washington.

JAMES RIDGEWAY: Hi. How are you, Amy?

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Well, why don't you let us know how you were tipped off to this story?

JAMES RIDGEWAY: Well, actually, I got a call from a group in Minneapolis, and they said that they had been trying to get people interested in this subject, and nobody really, I guess, had gone for it. So they put me in touch with a guy on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a person named John Dodd, who had turned out to be the primary investor of S2i, or BBI. And at first he didn't want to talk to me. And, you know, I persisted, and eventually he agreed and his lawyer agreed, and I went down there and began to go through boxes. He had sixty boxes in a storage vault. And I went through these boxes. These were boxes of records. And I began to find this different stuff. And the report is based on the documents, essentially.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about exactly what you found.

JAMES RIDGEWAY: Well, first of all, I have to tell you how this all happened, which is that Dodd had put over -- I think it was around $700,000 into this company. He had been approached at a bar by a guy from Easton, whom he got to know and who, in turn, introduced him to various Secret Service officers, most of them retired. And these Secret Service officers, you know, encouraged him to do it, said it would be a great company, that they would protect Clinton's inaugural -- second inaugural, I guess it was, and a variety of other things. So, anyhow, he puts the money in, and they then told them it was really profitable, really going great guns. He put some more money in, and on and on.

He kept asking for an outside accounting, and they refused, according to him. So, eventually he managed to get his own accountant to look at it, and his own accountant came back and told him that the books had been basically cooked and that there was fraud involved.

At that point, he heard from a friend who was working in the company that they were shredding papers. So he got his own friends, and they got in a truck, and they drove up to the company on Saturday morning. And they went in, and they took all the records they could find and took them out, and they hid them. I don't know where they hid them first, but they ended up putting them in this storage vault. So when I went there, there were these cardboard boxes stuffed with records. They weren't in any particular order or anything. So I just started going through them.

One of the most interesting things that I saw was one involving David Fenton. David Fenton runs a public relations operation in Washington, which is very well known, you know, amongst liberals and environmentalists. And this file had a background investigation of Fenton, his wife. It had the numbers and the types of cars that they own, license plate numbers. It had the tax assessments of his property. It had documents -- building documents from his office, which, I mean, clearly had been taken from his office, unless somebody had thrown them in the trash, which seems pretty doubtful, because they were very confidential.

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Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!