Ryle knew that he could not fight this battle and simultaneously land the biggest cross-border journalism project in history. Even as angry emails and conversations on the topic ricocheted around them, he and Walker decided to shelve the debate until after the project was published. There was too much at stake.
* * *
AS JÓHANNES KRISTJÁNSSON boarded his Icelandair flight in Munich to return home, he was recognized by a flight attendant. A fan of his journalism, she upgraded him to first class. It was a cherry on top of the Munich meeting—good feelings that would have to carry him through a long and lonely winter. There were few in Iceland with whom he could share the explosive information he possessed. Not only did the prime minister have a secret offshore company, but so did the finance minister and the minister of the interior.
As he worked on his stories, Kristjánsson cut off contact with all but his closest family members. He labored alone in his apartment and at a small summer cottage he and Brynja kept outside Reykjavík. As he parsed the Mossfon documents, mapping the stories on sheets of paper he taped to the walls, Kristjánsson covered the windows with dark material so the neighbors could not see inside. Occasionally he took his laptop to a harbor café where he passed the dwindling daylight hours watching the boats come in while he worked.
Money grew tight. Brynja’s mother questioned her daughter’s choice in a husband. Brynja’s friends worried that she had married a deadbeat: someone who did not work and seldom left the house. In order to bring in extra cash for the Christmas holidays, Kristjánsson agreed to write a newsletter for a church-run rehab and homeless shelter. He did it again around Easter but blew his deadline when Prometheus work interfered. He could not explain to his irate publisher that the church newsletter was being bumped for one of the biggest news stories in Iceland’s history.
Kristjánsson’s main refuge and support was the Global I-Hub, ICIJ’s virtual newsroom, where he could exchange his findings and ideas with fellow Prometheans. He also received visits from colleagues who were quietly reporting their own Icelandic stories for the project. Ryan Chittum, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who worked for ICIJ on a contract basis, Bastian Obermeyer, and Sven Bergman from Swedish public television all made the trip that winter.
In December, Ryle took the opportunity of a London meeting to stop in Iceland on the way home so Kristjánsson could interview him for a documentary about the project. For his part, Ryle wanted to ensure the Icelandic reporter was not losing his mind or his marriage over the story. During meals and long coffees, Kristjánsson and Ryle discussed how to confront the prime minister. If they notified Gunnlaugsson about Wintris, the offshore company the prime minister and his wife held, before an interview, he would never agree to discuss the matter on camera. Gunnlaugsson might also try to cover his tracks in some way. However, Kristjánsson was uneasy with the idea of an ambush interview. Was it ethical in this circumstance?
Kristjánsson had employed hidden cameras for stories in the past. His philosophy was that if one could obtain the truth without questionable methods, that was obviously better. But if a little subterfuge was absolutely necessary to document reality, then so be it. Gunnlaugsson’s reaction to the revelation about his secret offshore company, the very behavior he had built his political career railing against, was essential footage for the television program. The problem was that if Kristjánsson, known for hard-hitting investigative reporting, was the one to ask for an interview with the prime minister, Gunnlaugsson would know immediately that something was afoot.
Ryle and Kristjánsson decided to enlist Sven Bergman, the Swedish television reporter. Bergman and his colleagues were interested in doing their own Iceland story. Swedish public television asked to interview Gunnlaugsson to discuss Iceland’s handling of the financial crisis. The plan was for Kristjánsson to accompany the camera team as a local fixer. As soon as Bergman asked about Wintris, Kristjánsson would insert himself into the interview and ask the same question in Icelandic.
Bergman and his crew arrived a few days before the interview, which was scheduled for March 11, 2016. By this point, Kristjánsson had enlisted three Icelandic colleagues who would also be filming the interview for a program to air on Icelandic public television. In Kristjánsson’s cramped living room they pushed aside the furniture to simulate the interview, gaming out likely reactions and responses. The consensus view was that the prime minister, who had been a television personality himself, would likely shrug off the questions.
After a lunch of fish and chips, the team went to the Minister’s Residence at Tjarnargata, an old frame house with dormer windows where the prime minister held official meetings. Prior to rolling the cameras, Bergman succeeded at putting Gunnlaugsson at ease, talking about soccer and Sweden. The interview began broadly with Bergman asking about the 2008 financial crisis and Iceland’s response. Slowly, Bergman drew closer to the question. He asked about recent reports that the Icelandic government had purchased “sensitive tax information,” which was a reference to the Luxembourg Mossfon data. Bardi Stefánsson, one of Kristjánsson’s cameramen, fought to keep his rickety camera tripod still on the wooden floor as his heart pounded. Gunnlaugsson said he wanted to make sure the public knew his government was “leaving no stone unturned.”
Bergman asked what Gunnlaugsson himself thought about people having offshore companies in tax havens to hide assets. The prime minister said that in Iceland “we attach a lot of importance to everybody paying his share.” The Swede then went in for the kill.
“Mr. Prime Minister, have you or did you have any connection yourself to an offshore company?”
For the first time, Gunnlaugsson started to stammer nervously as he delivered a confusing word salad of an answer. “It’s an unusual question for … for an Icelandic politician to get. It’s almost like being accused of something … But … I can confirm that I have never hidden any of my assets.”
“Mr. Prime Minister, what can you tell me about a company called Wintris?” Bergman then asked.
A look of terror flashed over Gunnlaugsson’s face. More rambling ensued. “I’m starting to feel a bit strange about this question,” he said.
Bergman told Gunnlaugsson that his Icelandic partner had the details and would ask him further questions. Kristjánsson then fired a question at Gunnlaugsson in Icelandic.
Life seldom delivers moments when a single choice, made in an instant, determines the destiny of an individual and a country. Gunnlaugsson could have kept his calm and tried to talk his way out of the interview. Instead, he bolted from his chair and, after a few recriminations flung at the journalists, fled the room through the first door he saw, which led into a kitchen. Kristjánsson and Bergman implored him through the closed door to come out and finish the interview, to no avail.
* * *
BACK IN SEPTEMBER in Munich, the ICIJ leadership began a conversation over what to name the project. Walker solicited input from the partners. Ryle wanted to get away from the “leak” motif, which had graced ICIJ’s previous projects. He liked the alliteration of “Panama” and “Papers” as well as the allusion to Daniel Ellsberg’s consequential disclosure of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers in 1971. Vásquez and the La Prensa team were not happy, worried that the name would unfairly tar their entire country. This decision, like the publication date, ultimately rested with Süddeutsche Zeitung and ICIJ. Panama Papers won out.
In December, the deadline for publication was pushed further back, to two p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Sunday, April 3, 2016. Süddeutsche Zeitung, with some embarrassment, had belatedly realized that March 13 conflicted with regional elections in Germany. Under the new deadline, journalists working on the project could start contacting people who created offshore companies for themselves or others to ask for comment on February 21. ICIJ requested they not refer to a global leak or collaboration, simply to say that they had seen documents that concerned the given company or companies. The approach to Mossack Fonseca itself would occur in two stag
es beginning March 6.
As winter turned to spring, John Doe was getting impatient. It had been close to a year since the first contact with Obermayer and still no story had been published. Weekly calls and email conversations between the Germans and ICIJ discussed how to handle the problem. Ryle had dealt with similar tensions from his source during Offshore Leaks. All Obermayer could do was offer reassurances to John Doe. These were not enough. John Doe contacted WikiLeaks to see if the organization would be interested in the files. With months of work by hundreds of journalists hanging in the balance, WikiLeaks failed to answer its tip line. The Mossfon files stayed with Prometheus.
In late January 2016, Brazilian federal police raided Mossfon’s office in São Paulo. The operation was part of a fast-growing inquiry into bribery allegations involving the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht, the state oil company Petrobras, and Brazil’s top political leadership. Prosecutors issued arrest warrants for six people, at least three of them connected to Mossfon. In a press conference following the raid, Brazilian prosecutor Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima accused one of the firm’s employees of destroying documents. He described Mossfon as “a money-washing machine.”
The firm responded with a statement declaring that Mossack Fonseca Brazil was independent of Mossack Fonseca in Panama. The Brazilian office had created the company in question at the request of an intermediary in 2005. Mossfon complied with all the due diligence standards in place at the time, the statement said.
Public attention to Mossfon’s activities seemed to be growing by the day. The Brazilian partners in the project expressed alarm about losing their stories but promised to hold fast to the agreed-upon publication date. Ryle counseled calm as many wondered whether the largest journalism collaboration in history could remain a secret for two more months. Surely someone would break the embargo.
By early March, a few of Mossack Fonseca’s clients informed the firm that reporters had contacted them about their Mossfon companies. Ramón Fonseca appeared on Panamanian television to defend the firm. On March 4, ICIJ sent Mossfon seventeen general questions, including this: Had Mossfon, its affiliates or employees ever helped individuals launder money, evade taxes, or circumvent sanctions? The letter asked the firm to respond by six p.m. on March 9. Soon after its receipt, Fonseca took a temporary leave of absence from his position in President Varela’s government.
With thirty minutes to spare before the March 9 deadline, Carlos Sousa, Mossfon’s public relations director, responded with a three-paragraph email. “We only incorporate companies, which just about everyone acknowledges is important, and something that’s critical in ensuring the global economy functions efficiently,” he wrote. “In providing those services, we follow both the letter and spirit of the law.”
While Mossfon had been contemplating its answer, seven teams of television reporters in the project—from the United States, France, Germany, Denmark, and Finland—had come to Panama. The day after Sousa sent his email response, the television reporters staked out Mossfon’s office. Nearly twenty reporters and producers, with ten cameras pointed to the door, demanded that someone come out and speak to them. After a while, Sousa came out and answered a few questions.
The next day Sousa, Jürgen Mossack, and another Mossfon lawyer paid a visit to La Prensa. Fonseca had contacted the paper’s president to set up the meeting the week before but Mossack went in his stead. On the other side of the table were Rolando Rodríguez and La Prensa’s board chairman and managing editor. Mossack grew worried as he felt that the La Prensa participants refused to make eye contact. After declaring that his firm was being victimized by international journalists bent on sensationalism, Mossack said that he knew there was a reporter at La Prensa who was helping them. He physically described Rita Vásquez although he did not know her name. Mossack warned La Prensa of potential legal implications if they libeled the firm. He then invited Rodríguez to come to the office and learn more about what Mossfon actually did.
After some discussion, La Prensa’s leadership decided to assign a bodyguard to Vásquez. She worked late hours and they worried something might happen to her. It was an awkward fit. Even as Vásquez and her American husband, Scott Bronstein, were helping the foreign reporters, they were also entertaining friends who were visiting from the British Virgin Islands where they worked in the offshore business. They had put them off for most of the week while the reporters were in town. The day after the teams left, Vásquez and Bronstein invited their friends out to dinner. They passed off the bodyguard as an Uber driver. As the group headed to a restaurant, Bronstein looked in the front seat. Barely concealed in a bag by the driver was a handgun. No one else noticed.
17
THE WAVE BREAKS
Gerard Ryle and Marina Walker spent the last three weeks of Prometheus reassuring their partners.
In Iceland, Jóhannes Kristjánsson and his Swedish colleagues offered Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson another try after his disastrous interview. He declined. They also asked to speak with his wife, Anna Sigurlaug Pálsdóttir, who was listed as the owner of the couple’s Mossfon company, Wintris. The journalists gave the pair a few days in which to respond.
An hour before the deadline lapsed, Pálsdóttir posted a confusing statement on her Facebook page. While it made no direct mention of the interview, she admitted to owning Wintris and claimed its existence was never hidden. All applicable taxes on the company’s activities had been paid, she asserted. As Icelandic journalists learned about the company for the first time, they clamored for more information.
Russian president Vladimir Putin also chose the preemptive-strike approach. A detailed request-for-comment letter from ICIJ, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Le Monde, and others went to the Kremlin on March 23. It contained questions on topics such as Putin’s connection to the Mossfon companies ostensibly owned by his old pal, the classical cellist Sergei Roldugin, and whether the Russian leader had ordered the murder of his former communications minister, a Mossfon company owner himself, whose badly bruised, lifeless body had been found in November 2015 inside a Washington, DC, hotel room.
Five days later, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov held a press conference to denounce the “honey-worded queries” from “an organization calling itself International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.” The Kremlin spokesman warned that various media around the world planned to publish stories concerning offshore companies allegedly connected to the president and “a large number of businessmen Putin has never seen in his life.” The Russians appeared to be unaware the project was much bigger than Putin. Peskov, whose wife also had a company with Mossfon, blamed the yet-unseen revelations on a conspiracy driven by foreign intelligence services. The efficiency of their attacks would not be high, the spokesman promised, according to the government-controlled news agency Sputnik.
In Washington, Ryle dodged calls from media organizations fishing for information on what was in the offing. After several ICIJ partners expressed concern that these disclosures would imperil the project, Ryle batted down suggestions that they publish early. He insisted to worried editors and reporters that these early revelations would build interest. They should be happy, he told them, because Putin and Gunnlaugsson had tested the stories and they held up. Ryle stayed calm because he had been through this before in the previous leak investigations.
Mossack and Fonseca still did not realize what they were facing. There had been a leak, that much was clear, but its extent and how many media organizations were involved remained a mystery. Fonseca remembers shock at another list of forty-eight questions that ICIJ, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the Guardian sent the firm. Queries about Jürgen Mossack’s father being a Nazi and allegations that the firm had laundered money for an infamous English Brinks gold heist convinced the partners that the journalists were bent on sensationalism, not serious dialogue. These “idiotic” questions, as Fonseca described them, were starkly at odds with the partners’ conception of themselves.
&
nbsp; Mossack was semiretired. Fonseca was in the government. The partners viewed themselves as upstanding businessmen. They had never created companies for bank robbers; they had sold the companies to an agent in London, who in turn sold them to others. Whatever damage their companies had done in the world was neither their concern nor their responsibility, they believed.
That was about to change.
On Friday, April 1, the firm bowed to reality and sent a note to its clients about an unauthorized breach of its email server. Signed by marketing and sales director Carlos Sousa, the note acknowledged that the information had fallen into the hands of reporters, who had contacted the firm.
“We have responded in a general manner and have not provided details that would further expose confidential information,” the note reassured its customers.
It was akin to closing the barn door after the horses had bolted, but the firm was not going to be held responsible for divulging information willingly themselves.
“Rest assured that we accord the highest priority to the safety and confidentiality of your information,” the note continued. “We employ multiple layers of electronic security and limit access to files to selected individuals within our firm in order to prevent breaches.”
A subsequent analysis of Mossfon’s cybersecurity belied this assertion. Its biggest mistake was keeping its intranet, the company’s internal database and communications, on the same server as its public-facing website. The firm compounded this error by not updating its software, even after security flaws and patches for them were publicly available. According to a story later published in Wired, the firm’s content management system had at least twenty-five known vulnerabilities, some quite significant.
Secrecy World Page 26
