BY SEAN HEALY
Two of the world's largest oil multinationals have admitted that they hired a London private investigation agency with links to the British secret service to spy on the protest activities of Greenpeace, the Body Shop and other environmental groups.
The revelations, in the June 19 edition of the London Sunday Times, will confirm many activists' long-standing suspicions that industrial espionage is not only being directed at corporations' competitors but also at citizens critical of companies' operations.
Both Shell and BP admitted to the paper that they had at certain times employed the firm Hakluyt to carry out "research".
This "research" reportedly included information on whether Greenpeace had taken steps to protect its assets against sequestration in the event of it being sued by an oil company and on the Body Shop's opposition to Shell drilling for oil in a Nigerian tribal land.
Hakluyt in turn paid for the services of Manfred Schlickenrieder, an agent of the German secret service, the BND, who had infiltrated activist circles posing as an independent, and sympathetic, film-maker.
Schlickenrieder was a familiar figure in environmental and social movements for close to 20 years. He had established an independent, one-man film company, Gruppe 2, but his films were rarely seen. He had been making an unfinished film about Italy's Red Brigade since 1985.
Fouad Hamdan, communications director of Greenpeace Germany, said: "The bastard was good, I have to admit. He got information about our planned Atlantic Frontier campaign to focus on the climate change issue and the responsibility of BP. BP knew everything. They were not taken by surprise."
"Manfred filmed and interviewed all the time, but now we realise we never saw anything."
Greenpeace says the scandal has echoes of the 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, in which one man died. The French secret service, seeking to stop Rainbow Warrior operations against nuclear testing in the Pacific, had infiltrated an agent into the group posing as a volunteer.
Hakluyt, founded in 1995, has strong links with the British secret service agency, MI6. Schlickenrieder's controller was Mike Reynolds, a one-time MI6 head of station in Germany; the firm's managing director, Christopher James, had been head of the MI6 section that liaised with British firms.
MI6 has brushed aside claims, however, that Hakluyt is simply an agency front to allow "deniability".
The private investigation company also has close links to the oil industry through Sir Peter Cazalet, the former deputy chairman of BP, who helped to establish Hakluyt before he retired last year, and Sir Peter Holmes, former chairman of Shell, who is president of its foundation.