One of Ghislain de Castelbajac’s young apprentices invites me to enter a range of codes, take an elevator half-way up a baroque building nestled at the end of a mew in Paris. It is a grand entrance, and I am told simply to knock at an unnumbered door next to the elevator. There is no marking outside, but Ghislain, a due diligence operative and lobbyist who began his career as a member of the Secrétariat général de la défense nationale (SGDN) as a Chargé de Mission, is waiting and opens the door just as I knock. We sit in a spacious, dimly lit room amongst family heirlooms, which include an eighteenth century embroidered rug behind us, which is a rendition of the three phases of womanhood depicted in Raphael’s Les Trois Grâces, a Flemish painting of a Napoleonic camp, and an antique clock from the period following Napoleon’s return from Egypt in 1810.

Ghislain is also an associate professor in international risks management and due diligence techniques in emerging markets at the Ecole de Guerre Economique in Invalides, from where he plucked his young confrère Tristan out of 80 students last year to join in his ‘enhanced due diligence missions,’ 180 so far in 45 countries around the world, from Egypt to Nigeria, Turkey to Russia. “I counted yesterday,” he tells me with as much surprised eagerness as unhurried nonchalance. Others among his students go to offer the lay of the land to corporate compliance departments, others to the military and government intelligence. “In general, the students enjoy it.”

One thing he tells them is not to be impressed by anyone, “especially those New York hedge fund guys coming to the Middle East who try to trick you with their lingo. You just need to step back and read between the lines.” Following his own graduate studies, Ghislain says the National Security Council, founded in 1962 as an inter-ministerial body under the Prime Minister of France, called him. “I was about your age, I didn’t even know about the service, but they called me because they knew about me,” he says, and they asked him to become a Chargé de Mission on international affairs, where he was to focus on transnational risks. “My area was the globe.”

A gracious host and in temperament a person who exudes cautiousness and a carefree spirit in equal measure, at the SGDN from 1996 to 1998 Ghislain found himself in a group of five who operated in a way comparable to a newsroom, but with “no filter on the floor of information.” Classified files were freely harvested from the different French governmental services, military and diplomatic. Each day, the five would prepare a prospective report based on those files and information from the public domain, on pressing issues of their own choosing. On Monday, a report on the hows and whys of the collapse of several Albanian pyramid schemes. The nominal values of the pyramid schemes’ liabilities at their height was about half the country’s economic output and two-thirds of the Albanian population invested in them; major social unrest followed, the government fell, and around 2,000 people were killed in a near civil war (1). On Tuesday, a profile of Osama Bin Laden, the threats he posed while living in Sudan and the US embassy bombings he masterminded in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam (2). One would write through the night, while the remaining four would support with research, then they would rotate. Then, at eight the following morning, the report writer would present a 50-second précis to a closed-door consultation of a dozen officials seated at the Defence committee in Invalides, headed by the Secretary-General for National Defence, and also including the Head of International Strategic Affairs for the Prime Minister, the Chief of Staff, and various directors of the Prime Minister’s office. The report would then be dispatched to 20 people at the Élysée Palace and Ministry of Defence. Ghislain still has letters from President Jacques Chirac’s private strategic office, and Laurent Fabius, the current Foreign Affairs minister, and the President of the Assemblée Nationale at the time.

On the plates of commercial clients

Ghislain is now in a different world, operating like a skilled waiter who serves hot, out-of-the-way information onto the plates of commercial clients. This ranges from background checks on sanctions and embargoes to ‘enhanced due diligence,’ which includes information from human sources, and due diligence linked to capitalistic operations like mergers and acquisitions, “where sometimes we have access to their data-rooms.” But like the clatter of broken plates, the profession comes with its own hullabaloos. Kroll, one of the larger global investigations firms, was hired by the Ukrainian billionaire Dmitri Firtash’s bank Raiffeisen to investigate his own reputation (3). After Viktor Yanukovych was ousted earlier this year, the organised crime-unit of the Austrian police arrested Firtash in Vienna on a warrant issued by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation; the FBI (4) and US State Department’s (5) opinion of the oligarch’s links to Russia and the former Ukrainian President’s inner circle appeared to diverge from that of the firm he hired.

“That’s the difference between you and me, there is a business case,” says Ghislain tells me as I relate messier options that follow the scenario of companies and individuals hiring firms such as his to investigate their own reputations, not least the firm adjusting their reports to meet the client’s will or expectations. Stephan Blancke, an academic at the Freie Universität Berlin who specializes on China and North Korean intelligence matters, had pointed out that if the facts proved the client to be a money-launderer, for instance, would the client hand that report over to a financial institution or prospective business partner? “Or would they dispose of it, and pay another firm to re-investigate their reputation?” asks Blancke, over kimchee, a traditional spicy side dish made of napa cabbage, radish, scallion, or cucumber, in a Korean restaurant.

In London, Charles Carr, who heads up K2 Intelligence, a Kroll offshoot, says his firm carries out such reputational audit work with an additional set of rules, to address the unusual situation of having a client as a subject. “While the client is able to use our report in discussions with third-parties such as lawyers and banks, we retain full editorial control, including the way we state any limitations, and demand payment upfront,” according to Carr, who tells me his team prepared such reports for the politically-connected South African billionaire Walter Henning and for the South African-based oil trader Jean-Yves Ollivier.

In 2009, a London-based newsletter had labelled the latter “éminence grise of Françafrique,” reporting on alleged commissions he took on oil-backed loans he set up for Congo with ruinous interest rates (6), the effect of so-called ‘Vulture funds,’ which invest in debt considered to be very weak or in imminent default. In a comparable unproved reported scenario, a US$25 million loan by a British Virgin Islands-registered firm owned by Henning, Palladino Holdings, involved an agreement with Guinea that — should the country default on the loan — Palladino could “take up to a 30% stake in an unspecified subsidiary of the state mining company,” the Société de patrimoine du secteur minier (SPSM), and that Guinea couldn’t sell any state interest in a mining asset without first offering the option to Palladino (7). “I am not a journalist like you, or an NGO: I have a question from a client, and I answer,” says Ghislain. “They ask us to find out whether there are any red flags, problems, or issues, but in most investigations clients have a will to make business with a target, and my role isn’t to be a deal-breaker.” Probably, Ghislain says, the intelligence agencies of the world have more information than he does, but they work on a similar methodology, from electronic databases and human sources. “Obviously,” he says, “obviously, we don’t go into people’s offices and operate illegally.”

While at the SGDN, the then Chief of Staff of the Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed sent his chief of staff of the UAE Air Force to meet Ghislain in confidence and asked him to do for the UAE in Abu Dhabi what he was doing for the French government, but in English and with better information technology tools and budget, and yet with access to a lower level of classified information. “I wanted to travel a little, so I said yes for two years, and then stayed for five.” Between 2000 and 2005, a series of major world events followed in quick succession: September 11, the Iraq War, then the Afghanistan War, and nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan. One tool they developed together included semantic analyses in Arabic from the stems of words, which may indicate a positive, negative, threatening, or non-threatening meaning. “Let’s say we have a basket of publicly-sourced material, plus their own material, for instance SMS text messages they have gathered in Urdu, Pashto, and English. Analysing the information would depend on context. In the defence industry, ‘war’ or ‘weapon’ is not a negative term. In terms of tourism and the image of the UAE, which Ghislain says he also worked on, words like ‘smuggling’ or ‘war’ would obviously be negative. “We would then integrate these words into a systematic analysis cell. We developed our own Google Earth-like tool to see where the messages were coming from, before Google Earth even existed.”

Through the course of these five years as a special advisor, he noticed a key difference between French intelligence-gathering operations and those of the UAE and the Gulf states. The French prepare forward-looking analyses and have an extensive human intelligence network that traces its origins to networks in the historical colonial administration, he says. While he says the UAE lags in this sense, it has “quite powerful ways of controlling populations. It’s not that it’s a dictatorship in the sense of being repressive, but there are 119 nationalities living in the UAE.” In Abu Dhabi, 85 percent of the population consist of expats, while in Dubai that guest population is even higher. “They monitor their guest populations, and local intelligence knows everything there. They prefer to catch things when they are small and nascent, and resolve situations delicately.”

As Ghislain left for Dubai and left his assignment working exclusively for the UAE government, he founded the Dubai-based boutique intelligence company Applied Business Intelligence, or ABI Capital. Last September, Ghislain re-created ABI’s Paris office with Philippe Bertin, a former BNP Paribas banker and a Knight in the order of the French Legion of Honor. Ghislain no longer has ready access to government files, but one initial client was a UAE emirate, Ras al Khaimah, who asked him to create an offshore financial centre, which Ghislain says now has been 15,000 and 20,000 companies using its services. He took the challenge, but asked for three conditions: that there be no bearer shares because this would make things “too dangerous” in terms of money-laundering; a tight anti-money laundering scheme; and finally, that all responsibility be placed on the agents — the accountants and professional services people, rather than the government. He took Ireland as a model jurisdiction, given its history dealing with the IRA and terrorist financing. Another case involved the board of a Gulf airlines company, who hired him to look into its chief executive’s Résumé. “We found out he was a crook: he was lying on his CV from A-Z, he even lied about his pilot license.” “The information is not easy to find, but it’s there, and we don’t go into espionage.”

Where there is no corporate marriage, partnership, or will to acquire, and litigation is in process, “we have to be smarter, and more discreet, and use indirect ways of getting information,” he tells me. Those techniques are often flattery and sometimes involve deception. “This doesn’t’ mean that it’s illegal, but we ask a question that’s not directly linked to the subject, so we can have answers.” While preparing a private report on litigation between two companies connected with onshore Yemeni oilfields about a decade ago, Ghislain interviewed the then Minister of Oil in Sana’a for an article to be published in an archaeological periodical, and then “boom, I asked him a question indirectly about these specific litigation topics. He was in a good mood: I told him Yemeni coffee is much better than Saudi coffee.”