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 state.

Since Jules Kroll pioneered the modern US corporate intelligence industry in the 1970s, the business has gone global and, predictably, hi-tech.

"It's a totally different landscape today, having gone from the early days of men in fedora hats under lampposts to quite a sophisticated marketplace," said Patrick Grayson, the CEO of corporate intelligence firm GPW in London, who opened a London office for Kroll in 1986. Competition had got tougher, too, he said.

Orbis Business Intelligence, the private intelligence firm believed to be at the centre of the Trump memos, has suddenly thrust this hush-hush industry into the headlines.

Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer who co-founded the London firm, has been widely named as the author of the memos, which contain unsubstantiated allegations about Trump's personal life and business activities.

Speaking at his first news conference as president-elect on Wednesday, Trump called the claims "fake news" and "phony stuff".

Money plundered, deals cut, bribes paid - uncovering such secrets and more helps drive the private intelligence industry. When England's Football Association was preparing to bid for the 2018 Soccer World Cup, for example, it turned to Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence to find out what rival bidders were up to.

In London, a centre of the global private intelligence community, industry figures, including several close to Orbis, were stunned by Steele's - and their industry's - sudden notoriety. Telephone calls to Orbis's offices were not answered; Steele could not be reached.

Steele is a respected Russia expert, fluent in the language. He worked for MI6 in the 1990s and 2000s in Moscow and London, according to a person who worked with him there.

He set up Orbis in 2009, with Chris Burrows, a former British Foreign Office official. Their stated aim: to provide their clients with "strategic insight, intelligence and investigative services".

Staffed by four analysts and two directors, Orbis is a relatively small player in London and vies with bigger competitors such as Control Risks Group, Hakluyt, Kroll's K2 Intelligence and GPW.

Yet back in 2010, Steele's small firm was hired by the FA to learn what rivals at soccer governing body Fifa, such as Russia, were doing to secure votes, and to sweep hotel meeting rooms for bugging devices, Bloomberg News reported in 2011.

Using intelligence agents was a common practice among the various bidders. Following a controversial process during which allegations of wrongdoing were made against several members of Fifa's board, Russia was named host, with England's bid eliminated after the first round of voting.

A month after the vote, then-prime minister David Cameron, described the vote as "murky".

Corporate intelligence was not cheap, with many in the industry charging between £600 (about R9,900) and £1,000 an hour, Grayson said.

The work includes everything from tracing assets to investigating fraud to handling whistleblower cases. In the political sphere, the work can also include opposition research, or "oppo", aimed at digging up dirt on rivals.

Several Russia experts in the intelligence industry said this week that gathering intelligence in Russia was notoriously difficult.

"It's really hard to get good information," said Andrew Wordsworth, a Russia expert and co-founder of corporate intelligence firm Raedas in London. "Half a dozen firms in my sector have high standards and are tough about doing this work, but clients can't tell the difference between good stuff and crap stuff."

- Bloomberg