WorldCity Business Magazine

Sharing Secrets

by Mary Dempsey

A government-backed clearinghouse on foreign security has unveiled its first U.S. unit and it’s in Miami.

For businesses in a global economy, there’s plenty to worry about, from kidnappings of executives to the theft of propriety information from offices outside the United States.

For two decades, the Overseas Security Advisory Council, a public-private effort launched by the State Department, has organized meetings through U.S. embassies and foreign trade offices so overseas executives can share security concerns and tips.

Now OSAC has launched its first chapter on U.S. soil: its Latin America Region Council in Miami.

At the group’s first meeting, security officials from several multinationals discussed issues ranging from strategies for dealing with an Avian flu outbreak to alternative ways to get workers and cargo safely to the international airport outside Caracas.

“We’re doing a service to protect people overseas,” said Doug Allison, the global director of OSAC within the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C. “OSAC is a program that works. It works very well.”

The meetings are set up as a way for the private sector and the government to share information that could help businesses minimize their risk overseas.

“It allows us to be responsive to the needs of the private sector,” said Edgar Moreno, special agent in charge of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service in Miami and the local contact for the OSAC meetings.

“Terrorism has remained on the forefront since the beginning when OSAC was established. But there are other things, such as protecting the private sector’s proprietary information from economic espionage.”

In 1985, then-Secretary of State George Schultz formed OSAC within the State Department to protect corporations from a burst of terrorism.

Ireland’s IRA was setting bombs in Great Britain. The leftist Red Brigades had left a bloody wake in Italy. The Beider-Meinhof gang was active in Germany. And Greece’s 17th of November named for the date of a bloody government attack on protesting students in 1973 was attacking U.S. servicemen and diplomats and eventually bombed a Citibank office.

Lawlessness in Latin America was also a problem. Colombia’s drug lords were flashing cash outside their own country, and Sendero Luminoso terrorists were setting off bombs in Peru.

“Secretary of State Schultz was concerned about it for national security reasons but also from the business point of view. There were worries that terrorism was beginning to focus more on softer targets like the business community,” said Allison. “He believed exchanges of information between the government and U.S. businesses could help.”

Globally, the council began with 15 members, all of them large corporations. Since then it has grown to 3,500 members, include non-profits, universities and faith-based entities, although 85 percent of the members are corporations.

Odalys Fajardo-Guerrero, the managing director of global security risk company Vance, was an active supporter of the effort to open an OSAC chapter in Miami. She described the first Miami meeting:

“About 58 folks from Fortune 500 corporations were there. Most have their regional headquarters for Latin America here. Folks in Atlanta sent their representatives, too.”

She said damage to the key roadway linking Caracas to its international airport was a hot topic at the meeting, as were discussions of so-called bird flu. At the second meeting, the state department brought in officials from Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela to discuss general safety concerns, including street crime in those cities. The Miami chapter’s goal is to meeting quarterly.

“The people attending are the security professionals at the corporations. OSAC is a very credible organization and these meetings are bringing together the right people to discuss very serious issues,” Fajardo-Guerrero said. “The business sector can be another front on the war on terrorism.”

In Washington, Allison said the Miami chapter is already being eyed as a model for possibly starting a second domestic unit, perhaps a West Coast chapter to focus on concerns in Asia.

“I think it’s been a major success already,” said Moreno in Miami. “I literally get people every day calling to ask to join.”