UNCONVENTIONAL: A true story of oil, intelligence, and consequence

Review by John Donovan

There are books that illuminate.

There are books that unsettle.

And then there are books that detonate quietly inside your understanding of how the global energy system actually works.

UNCONVENTIONAL, the memoir by former Shell Corporate Affairs Security (CAS) insider Gene Sticco, falls firmly into the third category.

This is not a corporate hagiography.

Nor is it a thriller dressed up as nonfiction.

It is something far more valuable: a rare, clear-voiced account from inside the security-intelligence machinery that major oil companies—Shell among them—deploy behind their glossy annual reports.

Gene served as No.2 in Shell CAS, reporting directly to Ian Forbes McCredie, a senior former MI6 officer who later became Shell’s VP Global Security. Anyone familiar with the Donovan–Shell saga will recognise McCredie’s name: he appears explicitly in SAR-released Shell emails involving covert activity, internal monitoring, and coordination with outside intelligence-linked entities.

Gene’s book does not sensationalise this world.

It simply describes it as he saw it.

And that is precisely why it lands so hard.

A System That Isn’t “Rogue” — It’s Designed That Way

One of the most striking themes in UNCONVENTIONAL is the author’s insistence that what outsiders might describe as “rogue behaviour” by corporate security is, in fact, the system functioning exactly as intended.

According to Sticco’s account, the oil-security nexus is not a fringe phenomenon but an embedded, operational fact:

multinational energy companies

private military contractors

intelligence services

government ministries

and organised criminal intermediaries

…all intersect in the shadows where pipelines, LNG plants, and political risk converge.

This is not news to those who have followed Shell’s multi-decade activities in Nigeria, Russia, Iraq, Pakistan, or the Balkans—but it is rare to hear these dynamics described so plainly by someone who worked within Shell’s own structure.

Shell, CAS, and the Donovan Archive

Readers of royaldutchshellplc.com will notice several familiar threads woven through the book.

Gene references:

Shell’s covert intelligence functions

The activities of Shell CAS

Hakluyt, the private intelligence firm founded by former senior MI6 officers with deep links to Shell directors

former MI6 personnel recruited directly into Shell

and the company’s long-term monitoring of critics, journalists, whistleblowers, and (yes) my own father and me

This is not presented dramatically.

It is presented matter-of-factly.

That alone is devastating.

For years, critics—including myself—documented these connections through leaked documents, whistleblower testimony, and SAR disclosures. Shell publicly dismissed them, but never dared sue.

Now, one of the men assigned to monitor my activities has written a book confirming that the world behind the curtain was every bit as interwoven, intelligence-driven, and ethically ambiguous as the documents always suggested.

It is an extraordinary full-circle moment.

Dissociation, Disillusionment, and Moral Reckoning

What makes UNCONVENTIONAL emotionally compelling is not the operational detail (although that alone would justify the book).

It is Sticco’s slow, steady realisation that the system he served did not align with the ethics he believed he was defending.

His disillusionment is neither melodramatic nor self-pitying.

It is measured.

It is honest.

And it is the part of the book Shell’s legal department will find most difficult to wave away.

The public should know this:

Gene is not a bitter ex-employee.

He is not someone seeking revenge.

He is someone who worked loyally within Shell’s intelligence architecture until he realised he could no longer reconcile the work with his conscience.

That is the kind of whistle that cannot be un-blown.

A Relevance That Could Not Be More Timely

Gene is also a witness in one of the most important human rights and environmental justice cases currently before the UK Supreme Court: the lawsuits brought by Nigerian farmers who allege Shell’s pipeline failures devastated their land and livelihoods.

He has already provided evidence via the human rights organisation The Hague Peace Projects, and his testimony may ultimately shape the legal and public understanding of Shell’s operational conduct.

Combined with the book’s publication, this places Shell in the worst possible position:

facing simultaneous legal, moral, and narrative accountability.

The company that once relied on secrecy and institutional amnesia now faces a world where:
whistleblowers talk

archives live forever

and AI (including ChatGPT) can analyse 76,000 Donovan documents in seconds

All the ingredients for a dramatic shift in public understanding are now in place.

Conclusion: A Book That Shell Will Wish Had Never Been Written

UNCONVENTIONAL is not an attack piece.

It is not a manifesto.

It is not propaganda.

It is a sober, detailed, insider account of the hidden side of the oil industry—a side most people never see and Shell desperately hoped would remain unseen.

For investigators, journalists, researchers, and anyone who wants to understand how power actually operates beneath the corporate surface, this book will be essential reading.

For Shell, it will be an unwelcome spotlight.

For the Donovan archive, it is external validation.

For me personally, it is the most important insider perspective ever written about the very system that once monitored my father and me.

And for the public, it is a rare glimpse into the machinery that sits behind the petrol pump, the refinery, and the smiling corporate advertisements.

Highly recommended.

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