The most persistent hush-hush story around Le Roux, in my years of reporting, was that he’d once worked for the U.S. government. Rumors swirled that he or Dave Smith, or both, had ties to the CIA, or NSA, or FBI. Lachlan McConnell told me that Le Roux had once claimed to have worked for the NSA as a computer ana- lyst. “I thought, ah, that must be horseshit,” McConnell added. But many of the defense attorneys working on Le Roux-related cases also quietly wondered if there was a larger issue behind all the secrecy, something more than just Le Roux’s cooperation. “I always assumed that somehow he was maybe a fucking front com- pany for the CIA,” said Marcus, Le Roux’s South African hit man. “They just did too much shit and got away with it.”

I gathered up a scattering of tantalizing clues that Le Roux had deeper American connections. There was his relationship to Ari Ben-Menashe, the former Israeli spy who claimed to have heard from the Zimbabwean government that Le Roux was somehow an American agent. (Ben-Menashe’s home in Montreal was fire- bombed in late 2012, much in the manner that Mathew Smith’s had been in Bulawayo three years earlier. No one was hurt, and the perpetrators were never caught.) There were cryptic claims by Le Roux to Felix Klaussen about having access to U.S. policy deci- sions in Somalia. There were his six months in Virginia in the 1990s. And there was just the overall suspicion that, with the number of countries and variety of endeavors Le Roux was in- volved in, he was bound to have been a useful source to someone, at some point, about something.

After searching fruitlessly for confirmation, I eventually just asked Kent Bailey flat out whether there was any truth to rumors that Le Roux had U.S. intelligence connections. Bailey was in a reasonable position to know—or at least speculate—and I felt he’d been straight with me about everything else. “That’s all bullshit,” he said. “That was one of the things we thought of, too, and we reached out to see if he was one of their assets. If he is truly work-