Since the start of the year, someone has been sinking Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos with explosive-dropping drones — eight crew of the Fiorella presumed dead, and 36 survivors who say they were hooded, cuffed and shipped to El Salvador by armed men who spoke English and wore US-flag patches. This week, American readers finally got a reported answer to who "someone" is. The story of the year isn't just the answer — it's who told you, when, and with how many hedges in the headline. * Start with the outlet that was there first. NPR, May 26: "Ecuadorian survivors of suspected drone strike seek answers and restitution." Steve Inskeep introduced it as "the largely unreported stories of fishermen from Ecuador." Carrie Kahn went to San Mateo and rang every door in Washington: Southern Command said it had "no knowledge of the incident." The embassy in Quito, the Coast Guard, the White House, the CIA — no answers. The DEA volunteered that it "does not conduct kinetic strikes." The fishermen faced no charges anywhere, and had to pay for their own flights home from El Salvador. One detail NPR left you with: a nephew whose foot was sliced open in the strike needs a $1,800 skin graft, and his town is organizing a bingo night to pay for it. * Then the flight data. The New York Times, Wednesday: "They spoke English, wore US flags and attacked fishermen. Who were they?" The Times traced a surveillance plane patrolling near the boats' last known positions to a private company whose registered address is a mailbox at a UPS store in Richmond, Virginia. Note the discipline: receipts attached, question mark kept. When you can't name the agency, you print the mailbox and let the reader do the arithmetic. * The Washington Post answered the question mark on Thursday: "Covert CIA program said to be behind mysterious attacks on Galápagos boats." Read that headline twice. It names the CIA — and still hedges itself in both directions, "said to be" AND "mysterious," in the same breath. That's what single-source covert-action journalism looks like: the program is presidentially approved precisely so the government never has to acknowledge it, so even the scoop arrives dressed as a maybe. It's the most consequential headline of the week, written like an apology. * CNN closed the loop on Saturday with the survivors: "A 'ghost ship' allegedly attacked Ecuadorian boats with bomb-dropping drones. The survivors want answers." The hedge carpet is thick — "allegedly," "purported," "seemingly," a CIA spokesperson offering the immortal "We do not have any guidance to offer on this." But under the hedges sit coordinates: a NOAA satellite logged a fire at the Negra Francisca's position at 3:02 p.m. on March 17, minutes after the strike the crew described. A nephew's foot. A crewmate's burned back. An eye that lost most of its vision. The lawyers held the pen; the reporting held the receipts. * And Fox News? We went looking tonight — the politics feed, the world feed, the wider web — and came back empty. We could not find a Fox News version of this story. A clandestine bombing campaign that reportedly hit civilian boats and disappeared three dozen fishermen to a third country is, by any measure, a story with stakes. The network currently running daily headlines about who's attacking whom at sea apparently hasn't found the space. * Put the timeline together and you can watch accountability arrive in layers, each hedge shrinking as the receipts grew: NPR collected the victims in spring, the Times traced the plane in midweek, the Post named the agency a day later, and CNN stamped the faces on it by the weekend. The administration's standing line, as NPR summarized it, is that its 50-plus boat strikes since September target "alleged narcotraffickers within the law" — yet these boats aren't among the acknowledged incidents, and the Pentagon denies involvement in them. Covert stories don't end with confessions. They end with a mailbox in Richmond, and a bingo night in San Mateo raising $1,800 for a skin graft.