The Spy Behind the NGO in Burkina Faso 🇧🇫

Claire Dubois, a French woman in her early 30s, arrived in Burkina Faso posing as the director of a Western NGO called Hope Forward, which claimed to support girls’ education and women’s health.

She presented herself as a humanitarian focused on helping African women, visiting villages, schools, and markets, and praising Burkina Faso’s leadership on state television.

However, behind this façade, Dubois was engaged in espionage. She was gathering intelligence on military sites, including military training centers, oil facilities, and drone monitoring posts, under the guise of humanitarian work.

She carried two phones-one public and one for secure communication-and sent encrypted emails containing detailed maps and satellite images of sensitive military locations to contacts linked to NATO and foreign intelligence.

Burkina Faso’s intelligence services had already flagged her activities and monitored her communications. President Ibrahim Traoré allowed her to continue to gather evidence of her true mission. Eventually, she was publicly exposed at a National Conference on African Sovereignty, where the president presented her own classified documents and emails live on stage, revealing her spying activities to the world.

She was caught off guard by the exposure and later detained quietly by the government.

Despite diplomatic pressure for a quiet resolution, President Traoré insisted on transparency and justice, emphasizing the betrayal of trust involved.