WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

Uneasy partners

Editor’s office, the Guardian, Kings Place, London

1 November 2010

“I’m a combative person”

JULIAN ASSANGE, TED CONFERENCE, OXFORD, 2010

The three partner papers decided it was time for a meeting with Julian Assange. Everything was threatening to get rather messy. The embattled WikiLeaks founder now wanted the Americans frozen out of the much-delayed deal to publish the diplomatic cables jointly – a punishment, so it was said, for a recent profile of him, by the New York Times veteran London correspondent John F Burns. Assange had intensely disliked it.

The British were anxious about the fact that another copy of the cables had apparently fallen into the hands of Heather Brooke, a London-based American journalist and freedom of information activist. And the Germans were worried that things could get acrimonious all round unless the editors held a clear-the-air meeting with what was left of WikiLeaks.

There were at least three loose copies of the cables believed to be circulating now: with Brooke in the UK, Daniel Ellsberg – of Pentagon papers fame – in the US, and Smári McCarthy, an Icelandic former WikiLeaks programmer who had, according to Assange, let a copy pass to Brooke. David Leigh had signalled to the New York Times he was willing personally to hand them a copy if Assange would not co-operate. But none of the huge secret cache of state department dispatches had yet actually been analysed and published to the world as originally planned. Would the whole audacious project end in tears?

The conference was arranged for 1 November, at the Guardian’s London offices near King’s Cross station, with an initial meeting to go through the material in detail, trying to reach agreement on a possible day-by-day running order. Assange was supposed to join around 6pm – but a series of text messages to deputy editor Ian Katz indicated he was running late. Around 7pm, Rusbridger’s phone rang. It was Mark Stephens, a British libel lawyer he’d known for years. He said he had something to tell him: could he come straight round? Twenty minutes later Stephens burst through the door of the editor’s office, followed by Assange himself, along with his dour Icelandic lieutenant Kristinn Hrafnsson, and a young woman lawyer, later introduced as a junior solicitor in Stephens’ office, Jennifer Robinson. It looked, and felt, like an ambush.

Assange had barely sat down before he started angrily denouncing the Guardian. Did the New York Times have the cables? How did they have them? Who had given them to them? This was a breach of trust. His voice was raised and angry. Every time Rusbridger tried to respond, he pitched in with another question. When he finally paused for breath Rusbridger pointed out that the Spiegel people and other Guardian executives were waiting. Why didn’t we tell them to come in to continue the discussion? But Assange’s fury returned: this matter had to be settled first. He needed to know the truth about the New York Times. “We are getting the feeling that a large organisation is trying to find ways to step around a gentlemen’s agreement. We’re feeling a bit unhappy.”

Rusbridger responded that things had changed. WikiLeaks had sprung a leak itself. The cables had fallen into the hands of Heather Brooke. Things would soon move out of our control unless they decided to act more quickly. Assange didn’t look well. He was pale and sweating and had a racking cough. Rusbridger stuck to the line that he hadn’t given anyone the cables – which was perfectly true – and eventually persuaded Assange that it was better to deal with the larger group.

David Leigh immediately objected, however, to the presence of Stephens and Robinson. This was an editorial meeting, he protested. If Assange was going to have lawyers there, the Guardian needed lawyers. Rusbridger went off to try and raise a lawyer. The Guardian’s head of legal was cycling home and could not hear her BlackBerry ringing, so Geraldine Proudler, from the legal firm Olswang, who had fought many battles on behalf of the Guardian in the past, was interrupted at her gym and jumped in a taxi.

The argument – for the moment without lawyers – began again with the Spiegel team of editor-in-chief Georg Mascolo, Holger Stark and Marcel Rosenbach. Assange seemed obsessed with the New York Times, however, and launched into repeated denunciations of the paper.

“They ran a front-page story – the front page! – a front-page story which was just a sleazy hit job against me personally, and other parts of the organisation, and based upon falsehoods. It wasn’t even an assemblage of genuine criticism, assembling criticism without any balance. Their aim is to make themselves look impartial. It is not enough to simply be impartial. It is not enough to simply go: ‘That’s the story’ and put it through – they actually have to be actively hostile towards us, and demonstrate that on the front page, lest they be accused of being some kind of sympathiser.”

The Burns profile had dwelt, among other things, on the continuing police investigation into the Swedish sex allegations. Assange was quoted saying: “They called me the James Bond of journalism. It got me a lot of fans, and some of them ended up causing me a bit of trouble.”

Burns had written that WikiLeaks staff had turned against Assange in the scandal’s wake. They complained, he wrote, that their founder’s “growing celebrity has been matched by an increasingly dictatorial, eccentric and capricious style”. To one defector, 25-year-old Icelander Herbert Snorrason, Assange messaged: “If you have a problem with me, you can piss off.” Assange had announced: “I am the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest.” Snorrason riposted stoutly: “He is not in his right mind.”

Burns’ piece actually omitted the full facts: Assange’s key lieutenant, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, was also privately denouncing Assange’s “cult of stardom”. The German would write later: “It is not for nothing that many who have quit refer to him as a ‘dictator’. He thinks of himself as the autocratic ruler of the project and believes himself accountable to no one. Justified, even internal, criticism – whether about his relations with women or the lack of transparency in his actions – is either dismissed with the statement ‘I’m busy, there are two wars I have to end’ or attributed to the secret services’ smear campaigns.”

Round the Guardian editor’s table, the others now sat silently as Assange fulminated against Burns and the New York Times in the strangely old-fashioned declamatory baritone he used when angry. He returned to his questions. Did they have the cables? How?

The problem, interjected Rusbridger, was that the paper now had a second source for the cables. It was negotiating with Heather Brooke for her to join the Guardian team. Otherwise she would be free to take them to any paper – which would mean the Guardian losing all access, control and exclusivity. Assange turned on Rusbridger. This wasn’t a second source. Brooke had stolen the cables. It had been done “by theft, by deception … certainly unethical means”. He knew enough about the way she had operated to “destroy” her. The climax came when Assange (the underground leaker of illegal secrets) threatened that his lawyers could sue for the loss of WikiLeaks’ “financial assets”.

“I’d look forward to such a court case,” said the Guardian’s editor with a smile. None of this tirade made sense to Rusbridger. Brooke was a professional journalist: she had stolen nothing. More to the point, either the Guardian had a second source – in which case it no longer had to rely on Assange’s copy – or it all originated, as Assange claimed, from a single source, WikiLeaks, in which case WikiLeaks had broken its agreement to make a copy only for the Guardian, and Assange was in a poor position to be ranting at others.

Katz asked what other copies of the database existed: for instance, was it correct that Ellsberg had one? Assange shot back: “Daniel Ellsberg’s is an encrypted back-up copy of the database which he was to give the New York Times in a piece of political theatre.”

Assange returned to his favourite theme of how a gentleman leaker would behave: “People who aren’t behaving like gentlemen should start behaving like one. On the basis that the Guardian has given this to the New York Times, why should we collaborate with the Guardian?”

Assange began suggesting deals with other American papers. The Washington Post was hungry for this stuff. Under questioning, he elaborated a little, admitting that he had already been in discussion both with the Post and the US McClatchy newspaper group about possible co-operation.

Assange launched into the NYT again: “The strategy that the New York Times engaged in was … not very gentlemanly … They wrote a terrible piece about Bradley Manning and this terrible, terrible piece about me on the front page by John F Burns. He says that he has received the most criticism of anything that he has ever written in his entire journalistic career over that piece, from senior people, and there’s a reason for that.

“We’re willing to engage in realpolitik if necessary, but that’s an organisation whose modus operandi is to protect itself, by destroying us. I do advise you to read it. It is obvious to anyone who reads it that it is designed to be a smear. It uses unnamed sources to quote some random person who has never had anything to do with our organisation except running some chat room, saying that I’m mad, etcetera, etcetera. It really is bad journalism. I’m not asking much. We are asking for the Times to follow its own standards. The standards that it follows for other people, because those standards apply, and the Times should not go out of its way to produce a negative, sleazy hit-piece and place it on the front page.”

Katz asked him directly how far he had got in negotiation with the Washington Post. “I haven’t made an agreement. Though I think we’ll probably go with the Post unless we get a very good counter-offer, because the Times has defiled the relationship.”

Rusbridger suggested a short break. When they reassembled, still without lawyers (Stephens and Robinson were sitting outside the room, Proudler down the corridor) the temperature had lowered a bit. Rusbridger suggested they look at some of the issues around the sequencing of stories. Ian Katz led Assange through the work they had done earlier in the day on which items should run in which order. Assange listened calmly. Gone was the aggression and finger-pointing. In its place there was a new engagement – as though his brain had flicked a switch to channel the rational, highly strategic zones which had been missing in the early confrontation.

He was, however, now insisting on yet further delay. The journalists asked how WikiLeaks would ideally release the cables. He replied, “Our ideal situation is not till next year. Anything before one month is semi-lethal even under emergency conditions. We have woken a giant by wounding one of its legs [the US defence department] and the release of this material will cause the other leg [the state department] to stand up. We are taking as much fire as we can but we can’t take any more.” He stressed that he wanted the cables to be released in an orderly way and not in a “big dump”. Ideally, a “gradual release played out over two months”. But he was willing to see the launch in as soon as a month’s time: “We can gear up to attempt to be in a position such that we can survive, in a month.”

Assange had already spoken, only half-jokingly, of his need to have a safe refuge in Cuba before the cables came out. Now he said the ordering had to be arranged so that it didn’t appear anti-American. He didn’t want WikiLeaks to seem obsessed with America. The stories in the cables had far wider significance – so it was important to establish a running order which would make people realise that this wasn’t simply about the US.

“There are security exposés and abuses by other countries, these bad Arab countries, or Russia,” he said. “That will set the initial flavour of this material. We shouldn’t go exposing, for example, Israel during the initial phase, the initial couple of weeks. Let the overall framework be set first. The exposure of these other bad countries will set the tone of American public opinion. In the initial couple of weeks the frame is set that will colour the rest of it.”

Assange then made another startling announcement. He wanted to involve other newspapers from the “Romance languages”, to broaden the geopolitical impact. He mentioned El País and Le Monde. The others in the room looked at each other. This was going to double the complexities of an arrangement that was difficult enough to co-ordinate. How could they possibly do a deal between an American daily on a different time zone, with a French afternoon paper, a Spanish morning paper and a German weekly?

But by now there was at least a negotiation about the means to go forward. It was nearly 10pm. The discussions had been going relentlessly for nearly three hours. Rusbridger produced a couple of bottles of Chablis. The mood eased. Everyone readily agreed it could all be settled over some food at the Rotunda restaurant downstairs at Kings Place. The journalists moved, meeting Mark Stephens, Geraldine Proudler and Jennifer Robinson still sitting patiently outside the editor’s office.

Dinner was more relaxed, though Assange was still obsessed with the New York Times and its behaviour. Asked under what conditions he would now collaborate with the Americans, he said he would only consider it if the paper agreed to run no more negative material about him and offered him a right to reply to the Burns piece with equal prominence. “Good relationships extend to good people, they don’t extend to bad people. Unless we see a very serious counter-offer [from the New York Times] they have lost their exclusivity … Is the NYT a lost cause or is it a credible media outlet? Have things got that bad?”

The others decided to ignore that for the time being. They talked in more detail about how they could draw up a publication schedule, with agreed themes for each day. Assange was keen for the period of exclusivity to continue beyond the new year, or “the Christian calendar”, as he put it. He said WikiLeaks had already redacted the cables “and if there is a critical attack against us we will publish them all”.

By midnight the restaurant was empty and closing. It was decided that Rusbridger would go and ring Bill Keller in New York while the others relocated – taking the wine with them – to another meeting room back upstairs in the Guardian. Rusbridger had known Keller for about 10 years, which helped shortcut what was bound to be a slightly surreal conversation. “I’m going to tell you what Assange is demanding,” said Rusbridger. “I know what you’re going to say, but I have to go back and say I’ve put this to you.”

“Go ahead,” said Keller.

“OK, he wants a front-page rejoinder for the Burns piece and he also wants a guarantee that you’re not going to publish any more sleazy hit pieces on him.”

Keller let out a little snort. “He can write a letter,” he said curtly. “Strictly speaking, that’s not my department, but I’d certainly use any influence I had to suggest that it’s published. And – what was the second one? – er, you can certainly assure him we are not planning any sleazy hit pieces.”

Rusbridger returned to the room and conveyed Keller’s message. As he feared, Assange reacted furiously, saying this was not sufficient and, in terms, all bets were off. He announced that both the New York Times and Guardian themselves were now to be thrown out of the deal.

It was Georg Mascolo’s turn to speak – deliberately and firmly. The three papers were tied together. If Assange was cutting out the other two papers then Der Spiegel was out, too.

It was now nearly 1.30am. The discussion was going nowhere, so Rusbridger turned to Assange and summarised the position.

“As I see it you have three options. One, we reach no deal; two, you try and substitute the Washington Post for the New York Times; three, you do a deal with us three.

“One and Two don’t work because you’ve lost control of the material. That’s just going to result in chaos. So I can’t see that you have any option but Three. You’re going to have to continue with us. And that’s good. We have been good partners. We have treated the material responsibly. We’ve thrown huge resources at it. We’re good at working together, we like each other. We’ve communicated well with your lot. It’s gone well. Why on earth throw it away?”

If Assange was convinced, he wasn’t going to show it. Not that night, anyway. Rusbridger could see that doing it Assange’s way he would still be up for another few rounds before dawn. As the WikiLeaks capo di tutti capi headed off coughing into the night, he shook hands with David Leigh, with whom he had previously worked so closely. Assange shot him a meaningful look and said in low, distinct tones: “Be careful.”

The next day Rusbridger sent Mark Stephens 10 bullet points to put to Assange:

• Publish on Nov 29 in a staggered form.

• Run over two weeks or more up to just before Xmas.

• Exclusive to G, NYT, DS (plus El Pais and ? Le Monde).

• Subject matter to be co-ordinated between partners and to stay off certain issues initially. No veto to anyone over subjects covered over whole course of series (post Jan). WL to publish cited documents at same time.

• After Xmas the exclusivity continues for one more week, starting around Jan 3/4.

• Thereafter WL will start to share stories on a regional basis among 40 serious newspapers around the world, who will be given access to “bags” of material relating to their own regions.

• G to hire HB [Heather Brooke] on an exclusive basis.

• If “critical” attack on WL they will release everything immediately.

• If material is leaked to/shared with any other news organisation in breach of this understanding all bets are off.

• If agreed the team will commence work on a grid of stories for the first phase.

Within 24 hours Stephens rang back to say Assange had okayed the deal. Whether or not it met Assange’s criteria for “a gentlemen’s agreement”, it was, anyway, an agreement.

*

Five of the world’s most reputable papers were now committed to selecting, redacting and publishing, on an unprecedented scale, the secret leaked diplomatic dispatches of a superpower. It was a project of astonishing boldness, which stood a chance of redefining journalism in the internet age. But while the newspapers laboured to behave responsibly, Assange continued to go his own way.

Disguising himself as an old woman, as detailed in Chapter 1, he moved operations to his rural hideaway at Ellingham Hall, out in the Norfolk countryside. There, his security over the cables, which he had once described as worth at least $5 million to any foreign intelligence agency, seemed less than watertight. Staff say that Assange handed over batches of them to foreign journalists, including someone who was simply introduced as “Adam”. “He seemed like a harmless old man,” said one staffer, “apart from his habit of standing too close and peering at what was written on your screen.” He was introduced as the father of Assange’s Swedish crony, the journalist Johannes Wahlstrom, and took away copies of cables from Russia and post-Soviet states. According to one insider, he also demanded copies of cables about “the Jews”.

This WikiLeaks associate was better known as Israel Shamir. Shamir claims to be a renegade Russian Jew, born in Novosibirsk, but currently adhering to the Greek Orthodox church. He is notorious for Holocaust-denying and publishing a string of anti-semitic articles. He caused controversy in the UK in 2005, at a parliamentary book launch hosted by Lord Ahmed, by claiming: “Jews … own, control and edit a big share of mass media.”

Internal WikiLeaks documents, seen by the Guardian, show Shamir was not only given cables, but he also invoiced WikiLeaks for €2,000, to be deposited in a Tallinn bank account, in thanks for “services rendered – journalism”. What services? He says: “What I did for WikiLeaks was to read and analyse the cables from Moscow.”

Shamir’s byline is on two previous articles pillorying the Swedish women who complained about Assange. On 27 August, in Counterpunch, a small radical US publication, Shamir said Assange was framed by “Langley spies” and “crazy feminists”. He alleged there had been a “honeytrap”. On 14 September, Shamir then attacked “castrating feminists and secret services”, writing that one of the women involved, who he deliberately named, had once discussed the Cuban opposition to Castro in a Swedish academic publication “connected with” someone with “CIA ties”.

Subsequently, Shamir appeared in Moscow. According to a reporter on the Russian paper Kommersant, he was offering to sell articles based on the cables for $10,000. He had already passed some over to the state-backed publication Russian Reporter. He travelled on to Belarus, ruled by the Soviet-style dictator Alexander Lukashenko, where he met regime officials. The Interfax agency reported that Shamir was WikiLeaks’ “Russian representative”, and had “confirmed the existence of the Belarus dossier”. According to him, WikiLeaks had several thousand “interesting” secret documents. Shamir then wrote a piece of grovelling pro-Lukashenko propaganda in Counterpunch, claiming “the people were happy, fully employed, and satisfied with their government.”

Assange himself subsequently maintained that he had only a “brief interaction” with Shamir: “WikiLeaks works with hundreds of journalists from different regions of the world. All are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and are generally only given limited review access to material relating to their region.”

One can only speculate about whose interests Shamir was serving by his various wild publications. Perhaps his own personal interests were always to the fore. But while the newspapers had hammered out a deal to handle the cables in a responsible fashion, Shamir’s backstairs antics certainly made WikiLeaks look rather less so.