Intelligenceoriginal.com  ·  Power & Secrecy  ·  September 26, 2026

P o w e r  &  S e c r e c y

The Fixer

When governments need information they cannot officially request, when corporations need intelligence they cannot legally collect, and when powerful men need problems to disappear, they call the same category of person — someone who spent a career in a government intelligence service and then discovered that the private market for exactly those skills was larger, more lucrative, and considerably less regulated than anything the state had ever offered. The private intelligence industry now employs tens of thousands of people globally. Almost none of them will tell you what they do for a living.

By the Intelligence Original Editorial Desk  ·  September 26, 2026  ·  21 min read

In the autumn of 2017, a woman named Anna contacted a journalist at The New Yorker named Ronan Farrow. Anna said she worked for a nonprofit organisation focused on women’s rights. She wanted to meet to discuss a project she was working on. Farrow, who at that point was months into a reporting investigation that would ultimately produce one of the most consequential pieces of journalism of the decade, agreed.

Anna’s real name was not Anna. She was an operative working for Black Cube, a private intelligence firm staffed largely by veterans of Israeli intelligence units — the Mossad, Aman, Shin Bet — and retained, through a contract routed via the law firm of David Boies, by Harvey Weinstein. Her assignment was to get close to Farrow, to identify his sources, and, if possible, to disrupt his investigation before it reached publication. She brought him coffee. She expressed admiration for his work. She asked, with what must have required considerable professional discipline to frame as casual curiosity, who he had been talking to.

Farrow, who had by then developed the reporter’s instinct for implausible coincidences, eventually identified Anna for what she was. Through a sequence of events that involved a degree of reversal unusual even in intelligence work, he persuaded her to become a source for his investigation of Black Cube rather than an operative against his investigation of Weinstein. She subsequently provided testimony to US authorities regarding the firm’s American operations. The story, when Farrow published it, did not simply destroy Harvey Weinstein’s career. It illuminated, for a general audience that had no prior knowledge of the sector, the existence of an industry that had been operating in plain sight for decades.

That industry — private intelligence, corporate espionage, the constellation of firms that describe themselves variously as strategic advisory, business intelligence, competitive analysis, geopolitical risk consultancy, and reputational due diligence — had been growing steadily since the end of the Cold War, when several thousand intelligence professionals found themselves simultaneously superfluous to the state’s requirements and extremely attractive to the private market. It has been growing faster since 2001, when the expansion of the American intelligence community produced a generation of contractors accustomed to operating at the intersection of government authority and private enterprise. And it has been growing fastest in the past five years, as geopolitical complexity has driven demand from corporations, law firms, private equity funds, sovereign wealth funds, and individual clients of extreme wealth who want to understand — and in some cases to influence — the environments in which they operate, by methods that do not appear in any annual report.

I.   The Revolving Door

How Hakluyt Was Built, and What It Tells Us About the Private Intelligence Market

In 1995, a group of former officials of the British Secret Intelligence Service — MI6 — gathered in London and founded a company. They named it after Richard Hakluyt, the Elizabethan geographer and promoter of colonial expansion, a choice that conveyed a certain view of their purpose: the collection and analysis of intelligence about foreign territories, for the benefit of those with the resources to commission it. They set up offices in Mayfair. They recruited from the same institutions they had left. And they operated, from the beginning, with a discretion that made their former employer look garrulous.

The founding of Hakluyt & Company was, its founders later acknowledged, conducted with the blessing of Sir David Spedding, the then-chief of MI6. The managing director was Christopher James, who had run MI6’s business liaison section — the department that managed the service’s relationships with British corporations and briefed their executives on matters of commercial and strategic concern. Mike Reynolds, who had been MI6’s head of station in Germany, became a director. The original board included Sir Fitzroy Maclean, the Scottish soldier, diplomat, and travel writer who was, by general agreement, one of the principal real-world inspirations for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Baroness Elizabeth Smith, widow of the Labour leader John Smith, served as a director until the late 1990s.

This was not a coincidence of social networks. It was a deliberate construction of legitimacy — a board assembled to signal to potential clients that Hakluyt was not a private investigation firm in the low-rent sense, but something closer to a sovereign intelligence service that happened to issue invoices. The distinction mattered commercially. The companies, law firms, and private equity houses that became Hakluyt’s clients were not primarily seeking the kind of intelligence available through conventional commercial databases and research firms. They were seeking what only former intelligence officers could provide: networks of sources in difficult jurisdictions, the ability to assess information at the level of reliability that state services applied, and — critically — the assurance that what they were told had been filtered through professional tradecraft rather than assembled from publicly available sources and presented with the confidence of private knowledge.

“We give focused, timely intelligence. Our main commodity is the truth.”

— Christopher James, Hakluyt managing director and former MI6 officer, in a rare interview with the Financial Times

Hakluyt grew. By the mid-2000s it was providing intelligence services to more than twenty-six FTSE 100 companies. By 2021 it was reporting revenues of £84.9 million. Its international advisory board came to include Lord William Hague, the former British Foreign Secretary, and Andrew Mitchell, the former Secretary of State for International Development. In 2024, its managing partner, Varun Chandra, was appointed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer as his personal business and investment adviser. The firm that had been founded by former spies had arrived at a position where its alumni were advising the head of the British government — an outcome that, depending on your view of the relationship between private intelligence and democratic governance, is either a natural expression of expertise or something that should trouble a parliamentary committee.

Documents obtained in 2025 by the investigative outlet openDemocracy revealed that Hakluyt had arranged private briefings between senior government officials working on artificial intelligence policy and the firm’s technology-sector clients — briefings that were not publicly declared and that gave those clients access to civil service thinking in advance of policy decisions that would directly affect their commercial interests. Hakluyt, as a strategic advisory firm rather than a registered lobbying organisation, was not required to declare its clients or its activities publicly. The firm operated, in the description of its critics, in a regulatory blind spot of its own considerable utility.

II.   The Israeli Model

Black Cube, Weinstein, and the Industrialisation of Human Intelligence

Hakluyt represents one end of the private intelligence spectrum — the end where former officials of elite Western services provide geopolitical analysis and access to clients who are, in the main, operating within the boundaries of legality if not always the spirit of democratic transparency. Black Cube represents something different. Founded in Tel Aviv by veterans of Israeli intelligence — Unit 8200, the Mossad, and other services whose tradecraft includes active human operations rather than merely analytical work — Black Cube offered its clients not just intelligence but action: the deployment of trained operatives with false identities to penetrate the environments of its clients’ targets, extract information, and, where possible, neutralise threats before they became public.

The Weinstein engagement, which came to Weinstein’s attention through a connection made by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, was not the first case in which Black Cube had deployed these methods. The firm had previously been hired by Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer to run a campaign against Yair Lapid, then serving as Israel’s Finance Minister — a revelation that emerged from an Israeli television investigation in 2018. It had assembled and applied its tradecraft, which included the use of synthetic identities, targeted social engineering, and covert audio recording, in commercial and political disputes across multiple countries and jurisdictions.

What the Weinstein operation exposed, when Farrow’s reporting stripped away the professional cover, was the specific texture of human intelligence operations conducted in a corporate context. The female operative who approached Farrow was not improvising. She was applying a methodology developed in military intelligence environments and adapted for civilian targets: build rapport through a shared professional interest, establish trust incrementally, create the conditions under which the target volunteers information they would not share with a stranger. The methodology was effective enough to require the target to actively identify and reverse it in order to escape it — which Farrow did, but which most targets would not.

“In Black Cube’s case, that included human intelligence tactics — targeting women, targeting journalists, showing up in their lives using fake identities, using fake companies as a front. This was detailed. This was aggressive. And according to the women I spoke to, this was terrifying.”

— Ronan Farrow, speaking to NPR, November 2017

Black Cube’s response to the public exposure was, in its own way, instructive. It confirmed that it had worked for Weinstein. It stated that it had not known the full scope of what Weinstein had represented to it about his situation. It apologised. It promised to donate its earnings from the engagement to organisations supporting sexual assault survivors. It did not cease to operate. The private intelligence industry does not have a regulator in the conventional sense. It does not have a professional code of conduct with enforcement mechanisms. It has reputation — a currency that the Weinstein episode diminished for Black Cube specifically and had essentially no effect on the sector generally.

III.   The Regulatory Void

How a Global Industry Grew to Tens of Thousands of Practitioners Without a Single Governing Framework

The private intelligence industry occupies a position in the regulatory landscape that its practitioners describe, with varying degrees of comfort, as a grey zone. The activities it performs range from the entirely legal — open-source research, geopolitical analysis, corporate due diligence — through the legally ambiguous — the use of pretextual personas in information-gathering operations, the collection of information on individuals without their knowledge — to the straightforwardly illegal in some jurisdictions: wire-tapping, computer intrusion, the suborning of sources inside target organisations. The mix, in any given engagement, depends on the client, the target, and the judgement of the practitioner about how far to go.

No international framework governs private intelligence work. Individual jurisdictions apply individual laws — laws written for other purposes and applied to private intelligence operations as an afterthought. The United States has laws against wire fraud, computer intrusion, and the use of pretextual communication to obtain personal information from financial institutions. The United Kingdom has the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and various provisions of criminal law. Neither framework was designed with the specific activities of a private intelligence firm in mind, and both contain gaps that experienced practitioners know well. The Hakluyt model — strategic advisory, not lobbying, and therefore exempt from disclosure requirements — is one such gap. The Black Cube model — operational intelligence conducted through commercial entities in multiple jurisdictions, with the legal exposure distributed among a chain of contractors, sub-contractors, and cut-outs — is another.

The demand side of this market is itself a product of the regulatory and competitive environment in which corporations now operate. A pharmaceutical company considering an acquisition in a country with opaque corporate governance needs to know whether the target’s assets are clean, whether its regulatory approvals were obtained legitimately, and whether its management has relationships with state actors that would create problems post-acquisition. A private equity fund investing in an emerging market needs to understand the political risk profile of the jurisdiction in ways that the standard country-risk reports do not capture. A law firm engaged in international arbitration needs to know whether the opposing party’s witnesses will say what they claim they will say, and whether the opposing party’s principals have assets in jurisdictions that might be relevant to enforcement. These are legitimate needs. The firms that service them exist on a spectrum that starts at legitimate and ends somewhere that the clients, if they thought carefully about it, would prefer not to examine too closely.

IV.   The New Client

Sovereign Wealth, Geopolitical Risk, and the Privatisation of State Intelligence Functions

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the most timely and accurate intelligence about Russian military movements was provided not by any of the Western governments whose satellite systems were theoretically capable of producing it, but by private open-source intelligence analysts working from commercial satellite imagery and social media data. The assessment that Russia’s initial armoured thrusts had stalled was documented by open-source practitioners hours before it appeared in official briefings. The Ukrainian government’s understanding of Russian logistics failures came in part from commercially available satellite imagery processed by firms whose names most people have never heard.

This was not a coincidence. It was the product of a decade-long shift in which the private sector had developed intelligence capabilities that in some domains — specifically open-source collection and analysis — had come to exceed those of state services constrained by classification systems, procurement cycles, and institutional cultures built for a different era. The US Intelligence Community’s own OSINT Strategy for 2024–2026 acknowledged this directly, stating that “external partnerships will be vital to success in this domain” and that the community “must be postured to capitalise on pioneering efforts in the private sector.”

The consequence is a relationship between state and private intelligence that has become genuinely difficult to characterise. Firms like Palantir, which built its original business on contracts with the CIA and NSA and has since expanded into commercial markets, occupy a position in which the boundary between public and private intelligence function is architecturally dissolved rather than merely blurred. Firms like Hakluyt, whose principals move between private practice and senior government advisory roles with what critics call unseemly ease, operate in a relationship with the state that is neither contractor nor independent and neither regulated nor transparent. And firms like NSO Group — the Israeli developer of the Pegasus spyware that has been used by governments to surveil journalists, lawyers, activists, and heads of state — represent the most extreme version of the privatisation logic: a commercial company selling state-grade intelligence capabilities to any government willing to pay, with consequences for the targets of those capabilities that no commercial contract specifies and no regulatory framework addresses.

V.   The Price of the Truth

What the Private Intelligence Industry Has Become, and What Follows If Nothing Changes

The woman who told Ronan Farrow her name was Anna eventually became a witness for US authorities. The investigation she had been sent to suppress was published. Harvey Weinstein was convicted and imprisoned. Black Cube apologised and continued to operate. The private intelligence industry absorbed the episode as a reputational event rather than a structural reckoning, because there was no mechanism — no regulator, no professional body, no enforcement framework — through which a structural reckoning could be delivered.

The most useful framework for understanding what the private intelligence industry is, and why it is difficult to regulate, is the one that explains why it exists in the first place. Governments stopped exporting intelligence officers in significant numbers at the end of the Cold War, not because the demand for their skills disappeared but because the supply of state funding for their activities was constrained. The private market provided what the state had withdrawn. And the private market, unlike the state, does not require its practitioners to operate within a legal framework designed to protect the civil liberties of the people those practitioners are collecting intelligence about. It requires them only to avoid prosecution — a considerably lower bar, and one that, with sufficient structural complexity and jurisdictional arbitrage, is not difficult to clear.

Hakluyt’s founding directors described their main commodity as the truth. It is a formulation worth examining. Truth, in the intelligence context, is not a neutral product. It is information selected and framed for a specific purpose by practitioners who have been paid by a specific client. The truth that a private equity firm needs about an acquisition target is not the same truth that the acquisition target’s employees, or its regulators, or its creditors, would find most relevant. The truth that a billionaire needs about the journalists investigating him is not the truth that the journalists’ sources, or the public that reads the resulting journalism, would recognise as the most important truth available.

The private intelligence industry is, in the end, a market for asymmetric information — a market in which the clients who can afford it obtain knowledge that their counterparties do not have, to make decisions that their counterparties cannot anticipate, in environments that their counterparties cannot fully understand. This is, in a narrow technical sense, efficient. It directs resources to their highest-value use and rewards the accumulation of analytical capability with financial return. It is also, in a slightly wider sense, the description of a world in which the already-powerful have a structural advantage in obtaining information over the not-yet-powerful, in which that advantage is invisible because the industry that provides it does not publicly declare its clients or its methods, and in which the only check on its worst excesses is the occasional journalist who notices that the woman who keeps asking him about his sources has a cover story that doesn’t quite hold together.

Sources: Farrow, Ronan, Catch and Kill (2019); Farrow, Ronan, “Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies,” The New Yorker, November 6, 2017; Wikipedia, “Hakluyt & Company,” citing Financial Times and Companies House records; openDemocracy, “Burnham’s AI Head Secretly Briefed Tech Giants at No. 10 Adviser’s Investment Firm,” 2025; Tucker, Katherine and Maria Robson-Morrow, “Intelligence Outsourcing for Non-Traditional Clients,” Intelligence and National Security, January 6, 2025; US Intelligence Community, “The IC OSINT Strategy 2024–2026,” Director of National Intelligence; Javers, Eamon, Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy (HarperCollins, 2011); Meier, Barry, Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube and the Rise of Private Spies (HarperCollins, 2021); NPR, Farrow interview transcript, November 2017; The Nation, “Israeli Tech Firms Act as Global Agents of Repression,” 2018; Scotsman, “Intelligence Firm With an Air of Mystery,” on Hakluyt and the Komarek libel case; Sunday Times, reporting on Hakluyt and Manfred Schlickenrieder/Greenpeace surveillance operation; Bloomberg, “Labour Recruits MI6-Linked Consultants to Help Woo Business,” September 2023; Ynet News, Black Cube statement on Weinstein engagement, November 2017; Corpwatch, “UK: MI6 ‘Firm’ Spied on Green Groups.”

INTELLIGENCEORIGINAL.COM  ·  POWER & SECRECY  ·  SEPTEMBER 26, 2026

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