they heard, or sent me lists of officials in one country or another who they said had been in Le Roux’s pocket. Le Roux, according to one tale, had been planning to carry out a coup in Zimbabwe. (Le Roux himself had heard that one: “There is a lot of strange shit in that country. There was some rumor there I was planning to overthrow the president by force?” he once noted to his cousin Mathew in a 2009 online chat. “These people going to get me killed with stupid shit like that.”) A journalist told me he had evi- dence Le Roux had conspired with a South African security com- pany to move former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s stash of gold out of Libya. He even sent me a document purporting to be notes from the meeting in which it was planned. There was noth- ing to verify its authenticity. But given what I had been able to document, who knew? Le Roux had been involved in so many outrageous, impossible-to-believe acts that it was hard to discount even the most outlandish tales. For a man who had funded his own military protection force in Somalia and pursued drone subma- rines for shipping meth, nothing was really off the table.

The fate of TrueCrypt, the disk-encryption software that had been built partly on Le Roux’s code, only added to the intrigue surrounding him. TrueCrypt had been created by anonymous pro- grammers back in 2004, based largely on Le Roux’s first foray into encryption, E4M. Over the next decade, as TrueCrypt became one of the most widely used programs for securing digital secrets, the people behind it remained anonymous. Whether Le Roux had any hand in it, no one seemed to know. At the very least, he had confi- dence in the software: Former members of Le Roux’s organization told me that he had often required them to use TrueCrypt to pro- tect The Company’s secrets.

Le Roux’s confidence was validated in 2013, when Edward Snowden escaped the United States with a trove of National Secu- rity Agency documents, some of which revealed that the NSA had tried and failed to break TrueCrypt. But a year later, the mystery around the software deepened further, when the anonymous devel-