Private intelligence firm Stratfor was paid by Coca-Cola to gauge the threat of protesters at the Vancouver Olympics, provided Dow Chemical information on environmental activists, and sells what clients and subscribers consider some of the best geopolitical analysis that money can buy.
Now the Texas-based think-tank is the latest target of WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange, who says his anti-secrecy group has more than five million of Stratfor’s emails and is promising to release damaging material in the coming weeks.
The first, small batch published Monday contained little that was particularly scintillating — but revealed clients that Stratfor has long safeguarded and refused to disclose. They range from local universities to megacorporations like Coca-Cola, which apparently worried about animal-rights supporters crashing and disrupting the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.
“To what extent will U.S.-based PETA supporters travel to Canada to support activism?” a Coca-Cola manager asked a Stratfor analyst in a 2009 email.
An initial examination of the emails turned up a mix of the innocuous and the embarrassing. But Assange has accused Stratfor of serious deeds, such as funnelling money to informants through offshore tax havens, monitoring activist groups on behalf of big corporations and making investments based on its secret intelligence.
“What we have discovered is a company that is a private intelligence Enron,” Assange told London’s Frontline Club, referring to the Texas energy giant whose spectacular bankruptcy turned it into a byword for corporate malfeasance.
Read more HERE
