CIA, Inc.

• Author: Mintz, James
• Position: Director Library

By F.W. Rustmann Jr.

Published by Brassey's Inc., Washington, D.C., 217 pages, $27.50

"BUSINESS IS WAR," writes F.W. Rustmann in his new book, CIA, Inc., about applying to the business world what he learned during 24 years in the CIA's Clandestine Service. He has wise counsel on protecting your company from business opponents, but his advice for going on the offensive against corporate enemies belongs to a bygone era.

Rustmann joined the swashbuckling CIA of the mid-1960s, when the anti-Communist mission was simple, and agents took enormous risks in fighting an evil enemy. (The Agency was later ruined, in Rustmann's view, by directors recruited from outside the CIA's old-boy network, Congressional hearings, and press scrutiny.)

The lessons that Rustmann thinks businesspeople can learn from intelligence agents come from the risk-filled, pre-scrutiny time when Rustmann was a young agent. But how relevant is Rustmann's Cold War derring-do to business readers living in the modern (read complex, intensely scrutinized) world?

Rustmann's book teaches "clandestine tradecraft," the subtle techniques used by professional spies to gather information. He argues against being too "blatant" about obtaining information from a corporate adversary. He warns, for example, that having your "penetration agent" bring you proprietary documents can get the agent prosecuted for theft, along with the "case officer" (that's you if you haven't read CIA, Inc.'s caveats carefully enough!).

He's contemptuous of amateurish corporate secret-stealing, such as Volkswagen's recruitment some years ago of General Motors executives who brought along to VW boxes of confidential GM documents. The scandal resulting from the operation cost VW a $100 million payment to GM.

Rustmann makes a fascinating case that if VW had only used a professional former-CIA officer and less-blatant "tradecraft," VW could have "stolen all of those trade secrets and gotten off scotfree." VW should have used codes to communicate with the GM executives, and secret offshore bank accounts to pay them. And instead of "blatantly" stealing the documents, the departing executives should have used "roll-over cameras" to copy them.

Rustmann must be a popular lecturer at the CIA's legendary training facility called The Farm, but his advice could...