Bangladesh, Dec. 5 -- For more than a decade, the United Nations publicly portrayed itself as a neutral humanitarian actor navigating the complexities of Syrias civil war. Yet buried deep inside a dimly lit hallway of an unremarkable Damascus shopping center sat a company that quietly exposed a troubling contradiction at the heart of the UNs operations. This company – Shorouk for Protection, Guarding and Security Services – was not simply another local contractor in a war-torn country. According to a vast trove of leaked documents, Shorouk was secretly owned and directed by one of the Syrian regimes most feared intelligence agencies, even as it collected at least $11 million from UN agencies.

The revelations, uncovered by the...