Intelligence agencies gather information, especially secret information. They bug bedrooms, they hack databases, they recruit traitors. Wikileaks was unusual in that it made its secret information available to the whole world, via the Internet. It seems clear that Russia, perhaps the most accomplished country when it comes to traditional spycraft, was nimble enough to recognize the potential of Wikileaks and built a relationship with the organization. Snowden was escorted to Russia by Wikileaks' Sarah Harrison; Assange himself had a regular show on Russia Today. It would not surprise me if the TPP drafts were supplied to Wikileaks by Russian intelligence.
The instantly famous leak of legal and financial secrets from the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca, has the appearance of an American counter-gambit. MF itself may be a CIA asset, now being sacrificed. What better way to gather intelligence on who uses the offshore world, than to be the middleman yourself? The exact objective is a little unclear to me, but it's probably a move in the unipolar-vs-multipolar conflict over the shape of the world system. Pax Americana is a liberal international order in which justice is defined and administered by institutions based in America and Europe. Associations like BRICS, SCO, and OBOR threaten to establish a rival paradigm of international order. We shall see if the MF leaks have only propaganda value, or whether they are a stepping stone to something more.
