Just hours after WikiLeaks started publishing the 5 million emails it says come from the global-intelligence publisher Stratfor, it's becoming clear that this data dump could have a much larger impact than WikiLeaks' earlier publication of thousands of diplomatic cables. Those cables revealed, for the most part, mere gossip and mundane, low-level chatter. But the Stratfor emails could be explosive for companies, governments and individuals around the world, not least for Stratfor itself. Or they might not. At the very least, this batch of data seems far more interesting.
In the short term, it appears that the public-relations departments of many companies are going to be clocking a lot of overtime hours. In the longer term, much depends on what is revealed in the coming couple of weeks. The emails show Stratfor employees in discussions with executives at client firms, which include some of the biggest multinational corporations on the planet. So far, only a few hundred emails have been posted. If there are no ticking bombs, the forthcoming information at the very least promises to be interesting. The authenticity of the emails hasn't been verified in all cases, but according to some of the messages thus far:
• Stratfor employees in May 2011 discussed the possibility that Wachovia's involvement in laundering the money of Mexican drug cartels could run deeper and involve more money than was already known, and that an investigation of the bank was continuing. According to the purported email of a Stratford employee to some of his colleagues, one of his "CIA cronies" had told him that Wachovia was the subject of an "ongoing investigation." Wachovia, now owned by Wells Fargo (WFC) as it was when this discussion took place, settled the case against it without admitting wrongdoing. Wachovia in 2010 forfeited $110 million and was fined another $50 million.
• Coca-Cola (KO) in 2009 asked Stratfor to gather information on the animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, according to another purported email discussion. The company was worried about possible protest activity during the Winter Olympics in Vancouver the following year.
• Stratfor gathered intelligence on the anti-corporate agitprop group The Yes Men on behalf of Dow Chemical (DOW), as shown by several discussions among Stratfor and Dow employees and others, according to WikiLeaks. The company was worried about activism on the 25th anniversary of the 1984 Bhopal disaster.
• Perhaps most striking, at least for Statfor itself, is the revelation that the company was planning to create a fund, called StratCap, through which it would trade on intelligence information it gathered. An email purportedly written by George Friedman, Stratfor's founder and chairman, said the fund "would allow us to utilize the intelligence we were gathering about the world in a new but related venue -- an investment fund. Where we had previously advised other hedge funds, we would now have our own…" Involved in that discussion was Shea Morenz, then with Goldman Sachs (GS). Friedman wrote, according to WikiLeaks, "What StratCap will do is use our intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like." Morenz invested, according to the email, "substantially" more than $4 million.
