It is one of the largest investigative journalism organizations in the world. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has contributed to scoops that have entered the history of journalism. Scoops like the Panama Papers: more than eleven million confidential documents regarding tax evasion on the part of over one-hundred and forty heads of state and political leaders around the world, which came down heavily on Vladimir Putin‘s inner circle of cronies and their immense hidden wealth. And then Laundromat, regarding billions of dollars laundered by Russian officials in Europe, the U.S. and other nations. Suisse Secrets, on one of the world’s richest banks, Credit Suisse; Cyprus Confidential, on Cyprus’s tax haven, important to the Russian elites. Dozens and dozens of scoops, in collaboration with the world’s leading media: from the New York Times to the Guardian, from Der Spiegel to the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
Founded by two journalists, American Drew Sullivan and Romanian Paul Radu in 2008, OCCRP has journalists on six continents, two hundred employees, offices in Washington DC, Amsterdam, and Sarajevo, a twenty-two million dollar annual budget, and a network of more than seventy regional centers of investigative journalism, from Botswana to Italy, from Papua New Guinea to Kyrgyzstan. Big numbers and major prestige: OCCRP has won over a hundred journalism awards.
But what has been little known until now is its close relationship with the U.S. government. Massive funding ever since its creation. Certain forms of funding allowing U.S. authorities to approve key personnel. Targeted grants funding journalistic investigations into United States enemies such as Russia and Venezuela. A case of “revolving doors”: an anti-corruption adviser who stopped working for the U.S. State Department and a few months later began working for OCCRP, lauding journalistic work as a weapon to strike corrupt and criminal individuals with sanctions, who then left the OCCRP and immediately rejoined the State Department as an adviser to the Sanctions Coordinator.
Il Fatto Quotidiano is able to reveal these facts thanks to an investigation in collaboration with online newspapers Mediapart (France), Drop Site News (United States), Reporters United (Greece), and German state television broadcaster NDR. The broadcaster was the first to conduct this journalistic investigation – for over a year – obtaining the most important revelations and sharing them with us, but to date they have yet to publish them. Censored. And yet after their journalists uncovered some of these facts, NDR temporarily suspended their journalistic cooperation with OCCRP.
A ghost grant
It all began in the Balkans, in the early 2000’s, after the terrible war that devastated Bosnia. Drew Sullivan was an American structural engineer who had worked for the Rockwell Space Systems company on the Space Shuttle program in the late 1980’s and had a “security clearance” to access classified U.S. documents.
Having abandoned his career as an engineer and after a stint as a comedian, Sullivan switched to journalism and in the early 2000s was in Bosnia training local journalists. It was in the Balkans that, along with reporter Paul Radu, he developed a project for conducting transnational investigative journalism: the OCCRP, specializing in organized crime and corruption. The idea is that crime does not stop at borders, rather it can rely on transnational networks allowing criminals to traffic drugs, human beings and to launder money. If a journalist wants to investigate these networks, he needs his own network of transnational journalistic contacts and sources. From the United States to the Balkans, from Africa to the Pacific Ocean. “You need a network to fight a network” is OCCRP’s motto. But investigative journalism is very costly. And transnational journalism tremendously so. The first money came from the United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF), but was only a few thousand dollars: $346,000.
As our investigation can reveal, it was a grant from the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) at the U.S. State Department – the heart of U.S. foreign policy – that made the creation of the OCCRP possible: $1.7 million in 2008-2010. INL is not a law enforcement agency that can arrest or interrogate criminals and suspects, but it does work closely with law enforcement agencies and fight crime that threatens U.S. national security.
Playing a key role in the INL funding was David Hodgkinson, then a U.S. Army Reserve Officer holding a civilian position with the State Department: Director of Security and Law Enforcement Programs in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. Today, however, Hodgkinson works for the coordinating body of U.S. intelligence agencies: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
In the U.S. government’s documentation of the $1.7 million grant, however, the INL does not appear: the only institute named is USAID, the U.S. government agency for international development. Nor does it appear that Drew Sullivan’s organization ever made the role of INL and David Hodgkinson public.
When we ask him about this fund, Sullivan says, “We don’t have insights into exactly why things were done this way with INL and USAID. We believe simply that Mr. Hodgkinson liked the plan. There were very few, if any, programs to address organized crime in those days. He had the money and supported what he thought was valuable work. He didn’t have resources to administer it and passed it on to USAID”.
Sullivan’s organization subsequently received two more grants from INL: one for $200,000 in 2011 and one for $2.3 million in 2022, but in these two cases INL’s name appears in official documentation.
The press is called “the Fourth Estate” for a reason: it has the function of controlling the other three powers of the state: the legislative, executive and judicial, including the police force. When we asked Drew Sullivan if he did not think it problematic that a news organization dealing with corruption and organized crime received money from a body like INL, he replied: “we do not consider INL funding as problematic as long as their grants meet our standards of not interfering with editorial practices”.
Follow the money
The ghost fund is just the start of massive U.S. government funding to OCCRP. The organization’s dependence on U.S. government money has been structural over the last 15 years.
There are two sources of funding: the State Department and USAID. Created by President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1961 at the height of the Cold War, with the stated goal of helping developing countries combat threats like hunger and infant mortality, USAID is an agency with a checkered past; indeed, U.S. administrations have repeatedly used it for their foreign policy goals, as U.S. expert John Norris reconstructs in an acclaimed history of the agency.
A 2006 U.S. diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks, for example, describes USAID activities in Venezuela – led at the time by President Hugo Chavez – in support of five objectives: strengthening democratic institutions, penetrating Chavez’s political base, dividing Chavismo, protecting vital U.S. business, and isolating Chavez internationally.
Using the official financial documentation sent by OCCRP to the U.S. authorities to account for the funds received, our French partner Mediapart calculated that from 2008 to 2023, OCCRP received at least $47 million from the U.S. government, to which should be added $1.1 million from the European Union, $7 million from the British government, $4 million from the Swedish government, $1.2 million from Denmark, as well as funds from Switzerland, Slovakia, and France.
When you add these figures together, according to Mediapart‘s calculations, you find that from 2014 to 2023, 70 percent of the OCCRP’s annual budget came from government funds. The U.S. government provided 52 percent of the overall annual budget.
Drew Sullivan contests this figure however, arguing that funds received by OCCPR but earmarked for other organizations with which it collaborates on specific projects, such as Transparency International, should not be included in the tally, as they are monies spent by others. Adopting this method of calculation, Sullivan concludes that from 2014 to 2023, the U.S. government provided 46.4 percent of the annual budget, still a very high percentage.
In a comment to our team, a spokesperson for the New York Times, which has collaborated on projects with OCCRP, said that the news organization did not disclose the nature of its funding to the Times.
In addition, some forms of funding include specific conditions, such as “cooperative agreements”, for example, which allow U.S. authorities to approve the organization’s key personnel, for example the CEO or the editor-in-chief.
Sullivan by contrast argues it is not true that the U.S. government has the ability to decide who will be the editor and who will hold key journalistic positions. “During bidding, we have to identify someone who is responsible for managing the grant”, he tells us, adding that the person overseeing the funding has nothing to do with the person leading the journalistic work, “Therefore, the government has zero control of our editorial process and our selection of editors. If they don’t like them, they will not award us the grant”. Sure, but how much funding can an organization, whose budget depends so heavily on the U.S. government, afford to lose?
OCCRP has also accepted funding geared toward countries that are known enemies of the United States. Between 2015 and 2019, for example, the news organization received $2.2 million of a grant for Balancing the Russian media sphere. And then $173,324 to uncover and fight corruption in Venezuela, $1.7 million between 2019 and 2023 to strengthen investigative journalism in Eurasia, an area of the world that includes Russia, and $1 million from the INL in 2022 “to strengthen the capacity of journalists in Malta and Cyprus, expose crime and corruption, and accelerate the impact of investigative reporting in the two countries and regionally”. During the years when it received the latter two grants, the OCCRP worked on and published investigations such as Russian Asset Tracker, a huge database on the wealth of Russian oligarchs and politicians, and Cyprus Confidential, on how Russians used the tax haven of Cyprus to limit the impact of Western sanctions.
One of the OCCRP member centers for investigative journalism we contacted, the Italy-based IRPI, told us they are aware that some forms of funding might require doing investigations on specific areas of the world, and claimed to be informed that the U.S. government provided a significant slice of the budget over the 2014-2023 period, but according to the Italian center those funds account for less than 50%, a statement that seems to agree with Drew Sullivan’s calculations. However, IRPI journalists informed us, they are not aware of any veto on OCCRP personnel by the U.S. government. “IRPI participated in many OCCRP projects focused on many different areas of the world without any attempt from OCCRP at manipulating editorial results”, they told us.
Usually, money buys influence. But both Drew Sullivan and the OCCRP board of directors completely reject the idea that U.S. government money can in any way influence their work. “From the beginning, we made sure that government grants had impenetrable guardrails that would protect the journalism produced by OCCRP”, the board of directors declared to us, adding: “we are confident that no government or donor has exerted editorial control over the OCCRP reporting”. As for Sullivan, he says his journalistic organization is not the only one that receives money from the United States; many others do: “Forbidden Stories, ICIJ and others, also take government money” and stresses: “The US government has never interfered with our reporting”.
Unfortunately, other news organizations cannot say they have been as lucky as the OCCRP. WikiLeaks, for example. As early as 2008, not even a year and a half after Assange founded it and when it had not yet published such bombshells as the Collateral Murder video or the U.S. diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks was already in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center (ACIC) proposed identifying journalistic sources who provided documents to WikiLeaks, exposing them, firing them from their jobs, and promoting legal action against them. And from 2010 onward, Assange’s organization underwent a banking blockade by financial institutions, from Bank of America to Visa and Mastercard credit cards. It remained under investigation by U.S. authorities for more than a decade. Its founder, Julian Assange, was arrested and charged with Espionage Act violations, the first time a journalist has been charged under this act in U.S. history. What is more, according to statements by protected witnesses at the center of a criminal investigation by the Spanish judiciary, the CIA had planned to kill or kidnap him.
Drew Sullivan also rejects the objection that OCCRP does not investigate the U.S. government nor investigate in conflict with its interests. “Our series on the U.S. buying weapons in the Balkans for Saudi Arabia and UAE which ended up with ISIS is one example”, he tells us, citing other journalistic efforts, such as those on “Rudy Giuliani‘s visit to Ukraine and his meetings with organized crime and Hunter Biden‘s ethically questionable business partners”. But such revelations about the U.S. government are still limited compared to major investigations like those into Russia, which have hit headlines around the world.
An army of “clean hands”
However, the head of a Latin American newsroom who has worked in collaboration with OCCRP told our Drop Site News colleagues, those who think Drew Sullivan’s news organization takes orders from the U.S. government do not understand how Washington’s soft power – which allows the U.S. government to influence the perception of international public opinion by relying not on military force, but on its image and reputation abroad – works.
“OCCRP doesn’t have to provide the USG with any info to be useful to them”, explained the head of the Latin American newsroom, “It’s an army of ‘clean hands’ investigating outside the US. There is value in investigating alleged allies and enemies. Makes the US seem virtuous and allows them to set the agenda of what is defined as corruption. But it’s always other people’s corruption”.
As a matter of fact, the U.S. government openly promotes journalism as a tool in the fight against the corrupt. “Largely, the way that corruption is exposed is through the work of investigative journalists”, according to the National Security Council, the main body advising the U.S. president on national security and foreign policy matters.
USAID agency Administrator Samantha Power, who sits on the National Security Council, has openly referred to OCCRP as their partner. And since 2016, the State Department has been funding the Global Anti-Corruption Consortium (GACC), which has OCCRP and the NGO Transparency International working together to ensure that journalistic investigations into corruption turn into civil society action and lead to judicial investigations, sanctions against the corrupt, and legislative changes to defeat corruption.
According to Mediapart’s calculations, from 2016 to 2023 the U.S. government funded the GACC with $10.8 million. Camille Eiss who, according to her résumé, until January 2017 worked for the State Department as a senior advisor for Anti-corruption, in December 2017 joined OCCRP and in this capacity advocated for journalism as a weapon to provide civil society with the information it needs to push for accountability through the use of tools like sanctions. Eiss then left OCCPR in August 2022, returning a month later to work for the State Department as Senior Advisor to the Sanctions Coordinator.
When we asked OCCRP’s co-founder whether this example of revolving doors does not represent a conflict of interest, Sullivan replied: “We hired Ms Eiss because she is a talented thought leader in the anti-corruption space. We are satisfied that at OCCRP she followed all rules and procedures required of her in her dealings with her former employer”. Camille Eiss, however, did not respond to our questions.
The censorship of German state television
It was Norddeutscher Rundfunk television, known as NDR, that uncovered the most important information about the OCCRP. Multi-awarded investigative reporter John Goetz, winner of an Emmy Award and the European Press Prize, had been working on OCCRP together with colleague Armin Ghassim since early 2023, when a short time before Drew Sullivan’s organization had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Satisfaction with the nomination and pride in having played a role in the creation of OCCRP had led several U.S. government officials, particularly the USAID agency, to make major revelations including that about the first INL funding in 2008.
But eighteen months on, NDR has never published these revelations. Last August, NDR shared research materials with Il Fatto Quotidiano, Mediapart, Drop Site News and Reporters United. We worked as a team, along with Romanian reporter Stefan Candea, who co-authored this article and who for over a year had been working with our NDR colleagues. Candea, who won the prestigious Nieman Fellowship for journalism at Harvard University, is also coordinator of the European Centre for Investigative Collaborations (EIC), though EIC was not involved in this investigation.
Our work as a team ultimately confirmed the work of our German colleagues and also uncovered further important confirmations. However, when it came time to send questions to the OCCRP’s board of directors and to its co-founder Drew Sullivan to give them the right of reply, NDR backed down, despite calling our questions “impressive.” To our request for an explanation, three senior NDR managers denied censorship, characterizing their choice as an editorial one, while informing us that their “institutional cooperation with OCCRP has been put on ice since the first accusations became known in September 2023”.
With our partners at Mediapart, Drop Site News and Reporters United, we learned of some emails sent by Drew Sullivan to OCCRP journalists wherein Sullivan attacked journalist John Goetz, referencing German intelligence attacks on Goetz as “a Russian asset“. We have also received repeated emails with threats of legal action and attacks on our colleague Stefan Candea.
Despite pressure and announcements of legal action, Il Fatto Quotidiano has decided to proceed and to publish, together with Mediapart, Drop Site News, Reporters United, everything that is true and that we are able to prove.
NOTE TO OUR READERS
During our investigation, Drew Sullivan has repeatedly attacked the co-author of this article, Stefan Candea, as the driving force behind this investigation for “personal animosity and competitive interests”.
Back in 2001, Candea established the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism (CRJI) together with colleagues in Romania. Candea and several of his colleagues at CRJI had been participating in projects, meetings and discussions related to the OCCRP network.
In 2010 Candea was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. Before, during and after his fellowship in the US, Candea and his colleagues tried to clarify who owns OCCRP. Since the CRJI had not been involved in decision making related to the management and fundraising of OCCRP, and since the Board of OCCRP didn’t reflect the Eastern European participation, CRJI decided to step back from OCCRP at the end of 2011. His colleague at CRJI Paul Radu decided to quit CRJI and stay with OCCRP, starting a new investigative non-profit in Romania.
Candea continued his journalistic work and also co-founded together with Der Spiegel a novel type of investigative collaboration: a network by agreement called European Investigative Collaborations (EIC).
EIC has not been involved in our investigation on OCCRP.
In 2023, NDR asked Stefan Candea – who had collaborated with NDR a decade before to expose CIA blacksites in Romania – to participate in a research project on OCCRP, which NDR shared with Il Fatto Quotidiano, Mediapart, Drop Site News, Reporters United, but to date NDR has yet to publish its revelations.
Stefania Maurizi
ITALIAN VERSION – I soldi-fantasma degli Usa per i reporter d’inchiesta
