The men were supposed to be dead. For years, they were quietly telling executives about the actions of competitors, opponents and disgruntled employees. The team's secrecy ended abruptly in 2017: one member accused the others of stealing trade secrets, wiretapping and destroying evidence.
In an email to the top executives of the company, Richard Jacobs claimed that they broke the law while carrying out their dirtiest missions. His lawyer wrote a letter saying that the team went so far as to hack foreign governments and wiretap their own employees.
The most damning allegations of illegal activity were not true. He withdrew his claims in June after four years. Mr. Jacobs wrote a letter to his former co-workers as part of a legal settlement, but he never intended to suggest that they broke the law.
He apologized. I regret that I didn't clarify the statements earlier and that my statements may have caused injury or distress. A lawyer for Mr. Jacobs declined to comment.
The story Mr. Jacobs told was entwined with the reputation of the company. In the months before his story emerged, the ride-sharing company had been accused of permitting rampant workplace harassment, mishandling medical records and concealing data breeches.
It was obvious to people that the company was also stealing. The company fell in the economy because of perception. After a year of scandals, the company hired a new chief executive with a clean house and began reporting sexual assaults on its rides. In the most recent quarter, the company reported $4.8 billion in revenue, and has yet to turn a profit.
The spokesman wouldn't say what Mr. Jacobs claimed or how those claims affected the people involved.
The reputation of the company was more important than the reputation of its employees. The account is based on hundreds of pages of documents in lawsuits and conversations with some of the men involved in the incident, who are speaking about it for the first time.
The former teammates of Mr. Jacobs faced questions from friends, family and potential employers about their past. They didn't regain trust after they regained it. The men were worried about someone searching them next time.
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A former intelligence agent for the C.I.A. became a leader of the Strategic Services Group at the ride-sharing company.
Nick Gicinto walked out of a secure Central Intelligence Agency facility in suburban Virginia on a sunny spring day in 2016 for the last time.
It was a sad departure. Mr. Gicinto had worked at the agency for more than a decade, traveling around the world and honing his ability to cultivate sources and collect information. His wife worked for the government, but their careers created a strain on the family. Mr. Gicinto wanted to be home more often.
There were no security guards at the office. Mr. Gicinto could enter the office from the elevator and find a large space with fishbowl conference rooms, free snacks, and more.
The environment Mr. Gicinto had left at the C.I.A. was very different.
In that year, the company was expanding into foreign markets. The pushback was swift and sometimes violent. Several cars of the ride-sharing service were set on fire and drivers were beaten during protests by taxi drivers. Competitors in China and India used sophisticated methods to lower their prices.
To fight back, the company started to recruit former C.I.A. officers, law enforcement officials, and cybersecurity experts. The team would gather information about threats against the drivers and executives of the company.
They didn't know what was happening. They needed someone who understood the human aspect of these things and foreign environments.
Margaret O'Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and author of "The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America", said that tech companies hire from the intelligence community.
The tradecraft for the firms that followed the Semiconductor firms in Silicon Valley was established. They were paranoid about trade secret theft and hired former intelligence and law enforcement personnel to protect their intellectual property.
Silicon Valley is a highly competitive industry and it has always been important for security and secrecy.
In addition to the recruitment of the C.I.A., the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, other companies have also recruited former Pentagon officials to advise on defense contracts.
Silicon Valley executives were often reluctant to discuss where the hires came from, and wanted to avoid being accused of using the same intelligence gathering techniques as the government. Executives were interested in the skills the employees could provide.
Mr. Gicinto thought he would be the leader of the new intelligence team. He met Mr. Jacobs on his first day at the ride-sharing company. The two men would report to Mat Henley, a cybersecurity executive who had investigated fraudsters for eBay and child predator for Facebook.
The relationship was tense and both men seemed uneasy about sharing leadership.
Their work got going quickly. The group, which grew to include dozens of employees, wanted to keep track of their competitors in other countries. They needed to protect their own executives from being surveilled, as well as fend off web-scraping operations, which used automated systems to collect information about their pricing and driver supply.
It was a huge task. Some of the projects were sent to intelligence firms to spy on driver protests. Other work was done in house, as the company built its own system to gather competitor data. The law limits the use of public data for commercial purposes.
Mr. Gic recruited people he knew from his time at the C.I.A.: a fellow agent, Ed Russo, and a former agent for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Jake Nocon.
Didi's chief executive was tailed when she visited the Bay Area. When Mr. Kalanick traveled to Beijing, employees tried to keep Didi's teams out, shuttling his phones to other hotels so his location wouldn't ping in a place he wasn't.
The game of helping our executives carry out their meetings without divulging who they were meeting was what we wanted. It was fun, right? It was a cat-and-mouse game.
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The game of helping executives carry out their meetings without divulging who they were meeting was what Mat Henley, a former Uber cybersecurity executive, said.
The team relied on intelligence contractors. A contractor was taking photos at a conference in San Francisco. The contractor was sitting at a table in the lobby when members of Ms.Liu's team sat down next to him. He recorded their conversation and sent his findings to the company.
When I received it, I sent it to the company. What do we do with it? Mr. Gicinto said. The audio was choppy and filled with noise. It didn't bring any value to us.
Mr. Gicinto, Mr. Nocon, and Mr. Russo were trying to keep up with their frenetic pace. Tech workers used to take for granted the excesses of their old jobs, but they were a stark departure from their old jobs. The men were curiosities for their co-workers.
Mr. Nocon said that they were looked at as an outlier. A co-worker remarked that Mr. Nocon had carried a firearm instead of a laptop in the meeting.
The work was familiar. I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it, like, "Is this weird to be doing this for a tech company?" Mr. Nocon said so. I feel like I am doing what I was trained to do.
The end purpose in this is similar to the end purpose of doing surveille operations for law enforcement. You are trying to understand something that you cannot get off the internet.
Mr. Jacobs, who was a law enforcement officer, thought the work was unusual. The recording of Ms. Liu stuck in his mind and eventually made its way into a letter his lawyer sent to the executives of the ride-sharing company.
She was recorded in a public place. According to his email and letter, Mr. Jacobs believed that his co-workers had crossed a line.
The intelligence team tried to keep an eye on Didi, but they were unable to stop the rival. In exchange for a stake in the company, Didi agreed to sell its Chinese business. In the same month, the ride-sharing company acquired Otto, a self-driving truck start-up.
The acquisition caused alarm at the company. The executives believed that Otto's founders had walked out the door of Google with crucial documents about how its self-driving cars were built, and that they had been relentlessly poached after their departure. The employees and documents were going to be used in the company.
Mr. Kalanick believed that the acquisition of Otto would speed up the development of self-drive vehicles. The market was flooded with other companies chasing the same dreams as he imagined a future in which self-driving cars would replace human drivers.
The golden routes were developed by the companies to woo investors. Visiting venture capitalists would go for test rides along a golden route to decide whether or not to invest.
The intelligence team began filming competitors' vehicles as they traveled their golden routes after the overseas work ended. It staked out the routes in San Francisco and Pittsburgh to look for spies and recorded the vehicles on those routes.
Mr. Nocon said that the work he did in Arizona did not feel like tech work. I had been working for the government for a long time and I was used to observing things from public places.
In February of last year, the ride-sharing company faced a crisis. Users who objected to the company's labor practices launched a mass campaign calling on people to uninstall the app. Susan Fowler, a former employee at the company, went public about her experiences with sexual harassment, which opened the door for other employees to speak up. After Ms. Fowler gave her revelations, the company sued it for trade secret theft. Ms. Fowler later worked for The New York Times as an opinion editor.
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A car is being driven. The company demoted and fired Richard Jacobs after he clashed with other members of its intelligence team.
The intelligence team was not doing well. Mr. Jacobs was stripped of his managerial duties and assigned to Mr. Gicinto.
Mr. Jacobs was fired in April after he was accused of transferring confidential documents to his personal email account. Mr. Jacobs was demoted for raising concerns about the group's work. Mr. Halunen didn't reply to the request for comment.
After human resources scheduled a meeting with Mr. Jacobs, he sent his resignation to Mr. Kalanick and other top executives.
Mr. Jacobs said in the email that Mr. Gicinto had orchestrated the illegal activities, and his lawyer followed up with a letter that detailed his allegations of illegal behavior.
The company could not afford the first hint of a scandal.
Mr. Henley said that everything went off the rails. The law firm that was hired by the company to investigate Mr. Jacobs's claims was called, WilmerHale. At the same time, the lawsuit was pending, and the company stopped trying to gather intel on its competitors. The focus of the team shifted again, and members were tasked with internal investigations looking into fraud on the platform and media leaks by employees.
The men were aware that Mr. Jacobs was being investigated. People are getting pulled in to be interviewed.
The team filmed the vehicles of Waymo and the Didi executive was followed and photographed, some of the things Mr. Jacobs raised in the letter were true. Mr. Jacobs acknowledged in his letter to his former co-workers that some of his claims were false.
Mr. Jacobs wrote that he didn't mean to imply that Mr. Gicinto, Mr. Nocon, and Mr. Russo had a mission to steal trade secrets.
He said that the men hacked the Argentine government website and that they downloaded data about taxi drivers. He said that the team had wiretapped their own employees, but that the leak investigation was actually a wiretap of an employee who had secretly recorded an internal meeting and shared it with the news media.
According to legal documents in the Waymo lawsuit, Mr. Jacobs and his lawyer were paid $7.5 million to cooperate with the investigation. The findings were never made public, but the men said they had been cleared of any wrongdoing. In June, Mr. Kalanick resigned.
The allegations were made public in the midst of the lawsuit. The men went from being nowhere online to everywhere.
The letter written by Mr. Halunen seemed to confirm the theory that the technology was stolen by the company. The judge overseeing the case said that the letter required a postponement so that the company could dig into the claims.
If half of the letter is true, it would be an injustice for the company to go to trial.
Mr. Jacobs appeared to distance himself from some of the claims in the letter. He didn't have time to review it before his lawyer sent it, and he wasn't sure if Mr. Gicinto and his co-workers had broken the law.
I didn't think it was patently illegal. Mr. Jacobs had questions about the ethics of it. It felt overly aggressive.
The intelligence team was denounced by the executives of the company.
Tony West, the company's chief legal officer, wrote in an internal email that there was no place for such practices or behavior at the company. Any kind of competitive intelligence project that involves the surveilling of individuals should be stopped now.
The members of the intelligence team had a meeting with Mr. West because they were afraid they had just been fired.
Mr. Gicinto said that Tony met with him and his entire team. People felt better. He and other team members still wanted the record to be straight. It seemed to them that the company wouldn't defend them because of their reputation. The meeting on Mr. West's behalf was not commented on by the spokesman.
The work continued. The team briefed the new chief executive on the intel it had gathered after surveilling self-driving cars. The leak from Mr. West's legal team was investigated.
The scandal lingered. Some members of the other security teams refused to work with the men.
The team members resigned. Mr. Nocon and Mr. Gicinto went to the electric car company. Mr. Russo was back at work. They were sued by the company, which claimed they had taken confidential documents.
The spokesman said that they don't object to the former employees making claims. We object to their misuse of privileged information for personal gain and their walking off with company property. The lawsuit was not made public.
The men filed a libel suit against Mr. Jacobs. The allegations of wiretapping employees, hacking governments and stealing trade secrets were not publicly refuting and continued to be followed by Mr. Jacobs.
Mr. Henley was a manager on the security team. He said that some of the employees he tried to hire would drop out of the interview process after looking him up online. He said there was one issue that came up at the top if you typed in his name.
He returned to investigate child safety issues online after leaving Cloudflare, a year after he left Facebook. He now depends on former employees to vouch for him.
Mr. Nocon and Mr. Gicinto were looking into leaks to the media. The claims made by Mr. Jacobs were discovered by an employee who admitted to them that he had shared sensitive information. Mr. Gicinto felt that he couldn't continue in his job.
He said that if you continue to do this, you will be a target.
He quit the company and went to work with Mr. Russo. Mr. Nocon is still at the company.
Mr. Jacobs settled a lawsuit with his former co-workers. The terms of the settlement are private.
The men said their experiences in Silicon Valley made them distrust the executives who were eager to use their talents but unwilling to take responsibility for them.
Intelligence gathering in the hypercompetitive tech world continues to be in demand. Mr. Gicinto, the former C.I.A. officer, has a warning for any of his former colleagues considering a move to this part of the private sector, where the motives behind a given mission are not always as clear as he found them in his past work life.
When you are given a mission or a task in the government, you execute it. Your experience tells you to go execute because your boss or the leadership have given you the tasking, and you worry about how to do it, because you have never had to worry about that before.
