Carlos Ghosn and his taste for spooks

AtAt 10.10am local time on December 29th 2019, two men descended from a Bombardier Global Express private jet on the tarmac of Kansai airport close to the Japanese city of Osaka. The two Americans, who had rented the business jet explaining they were heading for a concert in Japan, had left Dubai the previous evening carrying two cases designed to carry musical equipment which had been specially modified with the addition of wheels and, more discretely, small drilled holes.

One of the pair was Michael Taylor, 59, a former Green Beret – the nickname for the US elite special forces – who after retiring from the army went on to work in the private security business, notably taking part in international operations for the liberation of hostages. The other was George-Antoine Zayek, who had previously worked on missions with Taylor as a subordinate, notably in Iraq.

The two men have common links with Lebanon, the mother country of Taylor’s wife and also that of Zayek who, before receiving US nationality, had served in the Christian militia of the Lebanese Forces during the Lebanese civil war. Taylor had served in Lebanon in the 1980s both as a soldier and later as a private security operative.

It was a few hours after the pair disembarked at Kansai airport when, 500 kilometres away, a man walked out of his Tokyo home. According to Japanese public broadcaster NHK and daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun, Carlos Ghosn was wearing a hat and a surgical mask worn by many in Japan for protection from pollution. Stepping out into the street, the shrouded 65-year-old took a taxi to the Grand Hyatt hotel, where Taylor and Zayek were waiting for him.

The three men then took a “bullet” high-speed train for Osaka. According to The Wall Street Journal, which first revealed the details of the flight of the former Renault-Nissan Alliance boss in a detailed investigation, CCTV cameras captured images of Ghosn entering a hotel close to Osaka’s Kansai airport. No pictures were found of him emerging from the building. It is believed he left it by hiding in one of the musical equipment cases, bored with breathing holes, brought to Japan by Taylor and Zayek.

At the terminal for private jet traffic at Kansai airport, the cases were loaded onto the plane without passing through any X-ray machine security checks because they were too big, a fact that reportedly was a reason that the Americans chose to exit Japan via Osaka. The Bombardier jet took off that Sunday at 11.09pm.

According to Turkish news agency DHA, the plane arrived at Istanbul Atatürk Airport on Monday at 5.12am local time. Ghosn then parted company with Taylor and Zayek and transferred to another private jet, a Bombardier Challenger 300, parked about 100 metres away, which soon took off on the southbound journey to Lebanon. The jet arrived at the Rafic Hariri airport in the Lebanese capital Beirut at around 7.30am.

There, Ghosn, who has joint Brazilian, Lebanese and French nationality, presented border guards a French passport and a Lebanese identity card, and was soon free to join his waiting wife Carole when he could savour his successful and remarkable escape from the Japanese justice system.

At first glance, the operation appears to have been prepared in fine detail over a long time. The two jets were rented out in the name of separate clients, and Ghosn’s name appeared nowhere on the paperwork. Dubai appears to have served as the logistics base for the operation, and several Japanese airports were reportedly previously studied to identify those with looser security checks. According to The Wall Street Journal, about 15 people in all were involved in the project. It cited “a person familiar with the matter” as saying that the flaws in the baggage security checks at Osaka’s Kansai airport were identified some three months before Ghosn’s escape.   

Following his release from prison on bail last April 25th, when he was ordered to reside in Tokyo but was allowed to travel within Japan, Carlos Ghosn had been under surveillance by a private security firm hired by Nissan, the Japanese carmaker he was once chairman of, acclaimed for saving it from bankruptcy, but which now accuses him of misappropriation of between 140-300 million dollars of its assets.

However, Ghosn’s lawyers threatened to sue the firm for harassment, and the surveillance ended on December 28th, allowing the escape operation to begin.

While the extraordinary flight of the former Nissan chairman and Renault CEO prompts images of a fiction thriller, it is also an example of a reality of the 21st-century, namely the privatisation of a sector of activity that was previously under the exclusive control of states.

Exfiltration, voluntary or otherwise, was the job of secret services and while often involving illegality, such operations were justified by reasons of state. Notable examples include the kidnap in May 1960 in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal organisers of the Nazis’ mass extermination of Jews, by the Israeli secret services, the Mossad, who secretly transfer him to Israel where he was put on trial and, in 1962, executed. Another was in January 1980, when CIA operatives covertly evacuated from the Iranian capital Tehran six US diplomats who had secretly found refuge at the Canadian ambassador’s residence after the US embassy was stormed by students in November 1979.

More recently, another example involved agents from France’s DGSE foreign intelligence agency who attempted to free one of their colleagues, Denis Allex, held prisoner by Islamist extremist group al-Shabaab in Somalia. The January 2013 operation ended in disaster, with the execution of Allex and the deaths in a firefight of three DGSE operatives.

But notably following the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, daredevil secret operations have also become the business of private sector operatives, and the numbers of security services providers have grown vastly. A 2018 French book of reference on intelligence affairs, Dictionnaire du renseignement (Dictionary of Intelligence), authored by two former French security officials, estimated that there are currently around 2,000 security firms operating in the US which provide covert services which “cover the complete spectrum of intelligence: the collection and processing of information […] not forgetting clandestine operations”.

In France, the sector has less political and social acceptance than in the US and the numbers of firms and specialists-for-hire are by comparison few. One rare example involved the so-called “Air Cocaine” affair of two French pilots sentenced to 20 years in jail in the Dominican Republic after the business jet they flew into the Caribbean country was found to be carrying suitcases of cocaine. After appealing their sentence, the pair were freed on bail, when a group of former French servicemen, reportedly steered by a criminologist and a far-right Member of the European Parliament, Aymeric Chauprade, led the pilots by boat to the Franco-Dutch island of Saint-Martin, from where they returned to France.

Ten years earlier, a covert escape operation was played out in Russia, involving French and local private security agents, and also Carlos Ghosn.

Bizarre tales of plots in Moscow and espionage at home

On December 29th 2005, French engineer Jean-Marie Vrac, his wife and two children hurriedly took their place in a Renault Mégane car parked at the foot of their apartment building in Moscow, close to the Lubyanka, once the headquarters of the KGB and now occupied by its successor, the FSB. Vrac, who was on the point of finishing a six-year mission in Russia for Renault, sat in the front passenger seat beside a Russian minder, dressed in combat gear, who took the wheel. On the back seat, beside Vrac’s wife and children, was another Russian bodyguard.

They drove off, followed by a 4x4 vehicle, through the streets of Moscow to join the motorway heading to Sheremetyevo international airport. As they reached the motorway, the Russian bodyguard shouted from the back seat of the Mégane to his colleague that they were being followed, telling him to speed up. Vrac’s wife translated to her husband what was being said.

As the driver accelerated, braked, veered left and right, the 4x4 vehicle followed the movement.

Vrac had been sent by Renault to Russia to oversee the refurbishment of a factory which previously belonged to Soviet marque Moskvitch and which was situated on a plot of land alongside the Moskva River. It had become the site of the French carmaker’s Russian subsidiary, then called Avtoframos (later renamed Renault Russia), created in a joint venture with Moscow city hall.

It was on the morning of December 29th when the plant’s manager, accompanied by his security chief, a former captain in the Soviet army’s intelligence branch, the GRU, told Vrac that he and his family were under threat of an imminent attack by Chechen terrorists. He was told he should leave Russia immediately.

“I wasn’t allowed to return to my office,” Vrac recalled in an interview in 2013. “I was to return straight home to pack my bags. Together with my family, we were to be exfiltrated ‘for our own safety’.” The family had been given barely 15 minutes to collect their belongings. Their departure was so rushed, said Vrac, that the children’s breakfasts were left lying on the table.  

When the family arrived at the departure lounge for their flight back to France from Sheremetyevo airport, Vrac came across another Renault engineer who had also been working at the new Avtoframos factory. He too had been told that morning that he was the target of Chechen terrorists.   

But once back in France, the two men were told by Renault management that they were accused of corruption. The staged escape from Russia had apparently been organised to force their return to France and in psychological conditions that would make them ready to sign their resignation notices, which they did. One of them later challenged their treatment before an industrial tribunal, which ruled that Renault had organised his dismissal “without any real or serious reason”.

According to the accounts of several people involved in the case, Renault security agents and those at its Russian subsidiary had dressed up an abandoned building in the outskirts of Moscow as a police station where false police officers questioned staff from the Avtoframos plant. According to some of those involved, the fiction was organised by the security agents without informing Renault’s management, unlike the circumstances of the ‘exfiltration’ of Vrac and his colleague.

Contacted in 2011 about the events in 2005, Renault’s press department stated: “This in no way concerned Carlos Ghosn. He had arrived from Japan and did not manage this type of affair. It is a case that dates from the Schweitzer era.” That was a reference to Louis Schweitzer, who was Renault chairman and CEO from 1992 until 2005, when he was replaced by Ghosn. But Ghosn’s appointment in 2005 was in fact two months before the events occurred in Russia.

Vrac’s engineer colleague rushed out of Moscow alongside him said he was later told by a Renault security agent that it was Schweitzer and Ghosn who decided to mount the operation.

During his more than two decades at Renault, Carlos Ghosn had demonstrated a keen interest in security activities. “When I arrived in 1997, I noticed that the group had a very open culture, a bit too much so at times,” he said in an interview with French weekly Le Journal du dimanche published in January 2011.

“I always ask not to be given written documents,” he added. “And I recommend to my staff to refrain from distributing [things] widely, and, of course, to leave nothing hanging about.”

Under Ghosn, Renault became what one trades union official in the company described in 2011 as “the kingdom of spooks”, a far cry from its once traditional status as the pulse of French industry and the battle ground, since the early 20th century, for hard-fought improvements in workers’ conditions, when its former major factory at the Boulogne-Billancourt suburb west of Paris was dubbed “the working-class fortress” (“When Billancourt sneezes, France catches a cold,” once declared a government minister).

Ghosn reinforced Renault’s internal security department, including with the recruitment of former officers of the French external intelligence agency, the DGSE, and the military intelligence department, the DPSD. These included an army colonel who had been active in Berlin during the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, a DGSE case officer versed in oriental languages (and one of whose agents was behind the false claim that the late former French president Jacques Chirac held a secret bank account in Japan), and an army captain who was specialised in intelligence on mercenary activities in Africa. None were specialised in the business of producing and selling vehicles.

In January 2011, Renault was shaken by accusations the company made against three of its executives, including one member of its management committee, who were accused of industrial espionage for the benefit of China, and swiftly fired. Ghosn stated that the “espionage” was apparently aimed at uncovering Renault’s investment model for its electric vehicles, but declined to provide proof. The three executives – Michel Balthazard, senior vice-president of advance engineering, his deputy Bertrand Rochette and Matthieu Tenenbaum, deputy head of Renault’s electric vehicle programme – vigorously denied any wrongdoing. By March, Ghosn was forced to publicly apologise to the three men who he admitted were completely innocent of the accusations which, it later emerged, were born of the fertile imagination of one or several members of the carmaker’s security department. Four former security staff are due later this year to stand trial over the affair, which appears to have been in reality an attempt to defraud the company.

For a while, Ghosn, who had had no hesitation in sacking his wrongly accused executives on the basis of wild allegations, found himself in political hot water, although it was his right-hand man, Renault’s Chief Operating Officer Patrick Pelata, who carried the can. At the time, then French budget minister and government spokesman François Baroin, spoke of the “incredible amateurism” of Renault’s management. “I don’t find it normal that a vast company like this one could have fallen into an amateurism and a Bibi Fricotin  [cartoon character] story, and third-division spooks,” added Baroin.

'He was certain he was being listened to'

The espionage accusations scandal was to reveal Carlos Ghosn’s very particular management style by which he would use his own spooks to investigate his employees rather than request the help of the police or government agencies. According to several well-informed sources, it was Ghosn who took the decision not to call in the French domestic intelligence agency, then called the DCRI (now the DGSI) when suspicion of the so-called industrial espionage emerged. Questioned by the magistrate who led a subsequent judicial investigation into the affair, Ghosn gave a convoluted statement that minimised his role: “I approved that we remained in the status quo of a non-information to the DCRI.”

The carmaker’s security department copied off the hard disks on the computers belonging to the three accused executives and studied the contents, including personal messages. A member of the security department would later say of the examination of the computer of one of the executives: “They hacked nine years of emails. There were even photos of his girls taking their bath.”

But the practice of computer intrusions and the capturing of data was not new to the company. Between 2005-2009, Renault’s research and development “Technocentre”, situated just outside western Paris, was rocked by seven staff suicides, including three employees who took their lives at their workplace. Renault tried hard to establish personal reasons for the suicides which began shortly after Ghosn took over as the carmaker’s boss, employing a strategy that earned him the nickname of “le cost killer”.

At the time, Renault’s PR team denounced “the shortcuts which consist of linking these deaths with the working environment”. Meanwhile, the personal belongings of those who took their lives were studied before being handed to their families, just as was also their professional equipment before being given to the police investigating the deaths. After being handed over, the computer used by a Renault technician whose body was found floating in a pond beside the Technocentre contained no data. Similarly, the email box of a bodywork designer who hung himself in his son’s bedroom was empty, as was the electronic agenda of an engineer who jumped out of the third floor of the Technocentre office building.  

The police were to suspect, without being able to prove, that the computer equipment and electronic aides of the dead were cleaned of information. Serge Nebbak, a union official at Renault who was himself the object of spying by Renault’s security agents, said one of them confirmed this. “He explained to me that at the time of the suicides at the Technocentre, they emptied the email boxes of the poor souls,” said Nebbak. He also gave a statement to a magistrate leading a judicial investigation into the cases, in which he said that another security agent had confided that his colleagues could “from [their] office pump out [information from] all the computer systems of any workplace in the Renault group, no matter where they were implanted”.

The staff at Nissan were just as vulnerable. In early 1999, Renault and Nissan formed the Renault-Nissan Alliance, when Renault soon after bought an almost 37% stake in the Japanese carmaker. In June that year, Ghosn, while remaining executive vice-president of Renault, entered Nissan as its chief operating officer (COO). But before taking up his post, the Japanese press had obtained leaked information about the negotiations held between the two carmakers and Ghosn’s appointment as Nissan COO. Alain Le Guen, who was then Renault’s head of security, and who is now deceased, later recalled how Ghosn had flown into what he said was a “terrible rage” over the leaks, and sent Le Guen to investigate in Japan. “I was asked to find the mole within the Nissan board,” he said. The “mole” was never found, but Ghosn locked down communications inside the group.

“I made known to everyone that I considered every leak as an act of sabotage against Nissan,” Ghosn declared after taking up his post. He swiftly ordered verifications to be carried out to ensure that there were no hidden microphones within the company buildings, and notably in his office and meeting rooms. Even his own home, a duplex apartment with a terrace and panoramic views across Tokyo, where he lived with his first wife and their four children, was also swept for microphones, as were also the homes of his deputy and Nissan’s financial director. The operations were repeated just months later. “It was his obsession,” said Le Guen. “He was certain that he was being listened to.”

In the case of the 2011 Renault espionage accusations scandal, the carmaker’s security agents at one point believed they had identified another individual in the supposed plot to pass on industrial secrets to competitors. This was Toshiyuki Shiga, then Nissan’s second-in-command. Informed, Ghosn demanded that the suspicion remain completely secret. “We were to speak about it to no-one,” one of the security team later recalled. “Carlos Ghosn had said that he would deal with the problem himself.” While Ghosn allegedly told his agents to continue with their investigations, they were to do so in all discretion, and not mention the subject even with the Renault chairman and chief executive’s closest staff.

Renault agents targeted shareholders, board members

On the margins of the espionage accusations scandal, and from the later confessions of security agents, it was to emerge that Ghosn did not stop only at ordering the spying of his employees, but also senior civil servants.

During the judicial probe into the espionage scandal, the security agent who was suspected of being behind the attempt to defraud Renault, and who had been placed under investigation, handed computer records to the examining magistrate leading the probe. These concerned the mobile phone records (in the form of detailed billing of calls) of management staff which were studied allegedly on the orders of Ghosn. But also studied allegedly on his orders were the mobile phone records of the two French senior civil servants who sat on the Renault board as representatives of the French state, which had a 15% stake in the carmaker.

The reason was that one of the state representatives, who were both from the French government agency that manages state participations in companies (l’Agence des participations de l’État, or APE), had contacted a Renault executive by phone to question him about a supposed secret meeting in January 2011 to discuss a takeover of German carmaker Opel, owned by General Motors. “What are you getting up to with GM?” the civil servant reportedly asked.

Informed, Ghosn was furious that the highly secret project was leaked, and was intent on finding the culprit. “I was given the mobile phone numbers of the two suspected Renault managers, as well as those of the two members of the state participations agency,” said the security agent in a statement to the judicial probe. “I was given the order of identifying all incoming and outgoing calls made over the past three days by the senior civil servants.”

When Ghosn was questioned in turn, he strongly denied the claim. “All that is false and, what’s more, void of any plausibility,” Ghosn said in his statement. “In January 2011 there was never any question of Renault buying Opel. The situation with our treasury and debt forbade us from any idea of a purchase.”

A senior member of Renault’s management confirmed to this investigation on several occasions that negotiations had indeed taken place for the purchase of Opel, and that Ghosn had demanded an investigation into those Renault staff who had contact with the state representatives. Furthermore, the security agent under investigation provided the judicial probe with a list of calls – detailed by date, at what time and by duration – between Renault staff and the two state representatives who sat on the board. One of the latter was Alexis Kohler, who was appointed by President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 as secretary general of the presidential office, the Élysée Palace.

Shortly before that episode, it was a shareholders’ representative who was targeted by Ghosn. On December 15th 2010, Renault’s financial director sent the company’s newly appointed head of security an email headed, “strictly confidential between ourselves”. He wrote: “You may have heard the defamatory remarks made these last few days about our CEO [Carlos Ghosn] by Proxinvest on the subject of his salary. This company is led by a certain […] Leroy who is across all the [radio and TV news] for the past two days. He accuses our CEO of concealing information from the shareholders, which is a serious accusation […] Do you have the means of knowing who could be behind Mr Leroy, [and] who appears capable of taking this accusation very far? Thanks in advance.”

Proxinvest is a consultancy practice that advises shareholders, which includes the study in detail of the remunerations of corporate leaders, and the resolutions put forward for shareholders to vote on. The Renault investigation was prompted because Proxinvest’s president, Henri Leroy, had the gall to denounce the opacity surrounding Ghosn’s salary. While it was known that Ghosn earned 1.2 million euros per year as Renault chief executive – as well as other payments, including stock options and bonuses on the group’s results – what was not then known, until new regulations in Japan required it to be reported in public, was that Ghosn also received a yearly 8 million euros from Nissan.

Leroy, for Renault’s finance director, had had the impertinence of suggesting that Ghosn was guilty of the “voluntary concealing of information”, and, according to the Proxinvest president, French law required that “these substantial elements of the remuneration of the chief executive of Renault” be published. Leroy added, in less legal but well targeted terms, that, “When one is worthy of the remuneration received, one is not frightened to see it published”.  

Today, the Tokyo prosecution services’ special investigations bureau in charge of fighting white collar crime has accused Ghosn of “conspiring to minimise his remuneration” over the months that followed Proxinvest’s accusation against him of concealing his earnings. According to the Japanese investigation, since 2011 Ghosn has hidden from shareholders his deferred revenues totalling 90 million dollars, and another 50 million euros in supplementary retirement payments.

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• The French version of this report can be found here.