Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Author:Barry Meier [Meier, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2021-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

ROB MOORE WAS BEGINNING to worry too. In the spring of 2016, he traveled to Hanoi to speak at a meeting of public health officials and local journalists. He had convinced Matteo Bigazzi to pay for the trip because Vietnam was one of the countries in Southeast Asia considering an asbestos ban and Moore said that attending the conference would help maintain his cover story as a journalist.

At the meeting, Moore gave his whistleblower persona a test run. One of his talks at the Hanoi conference was titled “The Duty of Journalists to Protect Public Health.” He listed those duties in a PowerPoint slide as the responsibility, among others, “To speak truth to power” and “To challenge corrupt practices.” He also castigated an industry-funded scientist who, during a recent visit to Vietnam, had played down the risks of chrysotile asbestos. And he showed his audience a slide containing photographs of the chairman of the Kusto Group, Yerkin Tatishev, and some of his associates.

Two days later, Moore’s cellphone rang and the name “ZAD” flashed in the caller ID. It was his code name for Matteo Bigazzi. “What the fuck is going on!” the K2 Intelligence executive shouted. “We’ve heard that there has been a vicious attack on the industry.”

Moore was jolted back to reality. He said he improvised and told Bigazzi that an American asbestos expert who had planned to speak about the Kusto Group at the Hanoi meeting had been forced to cancel his trip and insisted that he give his talk for him. Bigazzi seemed mollified by the explanation but offered Moore some advice. It was fine for him to pretend he was an activist but his act had limits. “I don’t want to hear you are speaking about the industry’s corruption because then you are putting your head above the parapet,” Moore said Bigazzi told him.

That evening, Moore heard a knock at the door of the Airbnb apartment in Hanoi where he was staying. He had given its address to his companion but no one else, not even Bigazzi. When Moore peered out through the door’s peephole, the hallway looked empty. When he asked who was there, no one responded. He panicked and suspected that a goon dispatched by the asbestos industry was lurking outside, waiting to beat him or worse. The apartment was on the building’s third floor but Moore could see from the bathroom window that the rooftop of the neighboring building was not far below. He imagined himself jumping onto it and then shimmying down to the street, where he would steal a moped and make a Jason Bourne–style escape.

He called the apartment’s Airbnb host but no one picked up so he left a message on the answering machine. For the next two hours, he frantically deleted documents on his laptop related to Kusto or sent them to encrypted email accounts he had created. When the Airbnb host finally returned his call, Moore’s Jason Bourne moment became more like one from Mr. Bean. His visitor, he was told, had been the apartment’s maid.

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