Risk management consultant gives insight into Korean security
Anthony Hegarty Security expert
By John Redmond
Former London police detective Anthony Hegarty met with The Korea Times and shared his experiences in working with Korean companies facing a new range of security threats. Now based on his farm near Daegu, Hegarty, has been in Korea since 1999 and spends a great deal of time dealing with issues ranging from industrial espionage and armed security protecting ships off the coast of Somalia to going undercover tracking pedophiles across Asia. He spoke in depth about the need for companies and government to be aware of warning signals.
Question: How long have you been in Korea and what brought you here?
Answer:
Got here in 1999...met my now wife (Korean) and stayed. I had been living in Indonesia, took a knife in the side and while recovering met a Korean guy who suggested I should write a police English book for Koreans...which I did.
Q: What is your current position and for how long?
A:
I run a consultancy in risk and security management advising companies on industrial security, espionage ... doing risk assessments for them and threat analysis. Most companies spend vast amounts on security which amounts to lots of gadgets intended to protect everything, rather than looking at the assets in need of protection and focusing on them _ hence I assess the assets and decide which are critical.
Most of the work is outside of Korea and we have current projects protecting ships from piracy off the coast of Somalia, to a just finished project in Afghanistan, and another in Iraq. They all amount to armed security and personal protection.
When advising executives the main focus is kidnapping and ransom; obviously we want to avoid it so we do a complete risk assessment on the asset (the executive). Before he/she travels we then have to value them in order that we can calculate a ransom value. That might seem odd to some but everyone has a corporate price. Whilst they may be priceless to their families, to the companies the value is limited. I calculate their value based on the consequences of their loss. Usually we arrange ransoms of up to $5 million through specialist insurance providers. If the demand is higher than that then it's for the company or the family to top it up. If they can't then we just have to keep negotiating it down and try to tire them out. This is where it can get complicated because kidnappers know that executives travel with effective security so they tend to go for the softer targets such as wives, kids or lower level employees.
I dealt with a number of kidnappings of children while living in Southern Asia and it's very different from dealing with executives as the emotions run very high. Fortunately things ended well in each of my cases.
So if they can't all be protected it's important at least to provide kidnap survival training to help them cope with the time that they are held which can be weeks, months or even years.
Korean companies tend not to concern themselves so much with this aspect of security because they are relatively new to the scene. Up to now they have been involved with going overseas to developed countries' exhibition shows, to sell and to buy and they'd be home within a few days. Only recently have they been involved in petro-chemical and construction projects in volatile regions and unfortunately it will take a few hard hits before they get the picture.
As an example I take a number of events often seemingly unrelated and look for a pattern. Perhaps the biggest single risk assessment I did was in the run-up to the first Bali bombing. I was sure it was going to happen and even got the location right to within about 200 meters. I wrote to all those I thought would want to know but I guess they considered me just another loon who didn't have any evidence to back up the theory. Sadly it happened and a lot of people died. It's a burden to carry but we do our best. I think that makes me more stubborn now and if I think I know something then I'll keep pushing. It is the weakness of risk management because most of the time you're trying to sell a security solution for something which might not happen at some unknown time in the future.
This is the work that keeps me going but I have a deep passion for child protection issues and got involved in confronting child sexual abuse whilst in Southern Asia many years back. Simply by over-hearing a conversation between a seller and a British pedophile buyer who was describing the type of child he wanted, I found myself starting up a conversation with the buyer after telling him I thought he had made a "good choice."
From that point onwards we met regularly in the same bar and I was able to convince him I had the same sexual interests. This was in Bali and there was a foreign community of such minded individuals there at the time. I eventually got "in" with the crowd and used it as an intelligence gathering project. I had no direction and obviously had no client and it was very nerve racking. I was soon to learn that this was a wider network than just Bali and I went to a few parties in Thailand on the border with Cambodia. The border is very porous and is exploited by child traffickers.
Things were going well until I was betrayed and for my troubles took a knife in the side which was intended to kill me. Unfortunately I was miles from anywhere at the time and having made my escape it took me some time to get patched up. I eventually got back to Bali where I had been living and managed to get treatment.
But I carried on the work with other people I knew in the region and we have been working in child protection there for some years now. And I still do it today. We still gather intelligence on child sex tourists and when we get information on the movements of children then we try to interrupt it. Nowadays the market for child sex trafficking is growing because it is as lucrative as the drugs market with far fewer risks and certainly far lesser punishments when caught. I provide lectures on this subject and the money I get is spent on projects in the south.
In a similar way to assessing the Bali bombings I looked at data on the crackdown on pedophiles in classrooms in the U.K. as well as other areas. After I had finished I realized that Korea was a prime target (not just Korea) for such individuals to gain access to children. I started the long journey of warning various government bodies but was rejected at every turn. Because of my failures over the Bali incident I wasn't going to let this one go. I went to the British Embassy and explained the risk assessment. They also rejected what I was saying and told me I should go to the police if I had evidence of a crime, which I didn't.
Not many months later Interpol released the image of Christopher Neil the boy-child rapist who was found to be working in Seoul with kids and had been there for some considerable time. Knowing the behavior patterns of these individuals it is simply unfathomable that he did not abuse children here.
I then got audiences with government officials and worked with a member of congress, Yoo Seong Min, and together we made a report to the Immigration Bureau on the vulnerabilities of the system here. However they have not heeded the warnings and Korea remains an attractive destination for child sex offenders. I should clarify that the overwhelming number of foreign people here are very decent law abiding citizens and that the biggest group of child sex abusers are from the Korean community, however, the fact is that there is no system in place to determine who is good and who is not.
I actually discovered this name changing pattern here in Korea when dealing with a homicide in Cambodia about six years ago. A British student had been murdered and I had been retained to investigate it. I found he wasn't as pure as his family had believed. Although he hadn't changed his name he was with others who had who were intent on working in Korea.
Q: You earned a BSc. How was that?
I have a BSc in risk and security management and I am currently doing an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Psychology. The difficulty with the current course is that when you have been working in the field for so many years and you already have a good understanding of how people tick then there is a conflict with the professors who do not have the work experience. I know the difference between mad and bad, I understand violence, psychopathic behavior, schizophrenia as it rolls out into real life events whereas they understand it from books. I have a wealth of knowledge on deviant sexual behavior, violence and dangerousness, as well as crime in general, but sadly there's a huge vacuum between academia and the real world, so I am not sure if I fit in with them.
Q. How do you see your future in here?
A.
My wife is Korean and we have two young kids. I tend not to travel so much now and just coordinate a lot from here. The child protection stuff can't stop...I am sure I'll be involved in this until I die. My farm is turning a profit these days so who knows maybe I'll retire to farming at some point.