CIA moonlights in corporate world
February 2, 2010
Eamon Javers
2/1/2010
In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.
In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.
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Investors in Hedge Funds take huge risks making sidebar bets whether a stock will go down (shorting stocks) and (Buy Stocks) betting they will go up) utilizing financial information provided by corporations and their CEOs.
Could hedge funds incur additional risks employing Moon Lighting CIA Agents trained in deception, to detect liars, unveil CEOs that disseminate false financial information to promote the sale of stock in their company, mislead institutional lenders? The obvious question, is there a conflict of interest when private hedge funds pay large amounts of money to hire CIA analysts? CIA analysts have access to national security information that could provide hedge funds an (economic advantage over other American investors) whose taxes paid the Agency to gather that information? Everyday the media reports police corruption. Is the CIA immune to internal corruption? What are the chances a Moon Lighting CIA Agent won’t be compromised by a hedge fund or outside financial interests to provide a (false analysis) to influence a hedge fund, so others can profit from insider information? For example, a CIA analyst could honestly or falsely allege a CEO’s representations of a company’s projected earnings cannot be substantiated. A corrupt CIA agent however could establish offshore, his or her own wealthy group of investors to Short or Buy Stocks (before providing their analysis to a hedge fund) regarding a CEO’s representations about the financial future of their company—profiting from expected hedge fund buying or selling stock in the company the corrupt CIA agent’s analysis supported or derided.
Was There Insider Information? After 9-11, it was discovered several anonymous investors just prior to the hijacking and crashing of four commercial jetliners; shorted stocks in companies foreseeable to be adversely affected by the 9-11 attacks: shorted were airline companies, hotel, travel related industries.