An Arabian sun beats down, searing a secluded outpost on the border of Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Two dozen travelers wait in line. The heat rises. The people sweat. The line has come to a stop.

     The border guard is speaking Arabic, trying to tell an Azerbaijani that his paper-work is useless. 

     “No! You cannot cross the border with this passport.”

     “I don’t understand! Stamp this! Let me go!”

     Mismatched words bounce off each other. The feud goes on. It is hot and dusty like only midday in the Middle East can be.

     And then a young man who speaks Arabic and a few words of Russian seems to simply appear. With a bit of tact and professional assurance, he sorts out the words and ends the dispute, and in doing so ingratiates himself with the guard. As a result, he gets preferential treatment to cross the border, treatment he can sorely use.

     The young man is traveling with a mother and four children. They are on a tight schedule. Turning back is not an option.

     The official gladly dashes off stamps and signatures and thanks, and in doing so has unwittingly hastened the escape of a family being smuggled away from an abusive Arab husband.

     Hours later the freed woman, an American, and her liberator, a former CIA spy, will celebrate with a champagne toast at 30,000 feet as they soar out into international air space. The abandoned husband will no doubt fume. The multilingual ex-spy will put the last touches on a report to his boss in West Palm Beach. And a small, private intelligence firm on Clematis Street will bill yet another client.

     Rustmann is not shy about his past affiliation with the CIA. It is his badge of legitimacy.

     In his West Palm Beach headquarters, he serves coffee in a mug bearing the CIA insignia. A stack of passports, topped with his old diplomatic issue, occupies a corner of the desk.

     He readily admits that CTC is run like a CIA field office. Everyone here has been trained at “the farm,” the CIA’s school in Virginia. They use the same methods. They talk the same language. They even fax information in CIA cable style.

     After doing it the CIA way for nearly a quarter of a century, Rustmann isn’t about to let good training go to waste.

     “It’s a style we’re all comfortable with,” he says. “I understand what everyone’s doing and how they’re going about it. I know that certain procedures are going to be used, that what we come up with is something we can trust.”

     Lean and trim at 55, Rustmann is friendly and surprisingly forthcoming. He comes off as a man who kept secrets for 25 years and then suddenly found his talent and his opinions unshackled in the world of free enterprise.

     “When I retired, the spirit of the agency was already changing, and some of us could tell it wasn’t going to be much fun anymore,” he says.

     “I was 50 and I was being paid at the top of the government scale, about $120,000 a year. That wasn’t going to change either.”

     In 1990 he borrowed some seed money and started CTC, “doing the kind of work for business that the government refuses to touch.”

     The firm’s revenues have doubled each of the last three years. CTC took in nearly $700,000 in 1995.

     The kind of “exfiltration” mission that brought the American woman out of the Middle East is “probably one of the sexier things we do,” says Rustmann, “but certainly not the bulk of it.”

     In that Arabian rescue, CTC used techniques similar to those the CIA would use for moving defectors.

     CTC’s man spent several days in the small Arab country, scouting out border crossings, setting up an unobtrusive meeting place, loading an escape vehicle with enough supplies for a family of six.

     Then, in the middle of a working day, the former spy and the mother met at a pre-determined parking lot, loaded the kids for a “picnic” and fled to the border.

     Smooth? Not quite. After being turned back at their planned crossing point and then having a traffic accident that disabled their vehicle, the group spent two days getting to an outpost on the opposite side of the country from their original route. The scene with the Azerbaijani was a bit of luck.

     “We were just standing in line like everyone else,” recalls CTC’s man. “We were expecting to be arrested at any minute.”

     Most of CTC’s work is less harrowing. Ninety percent of its business involves intelligence gathering on companies and individuals in foreign countries that are either competitors or possible partners for American business.

     Using an array of computer data bases, CTC’s investigators pull together what- ever information can be useful to a client. Then, using the same methods they learned at the CIA, they analyze the data, sort the good, file away what the client can’t use, and identify the gaps.

     Then CTC’s “old buddy network” in the field fills in any missing information. If necessary, CTC will send people out to do field surveillance or investigations.

     “One client is a major oil exploration corporation, and they wanted to search for oil in Ethiopia, a country about which they knew nothing,” Rustmann recalls.

     CTC found that the exploration was to go on in a region where rebel groups were active. Through Rustmann’s personal contacts - he was once the CIA station chief in Addis Ababa - an Ethiopian security force was arranged for the exploration teams, and the company worked in the region for two years without incident.

     “If you used the wrong group in that situation, you could lure trouble instead of deflecting it,” says Rustmann. “It’s just good business to have the best information and contacts you can when you’re deciding to invest a lot of money into a venture. But many U.S. companies have absolutely no international contacts.”

     Rustmann says he can dial up more than 50 former CIA officers who among them have thousands of contacts all over the world. In an ironic twist - and a true sign of the way the world’s spy networks have changed - Rustmann even depends on a half-dozen former KGB operatives to help him.

     “CTC does not have access to the voluminous research data of the CIA,” Rustmann says. “But we do have personal contacts all over the world, and that’s what makes us different and unique.”

     What also makes CTC agents different is their spy training. During his 11 years with the CIA, Brad Robinson was known for his innate ability to draw out secrets from the other side - a valuable skill when assessing business competition or deciding on a foreign partner.

     “It was shocking to me how tough it was for people to keep their mouths shut,” says Robinson, who helped Rustmann start CTC in 1992.

     In the ongoing game of spy vs. spy, recruitment is still the bread and butter of intelligence gathering.

     CIA spies rarely steal secrets on their own. They don’t break into consulates and military compounds a la James Bond and flee with bombs bursting behind them.

     The real skulduggery is in spotting someone from the other side who knows the secrets, then persuading him to give that information up.

     Robinson’s toughest assignment in 11 years was when he was asked to call up a KGB spy cold, no introduction and persuade him to defect.

     “His brother was also KGB, and he had been working with us for years without anyone’s knowledge,” Robinson explains.

     “We (the CIA) got word that they (the KGB) had discovered the leak. The brothers were posted on opposite sides of the world and, believe it or not, the Soviet bureaucracy is slower than ours. We had a few hours to work with.

     “The brother who’d been found out was doomed. The brother who had always been loyal was guilty by association and at best would be pushing pencils the rest of his life,” Robinson says.

     “We had one chance to get him. I talked to him for about 40 minutes. Told him he had one choice; walk out of the office now and defect, or take his chances.

     “I had a lot of personal information from his brother’s handler, but still for 38 minutes he denied everything. Then he walked out and joined us.”

     In putting such talents to use in the world of business, Rustmann says CTC’s people are still always watching a line that can’t be crossed.

     “We’re not corporate spies,” Rustmann says. “We don’t break any laws. And we’re certainly not going to jail for a client. We know how to get things done without stepping out of bounds.” 

     For now, CTC may just be ahead of the curve.

     If the U.S. Army can be transformed into protectors of oppressed civilians and the deliverers of humanitarian aid, is it so far-fetched to imagine the CIA using its talents to provide tactical information for American business overseas?

     New CIA director John Deutch has said that it is not the spy agency’s job to do such intelligence. Better to leave such things up to the private sector. And though Rustmann thinks it’s a mistake on the CIA’s part to stay out of the competition, he is more than willing to fill the gap.