Spies Like Him

It's less of a film-noir scene, but painstaking research and extensive long-range targeting of sources and contacts in an area of interest, before deploying an investigative team in the field to obtain evidence and documentation, does lead to meetings in warehouses, ports, and bars with dangerous people and situations we try to carefully anticipate.

I was in a bar in Tanzania, east Africa, receiving intelligence from a journalist implicating top-level politicians in large-scale smuggling of poached elephant ivory when two secret-service agents came in, eyeing us fiercely. The journalist's hands shook so hard he could hardly light a cigarette. We ducked out a back door to an alley and got away fast.

The head of a rhino-horn syndicate that smuggled six tons of horn to the Chinese mainland claimed he had a spiritual revelation. We filmed undercover a ton of the horn being offered for sale by Chinese state officials.

EIA has a history of major successes, but our focus on results is so intense that we often neglect to publicize our successes to generate more support to grow our organization. But that is changing. Environmental crime is vast and growing rapidly, fed by increasing trade liberalization and lax enforcement. The illegal timber trade is a glaring example, with billions of dollars of illegally sourced timber and wood products flooding into the U.S., but the loophole in the U.S. law that allows these imports to continue has still not been closed.

We can use Asia-based intelligence and evidence, but have limited capacity to oversee very much that is outside of our core operations because we're rolling out our exposés in all directions around the world. Contacts that have access to information on illegal trade are very useful. Traders or companies like to pass information on their rivals' illegal deals. Informants pass information to EIA on ships or companies moving illegal logs, ivory, or CFCs, but we have to verify this intelligence before acting on it. All the Asian nations have serious problems with illegal timber and wildlife trade, and you can find activity in or near most national parks or city markets.

Get a job at EIA as a research assistant and work your way up with superb research, writing, and obsessive attention to obtaining information, contacts, and leads.

Send us your résumé addressed to Catalina Boggio, our managing director (P.O. Box 53343, Washington, D.C., 20009), and tell us about your skills. We're a small, highly focused outfit based in D.C. and rely on a lean team of highly motivated researchers, campaigners, investigators, writers, and administrators. We're expanding and need more staff and support from people with media, corporate, government, or donor contacts, plus camera operators, photographers, writers, etc., who can help our wildly ambitious campaign and increasingly successful strategies.

Except for banking records, we can obtain evidence on virtually all the environmental crimes we look at through tenacious investigations. We can travel anywhere in the world subject to budget and staff limitations, and government enforcement personnel often express their envy at our ability to do so. They also welcome our evidence and contacts, which assist and support their work. We rarely get involved in specific court cases as we seek to trigger higher-level seismic changes against environmental crime like the current crackdown on log smuggling from Papua to China. We obtain photos, film, secret documents, and interview people extensively, often those seeking to make illegal deals.

EIA focuses on the responsibility of consuming societies in creating excessive demands for natural resources that overwhelm the enforcement ability of most resource-rich countries. We use our evidence to bring these links into focus and propose practical achievable solutions.

We have worked closely with many traditional Chinese medicine associations to promote elimination of the use of endangered- or threatened-species products and achieved considerable success with rhino horn and tiger bone. There are ongoing efforts to protect species from sharks to seahorses, which are still declining due to commercial trade.

Alias is a dramatic fantasy with little resemblance to reality, save the spy technologies -- and Marshall's character. We use human intelligence and ingenuity, which is a rare but powerful methodology. We're looking to raise the U.S. profile of the campaign against illegal timber imports by replicating the 1990s campaign when the tuna industry-related dolphin kills were highlighted in popular TV and films by West Coast conservationists who successfully persuaded scriptwriters to insert the issue into storylines.

EIA is approaching major U.S. retailers with our evidence of environmental crimes, like illegal timber, as they are sensitive to public sentiments and anxious to avoid being implicated in the illegal logging and the extinction of orangutans in the wild. The U.S. timber industry is Republican-friendly, but is being hammered by illegal imports that drive down prices and squeeze their markets. Our exposés and practical solutions are gaining traction, and we think a lot of Republican senators are interested in this issue. Last month, the U.S. agreed with other G8 nations to stop illegal timber imports, so EIA intends to ensure that happens.