May 11, 2022 • 11 mins
George Noory and author Robert Kerbeck recount his career as a secret spy trying to gain valuable information on companies for their competitors, how he used his skllls as an actor to trick employees, and if what he was doing was actually illegal.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori
with you our special guest tonight. Robert Kirbeck back with us.
His latest work is called a Ruse. He's an actor
an award winning writer. His essays and short stories have
been adapted to film and theater. Malibu Burning. His first book,
That's When He Was with Me, back about two and
(00:21):
a half years ago. Inspired by real life events, he
wrote about the opt for the Los Angeles Times. Robert
starred in the film Reconnected, based on one of his
own short stories, and he's a three time nominee for
the Pushcard Prize, which is a national literary award, and
a lifetime member of the Actor's Studio. His newest memoir, Ruse,
(00:41):
lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street as
a thrilling book and a look into the world of
corporate espionage and his career Get This as a secret spy, Robert,
Welcome back, Hi George, thanks for having me again. I
did not know you were a corporate spy when we
last talked. What the heck is that? Well, if I
told you, I would have had to take you out
(01:02):
back and shoot you, and I like you too much
to do that. Thanks, Well, what is a corporate spy? Yeah, So,
you know, I was a young guy and I wanted
to be an actor. My family was in the car business.
My great grandfather sold horse carriages before automobiles were invented.
He switched over to selling cars. My grandfather took over
the dealership, my father took over the dealship, and I
(01:24):
was supposed to take over the dealship, and when I
graduated college, I worked there briefly, but the kind of
trickery of car sales just didn't feel right to me.
Wanted to be an actor. Moved to New York. Of course,
I needed a survival job, and my buddy had this
job that was very mysterious and he kind of wouldn't
tell me about it, but I pressed him to get
me an interview because I was desperate for money, and
(01:45):
so he got me this interview. And I go to
the Upper East Side of Manhattan and there's this doorman
building and I take this elevator up to the penthouse
and this woman opens the door and you know, it's
a penthouse apartment. It's gorgeous, it's fantastic. It looks like
a decorator designed it. So right away I knew whatever
she did it was lucrative. And so I have this
(02:05):
very strange interview where she never asks me a question
about my skills. I had a resume. She ever looked
at my resume, and after a while she sent me
on my way. She basically just asked about my relationship
with my father and how he felt about me not
taking over the business. Very strange, and I go my
merry way. I don't think I've gotten the job. And
then next day my buddy calls and he says, you're hired.
(02:26):
And I felt pretty proud of myself for about two seconds,
and he said, don't don't you know, don't worry about it.
She hires everyone because no one can do this job.
And the next day I went and started training, and
I began to see what we were doing was corporate spine.
Now what is corporate spine? So basically, corporate spine is
anything that a corporation wants to know about their competitors. Right,
(02:50):
do you think about football if you could get the
playbook on your opponent, you know, two days before the
big game, you think about how valuable that would be.
So every project we did was bespoke, was custom and
the client would basically say, this is what I want
to know. These are the things I'm interested in finding out.
So a lot of times we would always start, we
do with the organization, Right, Who were the people working
(03:11):
at a firm, what they did, what their titles were,
how much money they made, what their rankings were. And
something that you know, many of your listeners probably don't
know is almost every corporation in America actually has internal
metrics that they rank their employees using. And so we
would determine these metrics so that we could tell our
client who the top people were at their rivals. Right,
(03:34):
we would find out expansion plans, we would find out
deals that were going down, we would find out secret strategies. Oftentimes,
of course, we would stumble upon sealacious information. Who was
drinking too much, who was having an affair. Again, it
was anything and everything that we could find out so
that our clients could utilize that to increase their bottom line. Now,
(03:56):
is that an ethical is a smart business? Yes? I
think the answer to that is yes. And you know, um,
you know, and that's I think the thing that I
always tell people when when I do interviews, is that
I'm not I'm not proud of what I did, but
it is a heck of a good story, and I'm
able to tell it now only because the statute of
limitations for whatever crimes I potentially committed has now passed.
(04:19):
And that's the reason I could write the book. Amazing.
What kind of things did you uncover? Well, you know,
I think the big thing that you know, again, people
don't realize is, you know, we all know the Russians
spy on the Chinese, and the Chinese spy on us.
But what most people don't know is that major American
and international corporations are spending forget about millions of dollars,
(04:40):
forget about tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions
of dollars and on occasion, billions of dollars to spy
on each other. Right. So Steve Jobs, the legendary CEO
of Apple, he was, you know, vehement about security, and
he wouldn't even allow his designers to be listed in
the corporate directory because he was a trade. Imagine if
(05:01):
you could figure out who the designer was of the
original iPad in the very early days. Imagine if you
could find out who that individual was and then steal
that individual to your firm. You know, that would as
you could imagine, that would have been worth tens of
billions of dollars. And so that's the type of intelligence
that our clients were looking for. How did you get
(05:22):
the information that you went after and what kind of
information did you look for? Yeah, so you know, basically
what we would do is we would create characters, We
would create ruses, hence the title of my book. We
would create stories that would convince people on the other
end of the phone, because most of this stuff was
(05:42):
via the phone, that would convince people to tell us
things that they definitely should not right. One of the
things in corporate America, people were trained to be a
good teammate, right, and the importance of corporate culture. Well,
we would use that to our advantage and we would
impersonate executives that were with the firm. They were off site,
(06:03):
there was some sort of emergency, they were meeting with
the US regulators, they were at a board meeting. Whatever
the story we would do the research on that seemed
to be that would make the most sense. We would
you know, basically set up this elaborate ruse and that
people would, you know, sometimes I would be impersonating the
CEO of a firm, or the CEO of a firm
(06:24):
I'd heard them on television. Obviously I was a former actor,
so I would mimic their voice, and you know, people would,
you know, answer the phone and oh my god, you know,
I can't believe I'm talking to the CEO of this company.
And of course in my head, I would say, you're not.
But imagine if you believe you have someone like you know,
Elon Muskll on the other end of the line, what
(06:45):
are you not going to tell that individual? Exactly? How
easy was it, Robert, to get your foot in a
corporate door? Very difficult, very difficult. I mean, in all
the years I did this job. I mean, obviously I
wouldn't be a very good spy if I was running
around telling people I was a spy. But you know,
was an inner circle of family and friends that knew
what I did. And of course, you know, every one
of them love the idea of, you know, of a
(07:07):
job that you could do from home. I mean, obviously,
you know, COVID kind of changed that equation, but you know,
before COVID, you know, not many people were able to
have a job that they could set their own hours
and work from home, and so everybody wanted to kind
of try this job. And I'm here to tell you
that nobody could do it. And in all of the
years that I did the job, I was able to
train one person to do the job. That's how hard
(07:29):
it is. Did your acting career help you, Yeah, for sure,
Yeah for sure. I mean, you know, we would do accents,
like I said, we would mimic people's voices. You know,
we were very good. Obviously, you have to be able
to think on your feet because somebody's going to be
questioning you about why you need this information. What is
the information? Boy, I'm not supposed to tell you this information.
(07:50):
This is really valuable information. I could get in trouble
for telling you this information. And so we had to
do a lot of improvisation to convince people that it
was okay for them to reveal these corporate secrets to us.
Did you do much computer hacking? You know? It's funny, um,
you know. Uh. Frank abcnail, who wrote Catch Me If
(08:11):
You Can, has been a really great and kind supporter
of the book. And he gave me a blurb for
the book, and he talks about he's on the coverage
a matter of fact. Yes, yeah, yes, he's He's a
wonderful guy, great guy, and he you know, as you know,
he did all these scams when he was a young guy,
and then he switched and began working with the FBI
to prevent the exact same type of scams that he perpetrated. Right,
(08:34):
And so he constantly drills in at all the speeches
he does, and even you know, even in some of
my interactions with him, that the weakest link in cybersecurity
is always the human being. Yeah, and so what we
would do is we would not hack using the computer.
We would hack the human being and get them to
(08:54):
access the computers for us and then just pass on
the information. Correct. Wow, is it illegal doing what you did?
You know, that's a great question. I mean, it's certainly
you know, in the dark gray Um. You know, I
was lucky I never was arrested. But there was a
moment in time where a laundry list of authorities thought
(09:18):
that I was the most famous hacker in the world.
And that was you know, I'm here to tell you
pretty frightening I was just an actor with the gift
of gab and they thought this hacker was trying to
shut down the Internet, and they thought that I was
this individual. So that was pretty scary and UM, and
(09:38):
that individual ended up going to jail, being arrested as
a domestic terrorist in spending. I forget exactly how long
in prison, four or five years, So, you know, I
always I always felt like it was in the dark gray,
but the legal threat certainly was real. Former CIA a
member Valerie Play is quoted in your book. Yeah, you
know Valerie Play and I, you know, Valerie was the
(10:02):
CIA agent that was outed by the US government, and
to my knowledge, I think she's the only CIA agent
ever outed by their own government. And Valerie and I
actually went to high school together, which is pretty crazy.
The two spies graduated from the small, same small high school. UM.
Somebody once asked me, did they did they have like
lying classes? Was there spycraft instead of homemaker you know,
(10:25):
wood shop? But yeah, Valerie, UM and I've done a
couple of events together. We're doing a book festival this
summer in Vermont bookstock. UM, if you happen to be
in the neighborhood of Woodstock, Vermont the summer, beautiful little town,
and we're going to do an event together talking about
the intersection of political spying and corporate spying and what
(10:45):
happens when those two worlds collide, and is that ongoing
if we really knew, Robert, what was going on, I mean,
is it rampant? Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, I'm
here to tell you corporate spying has done every single day,
you know, and I I can't say by every single
major corporation, but I'm going to say every single major corporation.
And I mean, I'm here to tell you that I
(11:07):
personally presented my you know, let's call it extracted data
to two individuals who today are the CEOs of some
of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. Listen
to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one
am Eastern, and go to Coast to Coast am dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori
with you our special guest tonight. Robert Kirbeck back with us.
His latest work is called a Ruse. He's an actor
an award winning writer. His essays and short stories have
been adapted to film and theater. Malibu Burning. His first book,
That's When He Was with Me, back about two and
(00:21):
a half years ago. Inspired by real life events, he
wrote about the opt for the Los Angeles Times. Robert
starred in the film Reconnected, based on one of his
own short stories, and he's a three time nominee for
the Pushcard Prize, which is a national literary award, and
a lifetime member of the Actor's Studio. His newest memoir, Ruse,
(00:41):
lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street as
a thrilling book and a look into the world of
corporate espionage and his career Get This as a secret spy, Robert,
Welcome back, Hi George, thanks for having me again. I
did not know you were a corporate spy when we
last talked. What the heck is that? Well, if I
told you, I would have had to take you out
(01:02):
back and shoot you, and I like you too much
to do that. Thanks, Well, what is a corporate spy? Yeah, So,
you know, I was a young guy and I wanted
to be an actor. My family was in the car business.
My great grandfather sold horse carriages before automobiles were invented.
He switched over to selling cars. My grandfather took over
the dealership, my father took over the dealship, and I
(01:24):
was supposed to take over the dealship, and when I
graduated college, I worked there briefly, but the kind of
trickery of car sales just didn't feel right to me.
Wanted to be an actor. Moved to New York. Of course,
I needed a survival job, and my buddy had this
job that was very mysterious and he kind of wouldn't
tell me about it, but I pressed him to get
me an interview because I was desperate for money, and
(01:45):
so he got me this interview. And I go to
the Upper East Side of Manhattan and there's this doorman
building and I take this elevator up to the penthouse
and this woman opens the door and you know, it's
a penthouse apartment. It's gorgeous, it's fantastic. It looks like
a decorator designed it. So right away I knew whatever
she did it was lucrative. And so I have this
(02:05):
very strange interview where she never asks me a question
about my skills. I had a resume. She ever looked
at my resume, and after a while she sent me
on my way. She basically just asked about my relationship
with my father and how he felt about me not
taking over the business. Very strange, and I go my
merry way. I don't think I've gotten the job. And
then next day my buddy calls and he says, you're hired.
(02:26):
And I felt pretty proud of myself for about two seconds,
and he said, don't don't you know, don't worry about it.
She hires everyone because no one can do this job.
And the next day I went and started training, and
I began to see what we were doing was corporate spine.
Now what is corporate spine? So basically, corporate spine is
anything that a corporation wants to know about their competitors. Right,
(02:50):
do you think about football if you could get the
playbook on your opponent, you know, two days before the
big game, you think about how valuable that would be.
So every project we did was bespoke, was custom and
the client would basically say, this is what I want
to know. These are the things I'm interested in finding out.
So a lot of times we would always start, we
do with the organization, Right, Who were the people working
(03:11):
at a firm, what they did, what their titles were,
how much money they made, what their rankings were. And
something that you know, many of your listeners probably don't
know is almost every corporation in America actually has internal
metrics that they rank their employees using. And so we
would determine these metrics so that we could tell our
client who the top people were at their rivals. Right,
(03:34):
we would find out expansion plans, we would find out
deals that were going down, we would find out secret strategies. Oftentimes,
of course, we would stumble upon sealacious information. Who was
drinking too much, who was having an affair. Again, it
was anything and everything that we could find out so
that our clients could utilize that to increase their bottom line. Now,
(03:56):
is that an ethical is a smart business? Yes? I
think the answer to that is yes. And you know, um,
you know, and that's I think the thing that I
always tell people when when I do interviews, is that
I'm not I'm not proud of what I did, but
it is a heck of a good story, and I'm
able to tell it now only because the statute of
limitations for whatever crimes I potentially committed has now passed.
(04:19):
And that's the reason I could write the book. Amazing.
What kind of things did you uncover? Well, you know,
I think the big thing that you know, again, people
don't realize is, you know, we all know the Russians
spy on the Chinese, and the Chinese spy on us.
But what most people don't know is that major American
and international corporations are spending forget about millions of dollars,
(04:40):
forget about tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions
of dollars and on occasion, billions of dollars to spy
on each other. Right. So Steve Jobs, the legendary CEO
of Apple, he was, you know, vehement about security, and
he wouldn't even allow his designers to be listed in
the corporate directory because he was a trade. Imagine if
(05:01):
you could figure out who the designer was of the
original iPad in the very early days. Imagine if you
could find out who that individual was and then steal
that individual to your firm. You know, that would as
you could imagine, that would have been worth tens of
billions of dollars. And so that's the type of intelligence
that our clients were looking for. How did you get
(05:22):
the information that you went after and what kind of
information did you look for? Yeah, so you know, basically
what we would do is we would create characters, We
would create ruses, hence the title of my book. We
would create stories that would convince people on the other
end of the phone, because most of this stuff was
(05:42):
via the phone, that would convince people to tell us
things that they definitely should not right. One of the
things in corporate America, people were trained to be a
good teammate, right, and the importance of corporate culture. Well,
we would use that to our advantage and we would
impersonate executives that were with the firm. They were off site,
(06:03):
there was some sort of emergency, they were meeting with
the US regulators, they were at a board meeting. Whatever
the story we would do the research on that seemed
to be that would make the most sense. We would
you know, basically set up this elaborate ruse and that
people would, you know, sometimes I would be impersonating the
CEO of a firm, or the CEO of a firm
(06:24):
I'd heard them on television. Obviously I was a former actor,
so I would mimic their voice, and you know, people would,
you know, answer the phone and oh my god, you know,
I can't believe I'm talking to the CEO of this company.
And of course in my head, I would say, you're not.
But imagine if you believe you have someone like you know,
Elon Muskll on the other end of the line, what
(06:45):
are you not going to tell that individual? Exactly? How
easy was it, Robert, to get your foot in a
corporate door? Very difficult, very difficult. I mean, in all
the years I did this job. I mean, obviously I
wouldn't be a very good spy if I was running
around telling people I was a spy. But you know,
was an inner circle of family and friends that knew
what I did. And of course, you know, every one
of them love the idea of, you know, of a
(07:07):
job that you could do from home. I mean, obviously,
you know, COVID kind of changed that equation, but you know,
before COVID, you know, not many people were able to
have a job that they could set their own hours
and work from home, and so everybody wanted to kind
of try this job. And I'm here to tell you
that nobody could do it. And in all of the
years that I did the job, I was able to
train one person to do the job. That's how hard
(07:29):
it is. Did your acting career help you, Yeah, for sure,
Yeah for sure. I mean, you know, we would do accents,
like I said, we would mimic people's voices. You know,
we were very good. Obviously, you have to be able
to think on your feet because somebody's going to be
questioning you about why you need this information. What is
the information? Boy, I'm not supposed to tell you this information.
(07:50):
This is really valuable information. I could get in trouble
for telling you this information. And so we had to
do a lot of improvisation to convince people that it
was okay for them to reveal these corporate secrets to us.
Did you do much computer hacking? You know? It's funny, um,
you know. Uh. Frank abcnail, who wrote Catch Me If
(08:11):
You Can, has been a really great and kind supporter
of the book. And he gave me a blurb for
the book, and he talks about he's on the coverage
a matter of fact. Yes, yeah, yes, he's He's a
wonderful guy, great guy, and he you know, as you know,
he did all these scams when he was a young guy,
and then he switched and began working with the FBI
to prevent the exact same type of scams that he perpetrated. Right,
(08:34):
And so he constantly drills in at all the speeches
he does, and even you know, even in some of
my interactions with him, that the weakest link in cybersecurity
is always the human being. Yeah, and so what we
would do is we would not hack using the computer.
We would hack the human being and get them to
(08:54):
access the computers for us and then just pass on
the information. Correct. Wow, is it illegal doing what you did?
You know, that's a great question. I mean, it's certainly
you know, in the dark gray Um. You know, I
was lucky I never was arrested. But there was a
moment in time where a laundry list of authorities thought
(09:18):
that I was the most famous hacker in the world.
And that was you know, I'm here to tell you
pretty frightening I was just an actor with the gift
of gab and they thought this hacker was trying to
shut down the Internet, and they thought that I was
this individual. So that was pretty scary and UM, and
(09:38):
that individual ended up going to jail, being arrested as
a domestic terrorist in spending. I forget exactly how long
in prison, four or five years, So, you know, I
always I always felt like it was in the dark gray,
but the legal threat certainly was real. Former CIA a
member Valerie Play is quoted in your book. Yeah, you
know Valerie Play and I, you know, Valerie was the
(10:02):
CIA agent that was outed by the US government, and
to my knowledge, I think she's the only CIA agent
ever outed by their own government. And Valerie and I
actually went to high school together, which is pretty crazy.
The two spies graduated from the small, same small high school. UM.
Somebody once asked me, did they did they have like
lying classes? Was there spycraft instead of homemaker you know,
(10:25):
wood shop? But yeah, Valerie, UM and I've done a
couple of events together. We're doing a book festival this
summer in Vermont bookstock. UM, if you happen to be
in the neighborhood of Woodstock, Vermont the summer, beautiful little town,
and we're going to do an event together talking about
the intersection of political spying and corporate spying and what
(10:45):
happens when those two worlds collide, and is that ongoing
if we really knew, Robert, what was going on, I mean,
is it rampant? Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, I'm
here to tell you corporate spying has done every single day,
you know, and I I can't say by every single
major corporation, but I'm going to say every single major corporation.
And I mean, I'm here to tell you that I
(11:07):
personally presented my you know, let's call it extracted data
to two individuals who today are the CEOs of some
of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. Listen
to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one
am Eastern, and go to Coast to Coast am dot
com for more
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