In the past, media exposés of the offshore system tended to be localized, dependent on a small number of internal documents, the testimony of whistle-blowers, hidden camera interviews, or legal filings. An inability to look at the system comprehensively made reporting difficult, if not perilous. Secrecy laws and incomplete information hog-tied journalists who tried to expose offshore wrongdoing. Lawsuits and public ridicule frequently followed publication. A partial picture allowed critics to dismiss findings as anomalies rather than patterns.
Ryle’s documents told a broader story, an unprecedented macro view of a hidden world. The data consisted of approximately two and a half million files. In size, it was 260 gigabytes, more than 160 times larger than the cache of U.S. State Department documents WikiLeaks obtained two years earlier. The data contained beneficial owner information, money transfers, incorporation dates, and criminal behavior by the rich and powerful. It provided insights into scandals touching Russia, the United States, Africa, and the Philippines, among other places.
In Washington, Roman Shleynov, a Moscow-based investigative reporter, was unimpressed. It’s common knowledge in my country that Russians have offshore companies, he said. What’s the big deal?
Ryle groaned inwardly. Since joining ICIJ the previous September, nothing had gone according to plan. Even for someone accustomed to adversity, ICIJ was proving an exceptionally hard road.
Ryle was raised in Ireland, in a working-class family, the third child of nine. His great-grandfather had been a prominent newspaper editor, but Ryle’s parents looked down on the profession. They wanted their son to be a doctor or an engineer. Unfortunately for them, he was an inattentive student. Journalism was about all he was qualified to do, he jokes.
Lacking connections or an exclusive school on his résumé, he struggled to break into the elitist Irish newspaper industry. Ryle worked at the first of a series of small Irish newspapers for free, while living on the dole. A few years later, when a colleague returned from Australia with stories of sunny skies and beautiful beaches, Ryle decided to give it a try. He wrote to three Australian newspapers and received three rejection letters. He went anyway.
Ryle arrived in Melbourne, where he had a cousin, and telephoned the Age, one of the newspapers that had rejected him. He told the editor’s secretary that her boss had sent a note summoning him. Fortunately for Ryle, the secretary was Irish. Seeing through the lie but charmed by the bravado, she laughed and told him to come around. The editor tried his best to get rid of the eager young reporter, but Ryle wouldn’t leave.
Over the next twenty-five years, he transformed himself into one of Australia’s top journalists, married a local multimedia editor, and bought a condo near the beach in Sydney. Thin and rangy, Ryle had a twinkle in his eye and a soft Irish lilt that contrasted with the careworn expression he often wore. In his adopted country, Ryle built a reputation for hard-hitting investigations. His subjects included police corruption, crooked land deals, and questionable medical experiments. He was a twelve-time finalist for the Walkley Awards, Australia’s top honor for journalists, and won four of them.
While working for the Sydney Morning Herald, Ryle broke a story about Firepower, a Perth-based fuel technology company that was in fact an elaborate financial fraud. The company claimed to have invented a pill to improve fuel efficiency and reduce pollution. In reality, it was a multimillion-dollar hoax to bilk investors and win government contracts. Ryle spent three years digging into the scandal, later writing a book on the scheme called Firepower: The Most Spectacular Fraud in Australian History.
Ryle’s work on Firepower caught the attention of an anonymous source who contacted him, asking for the best way to deliver documents connected to the case. Ryle gave his address at the newspaper. In the summer of 2011, a bulky hard drive arrived by mail, containing millions of leaked offshore files.
Ryle would subsequently learn that tax authorities in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom also possessed the data but had not done anything with it. This was understandable. The files were jumbled together in various formats and needed to be reconstructed in order to understand fully what they contained. Despite the help of the IT staff at his newspaper, searching through a single company could take all night. Ryle did not know precisely how to make the data accessible, but what he saw suggested it was worth the effort.
Around this time, ICIJ advertised for a new director. Ryle had recently finished a yearlong journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan. A friend at the program, an ICIJ board member, urged Ryle to apply. When Ryle interviewed for the job, he did not volunteer that he had a hard drive crammed with offshore documents. Instead, he suggested that the offshore world might be a fruitful area for cross-border collaborative journalism, which was ICIJ’s mission. He was hired. America, the land of opportunity, beckoned.
In his eagerness for the challenge, Ryle failed to do basic due diligence on his new employer.
“Some investigative journalist I am,” he says in retrospect. “I didn’t want to know.”
* * *
ICIJ WAS A creation of the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), one of the pioneers in nonprofit investigative journalism. The center was founded in 1989 by Charles Lewis, a hard-charging former 60 Minutes producer who quit CBS after his superiors pressured him to censor a segment. Lewis’s favorite saying was, “Don’t ever let the bastards get you down or intimidate you.” The center put it on its mousepads. Under his direction, CPI became a journalistic force, breaking stories on the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, including the high-dollar donor sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom and Halliburton’s no-bid wartime contracts.
In 1992, at an international journalism conference in Moscow, Lewis had an epiphany. The subjects that CPI tackled, from political corruption and environmental devastation to human rights violations and financial fraud, did not respect national boundaries. Great reporters from around the world investigated these subjects alone. Lewis envisioned a network where the best investigative reporters from multiple countries could collaborate on stories of global concern. It took him five years to raise the money to create ICIJ. In 1997, CPI flew some of the world’s top reporters to the United States for a kick-off conference at Harvard University. Lewis told them he wasn’t asking for anything; he wanted to help.
Underneath the collegiality, some detected a certain degree of paternalism, although not from Lewis directly. Others questioned whether ICIJ should be a stand-alone organization rather than an appendage of an American nonprofit whose initials sound like a U.S. intelligence agency.
“There was this thing in the air that they were going to bring American standards of journalism to the poor benighted denizens of the developing world,” acknowledges the Guardian’s David Leigh, who was one of the original ICIJ members.
Leigh, along with another founding member, Duncan Campbell, helped the network score its first major success. They made eleven thousand internal company documents from British American Tobacco (which were public but largely inaccessible) widely available to partners in multiple countries for a cross-border investigation into how Big Tobacco circumvented health laws and laundered money. It was a steam-powered version of the leak investigations to come, relying on the knowledge of local reporters and the sharing of documents, albeit hard copies. The initial story, published in January 2000, made the front page of the Guardian, which gave the consortium some much-needed credibility. Other projects followed, covering topics such as military contracting, U.S. support for death squads, and water privatization.
Lewis stepped down as CPI’s executive editor in 2005. Deprived of his vision and force of personality, ICIJ withered. Officially there were dozens of ICIJ members around the world, but the network itself accomplished little. Members had little direct input in its operation. CPI also struggled. Lewis had originally created a board for CPI entirely of journalists. It gradually morphed to one selected for fund-raising rather than journalism. The center was slow to adapt
to the digital age and to increased competition for scarce dollars by a growing cadre of nonprofit journalism organizations.
In 2010, CPI fell victim to John Solomon, a smooth-talking and energetic journalistic entrepreneur. Solomon vowed to bring innovation and funding to the center. His proposals were ludicrous on their face, including publishing between ten and twenty original investigative stories daily and selling fifty thousand annual Web subscriptions at $50 a pop. At the time, the center would have been lucky to muster ten thousand Facebook likes; nonetheless, CPI’s head Bill Buzenberg and the center’s board embraced the fantasy and appointed Solomon executive editor.
One person who saw through Solomon’s promises was David Kaplan, the director of ICIJ. Conflict between the two was inevitable. Matters came to a head when ICIJ published a major investigation into the multibillion-dollar black market for bluefin tuna. Overfishing was decimating tuna, a keystone species, and the multinational regulatory system designed to prevent overfishing was not working. The ICIJ team gained access to a multinational regulatory database that tracked tuna catches. The team’s investigation exposed the database as woefully incomplete.
Solomon then attacked Kaplan and the international team of journalists, accusing them of illegally accessing the database and paying a consultant quoted in the story. Solomon took his complaints to the CPI board, which hired a law firm to investigate. The investigation cleared ICIJ of any wrongdoing. Board member and Columbia journalism professor Sheila Coronel insisted upon a public exoneration, but Kaplan eventually decided to quit rather than continue to report to Solomon. Four months later, in May 2011, Solomon resigned as well, leaving CPI’s morale shaken and its finances precarious. Buzenberg spent the next three years pulling the organization back from the brink.
Ryle arrived in Washington that September, largely clueless of the controversy over the fishing project and the wreckage Solomon had left behind. Buzenberg had helped Ryle coax his wife, Kimberley Porteous, to America with a job as the center’s chief digital officer. The couple arrived for a new life in America on a stormy Labor Day weekend. They spent the first days in an unsuccessful search for a home in Washington’s tight housing market. On Labor Day, Ryle went into CPI and ICIJ’s empty suite of offices to meet with his new boss.
Buzenberg informed Ryle that he had given Porteous’s job to someone else. The numbers for ICIJ’s budget and staff were also different, Ryle discovered. The budget was less than half of the $1.5 million he had been promised, and the actual staff was six employees rather than seven, whom budget cuts reduced to four shortly after his arrival. Ryle returned to his hotel disconsolate. Porteous had been shopping. A new outfit for her first day at work hung in the closet. Ryle struggled to break the news. The job he had left behind as deputy editor of the Canberra Times was already filled. There was no turning back.
A few weeks later, Ryle, racked with guilt, left Porteous in a house with no furniture in Washington and flew to Kiev for the Global Investigative Journalism Conference. In addition to sharing skills and stories, the conference and other multinational journalism gatherings offer a place for international journalists to mingle and drink together after hours. They became essential in forging the relationships that would make ICIJ’s future collaborations function.
At Ryle’s side was the ICIJ deputy director he inherited, Marina Walker Guevara, an Argentinian journalist who had worked with Kaplan. An investigative reporter in her native Argentina, Walker had come to America in 2002 for a six-month fellowship at the Philadelphia Inquirer, when the paper was still a journalistic standout. Argentina was in the midst of its economic crisis, and in order to support her mother, she stayed, juggling school with various journalism jobs before landing at ICIJ. Walker’s familiarity with the developing world was matched by a Swiss-like ability to organize. She was friendly and engaging but could also be steely and demanding when called upon. Above all, she had credibility with the international members, many of whom were still angry about the bluefin tuna imbroglio and what they saw as the excessive U.S. orientation of the organization.
“Marina is not a bigoted American,” says Fredrik Laurin, a tart-tongued Swedish television journalist and early ICIJ member. “She really understands what this is all about, that the world is bigger than the United States.”
The group that came to Washington in January 2012, which included Laurin and the Guardian’s David Leigh, had been recruited in Kiev, where Ryle had introduced himself to many of ICIJ’s members. Ryle desperately wanted the Guardian’s participation, which would add needed credibility to the project. Each partner committed to some basic precepts necessary to make the collaboration work. They agreed to publish together at the same time. No one would leak the data. They would uphold journalistic standards.
Soon after the journalists returned home, large hard drives encased in rubber and full of Ryle’s data arrived at their offices via FedEx. At the time, ICIJ was not particularly security-conscious. None of the data was encrypted, although Ryle opted not to send a hard drive to Russia.
Possessing the data and making sense of it were separate matters. In addition to multiple formats, including ancient email systems long since abandoned and document scans, the names and companies found in the data were in separate spreadsheets that needed to be matched somehow. Several in the group also received a copy of a powerful indexing software that could search the data. Ryle had convinced Nuix, an Australian company, to donate its forensic investigation software with the vague promise that a future project, if successful, might bring it good publicity. Simply to run the program, the Guardian and ICIJ had to buy more powerful computers. In total, Nuix provided ten licenses, a mere fraction of the number needed.
Initially, Ryle and Walker thought that partners would travel to hubs, such as Washington or Bucharest, where they could explore the data. Few took the offer. To attract the interest of more journalists, spreadsheets were distributed to individual partners with local addresses and the names of their country’s citizens found in the data. If the partners wanted to research further, they were to contact ICIJ, which would help pull the documents together. This, too, proved untenable. Almost a year into the project, Duncan Campbell, with the help of a developer, created a searchable and secure website that the partners could use to explore the documents on their own. Campbell, an investigative reporter who doubled as a forensic expert on data and communications, had helped expose the Echelon global government surveillance program in 1988. He was justifiably famous in investigative journalism circles.
The group agreed to publish in September 2012.
Ryle then went looking for top media partners around the world. In contrast to CPI’s Lewis, who had targeted specific journalists, Ryle felt that only big media organizations would bring the impact he desired. One of his first stops was the New York Times. Bill Kovach, a CPI board member (and a former Times reporter and editor), set up a meeting with Richard Berke, a senior editor at the newspaper. Ryle took a copy of the data with him. When he was shown into the meeting, Berke appeared to have no idea why he was there. Ryle revealed some of ICIJ’s initial findings. Berke was intrigued. He gathered some of the top editors together. Ryle went through his presentation again. The high-powered audience was more skeptical. While Ryle had a serious reputation in Australia, it meant little to the Americans. They agreed to discuss the matter further. Negotiations dragged on for months. The Times wanted Ryle to hand over the material and reveal his sources. In return, it would credit ICIJ in its stories. The paper also refused to collaborate with multiple partners or share bylines on stories with journalists outside the Times. Talks broke down and Ryle abandoned his pursuit.
It was a similar story elsewhere. Major European media outlets like Spain’s El País and Germany’s leading newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, rejected Ryle’s overtures. The offshore system was disregarded, if acknowledged at all. And a journalistic collaboration of this ambition had never been attempted.
Ryle went to Paris to meet with someo
ne at Le Monde to see if the French newspaper would participate. He arrived at the paper’s new glass-encased office building on time but his contact had forgotten the meeting. As Ryle waited in the lobby, he watched a street person approach the building and begin to knock his head violently against the glass.
It felt like an apt metaphor.
* * *
AS HE ORGANIZED the collaboration, Ryle remained in contact with the leakers. It had been almost a year since he received the hard drive, and they were growing impatient. Ryle didn’t blame them. He wasn’t entirely positive he could pull the project off himself.
The September deadline was looking increasingly unrealistic. Making the data accessible for the partners had turned into a complicated slog. Many of the documents consisted of photos or PDFs. Each one had to be put through optical character recognition software in order to be keyword searchable, a slow and laborious process.
Ryle set up a special dedicated computer at ICIJ to give the leakers remote access to the material. The idea was that they would help reconstruct the data and add their insights. One day while on the computer, Ryle discovered a communication he wasn’t supposed to see. The leakers had forgotten to delete a message they had shared with one another: they had lost confidence in him. The message detailed a plan to stealthily delete the data and scuttle the project. Ryle acted quickly. He cut off their access to the computer and pretended to go off-line temporarily. When he resumed contact, Ryle acted as if the incident had never occurred.
ICIJ had come too far to turn back. Project members identified a number of compelling stories. Each day added more. They discovered links to the families of the deposed Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and the president of Azerbaijan. There were government officials from Venezuela, Thailand, and Mongolia in the data, along with some of the richest citizens of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Spain. They even found celebrities. Australia’s Paul Hogan, of Crocodile Dundee fame, had trusted the wrong asset manager, who stashed some of his fortune offshore.
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