June 17 2001 - SUNDAY TIMES	BRITAIN

©
Treacherous waters: Schlickenrieder's insider reports effectively scuppered Greenpeace campaigns against oil firms in the Atlantic and the North Sea
Photograph: PA

Maurice Chittenden and Nicholas Rufford

  WITH his shoulder-length hair tumbling over the collar of a leather jacket and clutching a video camera, Manfred Schlickenrieder cut a familiar figure among left-wing political parties and environmental groups across Europe for almost 20 years.

Whenever there was a campaign being organised, he was there to make a "sympathetic" documentary.

His political credentials seemed impeccable: he had once been chairman of the Munich branch of the German Communist party and the bookshelves of his office held the works of Bertolt Brecht, the Marxist playwright and poet.

One step ahead: Schlickenrieder had the right credentials

Behind the facade, however, Schlickenrieder was a spy working for both the German secret service and for Hakluyt, a private intelligence agency based in London's West End and set up by former officers of MI6, the secret intelligence service. His codename was Camus after Albert Camus, the existentialist author of L'Etranger.

Hakluyt paid him thousands of pounds to inform on the activities of Greenpeace, Anita Roddick's Body Shop and other environmental campaigners. The BND, the German equivalent of MI6, allededly paid him £3,125 a month living expenses.

The rewards of espionage brought him a spacious flat overlooking a park in Munich and a BMW Z3, the sports car driven by Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye.

The spying operation for Hakluyt began in April 1996, when Mike Reynolds, one of the agency's directors and a former MI6 head of station in Germany, was asked by Shell to find out who was orchestrating threats against its petrol forecourts across Europe.

The threats followed an outcry over the oil giant's attempts in 1995 to dump the disused Brent Spar oil platform at sea and allegations of environmental damage caused by its oil drilling in Ogoniland, Nigeria.

Schlickenrieder approached environmental groups and far-left organisations including Revolutionärer Aufbau, a Zurichbased communist group. He was finally betrayed to the group by a female colleague.

Last week Shell confirmed it was Hakluyt's client until December 1996. The company said that some of its petrol stations in Germany had been firebombed or shot at. "We did talk to Hakluyt about what intelligence they could gather," said Mike Hogan, director of media relations at Shell UK.

In May 1997, Reynolds asked the German spy for information on whether there were legal moves within Greenpeace to protect its assets against sequestration in the event of it being sued by an oil company. Two months later, Greenpeace occupied BP's Stena Dee oil installation off the Shetland islands in an unsuccessful publicity stunt to stop oil drilling in a new part of the Atlantic. Schlickenrieder sent a report saying that Greenpeace was disappointed with its campaign.

He sent an invoice to Hakluyt on June 6, 1997, billing the agency for DM20,000 (£6,250) for "Greenpeace research".

Commercial target: Anita Roddick's Body Shop campaigns were monitored carefully. Photograph: Mike Lawn

BP confirmed it had hired Hakluyt, but said it had asked the company to compile a report based only on published sources of information. BP has longstanding links with MI6. John Gerson, BP's director of government and public affairs, was at one time a leading candidate to succeed Sir David Spedding as head of MI6.

Schlickenrieder continued working for Hakluyt until 1999. He made a film on Shell in Nigeria called Business as Usual: the Arrogance of Power, during which he interviewed friends of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nobel prize nominee, who was hanged by the military regime in 1995 after leading a campaign against oil exploration.

Schlickenrieder sent a letter to a Body Shop executive saying he had been researching the activities of Shell in Nigeria, and asked about plans for further activities. Greenpeace said yesterday that Schlickenrieder's activities had effectively sunk its campaign against BP's oil exploration in the Atlantic.

Fouad Hamdan, communications director of Greenpeace Germany, said: "The bastard was good, I have to admit.

"He got information about our planned Atlantic Frontier campaign to focus on the climate change issue and the responsibility of BP. BP knew everything. They were not taken by surprise." He added: "Manfred filmed and interviewed all the time, but now we realise we never saw anything."