WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

The future of WikiLeaks

Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, England

Christmas 2010

“Julian is a spectacular showman for the youngsters of the internet era who are disgusted with the seniors”

JOHN YOUNG, CRYPTOME.ORG, 15 JULY 2010

Sitting in the kitchen of his temporary country home with the Guardian’s Ian Katz and Luke Harding, Assange contemplated the uncertain long-term future of WikiLeaks. He was looking better – still somewhat wrung out after his brief ordeal in Wandsworth prison, but cheerful and composed. It was a pleasant English scene: stilton cheese and fruitcake were on the table; two female kitchen workers were chopping up beef for dinner; his host Vaughan Smith’s father was once more protectively prowling the grounds with his rifle and deerstalker hat; and sacks full of Christmas cards and fan mail for Assange were arriving daily for the mantelpiece.

But anxiety was never far away. The previous night, yet another grandstanding commentator on Fox News had called for Assange’s death. “It’s quite dangerous actually. I’m known to be in a particular place at a particular time,” he said, casting a glance out of the window and across the estate. He had been thinking about how he would handle life in an American jail if they ever sought to extradite him: “I would … have a high chance of being killed in the US prison system, Jack Ruby style, given the continual calls for my murder by senior and influential US politicians.”

Even in his moments of gloom, Assange could not resist painting himself on a canvas of historical importance: in 1963 Jack Ruby shot to death Lee Harvey Oswald, days after Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President John F Kennedy. Many people at the time thought Oswald had to be silenced, because he Knew Too Much.

Assange’s counsel, Geoffrey Robertson, was even more extreme in his predictions. He told one British court: “There is a real risk … of him being detained at Guantánamo Bay … There is a real risk that he could be made the subject of the death penalty.”

By Christmas, there were indeed some reasons to wonder whether the WikiLeaks phenomenon might not be on the way out. Was it a brief comet that had streaked across the sky throughout 2010, thanks to an extraordinarily audacious act by one young soldier, but was now likely to be extinguished? The supposed leaker of the tsunami of documents, Bradley Manning, could only look forward to his court martial in the spring, followed, no doubt, by many grim years in a US brig. Meanwhile, anyone who typed in the URL “wikileaks.org” got a message that the operation was not functioning: “At the moment WikiLeaks is not accepting new submissions.”

There were money uncertainties, too. The Germany-based Wau Holland Foundation, WikiLeaks’ main financial arm, for the first time released some data about revenue from donations at the end of the year. It showed that Assange was trying to put his team on a more regular footing, with salaries for key employees costing €100,000 a year, including €66,000 annually to go to him. Another €380,000 was going on expenses, including hardware and travel. Thanks to the global publicity generated with his newspaper partnership, WikiLeaks had acquired an impressive €1 million in donations in 2010. But closer analysis showed donations had dropped off significantly in the second half of the year: by August, the site had raised about €765,000, meaning it only collected about €235,000 subsequently.

Assange said the “political interference” by the US, which had led corporations such as Visa and MasterCard to stop donations to WikiLeaks, had dealt his organisation a blow. It was “economic censorship outside the judicial system”. By his estimate, pulling these financial plugs cost WikiLeaks half a million euros in donations – a war chest that could have funded its operations for another six months. Assange added that his own defence fund had been “totally paralysed”. “We don’t have enough money to pay our legal bills,” he said. At this point WikiLeaks’ projected legal costs had risen to £200,000, with his own personal legal bill at another £200,000. It even cost him £16,000 to have the Swedish material in his case translated into English, he claimed.

These legal difficulties over his Swedish sex case were yet another brake on WikiLeaks’ future. The nomadic Assange was grounded. Because of his bail conditions, he was shackled to Ellingham Hall – almost literally so, since he had to wear an electronic tag round his ankle, even in the bath. He hated that, describing it in an interview with Paris Match magazine as “emasculating” and a “chastity belt”. He also had to turn out and report in person daily to the local police station. The future held the possibility of a wearying legal fight to avoid extradition to Sweden, and perhaps a long-lasting shadow over his reputation because he was not willing to face his accusers.

With another court hearing scheduled for the new year, Assange was still seething at the bad publicity when he met the two Guardian journalists, and smouldering at what he characterised as a plot to bring him down. There had been a leak from the Swedish prosecutor’s report, containing witness statements about his encounters with both women. The dossier did not support the idea of a “CIA honeytrap”. The Guardian’s Nick Davies had published an article in December itemising those details – to Assange’s complaints, and the chagrin of his celebrity supporters.

John Humphrys, the veteran anchorman of BBC Radio 4’s agenda-setting Today programme, followed up by demanding to know whether he was a “sexual predator”.

Assange replied: “Of course not.”

Humphrys sought to probe further: “How many women have you slept with?”

Assange, somewhat cornered: “A gentleman doesn’t count!”

He described this encounter with Humphreys as “awful” – it was further proof of his black-and-white insistence that there were only two kinds of journalist out there – the “honest” and the “dishonest”.

Ominously perhaps for the long-term future of Assange’s brainchild, it also looked as though there was a danger WikiLeaks could lose its cyber-leaking monopoly, thanks to the emergence of a crowd of imitators. Over in Germany, in December 2010, the former WikiLeaks No 2 Daniel Domscheit-Berg unveiled OpenLeaks, a rival platform. Domscheit-Berg had fallen out with Assange, accusing him of imperious behaviour. Assange’s personal control of the organisation had additionally created technical “bottlenecks”, he argued, with data not properly analysed or released. At a presentation in Berlin in December, Domscheit-Berg promised OpenLeaks would be more transparent and democratic.

He offered to work systematically alongside mainstream media, with a relatively modest and logical goal for his own “transparency organisation”. He said that OpenLeaks.org could confine its technical activities to “cleaning” leaks so that they could be submitted safely and anonymously online. That specialised task performed, the leaks would be turned over to newspapers and broadcasters, who would then do what the traditional media was good at, bringing resources, analysis and context. Finally, there was publication. Domscheit-Berg argued it was realistic that the mainstream media should generally be allowed to publish leaked material first, in return for the time and effort spent in editing it.

The breakaway organisation was described by one technology website as “hoping to do what WikiLeaks is trying to do but without the drama”. If Domscheit-Berg, or indeed other imitators, could develop workable clones of WikiLeaks, then there was little doubt that many other mainstream editors would be attracted to them.

Meanwhile, for all its high profile, WikiLeaks lacked a coherent organisation. One of his most stalwart helpers, Kristinn Hrafnsson, went back to Iceland for Christmas. Team Assange was only slowly moving from its origins as a rather chaotic insurgency towards a more structured organisation. Beseeched by his friends to enlist professional aides, Assange invited London PR professional Mark Borkowski to prepare him a public relations plan. After a day spent at Ellingham Hall, however, the elaborate Borkowski deal failed to materialise. Assange compromised by attempting to get in his own spokesmen to deal with the torrent of media demands. In January he advertised for some novel vacancies: “Four graduates wanted to staff newly established WikiLeaks press office. Appropriate remuneration. Successful candidates will be disciplined, articulate, quick-witted, capable of multi-tasking and accustomed to lack of sleep. Ability to start immediately is essential.”

Assange thus faced a formidable list of challenges as he sat around the Christmas Day lunch table with Vaughan Smith and his family – though you might not have guessed it from his decision to sport a Santa suit and play up to the camera lens for a gossipy Newsweek photo-shoot. But the man who had caused such a worldwide commotion had not lost his strengths.

He promptly succeeded in obtaining a contract to write his memoirs for more than a million pounds ($1.6m). This deal, brokered by literary agent Caroline Michel with Knopf in the US and Canongate in the UK, plus several foreign publishers, assuaged some of his money worries. “I don’t want to write this book but I have to,” he explained. He was liable to get more than £250,000 immediately in advances, although a six-figure chunk would have to be set aside to hire a ghostwriter. Michel’s agency also set up a meeting with Paul Greengrass, acclaimed director of The Bourne Ultimatum, with a view to him turning Assange’s life-story into a secret-agent escapade. The book, WikiLeaks Versus the World: My Story, was scheduled for release in April 2011 – an ambitious deadline.

Another piece of good news was the diminishing prospect that Assange would personally become the victim of some kind of vengeful US drone-strike. The US department of justice had issued secret subpoenas on 14 December for the Twitter accounts of Manning, Assange and his friends. This led to unwelcome publicity when Twitter robustly went to court and got the subpoena unsealed. Icelandic MP and WikiLeaks supporter Birgitta Jónsdóttir made a political fuss. “It sort of feels to me as if they’ve become quite desperate,” Jónsdóttir said. The investigation was fruitless, she added, since “none of us would ever use Twitter messaging to say anything sensitive”. If the US was reduced to chasing tweets, their legal pursuit appeared to have become slightly less menacing.

Contrary to the bloodcurdling claims made in public about the crimes of WikiLeaks, senior state department officials in fact appeared to have concluded by mid-January that the WikiLeaks controversy had caused little real and lasting damage to American diplomacy. The Reuters news agency reported on 19 January 2011 that in private briefings to Congress top US diplomats admitted the fall-out from the release of thousands of private diplomatic cables across the globe had not been especially bad. One congressional official briefed on the reviews told Reuters that the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers. “I think they want to present the toughest front they can muster,” the officials said.

The tacit retraction of Hillary Clinton’s lurid claim that the release of the WikiLeaks cables had been an attack on the entire international community followed the equally low-key admission that Assange did not in fact have “blood on his hands” from the release of the earlier Iraq and Afghan war logs.

But the publicity – and the controversy – had achieved something very valuable for him. WikiLeaks had, as a result of the rows, become a stupendous global brand. Writing in the New York Times, Evgeny Morozov, the cyber-analyst from Stanford University, saw a wonderful possible future. He argued that WikiLeaks could have two major advantages over any of its imitators: a widely and easily recognisable brand and an extensive network of contacts in the media. Following several years in “relative obscurity” it had now become the “media’s darling”. He envisaged that WikiLeaks could “morph into a gigantic media intermediary”, as a journalistic clearing-house: “Under this model, WikiLeaks staffers would act as idea salesmen relying on one very impressive digital Rolodex.”

Ian Katz, the Guardian’s deputy editor, put the position trenchantly at a debate organised by the Frontline Club in mid-January. “I think Julian has used his profile very cleverly and what he is doing is trying to make himself the brand, if you like, that is synonymous with whistleblowing … He wants you to think if you are a pissed off analyst in [the military] or wherever and you have got something you want to share with the world, ‘I will send it to that Assange fellow, not to the Guardian.’ Which poses a really interesting question for traditional media partners like us – have we helped to create, as it were, a brand which people will go to in place of traditional media?”

WikiLeaks had also spawned a host of clone sites which were not so much competitors as admiring tributes: IndoLeaks, BrusselsLeaks, BalkanLeaks, ThaiLeaks, PinoyLeaks. Some were reposting American embassy cables. Others were publishing material from their own sources. Assange’s concept of an online site for anonymous whistleblowing activists seemed to be going viral – as, perhaps, he always believed it might – while he continued his own plan to spend months sending leaked cables to journalists in an ever-widening range of countries.

One of the most interesting – and subtle – immediate positive outcomes of the WikiLeaks saga was in one of those normally obscure countries. Following the publication of excoriating leaked cables from the US mission in Tunisia, about the corruption and excess of the ruling family, tens of thousands of protesters rose up and overthrew the country’s hated president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

Was this a WikiLeaks revolution? Not quite. It began after an unemployed 26-year-old university graduate, Mohammed Bouazizi, set fire to himself in desperation. Officials had prevented him from selling vegetables. His death triggered nationwide rioting over joblessness and political repression. It was long-simmering frustrations with the Ben Ali regime which were behind the revolt. The Tunisians were the first people in the Arab world to take to the streets and oust a leader for a generation. But they already knew their ruling family was debauched; they didn’t need WikiLeaks for that.

There was, however, a genuinely extraordinary WikiLeaks effect. “Sam”, a pseudonymous young Tunisian writing on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site in mid-January, specifically referenced WikiLeaks as he described how a resigned cynicism about the regime under which he’d grown up turned to hope:

The internet is blocked, and censored pages are referred to as pages “not found” – as if they had never existed. Schoolchildren are exchanging proxies and the word becomes cult: “You got a proxy that works?” … We love our country and we want things to change, but there is no organised movement: the tribe is willing, but the leader is missing. The corruption, the bribes – we simply want to leave. We begin to apply to study in France, or Canada. It is cowardice, and we know it. Leaving the country to “the rest of them”. We go to France and forget, then come back for the holidays. Tunisia? It is the beaches of Sousse and Hammamet, the nightclubs and restaurants. A giant Club Med.

And then, WikiLeaks reveals what everyone was whispering. And then, a young man immolates himself. And then, 20 Tunisians are killed in one day. And for the first time, we see the opportunity to rebel, to take revenge on the “royal” family, who have taken everything, to overturn the established order that has accompanied our youth. An educated youth, which is tired and ready to sacrifice all the symbols of the former autocratic Tunisia with a new revolution: the jasmine revolution – the true one.

Paradoxically the leaked comments by the US ambassador in Tunis, widely read across the region, played a major role in boosting Washington’s image on the Arab street. Ordinary Tunisians liked the way in which the Americans – unlike the French – had so frankly highlighted corruption. They now wanted the US to support their on-going jasmine revolution. They asked Washington to exert pressure on neighbouring Arab leaders, and prevent them from interfering.

Muammar Gaddafi, the despot in neighbouring Libya, had no problem in acknowledging a link between events in Tunis and WikiLeaks – a demonic link, so far as he was concerned. Gaddafi said he was pained by Ben Ali’s overthrow and “concerned for the people of Tunisia, whose sons are dying each day”. He warned Tunisians not to be tricked by WikiLeaks, “which publishes information written by lying ambassadors in order to create chaos”.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, had previously denounced the leak of the cables, because it had “undermined our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems”. But the same leak was now helping to repair America’s battered reputation in the Middle East, damaged by the Iraq war, and to advance the White House’s lofty goals of democratisation and modernisation. Assange may have regarded the US as his enemy, but in this case he had unwittingly helped restore American influence in a place where it had lost credibility. It was ironic. By increasing the amount of information in the system, WikiLeaks had generated unpredictable effects.

For all the ironies and ambiguities of his campaign, and for all the problematic nature of his personality, Assange himself now seems to have acquired a vast worldwide fan-base – at any rate, outside the United States. Despite the hostility of government officials, and the “latex gloves” (as Vanity Fair put it) with which the mainstream media have handled him, much of the world has nothing but admiration for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. In his native Australia and elsewhere he is regarded by many unreservedly as a hero, as someone whose war on secrecy has created something genuinely new and exciting.

His own preferences remain subversive. He personally helped fund a humorous rap video about WikiLeaks which he plays to the visitors to Ellingham Hall, tapping out the address on his MacBook Pro. It is by Robert Foster, a performance poet living in Australia. The spoof news bulletin is titled, “RAP NEWS – WikiLeaks’ Cablegate: the truth is out there.” Foster raps while dressed up in a variety of roles: TV anchor, Hillary Clinton, Silvio Berlusconi, and Gadaffi, as well as the right-wing conspiracy theorist and American radio host Alex Jones. A voluptuous blonde nurse with a stethoscope sidles up to Gadaffi. Meanwhile, Berlusconi, flanked by two young women in underwear, says: “Hey Robert, how much for your news show? I pay cash! I just got some roubles!”

Assange loves this stuff: as it plays, he can be seen smiling and wiggling his feet to the music. There is something else which has also recently given him pleasure: Italy’s Rolling Stone magazine made him their cover-boy, depicting him – shirtless – with the legend, in a nod to David Bowie, “The Man who Fell (from the web) to Earth … a platinum villain who endangers the powerful of the planet, passing himself off as a cyberpunk”. The magazine named him “Rockstar of the Year”.