WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

The Hunt

Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, England

November 2010

“You can’t imagine how ridiculous it was”

JAMES BALL, WIKILEAKS

Glimpsed in the half-light of a London evening, the figure might just have passed for female. She emerged cautiously from a doorway and folded herself into a battered red car. There were a few companions – among them a grim-visaged man with Nordic features and a couple of nerdy youngsters. One appeared to have given the old woman her coat. The car weaved through the light Paddington traffic, heading north in the direction of Cambridge. As they proceeded up the M11 motorway the occupants peered back. There was no obvious sign of pursuit. Nonetheless, they periodically pulled off the road into a lay-by and waited – lights killed – in the gloom. Apparently undetected, the group headed eastward along the slow A143 road. By 10pm they had reached the flatlands of East Anglia, a sepia landscape where the occasional disused sugar factory hulked out of the blackness.

Fifteen miles inland, at the unremarkable village of Ellingham, they finally turned left. The car skidded on a driveway, and drove past an ancient dovecote before stopping in front of a grand Georgian manor house. The woman stepped from the car. There was something odd about her. She had a kind of hump! If a CIA agent or some other observer were hidden in the woodland along with the pheasants, they could have been forgiven for a moment of puzzlement.

Close up, however, it was obvious that this strange figure was Julian Assange, his platinum hair concealed by a wig. At more than 6ft tall, he was never going to be a very convincing female. “You can’t imagine how ridiculous it was,” WikiLeaks’ James Ball later said. “He’d stayed dressed up as an old woman for more than two hours.” Assange was swapping genders in a pantomime attempt to evade possible pursuers. With him were also his young aide, Sarah Harrison, and his deputy, the Icelandic journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson. On that evening, this small team was the nucleus of WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website Assange had launched four years earlier.

In a breathtakingly short time, WikiLeaks had soared out of its previous niche as an obscure radical website to become a widely known online news platform. Assange had published leaked footage showing airborne US helicopter pilots executing two Reuters employees in Baghdad, seemingly as if they were playing a video-game. He had followed up this coup with another, even bigger sensation: an unprecedented newspaper deal, brokered with the Guardian newspaper in London, to reveal hundreds of thousands of classified US military field reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of them damning.

Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, was a computer hacker of genius. He could be charming, capable of deadpan humour and wit. But he could also be waspish, flaring into anger and recrimination. Assange’s mercurial temperament spawned groupies and enemies, supporters and ill-wishers, sometimes even in the same person. Information messiah or cyber-terrorist? Freedom fighter or sociopath? Moral crusader or deluded narcissist? The debate over Assange would reverberate in the coming weeks in headlines the world over.

Assange and his team had fled here from the Frontline Club, a hang-out for foreign correspondents and other media types in west London. Since July and the launch of the Afghan war logs, Assange had slept, on and off, in the club’s accommodation at Southwick Mews. The club’s founder, Vaughan Smith, had become a sympathiser and ally, and invited Assange and his coterie to his ancestral home, Ellingham Hall, tucked away in a remote corner of East Anglia. And here these unlikely refugees had now arrived.

Smith was a former captain of the Grenadier Guards, an elite regiment of the British army, who went on to become a freelance video journalist with Frontline TV. His adventures in war zones – Iraq during the first Gulf war, where he bluffed his way in disguised as a British army officer; Bosnia, with its massacres and horrors; Afghanistan; and Iraq again – had demonstrated a spirit of maverick independence. Smith was no anarchist. His family had served in the British army for generations. His paper of choice was Britain’s conservative, crusty Daily Telegraph. Smith was also brave. In Kosovo, his life was saved when a deadly bullet lodged in his mobile telephone.

But in common with other right-wing libertarians, he had a stubborn sense of fair play and believed in sticking up for the underdog. In this instance that meant Assange, who had become a hate figure for the bellicose US right. They wanted him arrested. Some were even calling for his assassination. Smith broadly supported Assange’s crusade for transparency at a time when – as Smith saw it – journalism itself had moved uncomfortably close to government, and was in danger of becoming mere PR fluff.

When Assange settled in to work at Ellingham Hall, already living in the manor house were Pranvera Shema, Smith’s Kosovo-born wife, and their two small children. Aged five and two, their bikes stood outside the hall’s imposing porte-cochère entrance. Also in residence on the estate were Vaughan’s upper-class parents. Vaughan’s father, too, had served in the Guards; a portrait of him as a young officer in a scarlet tunic hung in the dining room. Smith Sr could be seen holding a white pouch: a discreet reference to his career as a Queen’s Messenger. The role involved travelling around the world on Her Majesty’s business, hand-carrying diplomatic secrets. It was clear that Smith Sr took a dim view of Assange, who was believed to be in possession of an astonishingly large number of secret diplomatic dispatches.

Smith Sr would take to patrolling the estate – with its twin lakes and cedar trees – armed with a rifle. The rifle was fitted with a sniper-sight. The sniper-sight was camouflaged. Normally he fired at partridge and grouse. The temptation, however, to take a shot at the paparazzi that would soon encamp themselves outside the manor – or indeed at the unwashed radicals inside it – must have been considerable. Asked two days before Christmas whether he was enjoying playing host to the group of international leakers who were here, he answered through gritted teeth. “I wish they weren’t.” It was one of many ironies that would pepper the tension-filled weeks.

Among the WikiLeakers at Ellingham was 24-year-old James Ball, whom Assange had recruited, one of the few collaborators to receive a salary. Ball’s talent was for dealing with large data sets. A cool young man, he was experiencing a giddy rise. Within a matter of months he went from a job as reporter on the Grocer trade magazine to being a spokesman for WikiLeaks, and even debating with the US diplomat John Negroponte on BBC World’s Hardtalk programme. Ball’s first task was urgent: to go into Norwich, 15 miles away, and head for a branch of the John Lewis department store for technical equipment. He set off, carrying several thousand pounds in cash (Assange’s preferred medium of exchange), emerging with several laptops, a router, and cabling – and leaving a bemused shop assistant in his wake. “Have you ever tried spending £1,000 cash in John Lewis? Honestly, the assistant looked scared of £50 notes,” Ball reflected. “It was a surreal experience.”

The team began setting up an anonymous internet identity. Their connection was designed to give the electronic impression that the WikiLeaks team sitting in rustic England was actually based in Sweden. The preoccupation with security was paramount: WikiLeaks was believed to be a permanent target for US surveillance and potentially crippling cyber-attacks. On trips outside the manor house, the team used the same counter-surveillance techniques they had employed during the journey to Norfolk. This may have been prudent. But it meant Ball was sometimes left hanging round for several hours at minor B-roads and other freezing rendezvous points, waiting for a lift.

Ensconced in a grand living room with a log fire, decorated with more portraits of Vaughan Smith’s forebears, Assange got to work. Typically, he would spend between 16 and 18 hours a day in front of his laptop, sometimes staying up for a 48-hour period before crashing out on the floor. Other WikiLeaks staff would rouse him, and prod him towards the upstairs bedrooms. He would sleep for a couple of hours. Then he would carry on. Assange’s cycle was nocturnal. He was at his most accessible at 3am or 4am. “I found it easier to do stuff at night when you could sometimes get Julian’s attention. He’s entirely capable of ignoring someone for five minutes while they’re calling at him, ‘Julian! Julian!’,” says Ball. Other WikiLeaks associates – Sarah Harrison and Joseph Farrell, both recent journalistic interns – managed his email and diary.

Assange saw his role as that of a chief executive. His job was to monitor WikiLeaks’ vast footprint in cyberspace, and to keep in touch with the organisation’s collaborators in the other jurisdictions and time zones. Smith says: “He is obsessed with his work. Julian needs to understand what is written about WikiLeaks and the story. He describes it as monitoring the temperature.”

To the right of the fireplace was a striking portrait of Vaughan Smith’s great-great-grandfather, “Tiger” Smith. Smith acquired his sobriquet after killing 99 tigers, lugging many of them back to Ellingham Hall. Two stuffed beasts sat in glass boxes; others had been chucked out after mouldering. The entrance lobby was decorated with crossed sabres, old rifles with bayonets and other memorabilia from forgotten colonial skirmishes. There was a stuffed deer head, a pair of antlers, and a large painting depicting two stags charging furiously towards each other against an unusual pistachio background. If an American film director wanted the quintessential English country pile for his period movie, he could hardly have done better than Ellingham.

The WikiLeaks team quickly adapted to the rituals of English country house life. Ellingham Hall had a housekeeper; there was a kitchen with a raised central square table where staff would make meals; chops and sausages were piled up in a cardboard box. The estate had an organic farm (whose produce was also served in the restaurant of the Frontline Club back in London). Vaughan Smith had a decent cellar – its contents selected by the former Guardian wine critic Malcolm Gluck. At mealtimes Assange and his co-workers sat in Smith’s splendid dining room beneath a venerable circular table. There was port – passed to the left by the cyber-radicals, in accordance with English convention. Assange insisted that nobody drank more than a glass a night, forcing his companions to cut side deals with the kitchen staff.

Assange’s own habits were ascetic: he paid little attention to what he ate. His otherworldliness extended to his wardrobe. He didn’t appear to possess any clothes of his own. At one point the WikiLeaks team decided Assange needed to remove himself from his screen and take some exercise. They bought him a red Adidas top: once a day Assange would jog through the parkland – a flash of brightness in a rural palette of browns and greens. Soon, Smith would transmogrify Assange further into the more muted shades of a country gentleman: he lent him a green parka and the tweed jacket with asymmetrical pockets that Smith had worn as a (trimmer) young man of 19. Assange also tried his hand at fishing.

From the outside few would have guessed what was really going on inside Ellingham Hall’s high bay windows. Assange had gone to ground in this way, like a fox, because he was preparing, along with the Guardian and four other major international papers, to broker publication of the most spectacular leak in history. He had confided he was a little scared. There had been nothing like it, not even the Pentagon papers – the publication of the secret record of America’s war in Vietnam – almost 40 years earlier. At one point the local hunt clattered across the grounds of Ellingham Hall; huntsmen and hounds crashing through the Spion Kop woods. It was the kind of pursuit that Assange seemed to sense he was involved in. Was he, too, the hunted animal, with prosecutors and US intelligence agents the red-coated huntsmen, riding to the sound of a blowing bugle, surging closer and closer?