![]() Kiriakou had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, according to The New York Times. The second was a man who would later go on to significant fame and controversy: John Kiriakou, a Deloitte employee and former CIA case officer who had served in various capacities for the spy agency in Bahrain, Athens and at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The first was a woman named Abby Vietor, a Deloitte employee who had earlier worked at a private investigative firm called Diligence LLC. With the analysts in place, it came time to select the collectors - the actual on-the-ground agents who would book hotel rooms near BearingPoint's meeting at the Orlando convention center and spend several days trying to figure out what was going on. Deloitte officials also checked in with the firm's general counsel to sort out what they would be legally permitted to do. They stood up a full time office in at Deloitte's offices in suburban Virginia, where managers and analysts could coordinate the operation. When the call from the source came in, nearly all of them went into action. It included at least three former CIA officers, a former Secret Service officer, a former IRS agent, an employee who wrote spy novels, and one who had a side business selling Kente cloth Polo shirts. By several accounts, there were tensions inside Deloitte about how far the intelligence team would be allowed to go, with some employees on the team pushing for a more aggressive approach and other forces inside Deloitte preaching restraint.ĭespite their exotic backgrounds, the team was much like any other in corporate America: It had go-getters and malcontents, people who were on their way up the corporate ranks and others who were burning out and would soon leave the firm. People who had jumped out of helicopters worked alongside people who rarely even jumped out of their office chairs. The last piece of the team was known as "win/loss." That group conducted after-action reports on efforts to win major accounts to determine what had gone right - or wrong - with each sales pitch.Īs a result, the Deloitte Intelligence team was a mixture of former government spies and accounting industry veterans. "We would show them what Target was doing that they were not, and show them how we could help." "Say Wal-Mart is our client and we want to sell more to them," said a Deloitte veteran. ![]() One was called "market intelligence" and focused on gathering details about companies that could be useful for its customers and could help Deloitte win new business. The competitive intelligence unit was part of a larger umbrella group called Deloitte Intelligence. "We were trying to steal their pricing models, how they determined discounts, and especially new product lines or service lines." The team developed networks of ex-employees as sources and traveled to trade shows to gather information. "Our job was to spy on Ernst & Young, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, KPMG and some of the consulting competitors," said a person who worked in the unit. Analysts poured through that information, combined it with other known facts and developed narratives about what they thought was going on behind the scenes in the offices of Deloitte's clients and customers. Collectors uncovered information that could be valuable to Deloitte's senior managers. The two CIA officers oversaw a team at Deloitte that was divided into two main categories: collectors and analysts. ![]() But Deloitte's managers were prepared to go to unusual lengths to unravel it. The source didn't know why the meeting was scheduled. BearingPoint partners from around the world would be coming to a hastily scheduled session at the convention center in Orlando, Florida. BearingPoint, the struggling consulting firm, had just called an emergency meeting. On the line was a source, passing on some valuable information. Then, in early 2007, a phone rang inside Deloitte. "They wanted to do an acquisition, but they weren't sure which one." "In '05 and '06, Deloitte was doing maybe $300 million a year in revenue and had maybe 1,000 people." The former partner says the firm had a lofty internal goal of getting its federal business to the billion-dollar level. "Deloitte had fits and starts in trying to do the federal business," recalls a former Deloitte partner who asked not to be named. ![]() At the time, Deloitte was not the major player in federal consulting it is today. ![]()
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