MI6, a death in China and the very secretive Mayfair company full of spooks

[Magda Hassan]

MI6, a death in China and the very secretive Mayfair company full of spooks

Labelled a convenient rest home' for spies, Hakluyt had always managed to stay in the shadows - until a top intelligence operator lost his life in murky circumstances. Stephen Robinson reports

Our man in Chongqing: Neil Heywood pictured with painter Geo Ge, was found dead in his hotel room









Stephen Robinson




30 March 2012

The tone of discretion and unbridled corporate wealth is set by Hakluyt's official website. It comprises precisely one page, with space only to list the firm's three business premises and telephone numbers.

Head office is naturally in Mayfair, in Upper Brook Street, while the Manhattan branch is on Park Avenue, and in Singapore the company can be found at Raffles Place.
No other information is forthcoming. You click in vain for chummy little biographies of "team leaders". There is not a hint of anything so vulgar as a corporate mission statement.
The reason for this is that if you have to ask what Hakluyt does, you will not be in a position to pay its extravagant fees for corporate and strategic intelligence. More importantly, Hakluyt does not welcome the sort of publicity it has garnered worldwide this week after the mysterious death of one of its occasional investigators in a Chinese hotel room.
Heywood, a gregarious old Harrovian and Mandarin speaker with a well-connected Chinese wife, was found dead in November last year in his hotel room in the megalopolis of Chongqing. Though he was a light drinker, British consular officials seem to have accepted the local authorities' claim that his death was due to excessive alcohol in his blood. Seemingly they did not quibble when the body was swiftly cremated, and his mother told the Daily Telegraph that her son had died of a heart attack.
There the matter might have rested but for a startling Chinese political scandal that has since erupted. For a Westerner, Heywood had become extremely close to the local Communist chief, a flamboyant populist called Bo Xilai. He was friendly too with Xilai's wife, and seems to have helped their son, Bo Guagua, gain admission first to Harrow School and then to Balliol College, Oxford (from which he was sent down temporarily for idleness).
Last month the Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun claimed to have quarrelled with Xilai when he told him of his suspicions that Heywood had been poisoned. Wang then sought asylum at the US Consulate. Much more sensationally, Xilai, regarded as a rising Chinese political star, was abruptly stripped of his Communist party posts, and has since disappeared from view. Yesterday former Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane called for British police to fully investigate Heywood's death. It is extremely dangerous to delve too deeply into the murky, corrupt and nepotistic world where Chinese politics and big business intersect. Heywood may well have paid with his life for crossing that line.
Hakluyt was founded 17 years ago by Christopher James, a former SAS and MI6 operative, and Christopher Wilkins, a businessman who had served in the Welsh Guards.
The links between the company and MI6 have always been strong. Spies preparing for retirement are approached discreetly in St James's clubs and asked if they would like some lucrative freelance action to top up their pensions.
"One person familiar with that world regards Hakluyt as "a convenient rest home for MI6 men" and suggests that "once an MI6 man, always an MI6 man".
Hakluyt regards itself as operating at the top end of one of the capital's most lucrative service industries. It has the most impressive list of big corporations, with particularly close links to the big oil firms.
The company attracted unwelcome publicity in 2001 when it emerged it had used an undercover agent known as Manfred to penetrate environmental groups targeting Shell and BP. Fouad Hamdan of Greenpeace Germany said at the time: "The bastard was good, I have to admit," which Hakluyt will have taken as a compliment of sorts.
The atmosphere in the Mayfair head office is discreet, formal, heavily biased towards former MI6 men, in large proportion ex-public school. It is a highly civilised office environment at odds with the twilight world in which its people in the field have to operate.
Apart from MI6, Hakluyt recruits from impeccably connected government people and big business. Its international advisory board includes a former US senator and an Australian foreign minister, and it rarely recruits to the board any diplomat who did not make ambassador. The boom in the emerging BRIC economies has created huge opportunities for global businesses based in London, but great risks too. Many companies do not instinctively understand the perils of joint ventures in China or Russia, so Hakluyt will be paid to find out if a potential partner can be trusted.
"We are there to answer specific questions what the real agenda is, who is in whose pocket and what is the role of certain people," was how one former senior executive described the work in a rare interview in the FT.
Reports are compiled in London using information from the field provided by well-connected operators like Neil Heywood, who had done this work for Hakluyt on a freelance basis over the years though not in the city where he died.
One unanswered question is who Heywood was working for at the time of his death in Chongqing. Hakluyt maintains that he was not working for them on a specific project, but given the links between the two organisations, it cannot be ruled out that he might have been working for MI6. This could explain why the British government appears to have raised Heywood's death with Beijing only after the Wall Street Journal broke the story this week.
Lib-Dem MP Norman Baker has long been suspicious of links between Hakluyt, MI6 and government. Yesterday he declined to comment on Heywood's death or Hakluyt because he is now a Coalition minister, but as a backbencher before the election he put down a series of written questions about Hakluyt's cosy relationship with government.
Baker focused on specific meetings between Hakluyt, ministers and officials at the Foreign Office, the department that oversees MI6. The answers, available on the Hansard website, variously explain that such details were not held centrally, or that finding the information would cost more than a "disproportionate" £750. Baker drew his own conclusions from that obfuscation.
Hakluyt yesterday appeared keen to distance itself from the murky circumstances of Neil Heywood's unexplained death. A spokesman said his relationship with the company had been "fleeting" and "passing". And asked if Hakluyt employees were contractually bound to sever their links to MI6 on taking up employment in Upper Brook Street, he replied: "We would have no comment on that."
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/londo...03151.html

[Peter Lemkin]

A retirement-home for spies....how 'loving'. :mexican:

[Magda Hassan]

Downer was Australia's former Foreign Affairs Minister under the Howard government. He has impecable tory credientials and comes from a a family of well connected tories even though the man is some thing of a joke.

"What hasn't been broadcast is Downer's role with corporate intelligence company Hakluyt…"

Posted on March 31, 2012 by @ndy

From the Department of Alexander Downer:
Ian Verender, business columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald, has written an interesting column (Be careful of the company you keep, March 31, 2012) on some of the issues confronting politicians when they exchange Parliamentary Cabinet meetings for those in corporate boardrooms. Apparently, the access to the networks of power and influence which retired politicians bring to their role as consultants and directors can sometimes generate difficulties when business scandals arise. A case in point relates to A Death in China and one of my favourite former Tories, The Honourable Alexander Downer:

What hasn't been broadcast in the past few weeks is Downer's role with a corporate intelligence firm called Hakluyt, founded by former officers at MI6, Britain's secret service. Downer, along with other political and business luminaries, is on the Hakluyt International Advisory Board, but claims he has never done any work for the company in China.
It has since transpired that the British businessman Neil Heywood, who was found dead in his hotel room in China in November, was an adviser to Hakluyt although he apparently was not working on any specific project for the company at the time of his death.
The mysterious circumstances surrounding Heywood's death have sparked a diplomatic rift between Britain and China and played a yet-to-be-defined part in what is shaping to be one of the most serious internal political crises in China in the past 20 years.

An internal crisis among ruling elites which is, perhaps, both a response to and a reflection of more serious political problems confronting the Chinese state, including, notably, a seeming increase in the last few years in expressions of popular discontent; expressions which find little, if any, outlet along formal avenues (see below).
As for the former Foreign Minister, his appointment to Hakluyt in May 2008 (five months after his retirement from Parliament) became NEWS! in October 2008. See : The Downer Age : Hakluyt & Co (October 14, 2008) | Hakluyt dons fishnet stockings! (October 13, 2008). Along with not-spying in China, Hakluyt has an undeserved reputation for not-spying on environmental and political activists, where it is not-joined by dozens of other companies in a sector of the economy that is not-growing and not-being awarded government contracts to monitor blogs like mine and not-employing local neo-Nazis likeKenneth Stewart as mercenaries…
As also noted previously (February 3, 2009), Alexander Downer spoke at an Australian League of Rights' (ALOR) event in 1987, but this fact was only publicly exposed in 1994. Typically, Downer relied upon his reputation as an idiot to escape criticism, claiming that despite being filmed looking on as SA ALOR director Frank Bawden urges the audience to read the literature "explaining the aims of the League" on their seats' he didn't know who he was addressing, who organised the event and for all I know why he was even there (perhaps he tripped and fell?). In any case, no harm was done to the witless Adelaide private schoolboy's career: twenty years later, he became Foreign Minister; after the Tories lost the 2007 Federal election, he was appointed vewy special envoy to Cyprus, and joined the spooky Hakluyt.
http://networkedblogs.com/vQrbb

[Peter Lemkin]

Neil Heywood 'was MI6 informant'
Neil Heywood, the British businessman murdered in China, regularly provided information on Bo Xilai, the powerful politician, to MI6 before he was killed, a new report has claimed.
Some say Neil Heywood acted as a sort of 'butler' for the Bo family

By Malcolm Moore, Beijing

10:07AM GMT 06 Nov 2012

The revelation in the Wall Street Journal raises new questions about the motives for Mr Heywood's killing, and about the reaction to his death by the British authorities, who delayed for several months before asking for an investigation.

According to unnamed sources, the 41-year-old businessman was not an MI6 officer, was not specifically tasked, and was not paid.

William Hague, the Foreign secretary, has stated that Mr Heywood was "not an employee of the British government in any capacity".

But, according to the report, he was a "willful and knowing informant", regularly meeting with a man he knew to be a spy, at least once also in the company of a member of the House of Lords.

His MI6 contact once described him as "useful" to a former colleague, according to the WSJ, adding: "A little goes a long way".
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A BRITISH businessman murdered by the wife of top Chinese politician Bo Xilai had informed on the couple for over a year to his country's spy agency.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Neil Heywood shared details derived from his unusually close access to the powerful couple, the paper said, citing his friends and current and former British officials.

The revelation that Heywood was murdered brought down Mr Bo and revealed rifts among top leaders as they negotiated a once-a-decade power handover set to take place this month.

"He had been knowingly providing information about the Bo family to Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, for more than a year," the report said.

It said Heywood became close to the family in the 1990s when Mr Bo was mayor of the northeastern city of Dalian. He was found dead in November last year in the southwestern city of Chongqing, which Mr Bo ran at the time.



Heywood drove a silver Jaguar with the licence plate "007", although people who knew him said he kept a low profile among fellow expatriates, the Journal said.

He operated a consultancy that relied on his connections to advise businesses how to manage Chinese bureaucracy.

After meeting someone in 2009 who later acknowledged being an MI6 officer, Heywood "met that person regularly in China" and provided "information on Mr Bo's private affairs", the paper said.

Mr Bo's wife was given a suspended death sentence in August for poisoning Heywood. Mr Bo was removed from the ruling Communist Party's top 25-member Politburo and now awaits trial for abuse of power and other charges.

Heywood's links with the family frayed in the last two years of his life. He had not seen Mr Bo for a year when he apparently sought to obtain money which he thought the family owed him as he prepared to leave China, the report said.

The businessman seemed to have grown stressed, having gained weight and begun smoking more, and was increasingly worried that his email and phone calls were being monitored.

When he flew to Chongqing to meet the Bo family, he feared he was in trouble, a friend who spoke to him that day told the Journal.

However, neither Chinese nor British officials pointed to Heywood's spy links as a reason for his murder, it said.

His death was initially attributed to alcohol consumption. Mr Bo's police chief and four subordinates were jailed in September for attempting to cover up the role of Mr Bo's wife.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman declined to comment on the report and the British embassy spokesman in Beijing could not immediately be reached.

[Jan Klimkowski]

New twist?

It was always pretty clear that Heywood was MI6.

The new twist for me is that the Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch rag, has breached protocol and identified Heywood as a British spy.

In public, Murdoch has been entirely supine to the Chinese power structure. For instance, Murdoch instructed Harper Collins not to publish an entirely anodyne book by former Hong Kong Governor, now BBC supremo, Chris Patten. See here.

So, is the claw of Rupert behind the outing of Heywood?

This is most likely about Power and Influence, not Truth.