In June, a sharp-suited Austrian executive from a global surveillance company told a prospective client that he could “go to prison” for organizing the deal they were discussing. But the conversation did not end there.

The executive, Guenther Rudolph, was seated at a booth at ISS World in Prague, a secretive trade fair for police and intelligence agencies and advanced surveillance technology companies. Rudolph went on to explain how his firm, First Wap, could provide sophisticated phone-tracking software capable of pinpointing any person in the world. The potential buyer? A private mining company, owned by an individual under sanction, who intended to use it to surveil environmental protesters. “I think we’re the only one who can deliver,” Rudolph said.

What Rudolph did not know: He was talking to an undercover journalist from Lighthouse Reports, an investigative newsroom based in the Netherlands.

The road to that conference room in Prague began with the discovery of a vast archive of data by reporter Gabriel Geiger. The archive contained more than a million tracking operations: efforts to grab real-time locations of thousands of people worldwide. What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry. 

This week on Reveal, we join 13 other news outlets to expose the secrets of a global surveillance empire.

Dig Deeper

Read: The Surveillance Empire That Tracked World Leaders, a Vatican Enemy, and Maybe You (Mother Jones) 

Read:  First Wap, a discreet cyber-surveillance firm tracking journalists, public figures and corporate executives (Le Monde)

Read: Surveillance Secrets (Lighthouse Reports)

Watch: This Secret Tech Tracked World Leaders, a Vatican Enemy, and Maybe You (Mother Jones)

Watch: Heimlich überwacht? Dein Handy als Spion (ZDF, Germany)

Credits

Reporters: Gabriel Geiger, Crofton Black, Emmanuel Freudenthal, and Riccardo Coluccini | Producer: Michael Montgomery | Editor: Lu Olkowski | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Fact-checker: Artis Curiskis | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Legal review: Victoria Baranetsky | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks: Nadia Hamdan and Flavio Pompetti 

This story is part of the Surveillance Secrets investigation, coordinated by Lighthouse Reports. It was produced in collaboration with paper trail media, ZDF, Der Spiegel, Der Standard, Tamedia, Haaretz, Tempo, KRIK, Investigace.cz, Le Monde, NRK, and IrpiMedia.

Support for Reveal is provided by listeners like you, and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.

Transcript

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Picture a map of the world laid out on a giant screen. It’s pulsing with tiny points of light from San Francisco to Tokyo, Stockholm to Cape Town. In countries like Nigeria and Thailand, the points of light are so dense, they spill across the map. Other places are marked with just a single pinprick, Shawnee, Kansas, Soran, Iraq.  
 There are 700,000 points covering 160 countries on this map. Each one represents a cell phone that was tracked at a specific place in time. Some phones are tracked multiple times over the course of an hour or day or week. This map shows how over 10,000 people were tracked using one surveillance company’s software. It was created by a group of journalists who for the past year and a half have been piecing together how the technology works.  
 The software has been unknown to the public or even many experts until now. It predates the leaks of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. It’s wider in scale than the hacks connected to Pegasus, the spyware that’s been blacklisted by the US. But here’s the thing, those scandals involve governments spying on people. This tech is also helping corporations and even some private citizens get in on the spine.  
 This week’s show lifts the lid on this surveillance and what it means for all of us. It’s a part of a blockbuster collaboration with the investigative newsroom Lighthouse Reports. Reveal is one of 13 media partners working with Lighthouse to break this story. The investigation is already grabbing attention around the world.  
Speaker 1:And reporter from Lighthouse Reports. [Foreign language 00:01:51]  
Speaker 2:[Foreign language 00:01:53] The story is that a couple of reporters from Lighthouse…  
Speaker 3:Lighthouse Reports. [Foreign language 00:02:01]  
Al Letson:Thousands of people fell victim to this digital dragnet. Who are they? Who was doing the spying and why? We begin with the discovery of a database that sent the whole investigation into overdrive Reveal’s Michael Montgomery.  
Michael Montgom…:Ever since finishing college a few years ago, Gabriel Geiger has been working as an investigative journalist in Europe. In that short time, he’s developed a specialty covering the surveillance industry. Not surprisingly, Gabe spends a lot of time online trawling for secrets.  
Gabriel Geiger:When you think about the internet, it’s almost like an iceberg, and you have the top of the iceberg, the tip of the iceberg. That’s everything that you can find on the internet via Google Search.  
Michael Montgom…:Then there’s the deep web, hidden parts of the internet that aren’t indexed by standard search engines.  
Gabriel Geiger:A sort of ocean beneath the iceberg.  
Michael Montgom…:So Gabe sees his job as something like an explorer searching for mysterious creatures in the vast uncharted ocean of the deep web.  
Gabriel Geiger:My bosses would be very angry if they understood how much time I spend phishing and getting nothing out of it. But every once in a while you find something that’s actually pretty interesting  
Michael Montgom…:That happened one evening in 2024. Gabe is at home on his living room couch, his laptop open and glowing. A colleague had given him a tip, the name of an obscure company that develops surveillance tools.  
Gabriel Geiger:I look at their website and it looks like it’s from the 2000s or something. It’s kind of run-down website, old web design.  
Michael Montgom…:Even the company’s name First Wap seems obsolete. The Wap stands for Wireless Application Protocol, a mobile internet technology that was abandoned years ago.  
Gabriel Geiger:I’m sort of poking around trying to find out more about this company, and I come across this set of data lying on the internet, unsecured. Downloading it takes quite a long time.  
Michael Montgom…:As the data slowly streams into his computer, Gabe sees phone numbers and geographic coordinates. They were collected by First Wap over a span of eight years.  
Gabriel Geiger:And it becomes clear that something is being tracked or monitored. I don’t know if it’s consensual or not consensual, but there’s numbers attached to geographic coordinates that are changing over time.  
Michael Montgom…:Gabe is burning to figure out who is being tracked.  
Gabriel Geiger:So I’m looking through these phone numbers and I see a +39 number. +39 is the country code of Italy where my mom is from and I spent a lot of time in. So I was sort of, okay, well, let me try to identify this Italian phone number that I see here.  
Michael Montgom…:He plugs the number into a web service that can identify names, email addresses, and social media accounts.  
Gabriel Geiger:And when I do that, I get the name Gianluigi Nuzzi. And I put that name into Google and I see that Gianluigi Nuzzi is an Italian journalist. And not just any Italian journalist, he’s quite a famous Italian journalist and he’s quite famous for his investigations into the Vatican, corruption at the Vatican. And when I saw that, I kind of realized that I think I stumbled across something, something really important here.  
Michael Montgom…:Gabe works all night downloading as much data as he can. It will eventually total a million and a half lines with hundreds of columns. Along the way, he texts his boss, Lighthouse’s managing director Daniel Howden.  
Gabriel Geiger:And I’m excited. I thought, of course, he’s going to be convinced. As soon as I show him this, he’s going to be like, “Wow, good job.”  
Michael Montgom…:So he gets Daniel on the phone.  
Daniel Howden:It’s still incredibly early. It’s like pre-coffee hour.  
Michael Montgom…:It’s 7:00 AM. on a Sunday.  
Daniel Howden:And Gabe is so excited. He’s zealous. I mean, he’s found something. “I found the new Pegasus. I found our Pegasus,” obviously talking about this massive surveillance spyware investigation that went all over the world. And my first thought is this is going to be a good laugh for everyone over beers for weeks to come. He is full of this kind of puppy-ish enthusiasm, and I pat him on the head a little bit, calm him down, and asked him a few questions.  
Michael Montgom…:Questions like, how is this different from the last three massive scoops that Gabe brought in?  
Daniel Howden:Which turned out not to be what we thought.  
Michael Montgom…:Daniel knows from experience that it can take months, even years to unravel a complex data set. And even then, there might not be a story. He’s also concerned that the information Gabe has dug up is old. The data trails off in 2015. Editor and reporter Crofton Black is also cautious of Gabe’s discovery.  
Crofton Black:He’s young enough and naive enough to think that he can take a million and a half row data set and turn it into a story just like that.  
Michael Montgom…:Still, something about all this is intriguing to Crofton. I mean, it’s just so much data. So he shares a sample with some trusted sources in the telecoms industry.  
Crofton Black:They were pretty stunned by the size of the data. They were like, “How did you get a million and a half rows of this?” It’s floated up from the depths of the deep web. It’s like the Kraken.  
Michael Montgom…:The Kraken, the legendary sea monster.  
Crofton Black:You can measure it. You can weigh it. You can count how many tentacles it’s got, how many eyes has it got, but you don’t have a guide. You don’t have Jacques Cousteau to tell you actually what it does, what it is.  
Michael Montgom…:Two months after Gabe discovers the Kraken, Lighthouse decides to move forward with the investigation. 13 other newsrooms join the Lighthouse team. They include Paper Trail Media from Germany whose founders broke the Panama Papers investigation. With Crofton and Gabe tag teaming as the famous Ocean Explorer Jacques Cousteau, they begin the tedious work of putting names and stories to many of those phone numbers.  
 And while they’re not able to trace all the numbers, what they find is pretty startling. A broad range of people from more than a hundred countries, including the US, all being tracked on their mobile phones.  
Gabriel Geiger:You see heads of state. You see award-winning journalists. You see human rights activists. You see leaders in industry. You see people inside the surveillance industry itself. It’s this sort of extraordinary cross-section of important people doing important things in their lives all over the world.  
Michael Montgom…:Turns out that First Wap, the company that makes the technology, has been around for two decades. But some surveillance experts, they’ve never heard of it.  
Ron Deibert:I was not familiar with this company.  
Michael Montgom…:Ron Deibert is an author, cyber sleuth, and director of Citizen Lab, the digital human rights group based in Toronto. He says the fact that he hadn’t heard about First Wap isn’t really a surprise.  
Ron Deibert:It’s a relatively crowded space. There are many companies that have been able to operate in the shadows, which I think says something about this sector as a whole.  
Michael Montgom…:As the Lighthouse team begins to make sense of the data, it also obtains company documents, marketing material, and connects with former employees. A picture emerges of this mysterious company, First Wap, and the software developed to track all those phone numbers. They learn the software’s name, Altamides, and what it stands for, advanced location tracking, mobile information, and deception system.  
Gabriel Geiger:And the selling point of this piece of software is that you can type in virtually any phone number and it’ll be able to track it anywhere in the world with no trace on the phone.  
Michael Montgom…:Altamides doesn’t leave a trace because unlike spyware like Pegasus, it doesn’t get inside your phone.  
Ron Deibert:It’s important to remember that our devices, our smartphones, sit on and function through a broader telecommunications ecosystem, which itself has been for decades notoriously insecure and poorly regulated. They can exploit these signaling protocols in order to package up a service that is not quite the same as getting inside a device, but can accomplish a lot.  
Michael Montgom…:Altamides works in a couple ways. If a customer, say a government, wanted to track a phone number, they could buy a system and run it themselves through a local phone network. Another way the software works is through a web-based portal. It taps into the global phone network through telecom companies in Liechtenstein or Indonesia. And it’s not just about tracking someone’s movements.  
 Altamides also makes it possible to listen in on voice calls, read texts, and hijack communications on encrypted platforms like WhatsApp. In its marketing materials and in a response to the reporting team, First WAP says Altamides was developed to help governments fight serious crime and track down terrorists. That’s a common refrain in the surveillance industry.  
 But many of the phone numbers from First Wap’s own database challenge that narrative. And this is where Italian investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi comes back into the picture. In May 2012, Nuzzi’s blockbuster book about Pope Benedict XVI was getting worldwide attention.  
Speaker 4:This morning, an author is defending his explosive allegations against the Vatican. His new book accuses powerful members of the church hierarchy of greed and financial mismanagement.  
Michael Montgom…:Nuzzi’s book drew on leaked documents, including private correspondence between Pope Benedict and his secretary. Crofton says the Holy See was irate.  
Crofton Black:At this moment in time, Gianluigi Nuzzi was the Vatican’s public enemy number one, but he was the guy who was splashing all their dirty secrets and hanging out their dirty laundry to an enormous audience in Italy, and they wanted to know where he got the stuff.  
Gabriel Geiger:We know at the time from reporting that there’s a sort of mad hunt to uncover who Nuzzi’s source is, who’s inside the Vatican leaking all these documents to him.  
Michael Montgom…:Gabe took a closer look at the data he discovered,  
Gabriel Geiger:And I’m looking at the dates and I realize Nuzzi is being tracked just days after he publishes his big book.  
Michael Montgom…:Gabe says the data shows Nuzzi was tracked for about a week. Then the day after the Vatican police arrested his source, the tracking suddenly stopped.  
Speaker 5:A scandal worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster is rocking the Vatican. The detention of Pope Benedict’s butler capped one of the most convulsive weeks in recent Vatican history.  
Michael Montgom…:The butler, Paolo Gabriele, was charged with stealing the Pope’s private papers and leaking them. He was convicted by a Vatican court and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Nuzzi was also indicted.  
Speaker 6:Defendant Gianluigi Nuzzi arrives for the first day of a Vatican trial over the alleged theft of confidential documents from the Holy See.  
Michael Montgom…:After years of legal wrangling, Nuzzi and another reporter were finally acquitted. Fast-forward about nine years to July 2025. Nuzzi is approached by the Lighthouse team. Like most people who show up in the tracking data, he has absolutely no idea he was being monitored.  
Gianluigi Nuzzi:[Foreign language 00:14:04]  
Michael Montgom…:In a noisy cafe, they show him a map on a laptop with dots indicating all the locations where he was tracked, like his home in Milan.  
Gianluigi Nuzzi:[Foreign language 00:14:16]  
Gabriel Geiger:He’s zooming in, zooming in, zooming in at one of the points. Oh, that’s my apartment. And they were tracking him everywhere he was going, while he was at the airport, while he was on a train or driving. They’d sort of scheduled the tracking every hour, so he was systematically being tracked as he moved across Italy.  
Michael Montgom…:Nuzzi is surprised at the precision with which he was tracked, but he’s also circumspect. Crofton says he didn’t want to jump to any conclusions that it was the Vatican that was behind the surveillance.  
Crofton Black:He was like, “Well, you know, it’s not really their style. I would expect them to be sending people to follow my car or people to break into my house maybe.”  
Michael Montgom…:Then there’s a breakthrough in the investigation. Lighthouse obtains emails and documents that show there is a connection to the Vatican. Here’s what they learned. A British company, KCS Group, was acting as a middleman for First Wap. They were preparing a pitch to the Vatican, showing them how they could use Altamides. Crofton says KCS was planning to ask the Vatican which phone numbers they should monitor.  
Crofton Black:Four days after they asked that, we see that Nuzzi’s numbers start being tracked. Then another five days later, KCS has their meeting with officials from the Vatican. KCS’ employee goes to the meeting and he’s got a presentation, a presentation that shows on a map Nuzzi’s movements over the last week. After the meeting, the employee from KCS, he actually emails First Wap saying, “Presentation fine. Client happy.”  
Michael Montgom…:We sent First Wap and KCS Group a detailed list of questions about how the Altamides software was used to track Nuzzi. First Wap responded saying it does not provide tracking services and that they aren’t involved with how its product is used once it’s delivered to a client.  
 KCS Group says they have not been involved in selling or using inappropriate surveillance materials. Today, Gianluigi Nuzzi believes the Vatican was tracking him and he’s disturbed by it. He says he’s still angry over the jailing of his source. He believes his only crime was exposing corruption.  
Gianluigi Nuzzi:[Foreign language 00:16:52] It was a shock to me because the Vatican never arrested pedophile priests. They never arrested money launderers. Money laundering was not even a crime, but they arrested a family man with a clean record who had committed a terrible crime of making photocopies and give it to a journalist.  
Gabriel Geiger:You can really tell over the course of that interview that he’s genuinely disturbed. He felt that this showed the chilling effect this type of technology can have on the work of journalists like himself and other journalists all around the world.  
Michael Montgom…:So if the Vatican tracked Nuzzi, were they breaking the law? Well, the Vatican is its own state and it wouldn’t necessarily be illegal to track someone within the walls of Vatican City. But Nuzzi was tracked outside the Vatican, in Rome, in Milan, all over Italy. To do that legally, the Vatican would need to make a formal request to Italian authorities. We asked the Vatican if they made a deal with KCS to use the Altamides software. We also asked whether they made a request to Italian authorities to track Nuzzi. They never responded.  
Al Letson:Gianluigi Nuzzi was one of a number of high-profile figures whose lives were secretly monitored. There were also hundreds of other people who weren’t public figures at all.  
Speaker 7:I felt really violated. I felt very vulnerable.  
Al Letson:That’s next on Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson.  
 Today we’re collaborating with Lighthouse Reports about a global surveillance software that can track virtually any mobile phone user around the world. After discovering that the software was used to spy on an Italian reporter as he was releasing a book about corruption inside the Vatican, Gabe and the team at Lighthouse Reports started digging deeper into the data set. They found that a wide range of public figures were being monitored.  
Gabe Geiger:There’s the actor Jared Leto in there; there’s Eric Prince, the controversial founder of Blackwater Security. You have this guy, Adam Ciralsky, who was a Netflix producer and a former lawyer for the CIA. There’s 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, the Prime Minister of Qatar, the wife of Bashar al-Assad, executives at the energy drink company Red Bull. It’s this sort of dizzying number of important people from all over the world.  
Al Letson:But they also came across names that didn’t fit that profile or any profile really, seemingly random people whose movements were also being tracked.  
 Reveal’s Michael Montgomery explains.  
Michael Montgom…:Gabe learned that lots of regular people were being tracked, like a teacher, a driver, even a softball coach in Hawaii.  
Gabe Geiger:And we have no idea why. You can understand why a journalist investigating the Vatican is being tracked. It’s not good obviously, but you can understand why it happens, the motivation behind it. But why is a therapist inside there? That’s a bigger mystery.  
Michael Montgom…:One phone number had a British country code, and they traced it to a person we’re going to call Sofia.  
Sofia:Hello, Gabriel.  
Gabe Geiger:Hi, how are you doing?  
Sofia:I’m doing all right.  
Gabe Geiger:Sofia is a Russian woman who fled the country in the late nineties and eventually ended up in the UK where she worked in the corporate sector for many years.  
Michael Montgom…:The First WAP data showed that Sofia was tracked for almost a year without her knowledge or consent. Sofia learned she was monitored in Britain and even on her travels abroad.  
Sofia:I could recognize the place where I stayed, the hotel, the restaurants area, the beach. So disturbing. Quite accurate and disturbing.  
Michael Montgom…:All of these searches put her in the top 10% of all the phone numbers that Lighthouse analyzed. Sofia asked that we not use her real name out of concern for retaliation, but she wanted her voice heard.  
Sofia:This needs to be shared as widely as possible for people to be aware that dangers like this are lurking just around the corner.  
Michael Montgom…:At the time she was tracked, Sofia was working in a highly competitive industry that put a premium on new patents. As a company executive, she had access to all kinds of confidential information.  
Sofia:I thought, “Well, most likely it was a competitor.” And then I thought, “Oh my gosh, maybe it was actually my own company,” because I’ve read stories of the companies also spying on their employees. And then a less likely but plausible scenario, maybe I have been surveilled by the Russian state, because I have been a fairly vocal critic of the inhumane policies of the Russian government in my own humble ways.  
Michael Montgom…:To figure out who was behind the tracking, Gabe went back into the data, where he noticed something unusual.  
Gabe Geiger:Which is that her phone number is being tracked at the same time as a bunch of Pakistani phone numbers.  
Michael Montgom…:Sofia recalled knowing only one person from Pakistan while she was living in Britain. He was an instructor her company had hired to help her get a driver’s license.  
Sofia:He had to sometimes meet me and pick me up at my home, and we would have to drive all the way to the office together. So he already knew where I worked, he knew where I lived.  
Michael Montgom…:Sofia says the man regaled her with stories about his time in the army and about his connections to Pakistani intelligence agencies.  
Sofia:He was quite keen to stay in touch with me, and over time he started to pursue me romantically.  
Michael Montgom…:Something about this guy felt off. Sofia definitely wasn’t interested, so she broke off contact. But for months the man kept calling and texting.  
 Years later, after speaking with Lighthouse Reports, Sofia learned something important. The man wasn’t just a driving instructor, he was also a sales manager for a private security company. It seems somehow he got access to Altamides and used it to track Sofia and several of his colleagues.  
Gabe Geiger:This software became a sort of plaything of some people who had access to it, and they used it to track people they were romantically pursuing or harassing, they used it to track their wives, they used it to track their kids, they used it to track the people their kids were dating.  
Sofia:It’s really alarming and disturbing how easy it is to use this type of technology.  
Michael Montgom…:The unwanted calls and texts eventually stopped, but since learning about the man who was secretly surveilling her, Sofia says she’s been asking herself a lot of questions; how do you build relationships with people and how do you maintain them?  
Sofia:It makes me definitely rethink how to deal with people without turning into a paranoid or a bitter person. It sort of put my own perceptions of safety upside down. Like there is no privacy, there is no safe space where I can just be left alone.  
Michael Montgom…:When you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that this massive data set that Gabe stumbled on would include a journalist covering corruption in the Vatican and just a regular person like Sofia.  
 The Lighthouse Reports investigation continued and Gabe says they figured out one way to make sense of the mobile numbers in the data set: look for patterns or clusters.  
Gabe Geiger:We’re talking about groups of numbers that are related to each other. So maybe every day these two numbers are being tracked within one minute of each other. Or they can be connected in terms of place, so these two numbers are being tracked in the same building or they’re being tracked a hundred feet away from each other.  
Michael Montgom…:That’s how they came upon a trail of South African phone numbers.  
Gabe Geiger:And we can notice that they’re all being tracked at the same time. This tracking is highly correlated.  
 We start digging in further and we realize that these aren’t South Africans. We see that they’re actually Rwandans in exile living in South Africa.  
Michael Montgom…:Turns out some of the numbers were connected to an opposition movement called the Rwanda National Congress that was actively campaigning for a more democratic government.  
Gabe Geiger:The movement was gaining momentum when one of its leaders was found strangled in a hotel room in Johannesburg.  
Speaker 5:A former head of the Rwanda External Intelligence Service has been found murdered in a hotel in South Africa, the country where he had been living in exile for several years.  
Michael Montgom…:The man’s name was Patrick Karegeya. He was a rebel fighter who became Rwanda’s Foreign Intelligence Chief after the genocide in 1994. He was a close ally of President Paul Kagame, but the two had a bitter falling out. As a result, Patrick was imprisoned and then went into exile.  
 Here’s Patrick talking about the dangers he and his comrades faced.  
Patrick Karegey…:Some have died, some are in prison, others are in exile like us. And it will continue.  
Michael Montgom…:Even in exile, Patrick says he knew they were being targeted by the Rwandan government.  
Patrick Karegey…:That’s why my colleague got shot. I probably was a bit lucky. I went off without a scar.  
Michael Montgom…:Still, he continued to speak out against Kagame, and for that he was branded an enemy of the state.  
Gabe Geiger:There’s been a wealth of reporting that’s sort of shown how Kagame’s regime was incredibly paranoid about potential opposition to his government, and it’s been well documented that Kagame has set up a sort of intelligence apparatus that tracks and hunts down dissidents abroad.  
Michael Montgom…:Patrick believed he was a marked man, but he would make light of it using his dry sense of humor. This is Patrick’s daughter, Portia.  
Portia Karegeya:He used to joke in a way that I didn’t enjoy that he was a dead man walking, in verbatim.  
Michael Montgom…:Journalist and author Michela Wrong knew Patrick and also remembers his dark sense of humor. She wrote a book about him and his murder called Do Not Disturb. In it, she writes about how Patrick would joke about Rwanda’s intelligence operations.  
Michela Wrong:Patrick Karegeya used to joke, “Hey, you think they’re James Bond, but I was James Bond. I’m the spy chief. I know how this stuff works. I’m ahead of the game.” And he was more vulnerable than he realized, and events proved that to be the case.  
Michael Montgom…:The Lighthouse team wanted to know if there was any connection between Patrick’s killing in 2013 and the tracking of people around him before his death.  
 They knew one thing: Patrick’s phone number didn’t show up in the cluster. But they uncovered the identities of others, including a man named Jack Nziza, and shared them with Michela Wrong.  
Michela Wrong:If you follow Rwanda closely, or even if you don’t follow it closely at all, Jack Nziza is infamous. He’s been associated really throughout his career with top level assassination. I mean, people sort of shudder when they mention his name.  
Michael Montgom…:Michela recognized a second person who showed up in the cluster, the wife of an opposition figure who worked closely with Patrick. And a third; Patrick’s bodyguard and driver.  
Michela Wrong:So you’ve got the wife of one dissident, the bodyguard and driver of another, and a man who is associated with top level hits.  
Michael Montgom…:Those clusters that Gabe and the Lighthouse team found are known as relational targeting in the world of surveillance technology. It’s a concept that’s very familiar to Ron Deibert from Citizen Lab.  
Ron Deibert:You have a principle target in mind, and you want to gather as much information about that target as possible, but you might have difficulty, for example, hacking their device because they’ve put in place all sorts of defense mechanisms.  
Michael Montgom…:This is where relational targeting comes into play. You track people whose movements mirror those of your targets.  
Ron Deibert:So you get at their daughter, their son, their cousin, their uncle or whatever, and you track them collaterally. We see it in just about every case that we investigate.  
Robert Higiro:You know, you can’t kill someone if you don’t know where they are. You can’t kill people if you don’t have real time intelligence showing you their locations.  
Michael Montgom…:As a former officer in the Rwandan army, Robert Higiro had organized sensitive military operations where intelligence gathering was crucial.  
 Robert was also living in exile and was close to Patrick. He says he knew the government wanted to kill his friend, but he didn’t know someone was using First Wap’s software Altamides to track people close to him. Learning about it today, he’s not surprised.  
Robert Higiro:They do these things. They choose these methods of eliminating people by killing in cold blood because they want to terrorize the population.  
Michael Montgom…:The tracking stopped months before Patrick’s murder, and it’s unclear if other people close to him were being monitored at the time of his death.  
 Portia was in Canada when she got word that her father was dead. It was New Year’s Day 2014.  
Portia Karegeya:Even when I used to visit and say goodbye, you would always wonder, “Is that the last time I say goodbye to my dad?” And then that he actually ultimately is killed, yeah, I just remember thinking, “Okay, so the world is just chaos and people are awful, and there’s not much you personally can do to get away from that, and it is absolutely a part of your life and your story.”  
Michael Montgom…:The Rwandan government was widely suspected of ordering Patrick’s killing, and arrest warrants were issued for two Rwandan men, but there’s never been a trial. Portia says her father’s murder had the intended effect of splintering the opposition movement.  
Portia Karegeya:There’s a certain something that happens when you feel like you’ve lost good people. And so I think folks just didn’t quite know how to stay together in the same way.  
Michael Montgom…:It remains a mystery who had access to the First Wap software that was used to track people close to Patrick Karegeya.  
 A representative from the Rwandan embassy in Washington said the government of Rwanda, quote, “Has never had nor sought to have such software directly or indirectly.”  
 In response to this investigation, First Wap denied it was involved in any human rights violations. The company also said it couldn’t address specific allegations because of client confidentiality.  
 There is other evidence showing how the company and its executives have been connected to a list of governments with poor human rights records, such as emails, interviews with former employees, and the original data that Gabe collected.  
 According to that data, First Wap founder Josef Fuchs visited more than 25 countries between 2007 and 2015.  
Gabe Geiger:One of the unique things that you see in this data set is that Fuchs and other company executives are tracking their own phone numbers hundreds of thousands of times as they crisscross the globe.  
Michael Montgom…:Lighthouse Reports suspects that Fuchs and other First Wap executives traveled to many of these places while drumming up business for Altimedes.  
Gabe Geiger:And what kind of ties a lot of them together is that, one, they’re authoritarian, and two, they have a history of abusing surveillance tech against their own citizens.  
Michael Montgom…:Like Thailand in 2013. Fuchs is there just as anti-government protests surge.  
Protesters:[inaudible 00:14:55].  
Gabe Geiger:We see Fuchs tracking his phone number and other Thai phone numbers. You know, maybe this is a way for him to show off how the software is working. But in any case, right after that, we see a huge uptick in activity in Thailand.  
Protesters:[inaudible 00:15:13].  
Michael Montgom…:Gabe says hundreds of Thai phone numbers were monitored with Altamides just as the authorities stepped up a brutal crackdown.  
 According to documents and interviews with former employees, Lighthouse learned that Altamedes customers included the governments of Belarus, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan.  
Ron Deibert:This is essentially despotism as a service.  
Michael Montgom…:Ron Deibert from Citizen Lab says working with repressive governments is a common feature throughout the surveillance industry.  
Ron Deibert:These are companies that are facilitating human rights abuses and some pretty horrible egregious practices. So we’re dealing with the facilitation through this service of transnational authoritarianism.  
Gabe Geiger:This is just probably a small slither of the company’s total activities. It’s clearly not the entire set. And we don’t have activities from 2015 onwards, so what happened after that point? Yeah, that keeps me up at night.  
Michael Montgom…:In a statement, First Wap said it had not offered or sold its products to repressive regimes, and it noted that it had no knowledge of any discussions or presentations that may have been carried out by the company’s founder, Josef Fuchs.  
 Fuchs died in 2024.  
Al Letson:In a moment, the team at Lighthouse Reports goes undercover to learn how this mysterious company markets its surveillance technology today.  
Speaker 12:We wanted to know, in 2025, is there anything that these guys would balk at? Do they have any red lines?  
Al Letson:That’s next on Reveal.      
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson.  
 Today we’re collaborating with Lighthouse Reports about a global surveillance software that can track virtually any mobile phone user around the world. After discovering that the software was used to spy on an Italian reporter as he was releasing a book about corruption inside the Vatican, Gabe and the team at Lighthouse Reports started digging deeper into the data set. They found that a wide range of public figures were being monitored.  
Gabe Geiger:There’s the actor Jared Leto in there; there’s Eric Prince, the controversial founder of Blackwater Security. You have this guy, Adam Ciralsky, who was a Netflix producer and a former lawyer for the CIA. There’s 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, the Prime Minister of Qatar, the wife of Bashar al-Assad, executives at the energy drink company Red Bull. It’s this sort of dizzying number of important people from all over the world.  
Al Letson:But they also came across names that didn’t fit that profile or any profile really, seemingly random people whose movements were also being tracked.  
 Reveal’s Michael Montgomery explains.  
Michael Montgom…:Gabe learned that lots of regular people were being tracked, like a teacher, a driver, even a softball coach in Hawaii.  
Gabe Geiger:And we have no idea why. You can understand why a journalist investigating the Vatican is being tracked. It’s not good obviously, but you can understand why it happens, the motivation behind it. But why is a therapist inside there? That’s a bigger mystery.  
Michael Montgom…:One phone number had a British country code, and they traced it to a person we’re going to call Sofia.  
Sofia:Hello, Gabriel.  
Gabe Geiger:Hi, how are you doing?  
Sofia:I’m doing all right.  
Gabe Geiger:Sofia is a Russian woman who fled the country in the late nineties and eventually ended up in the UK where she worked in the corporate sector for many years.  
Michael Montgom…:The First WAP data showed that Sofia was tracked for almost a year without her knowledge or consent. Sofia learned she was monitored in Britain and even on her travels abroad.  
Sofia:I could recognize the place where I stayed, the hotel, the restaurants area, the beach. So disturbing. Quite accurate and disturbing.  
Michael Montgom…:All of these searches put her in the top 10% of all the phone numbers that Lighthouse analyzed. Sofia asked that we not use her real name out of concern for retaliation, but she wanted her voice heard.  
Sofia:This needs to be shared as widely as possible for people to be aware that dangers like this are lurking just around the corner.  
Michael Montgom…:At the time she was tracked, Sofia was working in a highly competitive industry that put a premium on new patents. As a company executive, she had access to all kinds of confidential information.  
Sofia:I thought, “Well, most likely it was a competitor.” And then I thought, “Oh my gosh, maybe it was actually my own company,” because I’ve read stories of the companies also spying on their employees. And then a less likely but plausible scenario, maybe I have been surveilled by the Russian state, because I have been a fairly vocal critic of the inhumane policies of the Russian government in my own humble ways.  
Michael Montgom…:To figure out who was behind the tracking, Gabe went back into the data, where he noticed something unusual.  
Gabe Geiger:Which is that her phone number is being tracked at the same time as a bunch of Pakistani phone numbers.  
Michael Montgom…:Sofia recalled knowing only one person from Pakistan while she was living in Britain. He was an instructor her company had hired to help her get a driver’s license.  
Sofia:He had to sometimes meet me and pick me up at my home, and we would have to drive all the way to the office together. So he already knew where I worked, he knew where I lived.  
Michael Montgom…:Sofia says the man regaled her with stories about his time in the army and about his connections to Pakistani intelligence agencies.  
Sofia:He was quite keen to stay in touch with me, and over time he started to pursue me romantically.  
Michael Montgom…:Something about this guy felt off. Sofia definitely wasn’t interested, so she broke off contact. But for months the man kept calling and texting.  
 Years later, after speaking with Lighthouse Reports, Sofia learned something important. The man wasn’t just a driving instructor, he was also a sales manager for a private security company. It seems somehow he got access to Altamides and used it to track Sofia and several of his colleagues.  
Gabe Geiger:This software became a sort of plaything of some people who had access to it, and they used it to track people they were romantically pursuing or harassing, they used it to track their wives, they used it to track their kids, they used it to track the people their kids were dating.  
Sofia:It’s really alarming and disturbing how easy it is to use this type of technology.  
Michael Montgom…:The unwanted calls and texts eventually stopped, but since learning about the man who was secretly surveilling her, Sofia says she’s been asking herself a lot of questions; how do you build relationships with people and how do you maintain them?  
Sofia:It makes me definitely rethink how to deal with people without turning into a paranoid or a bitter person. It sort of put my own perceptions of safety upside down. Like there is no privacy, there is no safe space where I can just be left alone.  
Michael Montgom…:When you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that this massive data set that Gabe stumbled on would include a journalist covering corruption in the Vatican and just a regular person like Sofia.  
 The Lighthouse Reports investigation continued and Gabe says they figured out one way to make sense of the mobile numbers in the data set: look for patterns or clusters.  
Gabe Geiger:We’re talking about groups of numbers that are related to each other. So maybe every day these two numbers are being tracked within one minute of each other. Or they can be connected in terms of place, so these two numbers are being tracked in the same building or they’re being tracked a hundred feet away from each other.  
Michael Montgom…:That’s how they came upon a trail of South African phone numbers.  
Gabe Geiger:And we can notice that they’re all being tracked at the same time. This tracking is highly correlated.  
 We start digging in further and we realize that these aren’t South Africans. We see that they’re actually Rwandans in exile living in South Africa.  
Michael Montgom…:Turns out some of the numbers were connected to an opposition movement called the Rwanda National Congress that was actively campaigning for a more democratic government.  
Gabe Geiger:The movement was gaining momentum when one of its leaders was found strangled in a hotel room in Johannesburg.  
Speaker 5:A former head of the Rwanda External Intelligence Service has been found murdered in a hotel in South Africa, the country where he had been living in exile for several years.  
Michael Montgom…:The man’s name was Patrick Karegeya. He was a rebel fighter who became Rwanda’s Foreign Intelligence Chief after the genocide in 1994. He was a close ally of President Paul Kagame, but the two had a bitter falling out. As a result, Patrick was imprisoned and then went into exile.  
 Here’s Patrick talking about the dangers he and his comrades faced.  
Patrick Karegey…:Some have died, some are in prison, others are in exile like us. And it will continue.  
Michael Montgom…:Even in exile, Patrick says he knew they were being targeted by the Rwandan government.  
Patrick Karegey…:That’s why my colleague got shot. I probably was a bit lucky. I went off without a scar.  
Michael Montgom…:Still, he continued to speak out against Kagame, and for that he was branded an enemy of the state.  
Gabe Geiger:There’s been a wealth of reporting that’s sort of shown how Kagame’s regime was incredibly paranoid about potential opposition to his government, and it’s been well documented that Kagame has set up a sort of intelligence apparatus that tracks and hunts down dissidents abroad.  
Michael Montgom…:Patrick believed he was a marked man, but he would make light of it using his dry sense of humor. This is Patrick’s daughter, Portia.  
Portia Karegeya:He used to joke in a way that I didn’t enjoy that he was a dead man walking, in verbatim.  
Michael Montgom…:Journalist and author Michela Wrong knew Patrick and also remembers his dark sense of humor. She wrote a book about him and his murder called Do Not Disturb. In it, she writes about how Patrick would joke about Rwanda’s intelligence operations.  
Michela Wrong:Patrick Karegeya used to joke, “Hey, you think they’re James Bond, but I was James Bond. I’m the spy chief. I know how this stuff works. I’m ahead of the game.” And he was more vulnerable than he realized, and events proved that to be the case.  
Michael Montgom…:The Lighthouse team wanted to know if there was any connection between Patrick’s killing in 2013 and the tracking of people around him before his death.  
 They knew one thing: Patrick’s phone number didn’t show up in the cluster. But they uncovered the identities of others, including a man named Jack Nziza, and shared them with Michela Wrong.  
Michela Wrong:If you follow Rwanda closely, or even if you don’t follow it closely at all, Jack Nziza is infamous. He’s been associated really throughout his career with top level assassination. I mean, people sort of shudder when they mention his name.  
Michael Montgom…:Michela recognized a second person who showed up in the cluster, the wife of an opposition figure who worked closely with Patrick. And a third; Patrick’s bodyguard and driver.  
Michela Wrong:So you’ve got the wife of one dissident, the bodyguard and driver of another, and a man who is associated with top level hits.  
Michael Montgom…:Those clusters that Gabe and the Lighthouse team found are known as relational targeting in the world of surveillance technology. It’s a concept that’s very familiar to Ron Deibert from Citizen Lab.  
Ron Deibert:You have a principle target in mind, and you want to gather as much information about that target as possible, but you might have difficulty, for example, hacking their device because they’ve put in place all sorts of defense mechanisms.  
Michael Montgom…:This is where relational targeting comes into play. You track people whose movements mirror those of your targets.  
Ron Deibert:So you get at their daughter, their son, their cousin, their uncle or whatever, and you track them collaterally. We see it in just about every case that we investigate.  
Robert Higiro:You know, you can’t kill someone if you don’t know where they are. You can’t kill people if you don’t have real time intelligence showing you their locations.  
Michael Montgom…:As a former officer in the Rwandan army, Robert Higiro had organized sensitive military operations where intelligence gathering was crucial.  
 Robert was also living in exile and was close to Patrick. He says he knew the government wanted to kill his friend, but he didn’t know someone was using First Wap’s software Altamides to track people close to him. Learning about it today, he’s not surprised.  
Robert Higiro:They do these things. They choose these methods of eliminating people by killing in cold blood because they want to terrorize the population.  
Michael Montgom…:The tracking stopped months before Patrick’s murder, and it’s unclear if other people close to him were being monitored at the time of his death.  
 Portia was in Canada when she got word that her father was dead. It was New Year’s Day 2014.  
Portia Karegeya:Even when I used to visit and say goodbye, you would always wonder, “Is that the last time I say goodbye to my dad?” And then that he actually ultimately is killed, yeah, I just remember thinking, “Okay, so the world is just chaos and people are awful, and there’s not much you personally can do to get away from that, and it is absolutely a part of your life and your story.”  
Michael Montgom…:The Rwandan government was widely suspected of ordering Patrick’s killing, and arrest warrants were issued for two Rwandan men, but there’s never been a trial. Portia says her father’s murder had the intended effect of splintering the opposition movement.  
Portia Karegeya:There’s a certain something that happens when you feel like you’ve lost good people. And so I think folks just didn’t quite know how to stay together in the same way.  
Michael Montgom…:It remains a mystery who had access to the First Wap software that was used to track people close to Patrick Karegeya.  
 A representative from the Rwandan embassy in Washington said the government of Rwanda, quote, “Has never had nor sought to have such software directly or indirectly.”  
 In response to this investigation, First Wap denied it was involved in any human rights violations. The company also said it couldn’t address specific allegations because of client confidentiality.  
 There is other evidence showing how the company and its executives have been connected to a list of governments with poor human rights records, such as emails, interviews with former employees, and the original data that Gabe collected.  
 According to that data, First Wap founder Josef Fuchs visited more than 25 countries between 2007 and 2015.  
Gabe Geiger:One of the unique things that you see in this data set is that Fuchs and other company executives are tracking their own phone numbers hundreds of thousands of times as they crisscross the globe.  
Michael Montgom…:Lighthouse Reports suspects that Fuchs and other First Wap executives traveled to many of these places while drumming up business for Altimedes.  
Gabe Geiger:And what kind of ties a lot of them together is that, one, they’re authoritarian, and two, they have a history of abusing surveillance tech against their own citizens.  
Michael Montgom…:Like Thailand in 2013. Fuchs is there just as anti-government protests surge.  
Protesters:[inaudible 00:14:55].  
Gabe Geiger:We see Fuchs tracking his phone number and other Thai phone numbers. You know, maybe this is a way for him to show off how the software is working. But in any case, right after that, we see a huge uptick in activity in Thailand.  
Protesters:[inaudible 00:15:13].  
Michael Montgom…:Gabe says hundreds of Thai phone numbers were monitored with Altamides just as the authorities stepped up a brutal crackdown.  
 According to documents and interviews with former employees, Lighthouse learned that Altamedes customers included the governments of Belarus, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan.  
Ron Deibert:This is essentially despotism as a service.  
Michael Montgom…:Ron Deibert from Citizen Lab says working with repressive governments is a common feature throughout the surveillance industry.  
Ron Deibert:These are companies that are facilitating human rights abuses and some pretty horrible egregious practices. So we’re dealing with the facilitation through this service of transnational authoritarianism.  
Gabe Geiger:This is just probably a small slither of the company’s total activities. It’s clearly not the entire set. And we don’t have activities from 2015 onwards, so what happened after that point? Yeah, that keeps me up at night.  
Michael Montgom…:In a statement, First Wap said it had not offered or sold its products to repressive regimes, and it noted that it had no knowledge of any discussions or presentations that may have been carried out by the company’s founder, Josef Fuchs.  
 Fuchs died in 2024.  
Al Letson:In a moment, the team at Lighthouse Reports goes undercover to learn how this mysterious company markets its surveillance technology today.  
Speaker 12:We wanted to know, in 2025, is there anything that these guys would balk at? Do they have any red lines?  
Al Letson:That’s next on Reveal.  
Al Letten:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letten. This week’s show is about an investigation that began with a trove of data from one of the world’s oldest surveillance companies, First Wap. That data drops off in 2015, which left the team at Lighthouse Reports wondering what’s happened to the company in the decade since, how has their software advanced, and who are they willing to sell it to today? To answer those questions, Lighthouse Reports decided to go undercover. Michael Montgomery explains how they did it.  
Michael Montgom…:The Lighthouse Reports team is holed up in a rented apartment in Prague. It’s filled with breakfast dishes, luggage, a collection of laptops, and the sweat of anticipation. They’ve come to the Czech Republic to attend ISS World Europe, a premier gathering for intelligence agencies, police, and companies that build and sell surveillance systems. Outsiders, especially the media, aren’t allowed in.  
Emmanuel Freude…:We’re going to keep discreet about exactly where the camera is.  
Michael Montgom…:Emmanuel Freudenthal is an editor at Lighthouse. He’s dressed up in a flashy suit that’s been fitted with a hidden camera.  
Emmanuel Freude…:And basically, you can’t see, there’s a tiny hole, but you really can’t tell where. It’s a very beautiful fashion accessory.  
Michael Montgom…:Emmanuel is getting direction from his colleague, editor and reporter, Crofton Black. Crofton’s been planning this operation for six months.  
Speaker 4:You’ve got that in your trouser pocket just coming through with the wire.  
Emmanuel Freude…:In my underwear.  
Speaker 4:In your underwear? Okay. But let’s hope it doesn’t fall out in the middle of your conversation. This is what makes a podcast into a hit instead of being just run-of-the-mill.  
Michael Montgom…:To get inside the conference, Emmanuel is posing as Albert, a French business broker based in South Africa, with lots of connections to governments and mining interests throughout the continent. Reporter Gabriel Geiger explains why Emmanuel is perfect for the role.  
Gabe Geiger:He’s someone who just has a perfect poker face. You have no idea what this guy is thinking.  
Michael Montgom…:They crafted Albert’s backstory as a test to see how far First Wap would go to make a deal.  
Gabe Geiger:We intentionally designed him to be very shady. He’s working for unnamed governments, private clients. His company is supposedly registered in the British Virgin Isles, like a postbox address, a bunch of red flags that anybody who’s doing serious due diligence would pick up on.  
Speaker 6:We decided to approach First Wap Undercover for one very simple reason. We wanted to know is there anything that these guys would bulk at? Do they have any red lines?  
Michael Montgom…:Today, Albert is representing clients in French-speaking West Africa, where First Wap doesn’t seem to do much business. Lighthouse hopes First Wap will see meeting Albert as an opportunity to increase sales in a new region. He’s joined by a man they’re calling Abdu, one of Albert’s clients who’s looking to acquire some surveillance tech. Albert’s hidden camera is rolling as he and Abdu arrive at the conference. They ride an escalator up to the sales floor where tiny cameras and drones are on display. But the busiest vendors are focused on smartphones. Albert moves smoothly through the crowd. So far, so good.  
Emmanuel Freude…:Yeah. Hi, Gunther. How’s it going? Are you quite busy, I guess.  
Michael Montgom…:He and Abdu have set up a meeting with First Wap’s sales director, a man named Gunther Rudolf.  
Emmanuel Freude…:I wanted to introduce you to Mr. Malin, Abdu Malin.  
Gabe Geiger:Gunther Rudolf is in full sales mode. He doesn’t show any sort of skepticism towards Albert, and he’s just launches right in.  
Speaker 7:Please, take a seat.  
Michael Montgom…:Albert and Abdu move quickly to learn more about the company’s software, Altimedes. First, they get a look at it when one of the executives demonstrates the tracking function by locating Rudolf’s cell phone. On a laptop, they track his phone to a point on a map. This is the same software that was used to secretly track all those people, like Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi. Then Rudolf explains how you could use Altimedes to crack into an encrypted WhatsApp account.  
Speaker 7:What they can do now is, and it’s sending the OTP to his phone.  
Gabe Geiger:So what Rudolf explains is that First Wap software allows you to hack into WhatsApp accounts by stealing and intercepting these authentication text messages. And that allows you basically to take over someone’s account.  
Speaker 7:Then I take the OTP, put it in my mobile phone, and then have his WhatsApp on my phone with everything.  
Michael Montgom…:Then Albert presents Rudolf with one of those red lines that Crofton had mentioned. He says there’s a client, a private mining company in West Africa that’s having trouble with people protesting its operations.  
Emmanuel Freude…:So he’s wondering what would be the best approach for that to monitor those activists and check that they’re not disrupting business.  
Michael Montgom…:Rudolf asks Albert.  
Speaker 7:[inaudible 00:05:19] who are the leaders? What he want to find out?  
Michael Montgom…:Does the client already know who the leaders are, or does he want to find out?  
Speaker 7:The point is, do you know already the target and we want to monitor them to know what they’re doing, or do you have to find out who’s the organizer?  
Michael Montgom…:Rudolf explains that. Altimedes has another feature called geofencing. It can track large numbers of cell phones in a specific area like a protest. He said they can even use it to identify the organizers. Gabe says the fact that Rudolf even talking about sharing their surveillance system with this private mining company is shocking.  
Gabe Geiger:I think that’s the moment where we’re like, “Wow, they’re actually playing ball with this.”  
Michael Montgom…:Rudolf goes on to talk about why First Wap is special. Their headquarters are in Indonesia, which places fewer restrictions on the export of sensitive technology like Altimedes. He says that gives them a competitive advantage. That basic idea, the lack of strong export restrictions, leads them to a conversation about another red line scenario, working with a client on a sanctions list. Someone like that is known as a specially designated national.  
Speaker 7:Special designated nationals, that means there are some [inaudible 00:06:40] in Africa and also entities in Africa, which are under sanctions and export limitations.  
Gabe Geiger:You have to understand that sanctions are something that the United States and European countries put in place that bans you from doing business with a sanctioned entity. And that can be an individual, it can be a company, it can be a government.  
Michael Montgom…:Rudolf explains how First Wap could make a deal with someone who’s on a sanctions list.  
Speaker 7:If you trust holding a German passport like Johnny.  
Michael Montgom…:He’s talking about his colleague, Johnny Goebel.  
Speaker 7:[inaudible 00:07:14] an Austrian passport, like me, I am not even allowed to know about the project because otherwise I can go to prison.  
Michael Montgom…:The audio isn’t great here, but what Rudolf is basically saying is that he could go to prison in his home country of Austria because it’s illegal for him to help someone avoid sanctions. Then he explains how the company could run the deal through its office in Indonesia instead.  
Speaker 7:That’s why we can make such a deal. For example, we make it through Jakarta and signatures coming from our [inaudible 00:07:47].  
Gabe Geiger:And then he goes on to say, slyly, “We will never know about this project,” and then smiles. What Rudolf is talking about here is a way to circumvent sanctions.  
Michael Montgom…:At the end of the conference, Albert tells the executives he’ll follow up to continue the conversation.  
Emmanuel Freude…:All right, thanks a lot. Okay, good feedback. Bye.  
Michael Montgom…:With the undercover operation behind them, the Lighthouse team is stunned by what they’ve learned. First, there was all that data Gabe discovered, and the people who were tracked more than a decade ago, and now this. Here’s Crofton.  
Speaker 6:We spent like six months trying to figure out every possible permutation of what could happen from the sublime to the ridiculous. But I never anticipated that they were going to basically offer us a sanctions busting recipe.  
Michael Montgom…:There was just one thing left to do. The September, Albert set up one final call with Gunter Rudolf and two other First Wap executives, Johnny Goble and Evgeny Kharikanovsky. On the agenda, follow up on the proposed deal from the trade fair.  
Emmanuel Freude…:Hi, Gunther. How are you?  
Speaker 7:Hello, hello, hello. Fine, thank you.  
Emmanuel Freude…:I can see Dubai behind you.  
Michael Montgom…:Rudolf is in Dubai, where First Wap has offices. The conversation starts out with smiles and laughs. Albert asks about things like pricing for Altimedes.  
Speaker 7:Depends on what the client chooses on the different modules, on the features. Minimum 1 million to whatever, 15 20 million [inaudible 00:09:27].  
Michael Montgom…:Albert mentions that proposed deal he talked about at the trade fair, the client under sanctions who wanted to acquire Altimedes.  
Emmanuel Freude…:So I think we can all agree we found a good way around the sanctions, but I have to admit…  
Michael Montgom…:And then without missing a beat, Albert reveals his true identity.  
Emmanuel Freude…:… I’m actually working for a coalition of investigative journalists. And so I was wondering why did you agree to do a deal with a sanctioned client when you said yourself that you could go to prison for that?  
Michael Montgom…:Rudolf and his partners are silent, almost frozen after hearing what Emmanuel Freudenthal has just said. They’re not moving, just staring into their computers listening as Emmanuel asks again about their conversation in Prague.  
Emmanuel Freude…:You agreed to the sale and it was clear against the law and the European sanctions regime, but you agreed. What’s your comment on that?  
Michael Montgom…:Eventually, Rudolf responds.  
Speaker 7:We did not agree to deliver there, right?  
Michael Montgom…:He’s pointing out they never actually signed a deal.  
Speaker 7:So when we make a contract with you, you will see the clauses that we’re not dealing with people under sanctions.  
Michael Montgom…:What he’s saying here is that when we make a contract with you, there would be a clause that says we don’t deal with people under sanctions. And then he says, Emmanuel must have the wrong company altogether.  
Speaker 7:Either you really have the wrong company, you talk to the wrong company, or [inaudible 00:10:58] or whatever is completely wrong, I don’t know.  
Emmanuel Freude…:Okay. Thanks for taking the time to answer the questions. So we’ll be sending you an email with more question and further opportunity to respond. Have a good afternoon. Bye.  
Speaker 7:Bye-bye.  
Michael Montgom…:Just about a week before we published this investigation, First Wap issued a statement. The company said there had been misunderstandings at the conference in Prague, and that their executives only spoke about what was, “Technically feasible.” First Wap also told us they don’t sell to corporate clients, only governments.  
Gabe Geiger:When you get to the end of one of these big investigations, there’s always this question of what does it all mean? And I think that for me, it redefines who uses these tools, it redefines who can get targeted by them. And that image to me of them laughing about breaking sanctions is just something that really sticks with me, and I find it haunting in a way.  
Al Letten:A few days ago, our 13 reporting partners each released a version of this story. There’s already been reaction. In Europe, a telecom company in Liechtenstein suspended its business with First Wap after learning that Altimedes may have used it to tap into phone networks around the world. And in the US, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden responded to our investigation saying it underscores the glaring weaknesses in our phone system, which the US government and phone companies have failed dismally to address. A lot of people from a lot of places pitched in on this week’s show. Special thanks to our friends at Lighthouse Reports and the 12 other media outlets that were part of this collaboration. We’ve got the full list on our website. We’ve also got a terrific package from Mother Jones, including a video that follows reporter Gabe Geiger’s journey from the moment he discovered the massive trove of data.  
 Check it all out at revealnews.org. Our lead producer for this week’s show is Michael Montgomery. Lu Okowski edited the show. We have production help from Nadia Hamdan, Riccardo Colaccini, and Artis Curiskis. Artis is also our fact-checker. Special thanks to Flavio Pompetti. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production manager is Zulema Cobb. Score and sound designed by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. That helped this week from Claire C. Note-Mullen. Taki [inaudible 00:13:40] is our deputy executive producer. Our executive producer is Brett Myers. Theme music is by Comorado Lightning, support for Reveals provided by the Riva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letten, and remember, there is always more to the story.  

Michael Montgomery is a senior reporter and producer for Reveal who leads major collaborations and reports on America’s penal system, human rights and international trade, and labor exploitation. Previously he held staff positions at American Public Media, CBS News, and the Daily Telegraph, where he was a Balkans correspondent. Michael is a longtime member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a recipient of numerous national and international honors, among them Murrow, Peabody, IRE, duPont-Columbia, Third Coast, and Overseas Press Club awards. Contact him at mmontgomery@revealnews.org or @mdmontgomery.

Nadia Hamdan (she/her) is a reporter and producer for Reveal. She’s worked on a wide range of investigative stories covering elections, immigration, health care, gun violence, and more. Most notably, she co-reported and produced the historical investigation “40 Acres and a Lie,” exploring a reparation that wasn’t—and the wealth gap that remains. The project was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize and the winner of an Edward R. Murrow Award, a duPont-Columbia Award and a National Magazine Award. Nadia also once conducted an entire interview while riding a mule. Reach her at nhamdan@cir.org or on Signal at nadiaCIR.42.

Zulema Cobb is an operations and audio production associate for the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is originally from Los Angeles County, where she was raised until moving to Oregon. Her interest in the wellbeing of families and children inspired her to pursue family services at the University of Oregon. Her diverse background includes banking, affordable housing, health care, and education, where she helped develop a mentoring program for students. Cobb is passionate about animals and has fostered and rescued numerous dogs and cats. She frequently volunteers at animal shelters and overseas rescue missions. In her spare time, she channels her creative energy into photography, capturing memories for friends and family. Cobb is based in Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, three kids, three dogs, and cat.

Jim Briggs III is a senior sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. He joined the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2014. Jim and his team shape the sound of the weekly public radio show and podcast through original music, mixing, and editing. In a career devoted to elevating high-impact journalism, Jim’s work in radio, podcasting, and television has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, IRE, Gerald Loeb, and Third Coast awards, as well as a News and Documentary Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Sound. He has lent his ears to a range of podcasts and radio programs including Marketplace, Selected Shorts, Death, Sex & Money, The Longest Shortest Time, NPR’s Ask Me Another, Radiolab, Freakonomics Radio, WNYC’s live music performance show Soundcheck, and The 7 and Field Trip from the Washington Post. His film credits include PBS’s American Experience: Walt Whitman, the 2012 Tea Party documentary Town Hall, and The Supreme Court miniseries. Before that, he worked on albums with artists such as R.E.M., Paul Simon, and Kelly Clarkson at NYC’s legendary Hit Factory Recording Studios. Jim is based in western Massachusetts with his family, cats, and just enough musical instruments to do some damage.

Fernando Arruda is a sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. As a multi-instrumentalist, he contributes to the music, editing, and mixing of the weekly public radio show and podcast. He has held four O-1 visas for individuals with extraordinary abilities. His work has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, Edward R. Murrow, Gerald Loeb, Third Coast, and Association of Music Producers awards, as well as Emmy and Pulitzer nominations. Prior to joining Reveal, Arruda toured internationally as a DJ and taught music technology at Dubspot and ESRA International Film School. He also worked at Antfood, a creative audio studio for media and TV ads, as well as for clients such as Marvel, MasterClass, and Samsung. His credits also include NPR’s 51 Percent; WNYC’s Bad Feminist Happy Hour and its live broadcast of Orson Welles’ The Hitchhiker; Wondery’s Detective Trapp; and MSNBC’s Why Is This Happening?. Arruda releases experimental music under the alias FJAZZ and has performed with jazz, classical, and pop ensembles such as SFJazz Monday Night Band, Art&Sax quartet, Krychek, Dark Inc., and the New York Arabic Orchestra. He holds a master’s degree in film scoring and composition from NYU Steinhardt. Learn more about his work at FernandoArruda.info.

Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and as a teenager began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. His day job as a flight attendant allowed him to travel to cities around the country, where he competed in slam poetry contests while sleeping on friends’ couches. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows and even introduce the 2006 NCAA Final Four on CBS.

In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and is currently writing a comic for DC Comics. (He loves comics.) When he’s not working, Letson’s often looking for an impossibly difficult meal to prepare or challenging anyone to name a better album than Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides.

Daniel Schulman is Mother Jones’ deputy editor, news and politics. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Sons of Wichita (Grand Central Publishing), a biography of the Koch brothers. His latest book, The Money Kings, published by Knopf, chronicles the lives and legacies of a group of turn-of-the-century Wall Street titans who influenced the course of history and the rise of modern finance. Reach him at dschulman@motherjones.com or follow him on X @danielschulman.

Artis Curiskis is an assistant producer at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Previously, he was an editorial fellow at Mother Jones. Before that, he produced and reported the Peabody-nominated series The COVID Tracking Project podcast with Reveal and led data reporting efforts with The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. He was also an artist-in-residence at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art and a Thomas J. Watson fellow. You can reach him at acuriskis@revealnews.org.