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| Thierry Lacoste |
On Retainer to Prince Albert of Monaco
Summer 2006
I recruited a new agent: a Russian born female, very bright with stunning looks, and good Russian contacts around the principality.
More importantly, she was employed at Sotrama, the Monaco-based company linked to President Putin that we suspected of money laundering.
I code-named her MARTHA, after Martha Mitchell.
(We already had LIDDY and HUNT and I rather enjoyed a Watergate theme.)
But in actual fact, this oil distribution and trading company was laundering “millions and millions” of euros per month for its parent company Horizon Oil Terminal in St. Petersburg.
MARTHA attended a party in Cap Ferrat, at which Sotrama’s chief executive proposed a toast to the Russian president, saying, “Without Putin none of this would be possible.”
At 12:30 a.m. on August 22nd (2006), the Prince came to M-Base and we talked for almost two hours in the quiet of night—the first and only time the Prince was not interrupted by cell phones. We discussed a variety of topics, starting with his recent travels in the USA, where he’d visited Mount Rushmore, and my experience infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1970s.
It was a
good warm up for the topics that followed.
I briefed the Prince on the SICCFIN/Liechtenstein fracas over Andorra and confirmed that the first formal meeting of our informal association would convene in Luxembourg on October 24th.
The Prince was enthused—excited, even, about
this.
The
Prince was also pleased to learn Paul Masseron had been to M-Base and that
soon-to-be police chief Andre Muhlberger would follow.
Narmino: The proof was in. I presented our new documentation to the
Prince, explaining that Slovenia’s intelligence chief played back to me the
precise routing of the funds without me ever telling him that element of our
investigation. The Prince nodded grimly
and told me he would take action. The
Prince asked me, should he offer Narmino an explanation for sacking him?
“No,
just dismiss him,” I said. “He should come to you for an explanation. When he does, just show him the documents.”
And finally, funding: I made my case, again, that our whole team was working overtime. We’d built a solid little service from scratch on a shoestring, an investment in the Prince’s future.
With my name out there now, I probably needed a bodyguard, but I couldn’t justify the cost in view of other needs.
The Prince appreciated how well we
performed: he increased our budget by 25 percent.
Despite
so positive a meeting, I think I understood the Prince’s psyche by now.
For only one day later, I jotted
in my journal: A2 does not really care,
[he’s] just going through the motions.
Even with increased funding, I wrote myself a note to terminate my service to the Prince on June 30th 2007, five years after it began, giving myself ten months to establish the Micro-Europe intelligence association and the restructuring of SIGER.
And just two weeks later, after bouncing
through London to Washington, D.C. to California and back again to London, then
a delayed EasyJet flight from Luton to Nice, I scribbled: My
heart no longer in this.
Back in M-Base, I was beset by new intrigue.
Months earlier, Proust and Biancheri had tried to pitch JLA on commissioning Kroll, the private investigation consultants, to produce a study on how to remove Monaco from OECD’s tax haven blacklist.
JLA had shot it down on the basis that such a ploy would make Monaco look bad.
He thought he’d killed it, but Proust and Biancheri went forward anyway, behind JLA’s back. Months later, someone began a campaign of phoning JLA’s former employers to enquire about him.
Who authorized this? Was it somehow connected to Kroll?
LIDDY had the answer, even though I asked him about it as an aside after plowing through a number of items on both our dockets. It wasn’t an answer he wanted to provide, but I went at it a number of ways, prepared not to let him leave M-Base until I knew.
LIDDY finally responded, couching it in whimsical hypothetical terms, but the answer was clear: Thierry Lacoste was trying to dig whatever dirt he could on JLA with a view to having him replaced.
LIDDY had not thought to mention this on his own because he had not perceived it as a danger to our mission.
I corrected him: any
threat to JLA was a threat to the good work we were doing in service to the
Prince.
After LIDDY departed, I zapped an email to JLA saying I had an answer to the mystery we’d discussed. JLA phoned me immediately and was utterly astonished by my news, having met for breakfast with Lacoste the morning before in Paris, and confiding in him to boot.
“You warned me when I arrived in November
about Lacoste’s kitchen cabinet,” JLA said to me. “You were right.”
JLA
instantly phoned the Prince to convey this information, and called me
back. “The Prince wants to hear all the
details from you.”
And
next morning, indeed, the Prince phoned.
“Doctor Eringer?”
“Yes, my patient.”
“I need an antidote for Thierry Lacoste.”
“I’m
working on a cocktail.”
“That
might ease the pain.”
We
agreed to meet early evening.
After a long day of meetings with the interior minister, POLO, MARTHA, and others, I welcomed the Prince to M-Base. He seemed relaxed in a striped shirt and khaki trousers and freshly shaven head.
He had just met with the Venezuelan education
minister. (“Did he educate you on Hugo
Chavez?” I asked.)
Over martinis, I related the Kroll/Lacoste story, trying to put everything into proper perspective—and deescalate the situation.
“Everybody around you will constantly try to
undercut everybody else around you in a never-ending war for greater access and
influence,” I said. “Everybody
especially wants to cut away at JLA, who now stands in the way of everyone who ever expected to reap much influence and power during your reign by merit of their
friendship with you. Thierry Lacoste’s
behavior was to be expected. My only
surprise is that anyone is surprised.”
I reminded the Prince that Lacoste tried to do me in as well; that Lacoste had complained to him about me when I’d supposedly interfered in the Rotolo affair, after he’d asked me to assist, after his own incompetence had become obvious.
“The best thing,” I said, “is rise above it. As Walter Bagehot wrote in The English Constitution, royalty must
rise above the fray to retain its mystique.”
I added, “You’re good at this anyway.”
It
was true. In addition to a pathological
fear of commitment, the Prince suffered a pathological fear of confrontation.
I
took the opportunity to provide the Prince our Narmino intelligence: We had identified the two banks in San Marino
that received alleged kickbacks and we possessed documentation that a charity
called Mission Innocence had allegedly been used by Narmino and two Monegasque
accountants to launder money.
I was weary from investigating internal government corruption. It belonged in the realm of law enforcement, not intelligence, albeit the Prince needed this kind of intelligence to establish the fundamentals necessary to go forward.
That’s why I was delighted to meet Monaco’s
new police chief, Andre Muhlberger.
Four of us assembled at M-Base at 7:30 in the morning on September 14th: JLA, Masseron, Muhlberger and myself.
I briefed Muhlberger on my mission then focused on the importance of reorganizing SIGER to become the official arm of what I was doing, akin to the UK MI5/Special Branch model.
Masseron told us that Proust had shared my name with him and Alain Malric, but that he, Masseron, had not let on he was in regular contact with me.
We agreed that
our circle of four should become a kind of Executive
Committee, and that it should be kept secret from the minister of state.
Mid-afternoon that day, waiting to board a delayed flight to London at Nice Airport, I received a phone call from an extremely irate Thierry Lacoste.
Sounding like a man caught with his pants down, Lacoste denied that he had
been digging dirt on JLA and demanded to know why I would tell this to the
Prince.
I
could not believe two things: 1) Why and
how this was being blown out of proportion and 2) Why the Prince would be so
indiscreet as to call Lacoste and say, “Robert told me…”
Was I back in kindergarten?
I
explained to Lacoste that when I learned certain things from credible, tested
sources, it was my duty to convey such things to the Prince, and for the Prince
to decide whether or not it warranted further investigation.
Lacoste changed gears, commencing new rants: “I heard you were investigating me?”
Nonsense.
The only time Lacoste had featured in one of our investigations was when
Steven Saltzman insisted he meet FLOATER in Lacoste’s office. Lacoste himself was not a target in Operation Hound Dog. I told him we never targeted him for
investigation.
Rant two: “French intelligence came to me and said they cannot tell you everything because of your connection with U.S. intelligence—but they can tell me.”
So
what? If I were the French I’d feel the
same, yet the DST and I had found a comfortable level on which to cooperate
effectively.
Rant
three: “I hate Monaco and all its
back-biting gossipers,” said Lacoste.
“That’s why I’d never live
there.”
Although
we agreed on a pact to hold fire on one another until we’d had a chance to meet
and resolve this issue, Lacoste told me, in ominous tone, he would travel to
Monaco the following day and spend the weekend with the Prince at Roc Agel.
The
knives had now been unsheathed for me.
Truth be known, I did not care.
I’d long since lost faith in the Prince’s ability to take decisive action.
I was tired from
travel, weary from the constant carping of others, and I no longer enjoyed
spending time in Monaco, everybody stirring it up against everybody else.
As a wise man once said...
Sure enough, next day brought word from JLA that Lacoste had demanded the Prince fire me for providing him “bad information.”
The more I thought about this, the more I realized how good my information must have been to cause so violent a reaction.
From
the Virgin Clubhouse at Heathrow Airport on my way to the United States, I
spoke by phone with JL to convey my Lacoste encounter.
He countered with his own story: at dinner with Lacoste in Paris recently, the lawyer had bitched to him about JLA, saying, “I’m sorry I gave him the job. I drew up the contract. He is dangerous for the country.”
Lacoste then introduced JL to Steven
Saltzman, who suggested that “a group of us” will run things and asked, “What
role would you like to have in the principality?”
We conceived a codename for Lacoste: CROC.
(Albeit a crocodile with
rotted teeth.)
On September 28th, I received an email from interior minister Masseron: “Can you have informations on M. Yurgens, our consul general honoraire in Moscow since October 24, 2005. Is there problem with him?”
I could not believe my eyes. I had briefed the Prince several times on Yurgens, pointing out that he was unsuitable a) because he had been a disinformation specialist for the KGB and b) no one in Monaco’s foreign ministry could vouch for him or had even heard of him!
JLA had apparently halted the appointment. Yet Yurgens, according to Masseron, was
Monaco’s honorary consul in Moscow.
MARTHA contacted me with "urgent" news:
Sergey Vasiliev, the Russian we suspected as the link between Horizon Oil Terminal in St. Petersburg and Sotrama, had arrived in Monaco for meetings with Sotrama’s chief executive, Michele Tecchia.
It was the manner in which Vasiliev arrived that intrigued me: a chartered helicopter from Italy to Monaco’s heliport; clearly, a ploy to avoid French border control.
We had already connected Vasiliev to the Ta’ambov organized crime group in St. Petersburg.
He apparently kept a Bentley
garaged in Monaco and was said to be looking for a slip in the port to berth a
boat he hoped to buy.
The Russian invasion of Monaco had begun.
