The last item on the agenda was among the most difficult—when to publish. Mariel Fitz Patrick, with the public television channel El Trece in Argentina, made an impassioned plea to allow the Argentineans to publish before October 25, the date of the country’s presidential election. If the data included criminal activity that linked back to President Kirchner, they had to make that information public. It was a difficult conversation. Everyone in the room recognized the value of Fitz Patrick’s argument, but the project was no longer about a single country. The reporters who had gathered in Washington were from all over the world. They could not publish until the reporting was ready.
By that point, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters had seen how difficult it was to process the data. They had given up on publishing in 2015. Rather than fight with their bosses, they did what reporters do all over the world—they strung them along. Ryle told them that once their editors saw the scale of the project and the amazing findings, they would come around to a new deadline. It was a leap of faith.
A week after the Washington meeting, Mossfon’s lawyers submitted a declaration by Jürgen Mossack to the U.S. District Court in Las Vegas. Under penalty of perjury, Mossack declared that M. F. Nevada and Mossack Fonseca did not have a parent-subsidiary relationship. Mossack Fonseca did not “control the internal affairs or daily operations of M. F. Nevada.”
The declaration proved insufficient to get Paul Singer to back off.
16
COLLABORATION TRIUMPHS
Rita Vásquez could not stifle a sense of foreboding. It kept her awake on her overnight flight from Panama to Munich in early September 2015. When Vásquez gets nervous, she tends to giggle or smile maniacally. After Rolando Rodríguez, the head of investigations for Panama’s La Prensa newspaper, told her about Prometheus, she laughed uncontrollably. Rodríguez then swore her to secrecy and made her sign ICIJ’s confidentiality agreement.
Marina Walker had contacted Rodríguez to invite him and La Prensa into the project. A local partner in a tax haven was a delicate matter, but Rodríguez came highly recommended and La Prensa had a storied past. The newspaper was founded in 1980, in the teeth of the Torrijos dictatorship, by a group of returned exiles. The government forced La Prensa to close three times during the years of the dictatorship. Hard-hitting stories sent multiple reporters into exile.
In its first dozen years, the paper failed to earn a profit. Fearful vendors refused to sell it. Few dared advertise. The founders sold shares to raise capital. Mindful of the dangers of concentrated power, La Prensa’s organizational rules stipulated that no single person could own more than 1 percent of its stock. To be a La Prensa shareholder became a badge of honor. Share certificates were tangible representations of a common democratic vision. Ramón Fonseca was a shareholder. So was future president Ricardo Martinelli.
In the years after the fall of Manuel Noriega, the paper became complacent, but rampant corruption during the Martinelli administration reenergized its sense of mission. In 2012, La Prensa hammered Martinelli over the exaggerated costs of highway construction projects. A local building firm took offense at the allegations of bribery. Facing yet another exposé, the firm blocked the avenue leading to the paper’s printing press with tractor-trailers in an attempt to physically prevent the story from getting out. In response, La Prensa’s staff formed a human chain to carry the bales of newspapers past the blockade. As word of what was happening spread on social media, opposition politicians and neighbors joined the line. Around half past midnight, an inebriated Martinelli appeared on the scene, laughing. Video shows angry Panamanians surrounding him, yelling, “Thief!” He quickly departed. The blockade of trucks soon followed.
Vásquez was unique among the journalists in the project, and at La Prensa. In addition to being a deputy managing editor of the newspaper, she was also a lawyer who had worked for years in the British Virgin Islands for a midsize Panamanian law firm that provided offshore services. She knew that if her newspaper revealed the inner workings of one of Panama’s top offshore providers, it would have a seismic impact in her tight-knit country. Even though it was far from the largest segment of the economy, much of Panama’s political and economic elite worked in the offshore industry.
What also worried Vásquez was the personal toll that awaited her. She still had close friends in the business, some at Mossfon. She feared a fierce reaction.
Rodríguez had little to tell Vásquez about the project other than that they were going to Munich for a meeting hosted by Süddeutsche Zeitung. ICIJ expected more than one hundred top journalists from all over the world to attend. Oh, and by the way, he told Vásquez, you will be giving a presentation on how the offshore industry works.
On the morning of September 8, 2015, more than one hundred journalists gathered in the Sky Lounge conference room on the twenty-sixth floor of Süddeutsche Zeitung’s modern glass-encased office building on the outskirts of Munich. They came from every continent save Antarctica. The Germans had tried to limit the meeting to eighty, which was the room’s capacity, but as Walker and the ICIJ team picked participants, the list kept growing. It was like planning a wedding. There are certain family members you have to invite, and then all of sudden, you have a wedding of a hundred people, Mar Cabra recalled.
This particular wedding came with restrictions. In the past, cameramen had roamed freely at previous ICIJ project meetings to record the proceedings for documentaries that would be released concurrently with publication. Walker asked for moderation this time. She urged partners to keep in mind that some colleagues worked and lived in tough environments, and their appearance on camera could be dangerous. There were indeed people in the room who reported from countries whose leaders or other elites could be found in the Mossfon data, countries like Russia, Egypt, and Venezuela. Filming was limited to certain sessions and was to be avoided during strategy or case discussions. Those who did not want to appear were asked to make that known.
The editor in chief of Süddeutsche Zeitung, Wolfgang Krach, welcomed the journalists to the newspaper. Everyone went around the room introducing themselves. It was a United Nations of reporters, only this one functioned properly. Everybody was there for the same reason, with a similar motivation: to find the truth and hold the powerful accountable. For many of the reporters in the room, journalism was not merely a job but a calling. They came from countries with weak institutions and compromised politicians. The press was a bulwark against tyranny.
Krach beamed. Even Katharine Viner, the recently named editor in chief of the Guardian, had flown to Munich specifically for the meeting, in part to make amends with the Germans for the conduct of her predecessors during Offshore Leaks. That night, as the other journalists gathered for a meat-and-brew feast at an historic beer hall in the city’s center, Viner, Krach, and Ryle dined at a fancy restaurant. Whatever remaining concerns Krach may have harbored over deadlines and the considerable time his star reporters had invested in the project evaporated once he saw the global community of journalists and heard their findings. The excitement was infectious. Ryle’s strategy of letting events unfold had worked.
Obermayer, Obermaier, and Walker spoke after Krach. They reported that there were now 2.4 terabytes of data, and the material was still arriving. By the end of 2015, it would reach 2.6 terabytes. ICIJ would eventually calculate the number of files at 11.5 million, but this, too, would be a significant undercount. Many of the files were emails, which often came with multiple documents attached to them. Each email was counted as one file. Out of the more than 8 million files received by the time of the Munich meeting, in just six months ICIJ had managed to make 3.3 million of them searchable. It had required a technological leap for that to happen.
In the spring, not long after Cabra and Carvajal had returned from their trip to Munich with the data, ICIJ’s Matthew Caruana Galizia recognized that it would be impossible to extract all the information from the millions of documents and make them searchable with just one computer. There were t
oo many images. It would take at least two years. A radically new approach was needed.
Caruana Galizia found the answer in parallel processing. Rather than one giant computer churning through the data, they would employ multiple servers working collaboratively. At the height of the project, ICIJ had thirty-three Amazon cloud servers processing the data. Each server contained eight central processing units able to extract eight documents. When a CPU selected a document, the cue of documents froze so that it would be impossible for a different server to take the same file. Caruana Galizia designed a program that made this ballet of data extraction possible. A CPU grabbed a document—for example, an email with a PDF file as an attachment. The program indexed the text from the email and performed optical character recognition on the PDF. Then the machine extracted all the information from the PDF and indexed that as well, to ensure that every scrap of data from the email could be searched in Blacklight.
The data processing was analogous to the journalistic effort. By the Munich meeting, Prometheus was already the largest cross-border media collaboration ever undertaken. There were two hundred journalists involved, a number that by the end would swell to more than three hundred. They came from more than sixty-five countries and represented more than eighty media organizations. While English was the dominant language, the group covered twenty-five different tongues. They had already begun picking over the data, filling the I-Hub with their findings, and watching as their colleagues added details daily.
The German reporters presented a slide show of the world leaders found either in the data themselves or through relatives and cronies. Those new to the project gasped as photos of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Hosni Mubarak, Bashar al-Assad, the king of Saudi Arabia, Argentina’s Kirchners, Iceland’s Gunnlaugsson, the ruling family of Azerbaijan, and Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan, flashed on the screen. Sessions on specific cases then followed.
By the time Vásquez gave her presentation, she was freaked out by the scale of the findings. Her presentation was matter-of-fact, dry, and lawyerly. She ran through the history of Panama and its corporation and bank secrecy laws. The presentation ended with a slide that read, “They have resources … and will use them however they can. Lawyers doing what they do.” After she finished, her fellow journalists swarmed her, scarcely leaving her alone for the rest of the conference. They even chased her into the bathroom asking questions. For the first time in her life, Vásquez felt what it was like to be on the other side.
Later in the day, Jóhannes Kristjánsson offered one of the most popular presentations. To demonstrate the hubris of Icelandic bankers in the lead-up to the financial crisis, Kristjánsson showed an over-the-top in-house video produced by the Icelandic bank Kaupthing called Beyond Normal Thinking. As synthesizers swelled, an announcer declared the bank’s sky-is-the-limit philosophy, accompanied by images of Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, and Albert Einstein, along with clips from movies such as The Matrix and Lawrence of Arabia. Kristjánsson also showed an animation he had created for a news segment on the banks’ market manipulation, which featured a Rube Goldbergian circular machine that sliced and diced loans.
Perhaps even more than world leaders, what stirred the crowd was the information on the globe’s most popular sport, soccer. Hugo Alconada Mon, a reporter and editor with Argentina’s La Nación, gave a presentation on the preliminary findings. The greatest player in the game, Lionel Messi, was in the data through a company set up by his father. He was just one of dozens of high-profile sports figures who exploited the offshore world to escape taxes. The secrecy world was also used for more nefarious dealings involving sport. By the end of the project, the exposé would upend soccer’s world governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, known as FIFA, which was already tarnished by scandal and governmental investigations.
In Munich, the team set a publication date of March 7, 2016—six months hence. On that day, all the partners would begin to drop their stories at a prearranged time. The Russians objected because the date conflicted with International Women’s Day. The ICIJ team did not pay much heed initially to the concern, until they returned to Washington and realized how serious a holiday it was in Russia. Newspapers did not even publish. The date was pushed back by a week, to March 13.
Mar Cabra asked Ryle and Walker if they would have breakfast with her on the last morning they were in Munich. Throughout the meeting, Cabra had held tightly to a decision she had made over her summer holiday. Now she unburdened herself. She told Ryle and Walker that upon the conclusion of the project she was leaving ICIJ. Cabra considered ICIJ more like a family than a business, but she was too burned out to continue. Everybody was overworked, but neither Ryle nor Walker had seen this coming. Cabra started to cry. Ryle expressed sympathy. Both he and Walker had so many problems and challenges ahead, they were simply thankful six months existed to find a replacement.
* * *
THE BIENNIAL GLOBAL Investigative Journalism Conference was held a month later, in Lillehammer, Norway. Throughout the Mossfon project, ICIJ and its collaborators regularly attended conferences to give presentations and pick up awards for what had been their most successful project to date, the HSBC exposé Swiss Leaks, published nine months earlier. On the sidelines of the Lillehammer conference, the Prometheans stealthily met, trying hard not to tip off their fellow attendees, who were, by profession, inquisitive sorts. Will Fitzgibbon, an Australian-born ICIJ staffer who ran the organization’s Africa desk, asked Cabra to meet with a handful of African journalists attending the conference. Africa had been largely absent from the Munich meeting; the participating news organizations had paid for their journalists to attend, but most African reporters could not afford the expense.
A pay-your-way approach was part of Ryle’s innovation for ICIJ. Before he arrived, the organization often created the projects and then invited partners into them, sometimes even financing their participation. Under Ryle’s leadership the collaborators participated in developing the projects almost from the outset, and in return their news organizations paid their own way. ICIJ then worked to find ways to include those who, because of either their financial situation or security considerations, could not participate as readily. And so a subsequent meeting was held in Johannesburg, with more than a dozen reporters from African countries including Senegal, Mali, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.
For ICIJ, the most consequential gathering at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference was held in a tucked-away meeting room at the Radisson Blu Lillehammer Hotel. It set in motion events that would radically reshape the future of the organization and sour much of 2016 for Ryle, at the very moment he achieved his greatest journalistic success.
As part of a three-year grant from the Netherlands-based Adessium Foundation, ICIJ was required to produce a report that discussed how ICIJ planned to grow. Ryle tapped an advisory board to help with the task. The group included ICIJ veterans such as Columbia journalism professor Sheila Coronel, the Guardian’s David Leigh, and Fredrik Laurin, an outspoken special projects editor for Swedish public television. In Lillehammer, Ryle and Walker presented their growth plan to ICIJ members for discussion.
The group wrestled with the issue of ICIJ’s parent, the Center for Public Integrity. The ICIJ budget had grown from $600,000 to $1.8 million under Ryle, but CPI itself was in debt. To fill the gap, CPI appeared to be helping itself to money earmarked for ICIJ. CPI charged for a slew of services it provided ICIJ but not at market rates. The exact financial arrangements were opaque, invisible to Ryle and to the ICIJ staff. Increasingly, ICIJ did not even need CPI’s services as it focused more on data and project management.
In January 2016, the group completed its report. “To create a genuine growth strategy for ICIJ one must now consider a different arrangement between ICIJ and its parent that includes a new management and financial arrangement,” the report concluded. “ICIJ is at a crossroads in its history—to continue to grow it needs greater autonomy and flexibility.�
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Ryle and Walker were not proposing separation. Instead, they suggested a sort of “home rule” scenario. Rather than report to CPI’s executive director, Ryle would answer to the CPI board, which would expand to add international members more in tune with ICIJ’s mission. Under this organizational structure, ICIJ would continue as part of CPI but would be able to obtain services from whomever it chose, based on market rates. It would also do its own fund-raising. In return, ICIJ would pay an annual dividend to CPI.
Many of ICIJ’s international partners who had gathered at the meeting in Lillehammer had given little consideration to how the organization actually functioned. Several opined that maybe it was time for a complete separation. Ryle dismissed the idea. There was value to being part of CPI, not least of all having the legal protection of an established American media organization.
Ryle, Walker, Laurin, and a few others then presented the growth plan to Peter Bale, CPI’s chief executive officer. Bale had recently joined CPI after a stint as vice president and general manager of digital operations at CNN International. Laurin had never met Bale but was predisposed to like him because of his international background. That changed when Bale took offense at the suggestion that CPI was leeching off ICIJ. Bale told Laurin that if he wanted to understand the financials, he should look at CPI’s annual report. Laurin grew angry. For ten years, he and his colleagues had worked to build ICIJ into a global brand, sacrificing time with their families because they believed in the stories and the idea of international cooperation between journalists. Now, in Laurin’s opinion, Bale was talking like a politician, deflecting responsibility. The exchange grew heated.
Bale refused to submit the growth report to the CPI board for review. Instead, he created his own report, using numbers the ICIJ staff disputed. At this point, Sheila Coronel intervened. It was clear to her that ICIJ was financially carrying CPI, to the detriment of its own growth and development. Divorce appeared inevitable. She did an end run around Bale, submitting the report to the board as a letter from the advisory committee. A debate over the future of ICIJ quickly transformed into a personal dispute between Ryle and Bale. The board decided to support the man they had just hired.
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