WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

The deal

Hotel Leopold, Place Luxembourg, Brussels

9.30pm, 21 June 2010

“I felt this was the biggest story on the planet”

NICK DAVIES

Three men were in the Belgian hotel courtyard café, ordering coffee after coffee. They had been arguing for hours through the summer afternoon, with a break to eat a little pasta, and evening had fallen. Eventually, the tallest of the three picked up a cheap yellow napkin, laid it on the flimsy modern café table and started to scribble. One of those present was Ian Traynor, the Guardian’s Europe correspondent. He recalls:

“Julian whipped out this mini-laptop, opened it up and did something on his computer. He picked up a napkin and said, ‘OK you’ve got it.’

“We said: ‘Got what?’

“He said: ‘You’ve got the whole file. The password is this napkin.’”

Traynor went on: “I was stunned. We were expecting further very long negotiations and conditions. This was instant. It was an act of faith.”

Assange had insouciantly circled several words and the hotel’s logo on the Hotel Leopold napkin, adding the phrase “no spaces”. This was the password. In the corner he scrawled three simple letters: GPG. GPG was a reference to the encryption system he was using for a temporary website. The napkin was a perfect touch, worthy of a John le Carré thriller. The two Guardian journalists were amazed. Nick Davies stuffed the napkin in his case together with his dirty shirts. Back in England, the yellow square was reverently lodged in his study, next to a pile of reporters’ notepads and a jumble of books. “I’m thinking of framing it,” he says.

Just a few days earlier, Davies had been sitting peacefully in that study, glancing up from his morning paper to his garden and the Sussex landscape. Davies is one of the Guardian’s best-known investigative journalists. In a career spanning more than three decades, he has worked on many stories exposing the dark abuses of power. His book Flat Earth News was an acclaimed account of how the newspaper industry had gone badly wrong, abandoning real reporting for what he memorably dubbed “churnalism”.

Davies was currently embroiled in a long-term investigation into a phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World during the editorship of Andy Coulson. Coulson – who was as a result forced to resign in January 2011 as the public relations boss for Conservative prime minister David Cameron – denied all knowledge of his staff illegally hacking the phones of celebrities and members of the royal family.

Today, however, Davies’s attention was caught by the Guardian’s foreign pages: “American officials are searching for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in an attempt to pressure him not to publish thousands of confidential and potentially hugely embarrassing diplomatic cables that offer unfiltered assessments of Middle East governments and leaders.”

The story continued: “The Daily Beast, a US news reporting and opinion website, reported that Pentagon investigators are trying to track down Assange – an Australian citizen who moves frequently between countries – after the arrest of a US soldier last week who is alleged to have given the whistleblower website a classified video of American troops killing civilians in Baghdad. The soldier, Bradley Manning, also claimed to have given WikiLeaks 260,000 pages of confidential diplomatic cables and intelligence assessments. The US authorities fear their release could ‘do serious damage to national security’.”

Davies was thunderstruck. An unknown 22-year-old private had apparently downloaded the entire contents of a US classified military database. Manning was held in prison in Kuwait. But was there any way the Guardian could lay its hands on the cables? “I felt this was the biggest story on the planet,” says Davies. He searched online for “Bradley Manning”, and found the transcripts published by Wired.com. These detailed the conversations with former hacker Adrian Lamo, in which Manning apparently confirmed he had illicitly downloaded more than a quarter of a million classified documents, talked of “almost criminal political back-dealings” by the US, and said: “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack.”

If only a fraction of what Manning said was true, WikiLeaks was now sitting on hundreds of thousands of cables detailing dubious diplomatic operations, war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and God knows what else. It was a goldmine. “There was clearly a bigger story here. It wasn’t hard to see,” Davies says. His reporter’s radar was bleeping with excitement. But amazingly, nobody else on what used to be known as Fleet Street seemed to have yet worked out the massive potential dimensions.

The key to accessing the cables – and to the stories they contained – had to be Julian Assange. Davies himself had never met him but was aware of Assange’s website: he had come across WikiLeaks during the Guardian’s 2009 investigation into tax evasion and Swiss banks. He wanted to get to Assange fast, before the Pentagon investigators or anyone else. But where was he? The Daily Beast reported that Assange had cancelled a US public appearance in Las Vegas due to “security concerns”; a group of former US intelligence officers had warned publicly that Assange’s physical safety was at risk. There were few clues.

Davies sent a series of exploratory emails to Assange. He offered to assist on Manning, and to publicise the 22-year-old’s plight. On 16 June, he wrote: “Hi Julian, I spent yesterday in the Guardian office arguing that Bradley Manning is currently the most important story on the planet. There is much to be done, and it will take a little time. But right now, I think the crucial thing is to track and expose the effort by the US government to suppress Bradley, you, WikiLeaks, and anything that either of you may want to put in the public domain.” The email went on: “Can you communicate with me about that; or hook me up with somebody who can? Maybe one possibility might be for me to talk to any lawyer who has been helping Bradley. Good luck, Nick.”

This tentative pitch elicited a reply from Assange – but not a very helpful one. Assange merely sent back a press release describing how WikiLeaks had persuaded Icelandic parliamentarians to build a “new media haven” in Iceland.

Davies went up to the Guardian office in London to consult David Leigh, a colleague and old friend. Leigh had met Assange earlier in the year and, having failed to reach a deal over the Apache helicopter video, was sceptical. He warned Davies that the Australian was unpredictable. He doubted Assange would be willing to co-operate. But, Leigh added, “You’re welcome to try.”

Davies persevered. He sent Assange another email offering “to travel anywhere to meet you or anybody else, to take any of this forward”. This time Assange was more forthcoming. He sent back the contact name of Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the Icelandic parliamentarian who had co-produced the Apache video, and whose tweets the US department of justice would later attempt to subpoena. He also mentioned Kristinn Hrafnsson, his loyal deputy. Assange signed off: “I’m a bit hard to interview presently for security reasons, but send me ALL your contacts.” Davies sent further emails to Jónsdóttir, Hrafnsson and other WikiLeaks players, and spoke to several of them on the phone. He felt he was beginning to make progress. But he was also painfully aware that if he simply demanded that WikiLeaks share its information, Assange would see him as yet another representative of the greedy, duplicitous mainstream media – or MSM, as it is derisively described on much of the internet. Something more subtle was called for – something that ultimately gave the Guardian access to the cables, but perhaps also offered Assange a way to resolve his own problems.

On the evening of Sunday 19 June, Davies received a phone call. His informant said, “Don’t tell Julian I told you, but he’s flying to Brussels to give a press conference tomorrow at the European parliament.” Excited, Davies called Leigh, who was at home in London. Leigh was absorbed in a television detective serial, and seemed far from impressed by the development. Davies promptly dialled the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. The pair had started on the paper together in 1979 as junior reporters, and had lived in neighbouring flats in London’s Clerkenwell. Rusbridger trusted Davies completely, and had given him free rein to pursue investigative projects, believing he would always bring back something of value.

This unusual arrangement had seen Davies launch long-term investigations into a range of areas, including poverty in the UK, Britain’s education system, and police corruption. Davies’s challenging, in-depth journalism had made political waves and proved popular with readers.

“Alan, what do you know of this guy Bradley Manning?” Davies asked.

“Not much,” Rusbridger replied.

“Well, it’s the biggest story on the planet …”

Yes, Rusbridger agreed, “Go to Brussels.”

There was no transport to get Davies to Brussels in time for the press conference, however, so the editor suggested that Traynor, who was highly experienced and who was based in the city, should try to buttonhole Assange. Davies emailed Traynor that night:

“Bradley Manning, aged 22, is an American intelligence analyst who has been working at a US base outside Baghdad, where he had access to two closed communication networks. One carried traffic from US embassies all over the world, classified ‘secret’; the other carried traffic from US intelligence agencies, classified ‘top secret’. Manning decided he didn’t like what he saw and copied masses of it on to CDs.”

Davies explained his view that Manning then made a “good move and a bad move”. The good decision was to approach Assange; the bad one was apparently to blurt out what he had done to Lamo, “a lonesome American computer hacker”.

Davies asked Traynor to get to Assange’s lunchtime panel debate in the parliament building. “Longer term, it’s a question of trying to forge some kind of alliance so that, if and when Assange releases any of the material which Manning claims to have leaked, we are involved.”

Traynor successfully made contact with Assange’s colleague Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the next day in Brussels. He spotted her in a café with two male companions, including “a guy wearing a large Icelandic woolly jumper”. This turned out to be Assange, but Traynor – having never seen him before – failed to recognise him. “Otherwise I would have grabbed him!” Traynor only caught up with Assange himself at the European parliament event. The only other British reporter there was a junior hack from BBC radio. But the room was full, and there were a number of foreign journalists – among them an Austrian television journalist who Traynor knew had a good nose for a story – so the Guardian correspondent acted swiftly to get Assange away from the crowd as the meeting ended.

They set off together into a warren of parliament corridors and talked privately for half an hour. Traynor thought Assange quiet, cautious and inscrutable. He was impressed by his intellect and quick wit – and though he sometimes found his gnomic answers evasive and hard to follow, “I liked him and I think he liked me.” Traynor was pleased to hear that the WikiLeaks founder presented himself as a big fan of the Guardian. He seemed keen to engage in a collaborative project with a newspaper which had progressive credentials. Assange revealed, significantly, that WikiLeaks was planning to dump “two million pages” of raw material on its website. Traynor asked what it was about. Assange replied simply: “It concerns war.” Assange gave Traynor his local Brussels cellphone number; they agreed to meet again the next day.

Davies was meanwhile anxiously lunching with Rusbridger at the ground-floor restaurant in Kings Place, the Guardian’s London headquarters, overlooking the moored houseboats on the Regent’s Canal. In the middle of their lunch, Traynor’s email arrived. It confirmed that Assange was willing to meet. That night Davies didn’t sleep: “I was too excited.” First thing next morning he was on the high-speed train from London St Pancras station, through the Channel tunnel and on to Brussels.

As his Eurostar carriage shot through the green Kent countryside, he formulated and reformulated his pitch. As he saw it, Assange was facing four separate lines of attack. The first was physical – that someone would beat him up or worse. The second was legal – that Washington would attempt to crush WikiLeaks in the courts. The third was technological – that the US or its proxies would bring down the WikiLeaks website. The fourth and perhaps most worrisome possibility was a PR attack – that a sinister propaganda campaign would be launched, accusing Assange of collaborating with terrorists.

Davies also knew that Assange was disappointed at the reception of his original Apache video, single-handedly released in Washington. The story should have set off a global scandal; instead the narrative had flipped, with attention focused not on the murder of innocent Iraqis but on WikiLeaks itself.

There was another important concern. If the Guardian alone were to obtain and publish the diplomatic cables, the US embassy in London might seek to injunct the paper. The UK is home to some of the world’s most hostile media laws; it is regarded as something of a haven for dodgy oligarchs and other dubious “libel tourists”. What was needed, Davies felt, was a multi-jurisdictional alliance between traditional media outlets and WikiLeaks, possibly encompassing non-governmental organisations and others. If the material from the cables were published simultaneously in several countries, would this get round the threat of a British injunction? Davies opened his notebook. He wrote: “New York Times/Washington Post/Le Monde.” He added: “Politicians? NGOs? Other interested parties?” Maybe the Guardian could preview the leaked cables and select the best story angles. The Guardian and WikiLeaks would then pass these “media missiles” to other friendly publications. He liked that plan. But would Assange buy it?

Over in Brussels, Traynor was discovering, as many others had, that having Assange’s mobile number and actually being able to get in touch with him were two very different things. Fearing that the Australian had gone awol, Traynor headed for the Hotel Leopold on the Place Luxembourg, where Assange was staying, next to the European parliament. Traynor went up to his room and banged on the door. Assange eventually emerged and invited Traynor in. The room resembled that of a modern monk: Assange’s worldly possessions apparently comprised a couple of rucksacks stuffed full of gadgets, three laptops, and a jumble of mobile phones and Sim cards. His wardrobe seemed to be a T-shirt, a jumper and a pair of jeans.

Assange was in mischievous good spirits. The former hacker told Traynor: “You guys at the Guardian, you have got to do something about your security. You have got to get your email secure and encrypted.”

“He knew the contents of the email I had sent to London,” Traynor said, somewhat amazed. “He was showing off, but also expressing concern.”

When Davies arrived in town, the two Guardian reporters repaired again to the Leopold. They dialled upstairs. Assange – apparently still on Australian time – had crashed out again. He finally appeared 15 minutes later. The three sat in the hotel’s covered courtyard café. It was 3.30pm; nobody else was around.

What followed was a six-hour conversation. It would result in an extraordinary, if sometimes strained, partnership between a mainstream newspaper and WikiLeaks – a new model of co-operation aimed at publishing the world’s biggest leak. A Vanity Fair feature subsequently called it a courtship between “one of the oldest newspapers in the world, with strict and established journalistic standards” and “one of the newest in a breed of online muckrakers”. The article’s American author, Sarah Ellison, wrote: “The Guardian, like other media outlets, would come to see Assange as someone to be handled with kid gloves, or perhaps latex ones – too alluring to ignore, too tainted to unequivocally embrace.”

The hopes of an accord risked derailment from the outset, however. Assange had already positioned himself as an ideological enemy of Davies, whose high-profile campaign to force Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid the News of the World to confront and stop its phone-hacking had previously been denounced by Assange as a contemptible attempt by “sanctimonious handwringing … politicians and social elites” to claim a right to privacy. Assange had accused Davies of “a lack of journalistic solidarity” for criticising the News of the World – calling it merely “an opportunity to attack a journalistic and class rival”. Assange now failed to disguise a faint contempt for the MSM in general.

Assange nevertheless struck Davies as “very young, boyish, rather shy – and perfectly easy to deal with”. He drank orange juice. Delicately, Davies began setting out the options. He told Assange it was improbable anybody would attack him physically; that would be a global embarrassment for the US. Rather, Davies predicted, the US would launch a dirty information war, and accuse him of helping terrorists and endangering innocent lives. WikiLeaks’ response had to be that the world was entitled to know the truth about the murky US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We are going to put you on the moral high ground – so high that you’ll need an oxygen mask. You’ll be up there with Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa,” Davies told Assange. “They won’t be able to arrest you. Nor can they shut down your website.”

Assange was receptive. This wasn’t the first time WikiLeaks had worked with traditional news media, and Assange had decided it might be a good idea on this occasion to do so again. Then Assange revealed the scale of his cache. WikiLeaks had in fact obtained, he confided, logs detailing every single US military incident in the Afghanistan war. “Holy Moly!” remarked Davies. Not only that, Assange added, the website also had similar war logs from Iraq from March 2003. “Fuck!” exclaimed Davies.

But that wasn’t all. WikiLeaks was indeed in possession of the secret US state department cables from American diplomatic missions around the world. Fourthly and finally, he had files from enemy combatant review tribunals held in Guantánamo Bay, the US’s notorious penal colony in Cuba. In all, jaw-droppingly, there were more than a million documents.

This was stunning stuff. Davies proposed that the Guardian should be allowed to preview all the material, bringing context to what would otherwise be an incomprehensible mass data dump.

Assange said that WikiLeaks had been ready to post all the data for the past two weeks, but he was hesitating because, although he would never reveal whether Manning was a source, he was worried about the legal implications for the young soldier. The Army had still not charged Manning; Manning would have been trained to resist interrogation, he believed, and Lamo’s allegations were evidentially “not credible”; but Assange was concerned that publishing the leaked material might give Pentagon investigators further evidence to work on.

Davies and Assange discussed adding the New York Times as a partner. There was no way, Davies argued, that the Obama administration would attack the most powerful Democrat-leaning newspaper in the US. Any WikiLeaks stories in the paper would enjoy the protection of the free speech provisions of the first amendment to the US constitution; furthermore, there was the precedent of the New York Times’s historic battle to gain the right to publish the Pentagon papers. The paper’s domestic US status would also make it harder for the authorities to press espionage charges against Manning, which might follow from purely foreign publication. Assange agreed with this.

Ian Traynor recalls: “Assange knew people at the New York Times. He was concerned that the stuff should be published in the US and not only abroad. He felt he would be more vulnerable if it was only published abroad.”

Assange also insisted that, in any deal, the Times in New York should publish five minutes ahead of the Guardian in London. He theorised that this would reduce the risk of Manning being indicted for breaking the Espionage Act. Traynor suggested the possibility of additionally bringing on board Der Spiegel in Berlin. The German news magazine had lots of money, and Germany was itself embroiled militarily in Afghanistan, he pointed out.

Assange said that if the Big Leak were to go ahead, he would want to control the Guardian’s timing: he didn’t want to publish too soon if this would damage Manning, but he was also prepared to post everything immediately if there was any kind of attack on WikiLeaks.

At one point, the would-be partners went out to refuel at an Italian restaurant. As he ate, Assange scanned nervously over his shoulder to see if he was being watched. (There were no US agents there, as far as anyone could tell – only the European Green leader and former student rebel Daniel Cohn-Bendit sitting just behind them.) Assange cautioned that, if the deal were to go ahead, the Guardian would have to raise its game on security and adopt stringent measures. The paper had to assume phones were bugged, emails read, computers compromised, he said. “He was very, very hot on security,” Davies recalled. And he seemed media-savvy, too. “He suggested that we find a suitable story to give to Fox News, so that they would be brought on side rather than becoming attack dogs. Another good idea. We were motoring.”

Assange popped back to his room, returning with a small black laptop. He showed Davies actual samples from the Afghan database. The WikiLeaks team had examined the data, he said, encouragingly. They had discovered that the killing had gone on at a much higher rate in Iraq than in Afghanistan. But the database samples themselves seemed vast, confusing and impossible to navigate – an impenetrable forest of military jargon. Davies, by this point exhausted after a long day, began to wonder whether they in fact included anything journalistically of value.

And there was another problem. How was Davies to get the Afghan material back to the Guardian in London? He could, of course, save it on a memory stick, but this ran the risk that British officials might confiscate it at customs control. Assange, the hacking prodigy, offered the answer: he would transfer the material in encrypted form to a special website. The website would only exist for a short period before disappearing.

Reopening his netbook, Assange typed away and then circled words on the Hotel Leopold napkin. They were the password to decrypt data downloadable from the temporary website he would set up, encrypted in GPG (also known by its generic name, Pretty Good Privacy or PGP). Without the password, the website would be virtually uncrackable unless an opponent happened to stumble on the two large prime numbers which generated the encryption. Armed with the password, Guardian staff would soon be able to access the first tranche of data – the Afghan war logs. The three other promised “packages” were to follow.

The two men agreed on other precautions: Davies would send Assange an email saying that no deal had been agreed. (Written on 23 June, it read: “I’m safely back at base. Thanks for spending time with me – no need to apologise for not being able to give me what I’m after.”) The idea was to throw dust in the eyes of the Americans. Assange and Davies parted.

Davies grabbed a pastry and a cup of railway station coffee the following dawn and took the first train back to London. In the office he bumped into Rusbridger. “I’m going to tell you a secret,” he said. According to Davies, the owlish Rusbridger’s reaction was, as ever, understated. But he clearly appreciated the implications. By 9.30am he had agreed to ring Bill Keller, his New York Times counterpart, as soon as he woke across the Atlantic.

Heading back to his home in Sussex, Davies waited for news from Assange. Mid-morning on 24 June an email arrived directing Davies to the website. He downloaded the huge file, but was unable to disentangle the procedure required for GPG decryption. He phoned his local computer specialist, who was unable to help. Frustrated, Davies put the still-encrypted data on to a memory stick, and deleted Assange’s email. Soon afterwards the website ceased to exist. Davies traveled back up to London and handed the stick to Harold Frayman, systems editor at the Guardian Media Group. Frayman easily downloaded the contents as a decrypted spreadsheet. “It wasn’t actually a terribly difficult thing to do at all. We knew what the password was,” Frayman said calmly.

So by that evening the Guardian had the Afghan database – an unprecedented hour-by-hour portrait of the real, harsh war being fought in the mountains and dusty streets of the Hindu Kush. But it didn’t look like it at the time: for the first five or six days the Afghan record proved almost impossible to read. “It was a fucker,” Davies said. “The spreadsheet was terribly difficult to extract information from, slow and difficult.” Nonetheless, he sent a triumphant email back to Assange. It read: “The good guys have got the girls.”