http://www.nardelloandco.com/executive-leadership-senior-staff/sabina-menschel/A veteran of the top corporate intelligence firm in North America with stints in the FBI and Harvard Business School credentials, Menschel was a catch for Nardello & Co., which has offices in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and China.
What Menschel does in her short article is break down investigative work into three broad activities. These are Googling it, looking at public documents, and asking questions.
Hardly groundbreaking but it does confirm that intelligence work is the same as that other pursuit, plain old journalism, hence their ultimate classification as homework–the task of finding answers demanded by superiors.
So the different varieties of private eyes are just like their counterparts in the media? Actually more like their counterparts in genuine state-funded intelligence agencies who are in turn boring professorial types. Take it from Siegfried Beer, the director of an open source newsletter on covert activities, who appears to have visited the CIA often enough.
“They act like I did in university, sitting in the office,” he said in a 2014 interview with Cafe Babel. “…I felt like I was in uni, one doctor after the other. Specialist work on specialist problems, 9 to 5, it’s totally normal.”
According to Botbol his editorial team “read what others publish so as to know what is publicly known.”
Which fits with Menschel’s proclivity for search engine-ing facts and plumbing social networks even if the results are imperfect.
Then Botbol, and by extension Menschel, reach out to people as a final “intuitive” touch.
“Knowing which approach will resonate with an individual source requires contextual knowledge and experience,” is Menschel’s advice in her article. “An investigator should have questions prepared, but be flexible and ready to pursue unanticipated lines of inquiry.”
