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An insight into the character, personality and passion of the leading figures in the Investigation and Intelligence industry who have shaped the way we gather, analyse and utilise information and intelligence.
We have lost access to information that
is not aligned with what we think because
the news feed that you will receive on your social media
are exactly aligned with what you want to hear and your
beliefs, your set of beliefs.
And therefore we have lost the ability to understand
that there are other data, other information
out there that say things completely different. And we
have lost the ability to disagree because we are just
surrounded, we are just operating in safe space where nobody disagrees with
us. Decision makers operate
in an ivory tower and tend to be surrounded by sickle fence
and it creates huge disruption
about the kind of information that, that they
actually have access to. And breaking
that is absolutely essential.
Hello and welcome to the Intelligence Advantage podcast where we talk
to the movers and shapers in the investigation and intelligence
space. My name is Gary Miller. I've been an investigative
lawyer for nearly half a century and I'm also the chairman of the
IfG, a network of international investigative and
asset recovery lawyers. I'm delighted to
introduce and be joined today by my good buddy Thomas.
Thomas Eamon Larataz, Founder and CEO of
Highgate. Over the past two decades
Thomas has advised presidents, prime ministers and business leaders
in some of the most sensitive political and corporate situations
and now helps governments and companies navigate
high stake disputes through strategic intelligence.
He also happens to be a pretty good referrer of Indian
restaurants to me. So we're going to add that to your cv. Thomas,
welcome. Thank you, Gary. Okay, I'm going to be
with you. It's lovely to have you. I'm going to get straight into
it. You have advised presidents
and prime ministers and some pretty senior corporate leaders.
When you first walk into a room with them, what is the
first thing you do or the first thing that you say?
The first thing is that I try to listen to them
and try to understand the type
of issues that they are facing. I think if you want to
help someone you need to
sow respect, interest
and they need to have the feeling that
you care for the type of issues that they are facing and
you fully understand and you don't try to sell solutions without having
understood the problem and how. I'm sure you do. You
and I have not yet, but please,
inshallah, we will be doing it in not too distant
future in a room with clients together. But
what's your room reading? What's your body language and your people reading?
What are they like? Are you good at assessing and pretty,
pretty astute at assessing the kind of character someone is
if you've never met them before? Well, that's. We need to ask all
the people about this. I don't know, Gary.
Well, I have this habit that I don't know whether you do of when I
go in, of scanning a room and, and I've already got. It's a
kinetic thing. I already know by just
feeling the energy that comes out of the people, whether that's going to
be a tough cookie to crack or. Now, of course you get it
wrong sometimes, but I don't know, I kind of
feel that. But I'm not going to. Of course, none of it.
That's, that's obvious. I mean, being able to read the room and being able
to think. The most important thing is to be able to connect
emotionally with the other person. We always make
the mistake to think that the discussions we
are having are purely rational discussion.
And what matters is what is the vibe, what is the
emotional connection and
what is the body language and
how you can create ease and mutual understanding and respect.
That is essential. And if that is already established,
then this is a foundation to then
talk about content. And
this question or this topic of emotional
intelligence is what everyone's talking about in
certainly in this day and age, because everyone a has got
fed up talking about iq. But more importantly,
everyone realizes now how
lacking some people are, how some people lack any
emotional intelligence at all. Can you teach
emotional intelligence or do you either learn it, have it? What do you think?
Well, I think it's like for everything there is a part of
inner talent. There's a question of
awareness, there's a question of learning, and there's a question of practicing.
So it's like if you want to be good at a sport or other
musical instruments, you need to have some
already something in you that allows you to do
it. I tried for 10 years to play the Valley and I
was absolutely. It was an absolute disaster. So I
put a lot of hard work on it, but I didn't have the
minimum talent required to produce
any audible sound, any pleasant audible sound. Thomas.
Well, any, any kind of 10 years is. As a,
as a child, my parents were. Were putting me in the
bathroom, pretending that I needed to be in front of a
mirror to check the position. It was just to use a soundproof
tactic. I see. That's very smart. Now, 10 years,
that's already told me something. I probably knew it anyway from
time I've spent with you. You're a kind of determined
fellow. But 10 years, it's a long time to do it before
you realize that you were rubbish. Well, I mean, if. If
you wanted to prove a Flag of self awareness. You've got it.
I think it is coming back to the question of
emotional intelligence. Yeah. I think the most important thing
is you need to have interest and
empathy. If you don't care about the people,
you cannot have good emotional intelligence. And I think that
for me as a consultant and the way I select my consultants is that
I only want to work with people who are absolutely passionate
about helping others, about servicing others. If
you don't have the drive of
trying to help your
fellow citizens and trying to help your clients,
then it doesn't work because people immediately feel it.
If people sense that you are there for your own self interest
or for your own money, it will never fly. You must
genuinely be interested in helping them
and that's the foundation. And
I don't know whether you feel the same way that I do, but there are
certain places in the world which I work, I won't necessarily mention
where when you're dealing with people, you know it's all about the money,
it's nothing else. It's either you pay the price for what
they are either demanding the
price they're demanding from you. So there are not that many people that guide
themselves with, sadly with a genuine desire
to help. I mean, do you come across a lot of like minded
professionals like yourself who genuinely want to help and are not just selling
something for the, for the commercial value?
I think you can only sell successfully
if you are also at the same time interested in helping
the people. The two go hand in hand. If you just want to
make money, it will not fly, at least in the
service industry or which I think. Is the
same thing. Is that the relation? It won't be a relationship, it'll be a one
stop shop basically. Exactly. And all the people
that I know who work in
as very successful lawyers or
intelligence providers or consultants, the people who have really made
it and who are outstanding, they all have in common
a passion for servicing and a passion for helping others
and finding solutions. And
are you able to think of somebody, a mentor
or other person who you or maybe more
than one that you've met along the way that has had
a profound impact on you and the way you think about
life generally. But also you've come away thinking my God,
that person's just got that fairy dust.
Yeah. I've been extremely lucky
to work with some senior people who have told me a lot
throughout my career and, and I could name
half a dozen people who have profoundly
had an impact on, on me and the way I was working.
Do you feel Comfortable in naming one or two of them or is
it too confidential? No, I, I,
I can name them. When. But that
will oblige us to go through some elements of my career, which
not sure is the most interesting thing, but
when I started my career I was an
engineer and I was working for the French government and for the French
Ministry of Environment and I was in charge
of controlling industrial plants in
France for their impact on their environment and the risk. And I
was heading a team of about 40 people in southwestern
France. Right. And I've learned
a lot from the two people
who were leading the Ministry of Environment
that practice at that time. And you had a perfectly
tandem between the general director,
who was a very inspiring figure,
disruptive and thinking several
years ahead, and he was working
hand in hand with an extraordinary lady who was
able to translate this vision into
day to day operations. And these two
were aligned with the vision, but you could not find more contrasting
figures and approaches. Can you
explain that a bit more? At least tell me what it is? Or would you
be giving away a state secret and you have to shoot me? I mean,
is fascinated. When you've got a situation and
you've got such creative people and someone said why don't we
turn the switch that way instead of that way and suddenly
something else magical happens.
My experience is that to run an
organization you need a very different sets of talents
and you need to have people who are disruptive and
you need to have some people who are, on the contrary,
working within the system to
make the system work. And these two
profiles are fundamentally different. And
whenever you are in a situation when these people can work hand in
hand, this is where actually
a vision can translate into action. Because if you
just have disruptive visionary leadership, it is
rare that this actually translates to an organization.
And if you just have very good manager without
the visionary disruptive vision, then
it's a status quo. So if you want to move an
organization and create something new and
innovative, you need both sides of the coin.
So when you were thinking about, I haven't left your background as an
engineer because I'm fascinated with anybody that's got a science
and a mathematical background. Because most of us
lawyers, as you know, are innumerate and
find the scientific part of the world
a little bit difficult to cope with. But
so when you started that, when you started
creating or you were thinking about Highgate, you knew,
using those two balancing things, you knew that you needed
a manager to balance out your disruptive
thinking, or you were the manager and you needed disruptive thinkers or what, how
did you go about recruiting the very first people that you needed at
Highgate? So
I brought my COO two years after the
creation of the company and she is the
one who is the real manager.
Internally I was always the
disruptive thinker and I
don't think I'm a very good manager and I needed somebody
to be very good where I am
weak. And being
aware of your own weaknesses I think is very important because then
you try to work with the right people who can compensate that.
So really interesting because
I think, of course not for me to say, but
I kind of think I share a similar
lack of skill set in managing. I'm very good at, I think
leading is different from managing. I'm very good at thinking of an
idea and saying, right, that's what we got to do. But
over the years there have only been 48 of them that have been in business.
I do realize that there's some feedback in that. You just
don't really have the skill set of bringing those 68
people behind you. So is that something you learned
about yourself quite early on? That managing was not
your best suit? Yes, yes.
Well, I think, you know, life is the, is a self discovery process and
as you get older you start to learn about where you're good at and where
you're less good at. And once you
understand where you're less good at, you're looking
for talents to be able to fill the gap.
And I think any successful organization is an organization
where you have this right balance and the right diversity of
talents so that you cover all the grounds.
So I am going to dive back now into engineering. When you
were at university, that's where you first started engineering
or is there an engineering background in the family? Thomas?
My father had scientific education. I
see. And well, France is a very different system
than the US or the UK if you're good at school
and especially if you're good at math and physics, a
lot of people would do engineering, engineering schools, which is what I did.
And then most of these people end up being bankers
or consultants or managers and very few end up having
a true engineering job. I mean the city
of London is full of French bankers who are there
because they know how to count. And that's not usually what
people learn at Oxford and Cambridge where they read
classics or literature or Latin or
history. So
I became an engineer because I was good at school, especially
in math and physics
and I discovered a passion and I had a passion for environmental science.
So I graduated as a mining engineer, specialized in
Environmental science. Wow.
And I wanted to work in the field of environment. And at
that time, we're talking about more than 30 years ago,
I realized that the only field that was making sense for me was to
work for the government. And I was blessed to, to be able
to be taken to a fast track program for becoming a high
end French civil servant. So I joined the Ministry of
Environment and then I worked for the, for the Prime Minister in Paris.
Wow. So you were how old when you were working for the Prime
Minister? It sounds pretty young. I
was, I was 28.
So that's, that's quite. And you were with the Prime Minister of
Prime Minister's office for how long before you moved on? So
I worked for the Prime Minister's office for two years
and my job was to manage
interministerial coordinations on European affairs.
So you have a negotiation in Brussels
and you need to have all the different ministries
agreeing on what is the position of the French government. And so that was my
job. So that was to bring the people around the table,
find a compromise when there was no compromise, take a decision and
establish the position of the French government and give instructions to our
ambassador in Brussels. And
I was doing a lot of work in the field of environment.
So the first emission trading system in
the world, the CO2 directive, CO2 emission
directive. I established the position of the
French government on that
and was also working on the liberalization of the
electricity market, of the gas market,
on the research program, energy
policies, space policies. So I did that
for two years. And then
there was an opportunity to send
a French civil servant to Bulgaria
to be an advisor to the Bulgarian Prime Minister to help Bulgaria join
the European Union. And I was interested in a bit of
adventure. And so I volunteered and was
selected both by the French government, who was paying for this position,
and by the Bulgarian Prime Minister where I started
spending some time in Eastern Europe. Wonderful.
And dare I say you picked up some odd
phrases of Bulgarian while you were there, or are you
fluent now? No, no, I'm not fluent. I'm not friends.
But you learned enough to get by. And so
what role did the gathering of gathering
and analyzing intelligence play
in that part of your life when you were advising
the Bulgarian Prime Minister? So
I would not say that I was working with neither
the public intelligence or private intelligence industry.
But again, what I think
is very important when you advise a decision maker
is to be able to listen and not to
provide an answer before having understood the problem. And
a lot of the leaders suffer from operating in an
ivory tower. And all of us tend to end
up like that. And that leads
to bad decisions simply because we have bad data.
So being able to understand the environment around you,
being able to understand what are the concerns of the other side, what are the
expectations, and is absolutely key. So in a way,
that's soft political intelligence. And that was always something
that I was very much interested in,
because if you put the wrong data
in the software, you should get the wrong results.
And it seems to me, but I've never been
personally in that position, that when you're at that level of advising prime
ministers or government ministers, this whole
issue of, I don't know about
COVID intelligence, but the kind of intelligence that governments,
only governments, collect and analyze is absolutely
critical. To be able to do your job as a
prime minister, you need to know those things that are well beyond
what you pick up in a newspaper. Right. So that must be a
symbiotic relationship with the intelligence agencies. When you are
at that level of. Government, you would expect
it. The reality, I think, is fundamentally different.
I see. Wow. The reality is that
a very large number of organization, I'm not talking here about
Bulgaria at all, but my experience working with
a dozen presidents or prime minister and many, many CEOs
and private clients is that
decision makers operate in an ivory
tower and tend to be surrounded by sycophants.
Wow. And it creates
huge disruption about the kind of information
that they actually have access to.
And breaking that is absolutely essential.
Bringing a different perspective, Speaking truth to power
is essential. I'm reading at the moment
a book called King of Kings, which is about the fall
of the Iranian Shah in 1979.
78. 79. And it
is absolutely extraordinary to see how the US
government had absolutely no idea
about the discontent inside Iran
about the Shah. They were completely
blindsided. And the Shah himself had
absolutely no idea.
And they had. The largest secret
service operations
between Western Europe and China was in Iran
or the US and the Shah had an extraordinary secret police.
But these two intelligence bodies
provided completely distorted information to the
decision makers. Consciously,
consciously and consciously. Wishful thinking,
unconscious bias, laziness,
being a sycophant, everything
combined. And this is
something that we are seeing again and again and again
in private organization, in public
organization. So
having the courage to look
outside the box and break the wall of silence
about. There's an issue here. Have you
considered this perspective is absolutely
essential. So
would you share the view, then, that
bearing in mind that most people,
as they climb whatever ladder it is, a
governmental or a corporate ladder, whether it's a Law firm, whether
it's a corporate body, whether it's listed or not,
by definition you recruit and pick the people
that you like and who either you
recruit in your own image or people that you like. Is it then
inevitable that you end up with
that scenario where you're surrounded by people who
you like, they like you, they want to, as it were,
reaffirm that relationship. And so it's almost
a self perpetuating circle that sooner rather
than later that person is going to surround himself by yes
men and yes women. I think that's
part of, the, part of what is happening is the
yes men and yes women parts also is the
fact that we most of the time
are not aware that we operate in
completely different information bubble
than the other people.
Look at the debate on US Politics.
Take a Republican vulture, take a MAGA vulture
and take a Democrat voter.
The information they consume is just completely different.
Completely different. And this lead them to completely
different conclusions about
how the country should be governed and what should be the priorities.
You and I live in different information bubble. We have access to
different data on our social media feed, we read different
newspaper, we talk to different circle of friends. And the result is
that we develop a vision of the world and a vision
of our business where we're looking at different things
simply because we have enormous blind spots.
And being aware of these blind spots and
proactively trying to understand what is
there is absolutely essential. Now most
of the work I'm doing with Highgate is about disputes. So
we're helping people resolve disputes, right? And
disputes against government, dispute against other corporations, against other
individuals, shareholder dispute, corporate dispute, family
dispute, investor state dispute, you name it.
90% of the cases our client
comes with an idea about what is
driving their opponents.
In most cases are clients wrong because
they believe their opponents live in the same information bubble as they do.
My job is to convince the other side
to act differently and to do it and then
to negotiate. But the first thing that I need to understand
is in which information bubble the opponent
is operating. Why is he acting in such a
way?
We resolved a dispute of several hundred million US
dollars for US investment fund against the governments.
And when we started working for the client and the client
tried to steal sovereign assets, they had
won an award, they tried to seize sovereign assets all around the world. And they
were not from a legal perspective, they were not able to make any breakthrough.
And the government for more than 10 years refused to pay. So the
client came to us and said, could you help us? And
we started working with intelligence firms and not
to try to locate where the sovereign assets were and
try to seize them. This had been tried and led nowhere. Our
approach was very different. I wanted first and foremost to understand
why the government was refusing to pay.
And we understood. And they were refusing to pay for three reasons.
Very simple. The first reason is that
everybody in that government thought that they were winning the legal
battle. So the Minister of Justice who was in charge of the dispute was
lying to the President, to the Prime Minister, to the rest of the government, to
the elites and to the local media. So why would they pay my
clients if everybody was convinced that they were winning the lawsuits
where they had lost everything?
How did you find out that that was. So you need
intelligence to find out investigations to find out what he was
thinking? Correct. Or it was pretty obvious I needed.
Intelligence and I used intelligence and I used very high level people
that I send in the country to understand what he was telling the President,
the Prime Minister, the rest of the government and the elites. And once
we found that, we found that it was actually systematically lying.
The second thing we found is that we understood why he was lying.
He was lying because he had an economic interest in
the continuation of the disputes, because he was taking a cut.
So the more he was paying lawyers, the more he was making money. So we
then understood the rational. And then we also
understood that in addition to all these
lies, the government was paying no cost
whatsoever for
the continuation of the disputes. So there was no downside.
So first, the government was ignorant that they had to pay money
because they saw that they didn't need because they were winning. And
second, there was no downside for them not to pay the money.
And that's because the lawyers were doing it for nothing or what?
Well, the lawyers were costing them a fortune, actually. They spent more money
in legal fees than they would have spent in paying my clients.
So when you said. Maybe I've got myself confused, when you said there was
no cost to them continuing the litigation,
you didn't mean legal costs? I didn't mean legal cost.
I mean no political impact for the government. For the government,
it was not endangering their bilateral
relationship with leading countries around the world. It
was not endangering their FDI capability,
It was not endangering their credibility vis a
vis their own taxpayers in the. Country, even though the
dispute was costing millions. But of course, in the context, nobody. Knew
until I started working on it. Nobody knew, Nobody knew. Then I made it public,
then it became a big scandal. So then it created, then it became an issue.
I created A lot of issues for that government, a lot.
And eventually that led the government to, after they understood
that they had lost the legal battle, after they understood that there was a
corruption scheme, then I
created a lot of problems for the government and that convinced the government
that they needed to settle. And this is when then I sent some high level
negotiators to negotiate directly with them and
to reach a deal. But this
example illustrates something very important, is that if you don't
understand how your opponents are operating, what they have
in mind, what is motivating them,
you cannot find a way to influence them.
So intelligence is key in everything
we do, because if you have the wrong intelligence, you take the wrong
decision. And that's why, in my
view, I don't know whether you would agree. The question of who
controls social media and what kind of regulation,
which there isn't any at the moment or any meaningful, is
so important because if you divide the world in
between people that are just digesting social
media that has been curated by party A,
and then you want them to get on with the other part of the world
that is digesting media curated by party B,
and they are both, and they become more and more extreme. You're going to
have real problems socially and politically, aren't you?
Yeah, I think we're facing massive issues
here. One is about the ownership of these platforms which have a
huge impact on the way their algorithm is
designed and therefore the type of content
politically that is promoted. And we're seeing that on some
social platforms. That's one
thing. The other thing that is, in my opinion, even
more dangerous is the fact that
social media have created
millions of information bubbles that are not connected
one another. Ultra reality. Yeah.
So at the beginning, the big, the big slogan of
Facebook was about connecting people, you know, but actually
the social media are disconnecting us because we all
operate in our own bubble. And therefore
we have lost access to information
that is not aligned with what we think, because
the news feed that you will receive on your social media
are exactly aligned with what you want to hear and your
beliefs, your set of beliefs.
And therefore we have lost the ability to understand
that there are other data, other information
out there that say things completely different. And
we have lost the ability to disagree because we are just
surrounded, we are just operating in safe space where nobody disagrees with
us. And that's extraordinarily dangerous for
anybody who operates an organization, but also for a country
because as long as we're not able
to debate and to agree to disagree,
we've got A big issue. And I think this is probably the, the
biggest challenge of the coming decades
for our western democracies. So
we're both completely aligned on that. But
you are going to tell me how we solve that problem?
Not sure. Not sure.
I don't have the answer. I don't have the answer. It's
gotta be, I mean the issue of you
would, some people would say, well, the government ought to control
and regulate social media and what you and I
hear and see on a public basis. And then you have the problem
of, of course, governments have this rather interesting
tendency to promote or to use
their agenda to promote what they want. And so even
that itself is not a guarantee as impartiality.
So where do we, you and I, where do you get your
reliable, accurate news from?
So my newspaper of reference is the ft, right.
But I also look at
other sources and it's
always interesting to see,
looking at media from different parts of the world about how they treat
similar events and with completely different approaches.
And that's when you start realizing that even the media you trust the most,
like I trust the ft, is as huge
bias we all have, we all are reading
information that comes from people who have huge bias. So
it would be a mistake to believe that what the Economist
newspaper says is actually the absolute truth.
It is a very good quality, but it has a huge bias like
everything else we read. And do you think
that applies also to financial
analysts and people like that? And I think it must do. When
you look at the fact that, that economists, some
economists disagree vehemently with each other as to whether
there's a boom or a bus coming or whatever. So this bias
is built into any kind of, I don't know,
analysis of any intelligence, isn't there?
Look at what has been the trajectory of the financial
markets over the last nine months in the United States
and you will see that suddenly everybody thinks that
oh, we've got a glorious future thanks to Trump selection
and then everybody just, all the markets collapse
and then, oh, eventually there's hope and then again it
collapses. I mean, we spend our time doing, doing U
turns and, and depending on who you're asking the information, you
get completely contradictory messages. I remember
organizing a debate where I brought an extraordinary, prominent and
authoritative economist to Davos
just before the 2008 financial crisis and
who explained us with
fantastic series of arguments why the real estate
issue in the United States will not extend to the rest of
the world and why there will be no global financial crisis.
That's, you know, that's, that's that's life. That's life. You just
need, you just need to be aware that there are some other people
out there with different opinion and different set of data
and, and you need to proactively
seek these agreements. You need to proactively
challenge your views and always
think, am I really right to think that? And
along the way, particularly at the levels that you've been
operating, which is quite a
unique level in the context of the investigation
intelligence industry players that I've
met, being connected with governments
at the level you are, does it, how does it
affect the way that you look at the world? You've
explained, of course, this sycophancy and this
difficulty in getting people at the top to
actually have disruptors or
gainsayers in the room. But
has it made you more jaundiced in terms of the way in
which the politics and
the politicians work? Has it made you more, I don't
know, I guess more sanguine about the prospects for humanity?
No, it's your decision to look
at the glass half full or half empty.
And I think it's very important to
not to be naive about the way
organizations and governments operate. How much
democracies can be inefficient, how much
authoritarian regime can, can create chaos and
suffering for their people. So coming into situations with
open eyes is, is a healthy attitude
after that. I think it's very important that
you have a personal.
Discipline and routine to always
look at what gives hope and
the positive news around. So
don't be naive about the challenges, but also
don't get overwhelmed by it.
That's the reason why I refuse to watch telly because
Stelle is just sending me
images of violence and wars.
Because when people fall in love, it's not making
the headlines. The only thing that is making the headlines is
when somebody stabbed another person because they don't love anymore.
So the way the media is constructed is
constructed around negative news. So if
you don't protect yourself from that negativity,
then it has a big impact on your mental well
being and therefore on your capability to actually
make change within your organization and with your. Clients
and to make change within yourself because you start to have
these fixed ideas that something is actually. And
it's subliminal, isn't it, when you're watching these programs?
Absolutely. So I think it's very important to develop a self
discipline, to always look at
what is good while not being naive
about the failures.
So how long is it since you have switched on or
actually switched on, used the remote control to, to. Or do you still
watch movies and things like that, but just not tv? I
watch movies, I watch TV series, I can watch some videos, but
I haven't been watching telly for the last
10, 15 years. And what about 15 years?
And the family, is it something that your whole family have
adopted or it's just your particular choice not to. No,
no, no, the family, the family is allowing us on that.
You need to regain control of your own mental health. And
what is the worst thing that giving power to others
to actually go into your brain and
invade you with images of hatred and
violence?
You don't give this power, you don't give this power to anyone.
You need to protect yourself, I guess, and
instinctively. It's something that I have been doing for
as long as I can remember, which is why I love movies. I love to
be taken away into a la la land of
imaginary things. So it doesn't matter what I see on the screen. I know it's
not real and I know it's just a distraction.
Absolutely, absolutely. And the.
I'm interested in the extent to which you've seen
intelligence agencies in different parts of the world
operate. Are they.
What impression has it left you as to the quality of intelligence
gathering? You read about, of course, the Mossad and the recent
exercise in Iran when
some of the intelligence they acquired there was just
quite stunning. What's your view
and is there any particular aspect of
intelligence gathering that
you are familiar with and, or you've seen used to
good or bad ends? I think there are two
questions that are different here. One is the quality of
the information that is gathered. And
the second question is how this information is
used. And the way this information is
used doesn't depend from the intelligence service.
This is a political decisions
and with all the
weaknesses and challenges and contradiction that there can
be. And I think
that's one of the biggest issues
of intelligence agencies in the
world, is that their job is to gather intelligence. How
this information is used is a computer completely different sport
game on which they have very
little influence. And I think that's, that's one of
the, that's one of the big challenge. And talk to me a bit
about examples where you've seen intelligence
gathered and the action taken afterwards being
completely, either deliberately, consciously
ignoring that intelligence at certain levels.
You've come across, I'm sure, many situations where somebody you've
said, look, this is what the intelligence is saying is
what you should, is guiding what you should do. And yet
the leader says, you know what? No, I don't believe any of
that. I'm going to do this. Well, I'm sorry. Just
turn on the telly and listen to what the US President
is saying every day. And what about
illustration between what we know is happening
on the ground and
what is the political reaction? I'm trying to not
very elegantly bring that into your personal experience where
you've been advising leaders. I will not
go there. Fair enough, Fair enough.
And tell me about the way
in. Which. Can you teach somebody
how to, other than in the, in the services. How, how do
you teach, how do people learn in Highgate how to gather
intelligence, how to develop their contacts?
Do you do training courses? Do you bring people from. I know
you do. From places where they've, they've had training themselves. But still
there must be a continuum of training
within Highgate and trying to keep that quality.
So a few things here. First,
Highgate is not an intelligence firm. We work a lot with
intelligence, we work a lot with intelligence firms, but we're not an intelligence
firm ourselves. And I'm not an intelligence guy myself. I'm an
engineer by background and I was not in the services.
Second, we have quite a few of our colleagues who
come from either private or public
intelligence agencies. And that's very important for the
work we're doing and for the way we're advising our clients,
mostly corporates. And these are people who
have learned the intelligence work the hard
way throughout their career.
And they bring that level of competence and
expertise which allows then us to work
with corporate intelligence in a much more efficient way
because we're able to ask the right question,
challenge them, and help
our clients make sense out of it. The
biggest difference you have between private intelligence and public
intelligence is that in private intelligence it tends to be the same people who
gather the intelligence and who make the recommendations.
Whereas in a public intelligence you have a very
strict distinction between the people who gather the intelligence and
the people who then analyze it and challenge it.
And that's very important because the way you collect the information
would create a huge bias, very often unconscious,
emotional, about whether you believe this information is true or not.
And actually it's always in this important to have
a second layer of cold
analysis challenging the different information
intersecting them and seeing what makes sense, what doesn't make
sense. There's one case
where we were working for a corporate client on a
very, very complex and hostile
environment and our
clients was receiving intelligence report from a very
renowned intelligence firm and
that the client had hired, and then they hired us
to see how we can use this intelligence and what to
make out of it and how to find a solution in resolving these
conflicts. And we very quickly came to the
conclusion. When I say we, I mean my consultants, not myself, but my
consultants who have worked in private intelligence agencies and public
intelligence agency, they came to the conclusion that actually
these intelligence reports were highly biased,
were even more biased. They were actually dishonest.
Wow. Simply because looking at the fact and
questioning the outcome of this report, my team
came to the conclusion that the local person was
providing intelligence, was actually
blackmailed by the government to
provide a certain picture because they wanted to
manipulate a client in a certain way. So the
intelligence reports were actually
directed by their opponents. Wow.
But that requires real competence in
understanding the dynamic, in knowing how the intelligence is
gathered to be able to realize that. And we said that to the
client, and the client was a bit skeptical. And eventually we
proved it, a plus one plus one,
that indeed it was the case. And that was extremely important
because then the clients took a very different stand
vis a vis this information that was sent to them.
And therefore, we add a very different course of action.
Again, if you put the wrong data into the system, you get the wrong
outcome. And so this world of intelligence and
counterintelligence is fascinating
and a world, I guess I've chosen to live in. But
how many times have you come across that kind of situation where
your client's opponent is actually
consciously looking to compromise the way in which the
opponent gathers intelligence? Is it like every case, you
get that level of sophistication? No, no, no. It's not every case.
It happens rarely, but it happens. But it's
also happens sometimes that we are feeding the
wrong information to the other side. So I know we're getting close to
the witching hour. So give me another
example of something
unique or just either
amusing or highly effective that you and
your team have done that converted
a. A good position into a
excellent position or a bad position into a good position.
I mean, there are plenty of war stories, but one that I like
is a
massive global dispute against the Russian oligarch,
where the Russian
guy was on the wrong side of history but was
refusing to settle. And
the only way I managed
to compel him to settle was to create a very
tangible threat that he would be put by the US
Government on the US sanction list.
And the moment he understood this was a very serious threat,
he came to the negotiation table and he signed a deal. And
by definition, it was something that your client could actually
do. It was a real threat rather than. A
bluff I would not comment on that.
And a closing question that is not a war
story. Out of all of the leaders,
both in public and private life you've met,
and what would be the single lesson
that you would want them to learn for the
next generation of leaders to learn from all
of the disasters of, and maybe some of
the good decisions of the leaders that you've met? What would be
the thing you would want the new generation of leaders to take away with
them? If you want to change the world,
you have to start by changing yourselves.
And that's the hardest thing. And
I see so many people pretending to change the world
and actually they are the essence of what the
problem is. So the hard work starts with
oneself. Self development. That's the message.
Yeah. Another time we will
get into what kind of things you do and maybe I do in
order to make sure we're constantly self developing. But our time has
come to an end. I'm so grateful to you, Thomas, for spending time with
me. I know you've got clients banging down the door, but thank
you and I've really enjoyed it. Take care.
Thank you, Gary. Ciao. Bye Bye bye.
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