Spooking the spies

Pens with pin hole cameras and bug detectors may sound incredibly ‘James Bond’, but there’s no doubt that the business of corporate surveillance, and counter-surveillance, is booming, says Catherine Chetwynd

Special agent Pond adjusted the pen in his outer breast pocket and entered the fray. His quarry was chatting up a blonde half his age and looked ludicrously pleased with himself as she kissed him on the cheek and deftly extracted herself from his embracing arm. Pond introduced himself as a freelance researcher and, half an hour later, he had everything he wanted.

Caruthers had employed him to spy on a rival company, given his mobile phone number and even let slip about his mistress. Pond turned off the microphone in his pen and quietly left, knowing that everything Caruthers had said would have been safely transmitted to the receiver in his car.

The gadgets Q thinks up for Bond may seem far fetched but, in fact, cameras and microphones can be hidden in almost anything from pens and electrical sockets to sweat shirts. And there is a high demand for surveillance and counter-surveillance equipment in corporate life. Leading expert in the field is Spymaster, which sells everything from armoured vehicles, through the services of surveillance teams, to gadgets like the pen above; lie detectors also are no problem.

Says director Julia Adams: ‘More companies go out of business each year through fraud than for any other reason. If someone has learned something about your company and you cannot figure out how, then information has been leaked. I do not think we are a paranoid society and if something sparks a concern, in many cases it is justified. For a director to come here and secure their offices to ensure he or she can trust staff is a wise move.’

The flip side of this activity is counter-surveillance. ‘This is as common as surveillance and over the years demand has increased,’ she says. Spymaster supplies counter measures teams who sweep premises to ensure they are secure, give a report and also advice. Adams points out that if the surveillance team does find bugs, Spymaster does not always advise removing them. ‘If you do that they can be replaced and you tell the person who placed it there that you have found it,’ she says.

Sweeping is generally undertaken at night or at weekends and the ‘sweepers’ dress as requested by the client, in suits so that they might be attending a meeting, or to appear to be checking wiring, for example. Many of Spymaster’s customers have regular sweeps. ‘Customers need to understand that, as soon as we leave, the doors are open again. They are only safe for a short period,’ says Adams.

For telephone security, an encryption device can be installed to scramble a conversation. This requires the listener to have the unscrambling counterpart but ensures all conversations are protected. Says Adams: ‘You do not want to alert the person spying that you know someone is listening, so it is best to let unimportant calls go through and secure the important ones.’

Most fraud concerns information - people setting up their own business who want to take clients, or selling information for personal gain. ‘People often tell us: ‘We were ready to sign and then discovered we had been gazumped, someone had gone in with a lower price,’’ says Adams. ‘It indicates there is someone in the company who cannot be trusted or that another company is monitoring.’

It is scarily easy to bug a phone - an appliance can be inserted into the handset, behind a socket on the wall or in a splitter that allows two phones to be attached to one line. The recorder is connected to a transmitter, providing a record of both sides of every conversation.

For meetings, a variety of items can be put to the purpose, including pens, calculators and other office equipment. Anyone concerned they might be covertly recorded can buy a small bug detector that will vibrate if anything in the room is transmitting. One version is so small that a customer sewed it into the lining of his jacket. Forewarned is forearmed.

Not surprisingly, Spymaster has a team of people continually redesigning items to hide transmitters so that no one recognises them. The shop is also circumspect with advertising and selects carefully what is on its website and in the catalogue. The latter - appropriately called The Black Book - is sold to customers, so that the company has some control over who has it.

Spymaster is the only service that supplies the entire range of surveillance and counter- surveillance equipment, as well as protective paraphernalia. ‘We do a lot of press work - body armour, bullet proof vests, anti-stab vests, armoured vehicles,’ says Julia Adams. ‘We kitted out reporters who were going to Iraq.’ Spymaster can armour almost anything but armouring is heavy, so vehicles need to be powerful enough to perform normally.

The shop gets some strange requests, not least the customer who asked for his convertible to be armoured. Adams was impressively patient while explaining that armouring was not much use if he was not protected by the roof.

Bulletproof vests... for pensioners

A few years ago, an elderly lady came into the shop on London’s Portman Square to buy a bulletproof vest. ‘When a customer comes in, we don’t pry, although by the time we had fitted her and she purchased it, I was desperate to ask her why an elderly lady would want such a thing,’ says Adams.

Fortunately, curiosity was satisfied. The customer told them there was a railway line at the end of her garden and when she was weeding there, the high speed train threw up shingle, which hit her and hurt her. The vest was to protect her while gardening. The lightest bulletproof vest the shop sells is 1.2kg. It is flexible, moulds to the shape of your body, can easily be worn for 24 hours - for all-day gardeners - and provides protection from most hand guns and knives.

Cameras have a wider use than corporate espionage and Spymaster has sold Nanny cams to worried parents. They can be hidden in cuddly toys, although the thought of an all-seeing teddy is pretty sinister.

Spymaster also gets some dubious enquiries. ‘There are times we don’t get involved. We have a reputation to protect,’ says Julia Adams. ‘But most of our customers have genuine problems.’

The cost of this equipment varies considerably. A pen with pinhole camera in the clip costs £650 and the receiver will set you back £700. There are cheaper ways of doing it, with systems worth £500, but you get what you pay for and aural and visual quality is more basic. Says Adams: ‘You have to decide what the problem is worth and some customers come in saying they are losing deals worth thousands or tens of thousands of pounds.’

Pond may have got his man but one man who bought bugs to check up on his wife did not. ‘The very next day, his wife brought back the equipment we had sold and asked whether it was something she should be concerned about,’ says Julia Adams. ‘We could not discuss whether it was our equipment or whether her husband had bought it - everything is confidential. But she had decided he was listening to her and had bought a bug detector some time before.’ No trust there then.

Catherine Chetwynd is a freelance journalist specialising in business travel, conference, incentive and exhibition writing. She also writes for The Times and the Financial Times.