WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

In the bunker

Fourth floor, the Guardian, Kings Place, London

July 2010

“It felt like being a kid in a candy shop”

DECLAN WALSH, THE GUARDIAN

In the small, glass-walled office on the Guardian’s fourth floor, maps of Afghan and Iraqi military districts were stuck with magnets on to a whiteboard. Alongside them, the journalists were scrawling constantly updated lists of hitherto unknown US military abbreviations. “What’s EOF?” a reporter would shout? “Escalation of force!” someone would answer. HET? Human Exploitation Team. LN? Local national. EKIA was the body count: enemy killed in action. There were literally hundreds of other jargon terms: eventually the paper had to publish a lengthy glossary alongside its stories.

The discreet office, well away from the daily news operation, had become a multinational war room, with reporters flown in from Islamabad, New York, and eventually Berlin to analyse hundreds of thousands of leaked military field reports. They jostled with London-based computer experts and website specialists. A shredder was installed alongside the bank of six computer screens, and the air of security was intensified by the stern notice stuck on the door: “Project Room. Private & Confidential. No Unauthorised Access.”

Nick Davies was so fixated by secrecy that he initially even refused to tell the Guardian’s head of news, deputy editor Ian Katz, about the project. He was dismayed to discover how quickly word spread that he was involved in a top-secret story. Another colleague, Richard Norton-Taylor, the Guardian’s veteran security editor, soon asked Davies about his “scoop”. Davies refused to tell him. A couple of hours later Norton-Taylor encountered Davies again, and teased him gleefully: “I know all your secrets!” A newspaper office is a bad place in which to try and keep the lid on things for very long.

The paper’s staff did do their best, however. Declan Walsh, the Guardian’s Pakistan-based correspondent, was recalled in conditions of great secrecy. Meeting round a table in the editor’s office, the Guardian’s team chewed over the technical difficulties. David Leigh was cantankerous: “It’s like panning for tiny grains of gold in a mountain of data,” he complained. “How are we ever going to find if there are any stories in it?” The answer to that question set the Guardian’s old hands on a steep learning curve as they got to grips with modern methods.

First they discovered, embarrassingly, that their first download, the Afghan spreadsheet, did not contain 60,000 entries, as they had spent several days believing. It contained far more. But the paper’s early version of Excel software had simply stopped reading after recording 60,000 rows. The real total of hour-by-hour field reports – the war logs – amounted to 92,201 rows of data. The next problem was greater still. It transpired that a spreadsheet of such enormous size was impossibly slow to manipulate, although it could theoretically be sorted and filtered to yield reams of statistics and different types of military event. The Iraq war logs release dumped another 391,000 records into their laps, which quadrupled the data problems.

Harold Frayman, the technical expert, solved those problems: he improvised at speed a full-scale database. Like Google, or sophisticated news search engines such as LexisNexis, the Frayman database could be searched by date, by key word, or by any phrase put between quotation marks. Declan Walsh recalls: “When I first got access to the database, it felt like being a kid in a candy shop. My first impulse was to search for ‘Osama bin Laden’, the man who had started the war. Several of us furiously inputted the name to see what it would produce (not much, as it turned out).” Leigh, too, began to cheer up: “Now this data is beginning to speak to me!” he said.

Leigh was introduced to another Guardian specialist, Alastair Dant: “Alastair’s our data visualiser,” he was told. Leigh: “I didn’t know such a job existed.” He was soon brought up to speed. The WikiLeaks project was producing new types of data. Now they needed to be mined with new kinds of journalism. Dant explained that he could convert the statistics of the thousands of bomb explosions recorded in the Afghan war logs into a bespoke moving graphic display. He could use the same basic template with which the Guardian had formerly developed a popular interactive map of the Glastonbury festival. That had been a nice bit of fun for music fans. The viewer had been able to move a pointer over a map of the festival field, and up came the artists playing at that spot, at that particular time.

Now, with Afghanistan, the viewer would be able similarly to press a button, but this time a much more chilling display would start to run. It would reveal, day by day and year by year, the failure of the US army to contain the insurgents in Afghanistan, as literally thousands of “improvised explosive devices” blossomed all around the country’s road system. The viewer could see how the vast majority of the roadside bombs were slaughtering ordinary civilians rather than military opponents, and how the assaults ebbed and flowed with changes in political developments. It was a rendering that made at least something comprehensible, in an otherwise scrappy and ill-reported war.

The key online expert proved to be Simon Rogers, the Guardian’s data editor. “You’re good with spreadsheets, aren’t you?” he was asked. “This is one hell of a spreadsheet,” he said. After working on those spreadsheets, he concluded: “Sometimes people talk about the internet killing journalism. The WikiLeaks story was a combination of the two: traditional journalistic skills and the power of the technology, harnessed to tell an amazing story. In future, data journalism may not seem amazing and new; for now it is. The world has changed and it is data that has changed it.”

One obvious opportunity was to obtain genuine statistics of casualties for the first time. The US military had asserted, disingenuously, that at least as far as civilians and “enemies” were concerned, there were no figures available. In fact, the journalists could now see that the war logs contained highly detailed categories that were supposed to be filled in for every military event, breaking them down into US and allies, local Iraqi and Afghan forces, civilians and enemy combatants, and classing them in each case as either killed or wounded. But it wasn’t so simple. Rogers and his reporter colleagues had to grapple with the realities on the military ground: those realities made apparently enticing data sets into dirty and unreliable statistics.

At its simplest, a person listed as “wounded” at the time might have actually died later. More sweepingly, the casualty boxes were sometimes not filled in at all. The reporters felt sympathy with exhausted soldiers, after a day of fighting, being confronted with forms to input that required the filling in of no fewer than 30 fields of bureaucratic information. Some units were more meticulous than others. Early years of the wars saw sketchier information gathering than later, when systems were better organised. When there was heavy urban fighting, or when bodies were carried away, casualties were hard to count. Some units had a penchant for writing down improbably large numbers of purported “enemy killed in action”. Sometimes, more sinisterly, civilians who were killed were recorded as “enemy”. That avoided awkward questions for the troops. All the figures were in any event too low, because some months and years were missing. So were details from the special forces, who operated outside the normal army chains of command. And many of the clashes involving British, German and other “allies” were apparently not recorded on the US army database.

So it was a tricky task to produce statistics that could be claimed to have real value. That highlighted once again the inescapable limitations of the purist WikiLeaks ideology. The material that resided in leaked documents, no matter how voluminous, was not “the truth”. It was often just a signpost pointing to some of the truth, requiring careful interpretation.

Assange himself eventually flew into London from Stockholm late one night in July 2010. He arrived in the Guardian office with nothing but his backpack and a shy smile, like one of the Lost Boys out of Peter Pan. “Have you anywhere to stay?” asked Leigh. “No,” he said. “Have you had anything to eat?” Again the answer was no. Leigh walked him down the road to the brasserie which was still open at St Pancras station and presented him with the menu. Assange ate 12 oysters and a piece of cheese, and then went to stay the night at Leigh’s flat in nearby Bloomsbury.

He spent several days there, sleeping in the day and working on his laptop through the night. Then he moved to a nearby hotel, spent the World Cup final weekend at Nick Davies’ Sussex home (but, says Davies, “He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in football”) and settled for a while at the Pimlico townhouse of Gavin MacFadyen, the City University professor and journalist. Assange brought with him only three pairs of socks. But he swiftly charmed the MacFadyen household, borrowed poetry books from the shelves, and patiently explained the Big Bang, complete with mathematical formulae, to some wide-eyed visiting children. The only uncomfortable moment came over a meal of risotto, cooked by Sarah Saunders, a gourmet caterer and the daughter of MacFadyen’s wife, Susan. Typically, Assange would tap at his laptop throughout meals; other WikiLeaks volunteers who came and went did the same thing. On this occasion Saunders told him to turn his laptop off. Assange, to his credit, instantly complied.

A month later, he was provided with a bigger base for his growing organisation at the journalists’ Frontline Club in west London. Something about the wandering Assange made a succession of people he encountered want to look after him and protect him – even if that sentiment was not always enduring.

The team flowing in and out of the Guardian war room was also growing in size. The Guardian’s two distinguished veterans of the Iraq conflict, Jonathan Steele and James Meek, were co-opted. The executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, sent over Eric Schmitt, his highly experienced war correspondent. Schmitt, whose knowledge of the military background was helpful, was able to report back that the war logs seemed authentic. He put them on a memory stick and flew home to start the process of building a database in New York.

The German contingent, too, were able to make a crucial contribution to the verification process. As the broker of the original deal with the Guardian and the New York Times, Nick Davies had not at first been entirely pleased with the arrival of Der Spiegel – a prospect that had only been tentatively mentioned at the Brussels meeting by his colleague Ian Traynor. Assange told him that lunch with Der Spiegel was taking place in Berlin. Then, in a phone call from a man calling himself Daniel Schmitt – actually Assange’s then No 2, Daniel Domscheit-Berg – he was told not only Der Spiegel but also a German radio station would be full “media partners” on the war logs. “I felt very confused. My first instinct was to say no,” Davies recalled. “A deal is a deal. Security is very important. I felt: ‘You can’t come in.’” Davies eventually agreed that while German radio was out, Der Spiegel could be in. Their reporters John Goetz and Marcel Rosenbach flew over to the war room.

“They fitted in very well. We liked them as people. They had lots of background expertise on Afghanistan,” Davies says. Crucially, Der Spiegel sources had access to the German federal parliament’s own investigation into the war in Afghanistan, including secret US military material. This proved vital in confirming that the details in the database the Guardian had been given were authentic.

The papers had another headache. Normally, with a story of this magnitude, the practical thing to do was to run it over several days. This maintained reader interest and helped sell more copies. In a previous campaign, on corporate tax avoidance, the Guardian had run a story a day non-stop for two weeks. This time, such a strategy was going to be impossible. For one thing, the two dailies in London and New York were now yoked to a weekly magazine in Germany. With only one shot at it, Der Spiegel would want to get all its stories out on Day One.

Secondly, and more gravely, none of the editors knew whether they would be allowed a Day Two at all. The US government’s response might be so explosive that they sent their lawyers in with a gag order. So it was decided that, in the Guardian’s case, the paper would run everything they had over 14 pages, on the day of launch. There was, of course, a downside to the approach: although the launch of the Afghan war logs was to cause an immense uproar, it was difficult to find anyone in London the next day who had actually ploughed through all 14 pages. It was simply too much to read. For the Iraq logs, by which time it was clear the US government was not going to seek court injunctions and gag orders against the media, publication was to be more comfortably spread over a few days.

The knottiest problem surrounded redactions. The papers planned only to publish a relatively small number of significant stories, and with them the text of the handful of relevant logs. WikiLeaks, on the other hand, intended simultaneously to unleash the lot. But many of the entries, particularly the “threat reports” derived from intelligence, mentioned the names of informants or those who had collaborated with US troops. In the vicious internecine politics of Afghanistan, such people could be in danger. Declan Walsh was among the first to realise this:

“I told David Leigh I was worried about the repercussions of publishing these names, who could easily be killed by the Taliban or other militant groups if identified. David agreed it was a concern and said he’d raised the issue with Julian, but he didn’t seem concerned. That night, we went out to a Moorish restaurant, Moro, with the two German reporters. David broached the problem again with Julian. The response floored me. ‘Well, they’re informants,’ he said. ‘So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’ There was, for a moment, silence around the table. I think everyone was struck by what a callous thing that was to say.

“I thought about the American bases I’d visited, the Afghan characters I’d met in little villages and towns, the complex local politics that coloured everything, and the dilemmas faced by individuals during a bloody war. There was no way I’d like to put them at risk on the basis of a document prepared by some wet-behind-the-ears American GI, who may or may not have correctly understood the information they were receiving. The other thing that little exchange suggested to me was just how naive – or arrogant – Julian was when it came to the media. Apart from any moral considerations, he didn’t seem to appreciate how the issue of naming informants was likely to rebound on the entire project.”

Davies, too, was dismayed by the difficulty of persuading Assange to make redactions. “At first, he simply didn’t get it, that it’s not OK to publish stuff that will get people killed,” Davies said. The Guardian reporter had been studying Task Force 373, a shadowy special operations group whose job was to capture or kill high-ranking Taliban. One war log was especially troubling: it described how an unnamed informant had a close relative who lived an exact distance south-east of the named target’s house and “will have eyes on target”. Clearly it was possible to work out these identities with the help of some local knowledge, and to publish the log might lead to the Taliban executing both Afghans. But Assange, according to Davies, was unbothered. For all his personal liking of the WikiLeaks founder, says Davies: “The problem is he’s basically a computer hacker. He comes from a simplistic ideology, or at that stage he did, that all information has to be published, that all information is good.”

In fairness to Assange, he eventually revisited his view, despite the technical difficulties it posed for WikiLeaks. And by the time the US state department cables were published, five months later, Assange had entirely embraced the logic of redaction, with his role almost that of a mainstream publisher. Short of time before the Afghan launch, he removed wholesale the 15,000 intelligence files, listed as “threat reports”, which were most likely to contain identifying details. This left some identities still discoverable in the main body of the cables, a fact which Rupert Murdoch’s London Times published prominently. Despite their supposed disapproval of WikiLeaks, the paper had pointed to information that could have helped the Taliban to murder people. By the time the Iraq logs were launched, Assange had time to construct a more sophisticated editing programme, which redacted a vast number of names. And when it came to publishing the diplomatic cables, on the face of it at least, Assange had abandoned his original ambition to dump out everything. He contented himself during the course of 2010 with only publishing a small fraction of the cables – those whose text had already been individually redacted by journalists from the five print media partners.

In the end, then, all these anxieties about the fate of informants remained purely theoretical. By the end of the year in which WikiLeaks published its huge dump of information, no concrete evidence whatever had surfaced that any informant had suffered actual reprisals. The only reports were of defence secretary Robert Gates telling a sailor aboard a US warship in San Diego, “We don’t have specific information of an Afghan being killed yet.” CNN reported on 17 October that, according to a senior Nato official in Kabul, “There has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak.”

As Walsh had predicted, the enemies of WikiLeaks nevertheless did their worst. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was among the first. “The truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family,” Mullen told a Pentagon news conference four days after the leak. This slogan – “blood on their hands” – was in turn perverted from a speculation into a fact, endlessly repeated, and used as a justification for bloodlust on the part of some US politicians, who seemingly thought they might profit in votes by calling for Assange himself to be murdered. Particularly repellent was hearing the phrase being used by US generals who, as the WikiLeaks documents revealed, had gallons of genuine civilian blood on their own hands.

Assange was starting to prove a volatile partner in several respects. Nick Davies was his chief contact, and the man who had reeled him in for the Guardian. So it was a jolt when the pair fell out. Davies believed he and Assange had developed a rapport, cemented over dinners, jokes, late-night philosophical debates and al fresco dinners in Stockholm’s island old town. “I thought he was clever and interesting and fun to hang around with. The two of us were involved in this rather exciting, very important adventure.” But the day before the Afghan war logs launch, Davies’ phone rang. On the other line was Stephen Grey, a freelance reporter. Grey began: “Guess what? I’ve just been with Julian Assange.” Grey explained that Assange had given him an exclusive TV interview about the blockbusting Afghan war logs. He had also provided material for Channel 4’s website. And there was more bad news: Grey said that Assange had approached CNN and Al Jazeera offering them an interview as well. Davies was fuming. Assange, however, insisted: “It was always part of our agreement that I was going to do this.”

This quarrel did not bode well for the future. Nor did Assange’s growing friction with the New York Times. The NYT were refusing to link directly to the WikiLeaks cable dump from their own website. Bill Keller played it differently to the Guardian and Der Spiegel, who, after some debate internally, both decided to post a link to the WikiLeaks site in the normal way. The New York Times took the equally defensible view that readers – and indeed their own hostile US government – would not see the paper’s staff as detached reporters if they directed readers to WikiLeaks in such a purposeful manner. Keller says: “We feared – rightly, as it turned out – that their trove would contain the names of low-level informants and make them Taliban targets.” Assange was angered at what he saw as pusillanimity by the Americans. He went about declaring in his Australian twang, “They must be punished!” The editor of the New York Times, in turn, came to see Assange as “a self-important quasi-anarchist” Keller recalls. “I talked to Assange by phone a few times, and heard out his complaints. ‘Where’s the respect?’ he demanded. ‘Where’s the respect?’ Another time he called to tell me how much he disliked a profile we had written of Bradley Manning … Assange complained that we had ‘psychologicalised’ Manning and given short shrift to his ‘political awakening’.”

Beneath the surface, all these tensions simmered. But to the public, the launch of the first tranche of war logs about Afghanistan represented a smooth and well-orchestrated media coup. It gave the three papers massive exposure, and turned Julian Assange, for a time, into the world’s most famous man. It was the biggest leak in history – until it was followed by an even bolder set of disclosures about Iraq. These were the two immensely controversial wars which the United States had inflicted on the world, and now, at last, it seemed possible to lift the lid on them.