WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

The cables

Near Lochnagar, Scotland

August 2010

“ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#”

ASSANGE’S 58-CHARACTER PASSWORD

David Leigh had listened patiently to Assange, who had instructed him that he must never allow his memory stick to be connected to any computer that was exposed to the internet, for fear of electronic eavesdropping by US intelligence. But there was currently no danger of that at all. Leigh’s rented cottage way up in the Scottish Highlands was unable even to receive a TV signal, never mind a broadband connection. The Guardian’s investigations editor had originally planned to spend his annual summer vacation with his wife, hill-walking in the Grampians. But the summits of Dreish, Mayar, Lochnagar and Cat Law went unclimbed. He sat transfixed at his desk instead, while the sun rose and set daily on the heather-covered hills outside. On the tiny silver Hewlett Packard thumb-drive plugged into his MacBook were the full texts of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables. To search through them was maddening, tiring – and utterly compelling.

It had been a struggle to prise these documents out of Assange back in London. There were repeated pilgrimages to the mews house belonging to Vaughan Smith’s Frontline Club near Paddington station before Assange reluctantly turned them over. “We have to able to work on them, Julian,” Leigh had argued. “None of the partners have any real idea what’s there, except their contents are supposed to give Hillary Clinton a heart attack!” Assange was keeping the three news organisations dangling, despite his original agreement to deliver all the material for publication. He willingly passed on the less important war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, but talked of how he would use his power to withhold the cables in order to “discipline” the mainstream media.

The atmosphere had become even more problematic since Nick Davies personally broke off relations in the summer, after Assange breached the original compact, as Davies saw it, by going behind his back to the Guardian’s TV rivals at Channel 4, taking with him all the knowledge acquired by privileged visits to the Guardian’s research room. Davies at the time said he felt betrayed: Assange simply insisted there had never been a deal.

The other Guardian journalists tightened their lips and held their peace. There was still a long road to travel if all the leaks were ever to come out. But after the publication of the Afghan war logs, Assange proposed to change the terms of the deal once again, before the planned launch of the much bigger tranche of Iraq logs. He wanted more television, in order to provide “emotional impact”. He had by now made some new friends in London – Ahmad Ibrahim, from the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera, and Gavin MacFadyen from City University in London. MacFadyen, a veteran of World in Action, one of Britain’s most distinguished investigative TV series in the 1970s, had recently helped set up an independent production company based at the university. Called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, it was funded by the David and Elaine Potter Foundation. Elaine had been a reporter during the great days of London’s Sunday Times, and her husband David had made millions from the development of the Psion computer. There was a distinct prospect that the wealthy Potter Foundation might become patrons of WikiLeaks: the Florentine Medicis, as it were, to Assange’s Michelangelo. Rapidly, the “Bureau” was drawn into Assange’s new plans.

He demanded that print publication of the Iraq war logs be postponed for at least another six weeks. This would enable the Bureau, under Assange’s guidance, to sell a TV documentary to Channel 4’s well-regarded Dispatches series. The Bureau would also make and sell a second documentary, of a more wide-ranging nature, to be aired on both Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English-language channels, which could be guaranteed to cause uproar in the Middle East. Both documentaries eventually got made, and Assange sensibly hired a respected NGO, Iraq Body Count, to analyse the casualty figures for the TV productions.

The fledgling Bureau, headed by former TV journalist Iain Overton, unsuccessfully attempted to make further lucrative sales to TV channels in the US. Overton then exasperated his unenthusiastic print partners by giving an on-the-record interview to Mark Hosenball of Newsweek, betraying in advance the entire top-secret plan to publish the Iraq war logs.

“Exclusive: WikiLeaks Collaborating With Media Outlets on Release of Iraq Documents”, ran the headline above the article, which opened: “A London-based journalism nonprofit is working with the WikiLeaks website and TV and print media in several countries on programmes and stories based on what is described as a massive cache of classified US military field reports related to the Iraq war … The material is the ‘biggest leak of military intelligence’ that has ever occurred, Overton says.”

Assange’s side deal with the Qataris also angered the original partners. Al Jazeera English was to break the agreed embargo for simultaneous publication by almost an hour, leaving the other media organisations scrambling to catch up on their websites. Leigh found it hard to disagree with Eric Schmitt of the New York Times when he protested that Assange seemed to be doing media deals with “riff-raff”. The founder of WikiLeaks had been rocketed to the status of a huge celebrity, in large part thanks to the credibility bestowed on him by three of the world’s major news organisations. But was he going out of control?

Leigh tried his best not to fall out with this Australian impresario, who was prone to criticise what he called the “snaky Brits”. Instead, Leigh used his ever-shifting demands as a negotiating lever. “You want us to postpone the Iraq logs’ publication so you can get some TV,” he said. “We could refuse, and simply go ahead with publication as planned. If you want us to do something for you, then you’ve got to do something for us as well.” He asked Assange to stop procrastinating, and hand over the biggest trove of all: the cables. Assange said, “I could give you half of them, covering the first 50% of the period.”

Leigh refused. All or nothing, he said. “What happens if you end up in an orange jump-suit en route to Guantánamo before you can release the full files?” In return he would give Assange a promise to keep the cables secure, and not to publish them until the time came. Assange had always been vague about timing: he generally indicated, however, that October would be a suitable date. He believed the US army’s charges against the imprisoned soldier Bradley Manning would have crystallised by then, and publication could not make his fate any worse. He also said, echoing Leigh’s gallows humour: “I’m going to need to be safe in Cuba first!”

Eventually, Assange capitulated. Late at night, after a two-hour debate, he started the process on one of his little netbooks that would enable Leigh to download the entire tranche of cables. The Guardian journalist had to set up the PGP encryption system on his laptop at home across the other side of London. Then he could feed in a password. Assange wrote down on a scrap of paper:

ACollectionOfHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#. “That’s the password,” he said. “But you have to add one extra word when you type it in. You have to put in the word ‘Diplomatic’ before the word ‘History’. Can you remember that?”

“I can remember that.”

Leigh set off home, and successfully installed the PGP software. He typed in the lengthy password, and was gratified to be able to download a huge file from Assange’s temporary website. Then he realized it was zipped up – compressed using a format called 7z which he had never heard of, and couldn’t understand. He got back in his car and drove through the deserted London streets in the small hours, to Assange’s headquarters in Southwick Mews. Assange smiled a little pityingly, and unzipped it for him.

Now, isolated up in the Highlands, with hares and buzzards for company, Leigh felt safe enough to work steadily through the dangerous contents of the memory stick. Obviously, there was no way he, or any other human, could read through a quarter of a million cables. Cut off from the Guardian’s own network, he was unable to have the material turned into a searchable database. Nor could he call up such a monolithic file on his laptop and search through it in the normal simple-minded journalistic way, as a word processor document or something similar: it was just too big.

Harold Frayman, the Guardian’s technical expert, was there to rescue him. Before Leigh left town, he sawed the material into 87 chunks, each just about small enough to call up and read separately. Then he explained how Leigh could use a simple program called TextWrangler to search for key words or phrases through all the separate files simultaneously, and present the results in a user-friendly form.

Leigh was in business. He quickly learned that although the cables often contained discursive free-text essays on local politics, their headers were always assembled in a rigid format. In fact, the state department posted on its own website an unclassified telecommunications handbook which instructed its cipher clerks exactly what to do and how to do it, every time.

So, to type in, for example, “FM AMEMBASSY TUNIS” could be guaranteed to fetch up a list of each dispatch sent back to Washington from the American embassy in the capital of Tunisia. Similarly, the dispatches always signed off with the uppercase surname of the ambassador in post at the time. So the legend TUTTLE would fetch every cable during the ambassadorship of Robert Tuttle, George W Bush’s London envoy.

There were limits to the dossier’s contents. There was very little material prior to 2006 and the “Net-Centric Diplomacy” system had clearly been built up from some restricted pilot projects. So only a few embassies contributed material at first. Even the more up-to-date and voluminous dispatches were only a partial selection: many cables or sections that the state department could not bring themselves to share with other parts of the Washington military and bureaucratic forest were missing. Nevertheless, what the cables contained was an astonishing mountain of words, cataloguing the recent diplomacy of the world’s sole superpower in ways that no one in earlier decades could have even imagined.

Its sheer bulk was overwhelming. If the tiny memory stick containing the cables had been a set of printed texts, it would have made up a library containing more than 2,000 sizeable books. No human diplomats would have attempted to write so much down before the coming of the digital age: if written down, no human spy would have been able to purloin copies of that much paper without using a lorry, and no human mind would have been able subsequently to analyse it without spending half a lifetime at the task.

To be confronted with this set of data therefore represented a severe journalistic problem.

*

Leigh began his experiments by typing in the word “Megrahi”. He thought the name of the Libyan intelligence officer imprisoned for his part in the notorious 1988 Lockerbie plane bombing might be unusual enough to throw up relevant results. The Megrahi case was an ongoing diplomatic altercation involving the Americans, the Libyans, the British, the Scottish and – as it transpired – even the Qataris. Against US wishes, Megrahi had been released from a UK prison in August 2009, supposedly on compassionate grounds because he was on the brink of death from prostate cancer. A year later, he was still alive, after receiving a hero’s welcome back in Tripoli. That much was known to the outside world, and conspiracy theories abounded. Was there now a way of uncovering the insider truth?

The TextWrangler software took barely two minutes to throw up and itemise no fewer than 451 appearances of the word Megrahi in US dispatches. Taken together, the picture they painted was certainly different from the one officially fed to the British public at the time. The first cable up on the screen was from Richard LeBaron, the charge d’affaires in London, dated 24 October 2008. Marked “PRIORITY” for both the secretary of state in Washington and also the department of justice, the cable was classified “CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN”. It began, “Convicted Pam Am 103 bomber Abdelbasset al-Megrahi has inoperable, incurable cancer, but it is not clear how long he has to live.”

A succession of cables then charted growing pressure – described as “thuggish” – heaped on the British by Libya. Viewed sidelong from a US perspective, the dilemma for their junior ally in London was clear, and even evoked some sympathy. The American public was going to be furious if the ailing Megrahi was let out too soon: many US citizens had died on the bombed plane, and Megrahi was the only Libyan who had ever received any kind of punishment for the atrocity.

On the other hand, if Megrahi was allowed to die in a Scottish prison (the fragments of the plane had fallen on a Scottish town, and Scotland had its own legal system) then Muammar Gaddafi, the megalomaniac ruler of Libya, was threatening dire commercial reprisals. The British ambassador was privately warning that UK interests could be “cut off at the knees”. It was the crucial truth no British politician wanted to come clean about in public.

The British administration in London managed to push the decision for Megrahi’s release – and the subsequent blame for it – on to the autonomous government in Scotland. The Scottish nationalist politicians complained bitterly to the US that they had got nothing out of the deal. The US diplomats recorded privately that it served the Scot Nats right for getting out of their depth. The Americans also noted their own suspicions that the Scots might have been in effect bribed with the offer of Qatari trade loans to let Megrahi out (both parties vociferously denied it) and that Tony Blair, when prime minister, might have cynically promised leniency for Megrahi in return for lucrative British oil deals. (The British equally vociferously denied that accusation.)

The cables left the British looking ineffectual: they failed to prevent Gaddafi’s son Saif from arranging an embarrassing hero’s welcome for Megrahi, although celebrations were somewhat toned down. And UK intelligence was so weak that diplomats were wringing their hands over the prospect of a public Megrahi funeral the following year – but on the basis of false information, duly passed on to the US, that he was now due to die any minute.

The cables also disclosed that the Americans spoke with forked tongues. While it was left to US domestic politicians to huff angrily about Libyan perfidy, the state department signalled that Gaddafi might be co-opted to help hunt down al-Qaida fundamentalists. And the Libyan ruler was continuing to dismantle his would-be nuclear arsenal, even if Hillary Clinton had to personally sign a grovelling letter to mollify one of his massive sulks.

This particular sulk came about, the cables revealed, when Gaddafi, who appeared at the UN accompanied everywhere by a “voluptuous blonde Ukrainian nurse”, flew into a rage at the derisive reception accorded to his lengthy general assembly speech. His pique was compounded by US refusal to let him pitch his iconic Bedouin-style tent in New York. Gaddaffi vented his ire, it transpired, by suddenly refusing to allow a “hot” shipment of highly enriched uranium be loaded on a transport plane and shipped back to Russia, as part of his nuclear-dismantling agreement. US diplomats and experts warned in terrified tones of a radioactive calamity, as the uranium container sat for a month, unguarded and in danger of heating up and cracking open.

This picture that emerged of US diplomatic dealings with Libya was thus richly textured and fascinating. It showed a superpower at work: cajoling, fixing, eavesdropping, manoeuvring and sometimes bullying. It also showed the dismayingly crazed attitudes of a foreign ruler possessing both nuclear ambitions and a lucrative reservoir of the world’s oil – a truth which his own subjects would rarely be allowed to see. And, from the point of view of a domestic British reporter, it showed how limited the options open to the UK seemed to be despite its pretensions to punch above its weight in the world.

These documents had to be treated carefully, Leigh realised. Some of the informants who described Gaddafi’s idiosyncrasies would clearly have to have their identities protected. Although the cables themselves were obviously genuine, it did not mean that the analysis and gossip reported therein were also always correct. And one had to bear in mind that the authors of these dispatches to Washington also had their own agendas. They wanted to impress. They wanted to promote their own views. Sometimes they simply wanted to demonstrate that they knew what was going on: diplomats, like journalists, were all too capable of turning a shallow lunch with a “contact” into a hot story, for career-enhancing reasons.

Nevertheless, with all these caveats, it was clear that America’s secret diplomatic dealings over Libya were immensely revelatory. They were not only newsworthy, but also important. This was a picture of the world seen through a much less scrambled prism than usual. And there were more than another 100 countries to go! Leigh was plunging once more into the database bran-tub when his landline suddenly rang, breaking into the silence of the surrounding Highland hills. It was his London colleague Nick Davies, with a bewildering message. It was one that threatened to derail the entire WikiLeaks enterprise. “Julian’s about to be arrested in Sweden!” he said “He’s being accused of rape.”