WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

Before the deluge

El País newspaper, Calle de Miguel Yuste, Madrid

14 November 2010

“It was a fruit machine. You just had to hold your hat under there for long enough”

ALAN RUSBRIDGER, THE GUARDIAN

Viewed on screen, the unkempt, silhouetted figures looked like hostages held in the basement of a terrorist group’s safehouse. One of the stubbly, subterranean figures moved closer to the camera. He held up a sheet of paper. Written on it was a mysterious six-digit number. A secret Swiss bank account, perhaps? A telephone number? Something to do with The Da Vinci Code?

The shadowy figures had not, in fact, been seized by some radical faction, but were a group of journalists from Spain’s El País newspaper. Nor was their note a ransom demand. It was the index reference of one of more than 250,000 cables. Since being invited to join the existing British-US-German consortium – or “tripartite alliance” as the New York Times’s Bill Keller dubbed it – El País had wasted no time in setting up its own underground research room.

The paper – and France’s Le Monde – had joined the WikiLeaks party late. They had only two weeks to go through the cables before the D-day publication night. The Guardian had been in the luxurious position of having held the same material for several months. El País’s editor-in-chief, Javier Moreno, and executive Vicente Jiménez urgently summoned back to Madrid their foreign correspondents; sitting in the paper’s bunker, next to endless discarded coffee cups, they ploughed through the database.

The journalists may have been heartened to read that, according to a secret cable from US officials in Madrid dated 12 May 2008, El País was Spain’s “newspaper of record”. It was also, apparently, “normally pro-government”. But they also found sensational material: the US embassy in Madrid had tried to influence judges, the government and prosecutors in cases involving US citizens. One involved a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, another covered secret rendition flights in Spain, and another was about the murder of a Spanish journalist by US fire in Baghdad. They also discovered stories from all across Latin America: from Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela.

From the beginning, the papers had agreed to work collaboratively. They shared some discoveries from the cables and even circulated lists of possible stories. Assange later claimed in a Swedish TV documentary that it was he personally who was pulling the strings of the old-fashioned MSM. He said: “What is new is us enforcing co-operation between competitive organisations that would otherwise be rivals – to do the best by the story as opposed to simply doing the best by their own organisations.”

In reality, this was a co-operative technique that the Guardian, along with other international outlets, had long been building. The previous year, for example, the paper had successfully beaten off lawyers for the Trafigura company, who had dumped toxic waste, by working in concert with BBC TV’s Newsnight, with a Dutch paper, Volkskrant, and with the Norwegian TV channel NRK. The British arms giant BAE had also been brought to a $400m corruption settlement with the US department of justice, following a campaign in which the Guardian co-operated with other TV and print media in countries from Sweden to Romania to Tanzania.

The most distinguished pioneer of this globalised form of investigation was probably Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington DC, who, a full decade earlier, organised a massive exposure of the British American Tobacco company’s collusion in cigarette smuggling, with simultaneous publication by media in Colombia, London and the US.

So the present five-way media consortium was not a new invention. It was – or would be if it actually worked – the culmination of a growing media trend. What made this trend possible was what also made it necessary: the technological growth of massive, near-instantaneous global communications. If media groups did not learn to work across borders on stories, the stories would leave them behind.

In the run-up to cable D-Day, Ian Katz, the deputy editor managing these complex relationships, held regular Skype chats with the Guardian’s multilingual counterparts. “They were hilarious conversations,” Katz recalls. The reason the Spaniards were holding up the number of a US state department cable to the Skype camera was security – it had been agreed that no sensitive mentions would be made over the phone or by email.

In Berlin, similarly, Marcel Rosenbach, from Der Spiegel, was the first to unearth a cable with the deceptively bland title: “National HUMINT Collection Directive on the United Nations.” In fact, it revealed the US state department (on behalf of the CIA) had ordered its diplomats to spy on senior UN officials and collect their “detailed biometric information”. They were also told to go after “credit card account numbers; frequent flyer account numbers; work schedules and other relevant biographical information”. The cable, number 219058, was geopolitical dynamite. Nobody else had spotted it. “Marcel had written down the number. I could only see half of it. I had to tell him: ‘Left a bit, left a bit,’” Katz recalls.

For Julian Assange – like Jason Bourne, the Hollywood secret agent constantly on the run from the CIA – elaborate security precautions may have been second nature. But for journalists used to spilling secrets down at the pub after a gossipy pint or two they were a new and tricky-to-master art form. Katz and Rusbridger borrowed inspiration from The Wire, the cult US drama series set amid the high rises and drug dealers of Baltimore. The noir show was popular among some of the Guardian’s staff; in it, the dealers typically relied on “burners”, or pay-as-you-go phones, to outsmart the cops.

Katz therefore asked his assistant to go out and buy 20 burner phones for key members of the cables team. The Guardian now had its own leak-proof network. Unfortunately, nobody could remember their burner number. At one point Alan Rusbridger sent a text from his “burner” to Katz’s regular cellphone – an elementary error that in The Wire would almost certainly have prompted the cops to swoop. The Guardian editor picked up another burner during a five-day trip to Australia. When he got back to London Katz called him on that number. The conversation – routed right round the world – fizzled out after just three minutes when Katz ran out of credit. “We were basically completely useless at any of the spooky stuff,” Katz confesses.

Like El País, the Guardian had deployed a team of experts and foreign correspondents for a thorough final sift through the cables. Some – such as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent Luke Harding – were physically recalled to London for security reasons. Other foreign staff accessed the cables remotely via a VPN (virtual private network) connection. Ian Traynor in Brussels examined cables referring to the European Union, Nato and the Balkans; Declan Walsh, the Guardian’s correspondent in Islamabad, looked at Afghanistan and Pakistan; David Smith did Africa and Jason Burke took on India.

Other reporters included Washington correspondent Ewen MacAskill and Latin America correspondent Rory Carroll in Caracas. (Carroll’s VPN connection quickly packed up, making it impossible to eyeball the Chávez cables.) Simon Tisdall, Ian Black and Jonathan Steele, all immensely experienced, combed through the cables on the Middle East and Afghanistan. The sheer range of journalistic expertise that five major international papers were throwing at the data would perhaps demonstrate the value of the world’s remaining MSM. They could be the genuine information professionals, standing out in an otherwise worthless universe of internet froth.

Sitting in the fourth-floor bunker, Harding and a colleague, reporter Robert Booth, were among those who would spend long hours staring, increasingly dizzy eyed, at the dispatches. It soon became clear that there was an art to interrogating the database. If your search term was too big – say, “Britain”, or “corruption” – the result would be unfathomably large. The search engine would announce: “More than 1,000 items returned.” The trick was to use a relatively unusual name. Better still was to experiment with something off the wall, or even a bit crazy. Putting in “Batman”, for example, yielded just two results. But one was a delightful cable in which a US diplomat noted that “Dmitry Medvedev continues to play Robin to Putin’s Batman.” The comparison between the Russian president and his prime minister would whizz round the world, and prompt a stung Vladimir Putin to accuse the United States of “arrogance” and unethical behaviour.

Likewise, punching in the search term “vodka” popped the cork on unexpected results: drunken meetings between US ambassadors and central Asian despots; a memorable wedding in Dagestan in which Chechnya’s president – the murderous Ramzan Kadyrov – danced with a gold-plated revolver stuck down his trousers; and a Saudi Arabian sex party that spoke volumes about the hypocrisy of the Arab state’s princely elite.

In contrast to the staccato jargon of the war logs, the cables were written in the kind of prose one might expect from Harvard or Yale. Harold Frayman had improvised the original search engine used to sift the much smaller Afghan and Iraq war logs. By now he had improved these techniques. “I’m a journalist. I knew what we were going to look for,” he explains. “Diplomats were much more verbose than squaddies in the field. They knew longer words.”

The data set contained more than 200 million of those words. Frayman had originally used the computer language Perl to design the Afghan and Iraq databases. He describes it as a “very well developed set of bits of software … It did little jobs very tidily.” For the cables Frayman added refinements. Journalists were able to search the cables sent out by individual embassies. In the case of Iran, which had not had a US mission since the 1970s, most of the relevant diplomatic chatter actually came out of the US embassy in Ankara. It was therefore helpful to be able to quickly collect up the Ankara embassy output.

Of the files, 40% were classified confidential and 6% secret. Frayman created a search by five detailed categories: secret/noforn (that is, not to be read by non-Americans); secret; confidential/ noforn; confidential; and unclassified. There was no top-secret: such super-sensitive material had been omitted from the original SIPRNet database, along with a substantial number of dispatches that the state department in Washington considered unsuitable for sharing with its colleagues in the military and elsewhere. There were idiosyncrasies in the data: for example, very little material from Israel seemed to be circulated: suggesting that the US embassy there did not play an intimate role in the two-way dealings between Tel Aviv and Washington, and was largely kept out of the loop.

“Secret” was the place for the rummaging journalists to start. Some of these searches produced remarkable scoops. Many, however, did not. The secret category, it soon emerged, tended to cover a limited number of themes: the spread of nuclear material and nuclear facilities; military exports to Iran, Syria and other states considered unsavoury; negotiations involving top-ranking US army personnel. By far the largest number of stories came from lower classified documents.

Like the other reporters, Harding and Booth soon found themselves developing their own quirky search techniques. They discovered it was often useful to start at the bottom, working backwards from a country’s most recent cables, written as they were up to 28 February 2010. Such searches became, however, an exercise in stamina; after reading a batch of more than 40 cables, the reporters had to take a break. Adjacent to the secret bunker was a free coffee machine. There was also a relaxation room. “Here, after a long session of cable-bashing, you could at least flick the sign to engaged, grab a cushion and lie groaning on the floor,” says Harding. Katz said the company would pay for massages: but none of the Guardian’s weary cable slaves had time to spare.

To editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, the abundant disclosures pouring out of the US cables at first seemed like a player hitting the jackpot every time in an amusement arcade. He recalled how Leigh – after reading the material for a couple of weeks over the summer, chortling and astonished – had come back with enough stories for 10 splashes, articles that could lead the newspaper front page. “It was a fruit machine. You just had to hold your hat under there for long enough,“ Rusbridger says.

The analogy is a good one. But it perhaps makes the task sound too easy. To comb properly through the data, teams of Guardian staff had to be recruited. The reporters, especially the foreign correspondents, brought much to the table: contextualisation, specialist knowledge and a degree of entrepreneurship in divining what to look for. All these skills were needed to turn the cables into significant newspaper stories.

Leigh sent a memo to Rusbridger:

We’ve now got to the stage of story selection on project 3. The previous exercises (Iraq and Afghanistan) worked well politically, I thought, because Nick and I were able to focus the coverage [and the resultant global coverage] on elements that it was highly in the public interest to make known.

With Afghanistan, this was civilian casualties. With Iraq, it was torture. This time, I think it’s also important that we try and major on stories that ought to be made known in the public interest. That was the compass-needle which helped me when I originally tried to put together the first dozen stories.

So – top stories revealing corruption and crime (Russia, Berlusconi, etc) and improper behaviour (eg unwarranted US pressure on other countries, unwarranted leaking to the US by other country officials). This will then position us where we can be best defended on all fronts??

A herd of publishable articles began to grow in size. The task of readying them for publication fell to Stuart Millar, the Guardian’s web news editor, who says he felt like a harried cowboy. “I was trying to lasso them into some kind of shape.” This was a far more complicated production problem than the similar exercise with the Iraq and Afghan war logs. At first, it had seemed the cables would yield just a hatful of stories. By the eve of D-day, Guardian journalists had produced more than 160 articles, with more coming in all the time. “There was a crazy, enormous heave of copy,” Millar recalls.

For Millar, as a web expert, it was clear that the emergence of the vast cables database marked the end of secrecy in the old-fashioned, cold-war-era sense. “The internet has rendered that all history,” he reflects. “For us, there was a special responsibility to handle the material carefully, and to bring context to the stories, rather than just dump them out.”

There were further concerns. The full text of relevant cables was intended to be posted online alongside individual news stories. This practice – what Assange called “scientific journalism” – was something the Guardian and some other papers had now been routinely doing for several years, ever since the technology had made it possible.

Each reporter was now made responsible for “redacting” their own cables – blanking out from the original any sources who might have been put at risk if their names were published. Heads of state, well-known politicians, those in public life generally, were fair game as a rule. In some parts of the world, however – the Middle East, Russia and central Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – to be seen even talking to the Americans was a risky proposition.

The cables team took a conservative approach. If there was seen to be a risk of someone being compromised, then the name was scrubbed out. This was at times frustrating: long, informative cables might be stripped down to a couple of dull paragraphs. But the alternative was far worse. Redactions were passed on to Jonathan Casson, the paper’s apparently miracle-working head of production, and his harassed-looking team, who set up camp in a neighbouring fourth-floor room normally used as a training suite. Rusbridger had suggested early on that each paper nominate a “redactions editor” to ensure a belt and braces approach to protecting sources. Now Casson worked brutally long days comparing the Guardian’s editing decisions with those of his counterparts, and considering the representations about particular cables from the US state department that were passed on by the New York Times. The task was made vastly more difficult by the journalists’ determination not to discuss cables on the phone or in emails; after his daily round of Skype calls with international partners, Casson would meticulously alter the colour of some of the 700 or so cables listed on a vast Google spreadsheet that only he could understand. He looked like a man close to the edge.

And then there were the legal risks. Could the Guardian be prosecuted under the British Official Secrets Act or the US Espionage Act? And, if so, would it have to hand over internal documents and emails? Rusbridger had already sought the opinion of Alex Bailin, a QC who specialised in secrecy law, ahead of publication of the Afghan war logs. There had been no prosecution. But this did not mean that the White House would necessarily acquiesce in the far more damaging publication of the secret US state department cables.

Geraldine Proudler, of the Guardian’s law firm, Olswang, had been full of forebodings. Ahead of the publication of the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs she suggested it was “entirely possible” the US could bring a prosecution against the Guardian under the Espionage Act – though an all-out assault against the international media partners seemed unlikely. It was also possible the Americans could seek to lay hands on Rusbridger. “In a worst case scenario we cannot rule out extradition attempts.” At the least, it was “very likely” that the US might serve a subpoena demanding that the Guardian hand over material after publication, she had advised.

In addition to worrying about the risks of possible injunctions under the Official Secrets Act and the Espionage Act, Gill Phillips, the Guardian’s in-house head of legal, spent many hours weighing up the libel and privacy dangers: both were big problems domestically, because the UK lacked the free speech protections enshrined in the US constitution. The cables were fascinating, and credible as documents. They revealed international skullduggery and double-dealing, among other things. But the fact they had been written by US diplomats didn’t make them libel proof. Some of the cables from the former Soviet Union, Pakistan and Afghanistan made eye-popping assertions of top-level corruption, but could they land the Guardian with a costly writ? All had to be handled with care.

To a certain degree, Phillips could rely on the Reynolds defence, following a celebrated 1999 ruling that journalists were able to publish important allegations that could not be proved, so long as the material was in the public interest, the paper acted responsibly, and it followed proper journalistic procedures. (The case got its name after Albert Reynolds, the Irish premier, sued the London Sunday Times.) But the Reynolds judgment wasn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card; in some cases the Guardian had still, if necessary, to be able to prove in court the truth of what it had published.

Silvio Berlusconi was a case in point. The cables alleged that the controversial Italian prime minister had profited “personally and handsomely” from a close – the cables said too close – relationship with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister and former president. But might Berlusconi sue the Guardian in Rome, Phillips wondered? In the event, the Italian papers beat the Guardian to that one, and sprayed the detailed allegations all over the world.

There were further considerations. Responsible journalists normally approach the person they are writing about before publication, giving them the opportunity for comment or even rebuttal. In this case, however, there was a big danger in going too soon. That would reveal the Guardian possessed the cables: the other, alerted party could immediately seek an injunction, on the grounds that the paper was in unlawful possession of confidential documents. A sweeping UK gag order could be disastrous for the Guardian’s journalism: it might scupper their entire cables project.

Phillips, and Jan Thompson, the Guardian’s managing editor, held rambunctious meetings with the battle-scarred Leigh. His objective was to publish the best stories possible. The equally experienced lawyer’s task was to keep the paper out of the courts and the editor out of jail. Leigh proposed what he thought were ingenious solutions to libel problems. Sometimes the lawyer agreed. It was a very fine line. “We were incredibly careful legally, and responsible,” Phillips says. But “legalling” the Guardian’s cable stories was “exhilarating”, she adds. “You got completely sucked in. Suddenly you find yourself becoming an expert on all the world’s governments.” Phillips felt confident in the end. She nevertheless arranged for both a QC and junior barrister to be on stand-by on the evening of the planned cables launch. Legal opponents had been known in the past to wake up British judges, fully prepared to issue gag orders against the Guardian, even in their pyjamas.

There was a final grand conference in London of all the parties on Thursday 11 November to fine-tune the elaborate publication grid of day-by-day cable stories. Assange arrived in the Guardian offices rigged out this time in chief executive style, with a sharp, well-fitting blue suit. His Australian lawyer Jennifer Robinson was by his side. Representatives from Der Spiegel, El País, and Le Monde had flown in, together with Ian Fisher, a deputy foreign editor with the New York Times. In contrast to the difficult atmosphere at the last meeting, Assange was a model of bonhomie and charm; Leigh, with whom he had previously had some angry words, decided to be absent with what some suspected to be a case of diplomatic flu. The meeting went surprisingly smoothly.

Afterwards, the partners again headed for dinner in the Rotunda restaurant beneath the Guardian offices. Here, as the journalists sank pints of Pilsner Urquell, Assange confided he was thinking about going to Russia. Russia was an odd choice – especially in the light of soon-to-be-published cables that described it as a “virtual mafia state”. He did not disclose, however, details of the relationship he had privately struck up with WikiLeaks’ new “Russian representative”, the bizarre figure of Israel Shamir.

How much did the US administration know of this planned challenge to their secrets? The journalists assumed the CIA had followed every twist and turn of the project. The US army had certainly been aware that thousands of diplomatic cables had gone astray since the summer, when Private Bradley Manning had been specifically indicted for purloining them. But the Obama administration appeared remarkably unaware of just which cables WikiLeaks and its media partners now had in their possession.

In the week before publication, the state department warned many of its allies about the cables’ embarrassing contents. But they appeared not to know that the leaked cables ceased at the end of February, believing some to be more recent. Rumours circulated that Washington had been unimpressed with David Cameron and Britain’s new coalition government, which took power in May. The US ambassador in London, Louis B Susman, allegedly said as much in a post-election cable. The Americans, it was gathered, had now sheepishly briefed Downing Street about its contents. They were under the impression the leaked cables went up to June 2010, the month of Manning’s arrest.

The Guardian didn’t have that Cameron cable. As a result Cameron survived the WikiLeaks drama relatively unscathed. “We were amazed about how little the US knew about what we were doing,” Katz says. ‘They clearly had no idea which data set we had. They massively over-briefed about what was in the cables.”

The New York Times had decided to forewarn the state department which cables it was intending to use. The Guardian – which worked in Britain under a peculiarly oppressive legal regime – was not going to follow the Americans quite that far. The paper was willing to listen, but was already doing all it could, without official prompting, to protect sensitive human contacts from reprisal, and not to publish irresponsibly.

A few days before the cables’ release, two senior figures from the US embassy in Grosvenor Square called in to the Guardian’s London offices for a chat. This discussion led to a surreal transatlantic telephone call on Friday 26 November – two days before D-Day. Rusbridger had agreed to ring Washington. He made the conference call from the circular table in his office. On the line in Washington was PJ Crowley, the US assistant secretary of state for public affairs. The conversation began:

“OK, here’s PJ Crowley. I just want you to know in this phone call we’ve got secretary of state Clinton’s private secretary, we have representatives of the DoD, the intelligence communities, and the National Security Council.”

All Rusbridger could offer in reply was, “We have our managing editor here …”

Crowley then set out how the cable scandal looked from the lofty heights of US power: “Obviously, from our perspective these are stolen documents. They reveal sensitive military secrets and addresses that expose people to security risks.”

Crowley made his pitch. He said the US government was “willing to help” the Guardian if the newspaper was prepared to “share the documents” it had – in other words, tip off the state department which cables it intended to publish. Rusbridger was non-committal. He said: “I don’t think we are going to agree on that now, so why don’t we return later to that.”

Crowley said some special forces operations and dealings with some countries were sensitive. He then asked for a pause. He came back a couple of minutes later: “Mr Rusbridger, we don’t feel this conversation is working for us because at the moment we are just giving a lot of stories, and we are not getting a lot in return.”

Clinton’s private secretary chipped in. She said: “I’ve got a very direct question for you, Mr Rusbridger. You journalists like asking direct questions and I know you expect direct answers. So I’m going to ask you a direct question. Are you going to give us the numbers of the cables or not?”

“No, we’re not.”

“Thank you very much.”

Rusbridger did decide to tell the Americans the Guardian’s broad publication schedule. Day one, he said was to feature Iran, with North Korea on day two and Pakistan on day three. Then the conversation was over.

In Germany, the editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel had taken a call from the US ambassador. He told Georg Mascolo that there was huge concern at the “highest, highest levels” about the security of sources: “Lives could be in jeopardy.” Mascolo replied that Der Spiegel had done everything it could to protect sources who might be in danger. He invited the state department to share with him their areas of concern.

The New York Times had been holding its own sometimes tense negotiations with US government officials. The paper’s lawyers were confident that it could report on the secret documents without violating American law. But Bill Keller felt a large moral and ethical responsibility to use the material responsibly: “While we assumed we had little or no ability to influence what WikiLeaks did, let alone what would happen once this material was loosed in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, that did not free us from the obligation to exercise care in our own journalism. From the beginning we determined that in our articles and in any documents we published from the secret archive we would excise material that could put lives at risk,” he wrote later.

The New York Times’s policy was to err on the side of caution. With the Afghan and Iraq war logs, the paper redacted names of all sources who had spoken to US soldiers and diplomats, and edited out details that might have revealed continuing intelligence-gathering operations or military tactics. But because of the range of the material and the hypersensitivities of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the war logs, Keller considered.

Dean Baquet, the New York Times’s Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on 19 November. Five days later, the day before Thanksgiving, Baquet and three colleagues were invited to a windowless room in the state department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd: representatives of the White House, the state department, the director of national intelligence, the CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the Pentagon, gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.

The meeting was off the record, but it is fair to say the mood was tense. Scott Shane, one of the reporters who participated in the meeting, described “an undertone of suppressed outrage and frustration”. Subsequent meetings and daily conference calls were less prickly and more businesslike, Keller says. The US administration had three areas generally of concern. It wanted to protect individuals who had spoken candidly to US diplomats in oppressive countries – something the New York Times was happy to do. It also wanted to remove references to secret American programmes relating to intelligence. Lastly, it did not want the paper to reveal candid remarks by heads of state and other top foreign officials, and feared publication would strain relations with those countries. “We were mostly unpersuaded,” Keller recalls.

This was, of course, hardly the first time the New York Times had published secrets that discomfited the US government. Before the year of WikiLeaks, nothing the paper had done on Keller’s watch had caused quite the agitation of two articles the paper published about tactics employed by the Bush administration after the attacks of 11 September 2001. One article, which was published in 2005 and won a Pulitzer prize, revealed that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on domestic phone and email conversations without the legal courtesy of a warrant. The other, published in 2006, described a vast treasury department programme to screen international banking records.

The editor had vivid memories of sitting in the Oval Office as President George W Bush tried to persuade him and the New York Times’s publisher to withhold the eavesdropping article. Bush told him that if the paper published, it should share the blame for the next terrorist attack. Unconvinced, the paper published anyway, and the reaction from the government and conservative commentators in particular was vociferous.

This time around, the US administration reaction was different. It was, for the most part, sober and professional. The Obama White House, while strongly condemning WikiLeaks for making the documents public, did not seek an injunction to halt publication. There was no Oval Office lecture, no plea to Keller or the publisher not to write about the documents. “On the contrary, in our discussions before the publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care. The secretaries of state and defence and the attorney general resisted the opportunity for a crowd-pleasing orgy of press-bashing,” Keller says, adding: “Though the release of these documents was certainly painfully embarrassing, the relevant government agencies actually engaged with us in an attempt to prevent the release of material genuinely damaging to innocent individuals or the national interest.”

From his secret hideout back in Ellingham Hall, Assange sought to open his own channel of negotiations, sending a letter on 26 November to the US embassy in London. Headed “Julian Assange, editor-in-chief, WikiLeaks”, it began: “Dear Ambassador Susman, I refer to recent public statements by United States government officials expressing concern about the possible publication by WikiLeaks and other media organisations of information allegedly derived from United States government records.”

Assange invited the US government to “privately nominate” examples where publication of a cable could put an individual “at significant risk of harm”. He promised WikiLeaks would quickly consider any US government submissions ahead of publication. The state department’s legal adviser Harold Koh sent an uncompromising letter back. It stated that the cables “were provided in violation of US law and without regard for the grave consequences of this action”.

Releasing them “would place at risk the lives of countless individuals”, jeopardise ongoing military operations, and threaten co-operation between the US and its allies and partners, the letter said. It would hinder co-operation on “common challenges such as terrorism, pandemic diseases and nuclear proliferation”.

The letter ordered WikiLeaks to halt plans to publish the cables, hand back the stolen files, and “destroy all records of this material from WikiLeaks’ databases.”

Assange wrote to Susman again on 28 November. He made clear that WikiLeaks had no intention of putting anybody at risk, “nor do we wish to harm the national security of the United States”. He continued: “I understand that the United States government would prefer not to have the information that will be published in the public domain and is not in favour of openness. That said, either there is a risk or there is not. You have chosen to respond in a manner which leads me to conclude that the risks are entirely fanciful and that you are instead concerned only to suppress evidence of human rights abuses and other criminal behaviour.”

The negotiations with the state department – such as they were – thus terminated. All that was left was to prepare for simultaneous publication of the biggest leak in the history. What could possibly go wrong?