Mysterious birdhouse


Spies and Shadowy Allies Lurk in Secret With Help From Offshore Firm

The documents also pull back the curtain on hundreds of details about how former CIA gun-runners and contractors use offshore companies for personal and private gain. Further, they illuminate the workings of a host of other characters who used offshore companies during or after their work as spy chiefs, secret agents or operatives for the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

“You can’t exactly walk around saying that you’re a spy,” Loch K. Johnson, a professor at the University of Georgia, says in explaining the cover that offshore firms offer. Johnson, a former aide to a U.S. Senate committee’s intelligence inquiries, has spent decades studying CIA “front” companies.

The documents reveal that Mossack Fonseca’s clients included Saudi Arabia’s first intelligence chief who was named by a U.S. Senate committee as the CIA’s “principal liaison for the entire the Middle East from the mid-1960’s through 1979,” Sheikh Kamal Adham, who controlled offshore companies later involved in a U.S. banking scandal. Also found in the files are Colombia’s former chief of air intelligence, ret. Maj. Gen. Ricardo Rubianogroot, who was a shareholder of an aviation and logistics company, and Brig. Gen. Emmanuel Ndahiro, doctor turned spy chief to Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame.