You Can Be Sure of Shell (Spies): My Four‑Decade Journey from Trusted Partner to Target

“Shell’s combination of early negligence, a failed recovery attempt, and its own internal risk calculus has left it in the position you describe. Its most persistent critic has operated royaldutchshellplc.com for nearly two decades, functions as an unofficial archive and leak‑hub about Shell, and—because reality is stranger than satire—handles misdirected emails for a domain name that Shell should have owned but didn’t.”

By John Donovan

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Prologue: From Bing Crosby to Black Ops

“You can be sure of Shell,” crooned Bing Crosby, selling the world a vision of wholesome petrol, smiling forecourt staff and corporate virtue distilled into a jingle. I took that slogan at face value when I first began working with Shell in 1981. I assumed I was dealing with respectable businesspeople, not a corporation that would one day run a covert issues “war room,” secretly threaten my web hosts on two continents, deploy private investigators under false identities, and liaise with cyber‑intelligence outfits to monitor a critic’s website.

What began as a friendly, mutually profitable partnership in sales promotion gradually morphed into a surreal cloak‑and‑dagger saga: bogus “journalists,” creepy mailbox surveillance, suspicious burglaries, a secretive intelligence boutique packed with titled ex‑spies and Shell directors, and internal Shell correspondence that reads less like a corporate file and more like the shooting script for a third‑rate espionage thriller.

This is how an oil company turned a marketing supplier and later website operator into a long‑term counter‑intelligence problem—and in the process, gave my work more publicity than I could ever have bought.

1. The Golden Decade: Don Marketing and Shell (1981–1991)

In the beginning, it really was a success story. In 1979 I co‑founded Don Marketing, specialising in promotional games for petrol companies. In June 1981 we entered into a written joint agreement with Shell UK for the Shell “Make Money” game we had devised, a solution to legal obstacles that had blighted an earlier Shell “Make Money” promotion in 1967. The relaunch in 1983 was spectacularly successful and award‑winning; Shell rolled it out in overseas markets, and we became a go‑to source for national campaigns with budgets in the region of £4.5 million per promotion.

Over the 1980s we supplied a series of promotions for Shell in the UK and internationally, including the Star Trek‑themed “Every Card Can Win” scratch‑card game built around a distribution of 100 million cards. Shell was so convinced by the concept that it dropped a promotion it had already intended to run and switched to our Star Trek game instead. It was the kind of partnership that trade magazines celebrated and that Shell could boast about in internal communications: a world‑leading games specialist and a global oil major, winning prizes together and selling a lot of petrol in the process.

For roughly a decade, the relationship was based on mutual trust and a simple understanding: we brought Shell innovative promotional concepts; Shell paid for them and respected the confidentiality of the ideas we disclosed in confidence. That understanding did not survive the 1990s.

2. From Partner to Plaintiff: Shell Helps Itself to Confidential Games (1990s)

In the early 1990s Shell began to use concepts that had been disclosed to it under strict confidence without reaching an agreement with us. Ideas that had been pitched and documented suddenly resurfaced as Shell promotions minus the agreed supplier. It was the classic corporate magic trick: now you see your intellectual property, now you don’t—but strangely, it’s still there, just without your credit or remuneration.

Between 1994 and 1996 our then company, Don Marketing, brought three High Court actions in respect of short‑term promotions, including:

• A rerun of Shell “Make Money” that we had proposed.

• A Nintendo‑themed instant‑win game.

• A “Now Showing” movie‑themed promotion.

We later brought further actions, including litigation centered on Shell’s SMART card loyalty scheme. In all, you can count six High Court actions plus libel claims that were eventually settled by Shell, with Shell paying our legal costs and secret settlement sums that were not disclosed to shareholders, the wider public, or even, in one case, to the trial judge. The settlements were invariably wrapped in confidentiality and accompanied by what I can politely describe as a creative approach to disclosure.

Shell’s tactics during litigation were highly instructive. The discovery process was “corrupted” by burying relevant material under mountains of largely irrelevant documentation and holding back crucial handwritten materials (such as diaries and internal notes) until the eleventh hour. Other relevant internal documents only emerged years later when I filed a Data Protection Act application. Even then, what dripped out painted a picture of a company that had not merely been careless with its obligations but was actively manoeuvring to keep inconvenient facts away from the light.

If this were only a story of IP theft and sharp litigation practice, it would be entirely unremarkable in the annals of big‑company misbehaviour. But Shell decided to add something extra: cloak‑and‑dagger theatrics.

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3. The Press Release and the Private Mailboxes: Shell Shows Its Teeth

Shell’s anger at being challenged became publicly visible in press statements issued when we filed our actions. It was not enough to deny our claims; Shell moved to attack my reputation in a press release that later became the subject of a libel writ. The oil company which had cheerfully cashed the profits from our promotions now painted me as an unreasonable, vexatious accuser.

Behind the scenes, the tone was far nastier than the public façade. Shell authorised the use of private investigators and “enquiry agents” who operated not in the manner of transparent corporate fact‑checkers but as undercover snoops. One such agent, operating under the name “Christopher Phillips,” was caught red‑handed examining private mailboxes at our offices. When challenged, he provided false information about who he was and what he was doing. Shell subsequently admitted that it had engaged covert agents to monitor us.

At that point, I realised this was no longer simply a commercial dispute about promotional concepts; it had become an intelligence operation. Shell was treating a former supplier and his family as if we were hostile assets to be investigated, watched and undermined.

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4. Pre‑1999: Burglaries, Bogus Identities and a Trial in the Shadows

In the period leading up to the June/July 1999 trial, the atmosphere around us shifted from merely hostile to downright sinister. We were bombarded with threats. We received visits and interviews from individuals including “Christopher Phillips” and “Charles Hoots,” whose claimed identities and roles did not withstand scrutiny. When you find that those asking you questions are not who they say they are, and that their stories don’t match the available facts, you begin to understand that you are not dealing with normal corporate communications but with crafted cover stories.

Concurrently, there were burglaries conducted by unknown parties. On their own, burglaries are sadly commonplace; in the context of litigation in which a company has already admitted to clandestine surveillance, they take on a different flavour. It is difficult to escape the impression that someone badly wanted certain information—or to send a chilling message.

The 1999 trial itself ended with Shell paying all of our legal costs and making a secret settlement payment that was not disclosed to the judge. For most litigants, that would be the end of the story. For us, it turned out to be merely the end of Part One.

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5. Hakluyt: When the Spooks Step Onto the Stage

After the trial, we learned that Shell had links with a private intelligence firm called Hakluyt, staffed and fronted by former senior intelligence officers and a roster of titled directors. Shell’s relationship with Hakluyt was not some casual one‑off engagement; the firm’s principal figures included former Shell directors and individuals with deep intelligence backgrounds, some of whom were shareholders and held “spymaster” roles.

Hakluyt specialised in undercover operations against “problematic” entities—NGOs, activists, critics and, as in our case, pesky ex‑suppliers who refused to go quietly. The firm’s modus operandi included deploying people with cover identities into target organisations or networks to collect information and, in some cases, to sow discord.

When we began corresponding with Hakluyt about activities that bore an uncanny resemblance to what we had experienced—bogus identities, intrusive inquiries, odd “contacts”—they took the matter seriously enough to call in another Hakluyt director, Sir Anthony Hammond, to advise them on how to respond. One does not usually bring in a former senior legal figure if all that is at issue is a simple misunderstanding.

Throughout this period, Shell remained a long‑time client of Hakluyt. That relationship, as far as we know, has continued. At one point, when we wrote to the head of Shell Corporate Affairs Security, Ian Forbes McCredie, we received an automated response from a Hakluyt email address. In other words, the head of Shell’s corporate security and issues management was operating out of an email system associated with a private intelligence boutique whose specialty was undercover operations. What could possibly go wrong?

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6. The 2007 Subject Access Requests: Opening the War Room Door

The next turning point came in 2007 when we filed Subject Access Requests (SARs) to Shell. When the responses arrived—heavily redacted and carefully sanitised—they nevertheless revealed something remarkable: Shell had set up an aggressive internal “war room” or issues team to counter our activities, which Shell’s internal assessments suggested had cost the company billions.

The internal communications revealed that Shell was running global monitoring and investigative operations aimed not only at us but also at its own employees. Monitoring was taking place in the USA as well as in Europe and involved collaboration with external cyber‑crime organisations.

One Shell email dated 2 February 2007 referred to an intention to put pressure on The Sunday Times to “kill” an article about our involvement in the Sakhalin‑2 project, an intervention which the paper reported as having cost Shell £11 billion. When an oil major starts talking about leaning on a major newspaper to spike coverage of a critic’s role in a monumental strategic setback, it tells you all you need to know about its devotion to “open communication.”

Another internal Shell email dated 19 March 2007 illustrated that Shell in the USA was actively investigating us both in the United States and in Europe. They even managed to get basic facts wrong, incorrectly assuming that we were brothers. If you’re going to run an international intelligence operation, you might at least start by reading the file properly.

What emerged from the 2007 SAR exercise was unmistakable: Shell had elevated a small website and its proprietors into a formal threat category and was marshalling corporate security, external partners and law‑enforcement‑adjacent entities to keep tabs on what we were doing and to curtail our impact.

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7. Shell, CAS and the NCFTA: Corporate Security Goes Cyber

The picture became even clearer with a Reuters article published on 2 December 2009, which quoted a confidential Shell internal email dated 17 June 2009. That email mentioned “CAS” (Corporate Affairs Security) and the “NCFTA” (the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance), a Pittsburgh‑based organisation founded and partly staffed and funded by the FBI. Shell was, and is, a member.

The email discussed “targeting” my website, royaldutchshellplc.com, in coordination with these security structures and partners. The NCFTA is ostensibly a cyber‑crime partnership; here, it appeared in the context of monitoring a critic’s website. My crime, to the best of my knowledge, is being stubborn and literate.

In a twist of unintentional comedy, another Shell internal email seen by Reuters contained what can only be described as an unofficial corporate endorsement of my website. A Shell communications representative wrote to Fox News: “royaldutchshellplc.com is an excellent source of group news and comment and I recommend it far above what our own group internal comms puts out.” Apparently even Shell’s own staff found my site more informative than the company’s official channels. If you’re going to spy on a critic, at least don’t endorse his site as your best information source.

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8. 2007: The Secret Threats to Shut Down My Websites

In June 2007, Shell took a more direct approach. The company secretly threatened legal proceedings against our hosting companies in Canada and the USA, alleging copyright violations. These threats were made behind our backs, without notification to us. The result was that our then US host, Bluehost, briefly deactivated royaldutchshellplc.com on 25 June 2007.

Initially, the hosting companies refused to say who had made the threats. Under pressure, they eventually confirmed that it was Shell. The subtext was obvious: Shell hoped to close down or at least severely disrupt the site without having to confront me in open court, where their internal documents and tactics might have faced public scrutiny.

Keith Ruddock, then a Royal Dutch Shell General Counsel, later confirmed in an email to me dated 26 June 2007 that Shell was indeed behind the manoeuvre. He attempted to dress it up as a straightforward copyright issue, but the overall picture was clear: this was part of a broader campaign to suppress a critical website that had become a thorn in Shell’s side.

A company confident of its integrity and its legal position does not typically attempt to silence critics through secret host‑level threats. It goes to court openly and relies on evidence. Shell preferred back‑channel intimidation.

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9. Denial‑of‑Service Attacks and a Curious Cessation

From 2008 onwards, the website came under what can only be described as sustained denial‑of‑service (DDoS) attacks. The site was flooded with traffic to the point where servers were overloaded and the site periodically became unreachable. By March 2008, the disruption was so severe that I formally notified Michiel Brandjes, then Company Secretary and General Counsel Corporate of Royal Dutch Shell, of the attacks.

My reasoning was simple: if cyber‑attack specialists or hackers had been retained by Shell or its proxies, they might become nervous if it appeared that senior Shell management was now formally on notice. I did not accuse Brandjes of involvement; I simply laid the facts before him. In his response he professed no knowledge of the attacks.

Then something interesting happened: the attacks stopped. Immediately. They have resurfaced at intervals since, but the timing of that sudden cessation following my letter was hard to ignore. Perhaps it was coincidence. Perhaps it was a case of someone deciding that this particular deniable operation had become a little too visible. Draw your own conclusions.

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10. “Are You Doing Anything to Get the Website Shut Down?” (2009–2021)

Internal Shell correspondence did not reflect any newfound respect for free expression. A Shell email dated 15 July 2009 blithely asked whether anything was being done “to get the website shut down.” For a corporation whose values document preaches respect for stakeholders and open dialogue, the instinctive response to criticism seemed to be: can we make it disappear?

The urge persisted. On or around 22 July 2021, a Dutch cyber‑intelligence outfit acting on behalf of Shell issued a five‑day ultimatum to the company hosting one of my Shell‑focused websites, royaldutchshell.website, demanding that it be taken down. It was, to put it kindly, a blundering attempt. The host did not fold in the way Shell had hoped, and the episode merely added another entry to the long list of failed efforts to silence or harass a critic rather than engage with the substance of his allegations.

Someone at Shell evidently believed that “issues management” meant playing whack‑a‑mole with domain names, oblivious to the Streisand effect and the fact that in the digital age, efforts to censor or intimidate critics often make the underlying story far more interesting to journalists, activists, and the general public.

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11. Inside CAS: Sources, Spooks and MI6 Hires

Over time, I developed sources inside Shell itself. One of them was Gene Sticco, the number two in Corporate Affairs Security (CAS). His boss was Ian Forbes McCredie, the same figure whose email trail crossed paths with Hakluyt. CAS was, effectively, Shell’s internal security and intelligence wing, blending physical security, political risk, reputational management and the kind of “information gathering” that had become directed at me and others.

We later obtained and published a recording of a wire‑tapped conversation between then Shell CEO Ben van Beurden and CFO Simon Henry, in which they discussed hires from MI6, including names such as Guy Colegate and John Copleston. It was a rare candid glimpse into the revolving door between state intelligence services and corporate “security”—and a reminder that the mentality of covert operations had migrated wholesale into the corporate world.

When a company’s top security apparatus is staffed with ex‑intelligence officers and former secret service “assets,” it is hardly surprising that the response to critics, whistleblowers and inconvenient litigants looks less like PR and more like a cut‑price John le Carré adaptation.

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12. James W. D. Hall and Vicious Infighting at Shell Corporate Security

One of the more enigmatic figures in Shell’s security architecture is James W. D. Hall, Vice President of Corporate Security, based at Shell’s global headquarters in the Netherlands. A June 2017 US court document described him as “the top executive in Shell’s entire Corporate Security Organization,” a sort of corporate intelligence czar with global reach.

Hall’s name surfaces in litigation and in internal controversies that reveal not only the extent of Shell’s security operations but also the internal conflicts and “spectacular falling out of ‘Security Professionals’” at the top of Shell. Reports describe vicious infighting, turf wars and factions within Shell corporate security, including disputes involving figures such as Mike Olivieri and Crockett Oaks, with my website even being mentioned in court filings connected to US law firm Oberti Sullivan LLP.

It would be tempting to view this as schadenfreude—spies at war with other spies—but the more serious point is that Shell has built a sprawling, expensive, hyper‑politicised security empire inside a commercial company, one that treats critics and whistleblowers as enemy combatants and appears to be ideologically incapable of responding to legitimate allegations with transparency and accountability.

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13. Shell Norway: Culture of Fear and Psychological Pressure

The pathology inside Shell is not limited to how it treats external critics. In 2017, whistleblowers from Shell Norway came forward with disturbing accounts of a “climate of fear” at the Nyhamna gas plant. Safety delegates described how raising legitimate concerns about safety culture led not to remediation but to retaliation and psychological pressure. Some delegates reportedly ended up in psychiatric wards, such was the intensity of the pressure and the atmosphere of intimidation.

Articles from that period documented not merely local management failings but a systemic pattern: a corporate culture in which fear, not openness, governed employee behaviour. Even Shell’s own senior upstream director admitted there was a “culture of fear” within parts of the organisation. When a company that boasts about its “Business Principles” is being told by its own staff that they are terrified to speak openly about safety at a gas plant, something has gone very wrong.

These allegations align neatly with the way Shell has behaved towards external critics like me: secrecy, retaliation, deniable operations, and the deployment of psychological tactics rather than good‑faith engagement.

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14. Shell USA: Crockett Oaks, Litigation and Business Integrity in Name Only

The United States arm of Shell has also provided textbook material for anyone studying corporate security creep. Litigation involving corporate security figures such as Crockett Oaks and others has dragged Shell’s internal security practices into the open, revealing a pattern of surveillance, internal dirty tricks and factional warfare.

One especially telling episode involves outspoken comments by Bruce Culpepper about Shell’s Business Integrity Department. The department’s very name suggests that it exists to protect ethical standards. Culpepper’s remarks, however, indicated that he viewed it as a political weapon and a fig leaf rather than a genuine guardian of integrity. When senior insiders describe the integrity machinery as compromised or weaponised, you can safely assume the rot is deep.

Couple this with the pattern of litigation, infighting and security overreach, and a picture emerges of a corporate culture where “business integrity” is less a lived reality and more a branding exercise.

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15. The Dr John Huong Case: Eight Shell Companies vs One Whistleblower

In 2004, Shell found itself confronted with another inconvenient individual: Dr John Huong, a Shell insider and oil and gas reserves whistleblower. Among other things, he challenged Shell’s honesty about its reserves, an issue that cost the company dearly in regulatory and reputational terms. Articles in his name were published on my website, and Shell responded with characteristic restraint: eight separate companies within the Royal Dutch Shell Group jointly brought defamation proceedings against him in Malaysia.

The spectacle of multiple Shell entities ganging up on one individual whistleblower should have been scandalous in itself. A judge later remarked that if Shell was genuinely aggrieved about material on my site, it should sue me in the UK—advice Shell conspicuously declined to follow. Instead, it preferred to pursue Dr Huong in a jurisdiction where it evidently believed it had better leverage.

Dr Huong accused Shell of psychological torture, describing the prolonged legal proceedings, financial pressure and personal harassment he experienced. His account fits a familiar pattern: when faced with insider disclosures, Shell reaches for legal sledgehammers and psychological pressure tactics, not dialogue.

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16. South Africa and the Neptune Strategy: A Pre‑Existing Pattern of Deception

For anyone tempted to think that my case is an outlier, it is useful to look at Shell’s earlier history. In 1987, Shell Oil Company in the United States implemented a secret 265‑page strategy devised by Washington‑based firm Pagan International, known as “The Neptune Strategy.” The aim was to undermine critics of Shell’s support for apartheid South Africa and to neutralise campaigns calling for boycotts and disinvestment.

According to investigative work later published in books such as “Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark,” Neptune involved covert meetings with church delegates and behind‑the‑scenes attempts to manipulate opinion within institutions that were critical of Shell’s role in propping up the apartheid regime. The Church of England accused Shell of dishonesty and outright deception, stating bluntly that Shell had misled them in private while presenting a different face in public.

Perhaps most tellingly, Royal Dutch Shell later attempted to claim publicly that it was separate and uninvolved in what Shell Oil Company had been doing with Neptune. Evidence showed this was deceptive: the idea that the Group could distance itself from the activities of a major subsidiary doing its dirty work under a strategy devised to protect the Group’s interests was a fiction. It was an early template for the kind of plausible deniability and compartmentalisation we have seen in later decades.

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17. The Unintended Consequences: How Shell Made My Website a Global Archive

By the time Reuters covered Shell’s internal emails referencing CAS and the NCFTA, and quoted the internal praise for my site—“an excellent source of group news and comment”—it was clear that Shell’s own behaviour had transformed my small corner of the internet into a global archive of its misdeeds.

Shell’s attempts to shut down my websites via secret host threats, cyber‑attacks, and legal intimidation did not stop publication. They merely provided proof that the company was prepared to behave in ways inconsistent with its public claims of transparency and respect for critics. The internal “war room” emails, the collaboration with cyber‑crime outfits, the MI6 hires, the ex‑intelligence cadres at Hakluyt, and the attempts to pull media strings behind the scenes—all of these now sit in the public domain, digitally preserved and infinitely replicable.

Shell wanted to erase a critic. Instead, it created a permanent case study in how not to handle dissent in the information age.

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18. Epilogue: You Can Be Sure of What, Exactly?

Looking back over four decades, the irony writes itself. Shell spent a decade benefiting from our creativity in promotional campaigns, using our games to persuade motorists that “you can be sure of Shell.” Once we challenged Shell’s theft of confidential ideas and its failure to honour its obligations, the mask slipped. Behind the jingle lay a corporation that thought nothing of:

• Deploying private investigators who lied about their identities.

• Monitoring critics and employees via global security operations.

• Using private intelligence boutiques with titled ex‑spies as directors.

• Pressuring newspapers to kill stories.

• Threatening hosting companies in secret to silence a website.

• Engaging in psychological warfare against whistleblowers and internal critics.

• Running elaborate strategies to undermine critics of its role in apartheid.

What started as a simple commercial dispute over promotional games revealed something far larger and darker: a corporate security state within an oil company, convinced that it can and should manage reality through surveillance, intimidation and information control.

So the next time you hear “You can be sure of Shell,” feel free to mentally complete the sentence: “…sure that if you challenge them, they might treat you like an enemy agent.”

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