Spy
vs. CI
By
John Allen
Despite
the Machiavellian language, Johnson isn't a product
of the FBI or CIA, but rather of L&S — UW-Madison's
College of Letters and Science. By his own admission,
he has no formal training in intelligence. Instead,
he studied history and political science, and he left
the university not knowing exactly what to do with
his life. He took a job as a business analyst with
a major international consulting firm. After a year
and a half, he felt he'd learned enough to start his
own consulting business, so in January 1995, he left
his job. In February he moved to Chetek, which lies
about forty miles north of Eau Claire, and launched
Aurora.
"My mother was a hairdresser in Chetek," he says.
"She said the twelve feet of space on the east side
of her salon were mine. So I set up shop." Initially,
Aurora offered general strategic consulting, but Johnson
soon learned that businesses in Chetek — and even
in the greater Chetek metropolitan area — lacked the
kind of revenues that would enable them to hire consultants
on a regular basis. He knew he needed to break into
a bigger market, which meant finding a way to specialize
his services.
"I decided on intelligence because there just weren't
many people doing it then," he says. "I'd done some
intelligence work for my former employer, and I figured
I could act as a subcontractor, selling my services
back to them."
For the next two years, he continued to act as a one-man
operation, hiring freelancers when necessary and learning
more about the trade. Then he discovered SCIP, and
became the coordinator for the organization's Wisconsin
chapter.
"Things really took off once I became involved in
SCIP," he says. "In 1997, Aurora had just one employee:
me. Now I've got a full-time staff of intelligence
liaisons and analysts, and about 200 contract specialists
who work on freelance projects."
To
put their clients on the road to market hegemony,
Johnson and his team offer a series of services, most
of which center around collecting raw information
and then transforming it into intelligence. This requires
examining the client's business strategies and looking
through all data about competitors, customers, and
suppliers to find out where threats and opportunities
exist.
"Analysis is the real key," Johnson says. "You can
collect 200 pages worth of information for a client,
covering markets, specific competitors, technology
advances, and so on. But no CEO wants to read 200
pages. They want to see a report that's about a half-page
long, telling them what to do or giving them a playbook
of options."
Still, few CEOs would follow Aurora's recommendations
unless they knew that the 200 pages of data existed
to back up those plans. Collecting that information
is the work of Johnson's team of salaried and freelance
analysts.
There are two ways to go about collecting intelligence,
Johnson says: primary and secondary research. Secondary
research comes from explicit, publicly available documents.
It means reading newspaper and magazine articles,
conducting Web searches, examining credit reports,
and searching through patent applications. "Basically,"
says Johnson, "a five-year-old could get this stuff."
But though secondary research may be relatively easy
to obtain, such data has its advantages. First, it
runs no risk of violating trade secrecy laws or even
codes of ethics. Second, as it's been published in
one form or another, a CI operative can assume it's
likely to be accurate and can use it to confirm information
found in other sources. And third, secondary intelligence
tends to highlight the people who should be targeted
in primary research efforts.
Primary
research is where the questions of legitimacy and
ethics enter the process. This is the collection of
information that isn't in the public domain. It requires
talking to actual people and trying to cajole them
into giving you an inside scoop while you give up
virtually nothing in return. In order to get the data
they're looking for, CI operatives have to seem open
and friendly. But in order to protect their clients,
they can't reveal any of the reasons why they're collecting
information or to whom it will go.
"It's called telephone elicitation, which I
admit sounds kind of shady," says Johnson. "But the
golden rule is never tell a lie to an interview subject — which isn't exactly the same as telling the whole
truth."
This,
he says, is one of the best reasons to hire a CI firm
to collect intelligence. While an engineer at GM,
for instance, might not talk about management structure
or new engine designs to someone calling from Ford,
there's a better chance that he or she would speak
to a researcher from a firm with the innocuous name
of Aurora Worldwide Development.
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