The Romanian silver mine is the case John Kiriakou tells to explain what private intelligence analysis is, as distinct from private investigation — and, he says, “a lot more fun.”
Working for himself between government jobs, he had three big clients: the ninth-largest hedge fund in the world, a mutual fund, and the largest mining company in the world, plus a contract for an oil company.[1][2] They asked very specific questions. One of them was: who is going to win the Romanian municipal elections in September?[3]
The method
Kiriakou’s reaction was that he knew nothing about Romania. His solution was LinkedIn and a shared religion: he is Greek Orthodox and, as he puts it, everybody in Romania is Orthodox, so he sent connection requests to everybody who looked interesting and happened to be Orthodox in Romania — about sixty people — and asked his question. One of them gave him private polling data.[3][4]
Why they were asking
He then did what he says a good analyst does and asked the client why they cared. They told him: they were thinking of buying a silver mine, the silver lay underneath a village, and to mine it the whole village would have to be destroyed. If the socialists won they would not be allowed to do it; if the conservatives won, the villagers would simply be relocated.[4][5]
Kiriakou told them the polls said the conservatives would win. They bought the mine at the pre-election price. The conservatives won, the village was moved out and destroyed, and the company took billions of dollars’ worth of silver out of the ground.[6]
He files the episode alongside the other questions clients put to him — should I do business in Yemen, should I buy that silver mine in Romania — as the everyday substance of commercial intelligence work.[7]