Over the past year, a high-profile courtroom drama has been attracting international attention on an otherwise quiet corner of London’s Marylebone Road. Behind the limestone façade of Westminster Magistrates’ Court, an Israeli private investigator, accused of orchestrating an illegal hacking conspiracy bankrolled by ExxonMobil, has been battling extradition to the U.S.
Arrested at Heathrow Airport under an Interpol red notice in April 2024, Amit Forlit was allegedly paid $16 million to carry out cyber-attacks, by the prestigious K Street public-affairs and lobbying firm DCI Group on behalf of its longtime client ExxonMobil. His targets: U.S.-based environmentalists and their philanthropic funders.
These bombshell allegations have thrown a spotlight on the hitherto clandestine world of P.R., surveillance, and corporate money.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Forlit’s 2013–18 activities, code-named “Operation Fox Hunt,” were aimed at discrediting individuals and groups who were considering suing ExxonMobil on the grounds that the company deceived the public about the role fossil fuels play in causing climate change.
In an ironic twist, Forlit’s targets included Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a $200 million philanthropic nonprofit controlled by the heirs of John D. Rockefeller, the 19th-century robber baron who founded ExxonMobil (then known as the Standard Oil Company). In 2016, the Rockefeller Family Fund began divesting its fossil-fuel holdings, beginning a campaign that has made Rockefeller’s environmentally minded great-great-grandchildren adversaries of the oil company responsible for their historic fortune. Since then, the fund has supported groups assisting more than 30 lawsuits involving alleged climate deception across the U.S., all of which have named Exxon as a defendant.
Forlit’s arguments against extradition were rejected last Wednesday by a U.K. district judge, who ruled that he can be extradited to the U.S.
Forlit is expected to appeal the decision, but if that fails he will be sent to the U.S. to await trial at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, where current inmates include Luigi Mangione and Sean “Diddy” Combs. If found guilty, Forlit, aged 57, faces a potential 45 years in prison.
Neither ExxonMobil nor DCI has been accused of wrongdoing, and both have denied any knowledge of or involvement in the hacking operations.
This current saga, however, is only the latest chapter in the long and shadowy history of corporate spying against groups or individuals seen as potential threats.
Code Name: Chowder
John D. Rockefeller was an expert in industrial espionage, using paid spies to squeeze rivals, subdue workers, and secure his company’s vast monopoly. Obsessed with secrecy, he ordered employees to communicate using a confidential code. Standard Oil was “Club” while Rockefeller himself adopted the code name “Chowder.”
During the Progressive Era, corporations increasingly relied on professional firms to infiltrate unions, spawning a lucrative new enterprise: spies for hire. By the mid-1930s, there were more than 200 private-detective agencies in the U.S. openly offering espionage services.
“They have got spies all over; every place,” a witness from the automobile industry told a U.S. Senate committee in 1936. Another reported that mining country was “honeycombed with spies.” Struggling to decipher the operatives’ terms of art, senators were presented with a helpful glossary: a “Correspondent” was a labor spy, an “Inside Man” was a spy posing as a factory worker, a “Hooked Man” was a worker engaged in industrial espionage without knowing it, and a “Missionary” was a spy who spread anti-strike propaganda, particularly among workers’ wives.
Standard Oil was a client of both the Corporations Auxiliary Company, a nationwide organization that offered spies at the competitive rate of $9 a day plus expenses in the 1920s, and New York City’s master strike breaker, Pearl L. Bergoff.
The New Deal curtailed some of the worst practices, but in the late 1960s a wave of ecological consciousness put corporations on the defensive. “What can corporations do about the environmentalists?” asked leading New York P.R. firm Hill & Knowlton in 1971. Infamous for its work defending Big Tobacco, Hill & Knowlton recruited students to attend demonstrations on campus and file reports on what they saw and heard.
It’s here, in the shadows between legitimate risk research and the use of unethical, sometimes even illegal information-gathering techniques that the services offered by P.R. companies tip into the darker, shadier world of corporate espionage.
Issues Monitoring
In the 1990s, the billion-dollar P.R. agency Ketchum hired the intelligence-gathering firm Beckett Brown International (B.B.I.) to spy on environmental groups including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and Friends of the Earth for its $500,000-a-year client, Dow Chemical, documents show. According to a lawsuit filed by Greenpeace, B.B.I. used wiretaps, hacking, and other surveillance methods.
In 1999, another D.C.-based P.R. outfit, Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin (M.B.D.), commissioned B.B.I. to spy on a Greenpeace climate campaign that targeted ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Texaco (now Chevron), leaked documents revealed.
Led by a former Pentagon news chief, M.B.D. later merged with the security firm Strategic Forecasting, commonly known as Stratfor, which billed itself as a private C.I.A. The new firm became the subject of an embarrassing cyber-attack in 2012, when five million of its private e-mails, illegally obtained by the hacking collective Anonymous, were published by WikiLeaks.
Stratfor’s hacked e-mails revealed a list of clients code-named for security. Northrupp Grumman was “Poker,” Dow Chemical “Mambo,” Walmart “Roadway,” and ExxonMobil “Wildflower.” According to a hacked spreadsheet, Stratfor conducted regular “energy and climate issues monitoring” for ExxonMobil, resulting in “3-5 memos a week,” for which the firm was apparently paid a monthly retainer of $12,500.
Other e-mails show Stratfor warning ExxonMobil about likely “actions by the Greenpeace boats” in the Gulf of Mexico, and ExxonMobil executives requesting “anything you know about Northern Rockies Rising Tide,” an environmental group concerned about the ecological impact of oil and gas operations across Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho.
Dropped Cases
BP, Shell, Chevron, Monsanto, Philip Morris, BAE Systems, and even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have all reportedly used private intelligence firms to investigate their critics.
The Forlit case offers a rare window into a world usually veiled in secrecy. This window, however, may soon close. To date, the Trump administration has dropped 41 investigations or enforcement actions against suspected corporate criminals and paused another 68 until further notice, according to a report by Public Citizen.
In March, during a meeting between the president and oil and gas executives, the subject of climate lawsuits was reportedly discussed. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump signaled he would consider ways his administration could help the industry, which donated almost $100 million to his election campaign. On April 8, Trump issued a new executive order directing the U.S. attorney general to identify and stop the enforcement of all state laws that cite climate change as a way of restricting the use of domestic resources, like oil.
Whether the Forlit case falls victim to this attempted politicization of the justice system remains to be seen.
Earlier this year, the Daily Beast reported, Forlit’s alleged DCI Group paymasters co-hosted a “Freedom of the Press” party with the Daily Caller, a right-wing media outlet founded by Tucker Carlson, to celebrate Trump’s inauguration. The exclusive invitation promised cocktails, V.I.P. guests, and a cigar lounge.
Will it be jail or the cigar lounge for Amit Forlit? Only time will tell.
Rebecca John is a writer, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, and a freelance investigative researcher for nonprofits, including the Center for Climate Integrity, a group supported by the Rockefeller Family Fund