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Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies
Bottom of the pile
8
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
3/100Critics
13/100Scholars
Author:
Barry Meier
Publisher:
Harper
Date:
May 18, 2021
For decades, private eyes from Allan Pinkerton, who formed the first detective agency in the U.S., to Jules Kroll, who transformed the investigations business by giving it a corporate veneer, private spies were content to stand in the shadows. Now, that is all changing. High-profile stories grabbing recent headlines - the Steele Dossier, Black Cube, the Theranos scandal, Harvey Weinstein's attacks on his accusers - all share a common thread, the involvement of private spies. Today, operatives-for-hire are influencing presidential elections, the news media, government policies and the fortunes of companies.. They are also peering into our personal lives as never before, using off-the shelf technology to listen to our phone calls, monitor our emails, and decide what we see on social media. Private spying has never been cheaper and the business has never been more lucrative--just as its power has never been more pervasive. Spooked is a fast-paced tour through the shadowlands of private spying and its inhabitants, a grab-bag collection of ex-intelligence operatives, former journalists and lost souls.
What The Reviewers Say
Meier’s book compiles and synthesizes several stories about recent private intelligence misadventures. While a fair amount is aggregation—readers of Ronan Farrow’s groundbreaking reporting on Black Cube’s work for Harvey Weinstein, for example, may find portions of that part of the book to be familiar territory—Meier’s research and original interviews flesh out the stories and characters involved. Through his eyes, they are often unsavory people. The best part of his book, upstaging the other sagas, covers the Steele dossier.
In Spooked, the former New York Times investigative reporter Barry Meier makes clear he has some big and important ambitions: to probe deeply into the murky world of private spies.
He is right, and he deserves credit for documenting the duplicity of the people who gave us the Steele dossier. Mr. Meier neglects to mention that two columnists in these pages have chronicled the treachery of Fusion GPS and Steele in detail, but put that to one side. He has said what hardly anyone else in his circle of elite mainstream journalists has had the courage to say.
The labyrinthine narrative reveals a slick, high-stakes dark side to the proliferation of private intelligence firms.
