According to internal company documents obtained by Mother Jones, the now defunct investigative firm, Beckett Brown International spent most of the late 1990s through 2001 closely scrutinizing several prominent environmental groups (Greenpeace being the most well known) on behalf of a group of unknown clients. While most of what BBI got up to seems to have been legal, a lot of it wasn't pretty.

The records obtained by Mother Jones would seem to indicate that Beckett Brown went pretty much full monty on their environmental activist surveillance projects, which must have had bottomless budgets - they pulled trash to hunt for internal documents, they obtaining the groups' telephone records, employed undercover operatives to infiltrate the environmentalists' meetings and did pretty much everything in between.

While the records obtained by Mother Jones don't specify, the above work may have been conducted on behalf of BBI clients, PR Firms Ketchum, Nichols-Dezenhall Communications, and Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin. At the time these firms repped just the kind of clients that might want to keep an eye on environmental activists: Dow Chemical, Kraft Foods and chemical company, Condea Vista.

Beckett Brown had a strong pedigree, with former Secret Service officers amongst its founding fathers. The firm also had a generally spectacular group of A-List corporate and government clients during the its heyday and with services ranging from investigations to private security. Beckett Brown dissolved in 2001. Several of the firm's major players remain active at firms like the Annapolis Group, Global Security Services and Chesapeake Strategies Group.

You can check out the rest of the highly colorful BBI story over at Mother Jones.

--MDT

Labels: Brown Beckett International, Mother Jones