It wasn’t all in your imagination: Private security company Beckett Brown International spied on Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and other big environmental organizations in the late 1990s through at least 2000, according to documents obtained by Mother Jones. To produce intelligence reports for PR firms and corporations involved in environmental kerfuffles with green groups, BBI operatives snooped through garbage, cased offices, collected phone records, and tried to infiltrate groups with spies. Records show that operatives managed to attend confidential meetings and gain access to confidential internal records including donor lists, financial statements, security-system instructions, and staff members’ Social Security numbers. Says an ex-CIA operative who worked for BBI, “I have worked for a number of security companies. Some are ethical, some are not. Beckett Brown was not especially so.”
