The first thing to do was build a search engine that could make sense of the data, the next to bring in foreign correspondents and foreign affairs analysts with detailed knowledge of the Afghan and Iraq conflict. The final piece of the journalistic heavy lifting was to introduce a redaction process so that nothing we published could imperil any vulnerable sources or compromise active special operations. All this took a great deal of time, effort, resource and stamina. Making sense of the files was not immediately easy. There are very few, if any, parallels in the annals of journalism where any news organisation has had to deal with such a vast database – we estimate it to have been roughly 300 million words (the Pentagon papers, published by the New York Times in 1971, by comparison, stretched to two and a half million words). Once redacted, the documents were shared among the (eventually) five newspapers and sent to WikiLeaks, who adopted all our redactions.
The extent of the redaction process and the relatively limited extent of publication of actual cables were apparently overlooked by many commentators – including leading American journalists – who spoke disparagingly of a willy-nilly “mass dump” of cables and the consequent danger to life. But, to date, there has been no “mass dump”. Barely two thousand of the 250,000 diplomatic cables have been published and, six months after the first publication of the war logs, no one has been able to demonstrate any damage to life or limb.
It is impossible to write this story without telling the story of Julian Assange himself, though clearly the overall question of WikiLeaks and the philosophy it represents is of longer-lasting significance. More than one writer has compared him to John Wilkes, the rakish 18th-century MP and editor who risked his life and liberty in assorted battles over free speech. Others have compared him to Daniel Ellsberg, the source of the Pentagon Papers leak, described by the New York Times’s former executive editor Max Frankel as “a man of incisive, devious intellect and volatile temperament”.
The media and public were torn between those who saw Assange as a new kind of cyber-messiah and those who regarded him as a James Bond villain. Each extremity projected on to him superhuman powers of good or evil. The script became even more confused in December when, as part of his bail conditions, Assange had to live at Ellingham Hall, a Georgian manor house set in hundreds of acres of Suffolk countryside. It was as if a Stieg Larsson script had been passed to the writer of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes.
Few people seem to find Assange an easy man with whom to collaborate. Slate’s media columnist, Jack Shafer, captured his character well in this pen portrait:
“Assange bedevils the journalists who work with him because he refuses to conform to any of the roles they expect him to play. He acts like a leaking source when it suits him. He masquerades as publisher or newspaper syndicate when that’s advantageous. Like a PR agent, he manipulates news organisations to maximise publicity for his ‘clients’, or, when moved to, he threatens to throw info-bombs like an agent provocateur. He’s a wily shape-shifter who won’t sit still, an unpredictable negotiator who is forever changing the terms of the deal.”
We certainly had our moments of difficulty and tension during the course of our joint enterprise. They were caused as much by the difficulty of regular, open communication as by Assange’s status as a sometimes confusing mix of source, intermediary and publisher. Encrypted instant messaging is no substitute for talking. And, while Assange was certainly our main source for the documents, he was in no sense a conventional source – he was not the original source and certainly not a confidential one. Latterly, he was not even the only source. He was, if anything, a new breed of publisher-intermediary – a sometimes uncomfortable role in which he sought to have a degree of control over the source’s material (and even a form of “ownership”, complete with legal threats to sue for loss of income). When, to Assange’s fury, WikiLeaks itself sprang a leak, the irony of the situation was almost comic. The ethical issues involved in this new status of editor/source became more complicated still when it was suggested to us that we owed some form of protection to Assange – as a “source” – by not inquiring too deeply into the sex charges levelled against him in Sweden. That did not seem a compelling argument to us, though there were those – it is not too strong to call them “disciples” – who were not willing to imagine any narrative beyond that of the smear.
These wrinkles were mainly overcome – sometimes eased by a glass of wine or by matching Assange’s extraordinary appetite for exhaustive and intellectually exacting conversations. As Sarah Ellison’s Vanity Fair piece on the subject concluded: “Whatever the differences, the results have been extraordinary. Given the range, depth, and accuracy of the leaks, the collaboration has produced by any standard one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years.”
The challenge from WikiLeaks for media in general (not to mention states, companies or global corporations caught up in the dazzle of unwanted scrutiny) was not a comfortable one. The website’s initial instincts were to publish more or less everything, and they were – at first deeply – suspicious of any contact between their colleagues on the newspapers and any kind of officialdom. Talking to the state department, Pentagon or White House, as the New York Times did before each round of publication, was fraught territory in terms of keeping the relationship with WikiLeaks on an even keel. By the time of the Cablegate publication, Assange himself, conscious of the risks of causing unintentional harm to dissidents or other sources, offered to speak to the state department – an offer that was rejected.
WikiLeaks and similar organisations are, it seems to me, generally admirable in their single-minded view of transparency and openness. What has been remarkable is how the sky has not fallen in despite the truly enormous amounts of information released over the months. The enemies of WikiLeaks have made repeated assertions of the harm done by the release. It would be a good idea if someone would fund some rigorous research by a serious academic institution about the balance between harms and benefits. To judge from the response we had from countries without the benefit of a free press, there was a considerable thirst for the information in the cables – a hunger for knowledge which contrasted with the occasional knowing yawns from metropolitan sophisticates who insisted that the cables told us nothing new. Instead of a kneejerk stampede to more secrecy, this could be the opportunity to draw up a score sheet of the upsides and drawbacks of forced transparency.
That approach – a rational assessment of new forms of transparency – should accompany the inevitable questioning of how the US classification system could have allowed the private musings of kings, presidents and dissidents to have been so easily read by whoever it was that decided to pass them on to WikiLeaks in the first place.
Each news organisation grappled with the ethical issues involved in such contacts – and in the overall decision to publish – in different ways. I was interested, a few days after the start of the Cablegate release, to receive an email from Max Frankel, who had overseen the defence of the New York Times in the Pentagon papers case 40 years earlier. Now 80, he sent me a memo he had then written to the New York Times public editor. It is worth quoting as concise and wise advice to future generations who may well have to grapple with such issues more in future:
1. My view has almost always been that information which wants to get out will get out; our job is to receive it responsibly and to publish or not by our own unvarying news standards.
2. If the source or informant violates his oath of office or the law, we should leave it to the authorities to try to enforce their law or oath, without our collaboration. We reject collaboration or revelation of our sources for the larger reason that ALL our sources deserve to know that they are protected with us. It is, however, part of our obligation to reveal the biases and apparent purposes of the people who leak or otherwise disclose information.
3. If certain information seems to defy the standards proclaimed by the supreme court in the Pentagon papers case – ie that publication will cause direc
t, immediate and irreparable damage – we have an obligation to limit our publication appropriately. If in doubt, we should give appropriate authority a chance to persuade us that such direct and immediate danger exists. (See our 24-hour delay of discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba as described in my autobiography, or our delay in reporting planes lost in combat until the pilots can perhaps be rescued.)
4. For all other information, I have always believed that no one can reliably predict the consequences of publication. The Pentagon papers, contrary to Ellsberg’s wish, did not shorten the Vietnam war or stir significant additional protest. A given disclosure may embarrass government but improve a policy, or it may be a leak by the government itself and end up damaging policy. “Publish and be damned,” as Scotty Reston used to say; it sounds terrible but as a journalistic motto it has served our society well through history.
There have been many longer treatises on the ethics of journalism which have said less.
One of the lessons from the WikiLeaks project is that it has shown the possibilities of collaboration. It’s difficult to think of any comparable example of news organisations working together in the way the Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País have on the WikiLeaks project. I think all five editors would like to imagine ways in which we could harness our resources again.
The story is far from over. In the UK there was only muted criticism of the Guardian for publishing the leaks, though the critics’ restraint did not always extend to WikiLeaks itself. Most journalists could see the clear public value in the nature of the material that was published.
It appears to have been another story in the US, where there was a more bitter and partisan argument, clouded by differing ideas of patriotism. It was astonishing to sit in London reading of reasonably mainstream American figures calling for the assassination of Assange for what he had unleashed. It was surprising to see the widespread reluctance among American journalists to support the general ideal and work of WikiLeaks. For some it simply boiled down to a reluctance to admit that Assange was a journalist.
Whether this attitude would change were Assange ever to be prosecuted is an interesting matter for speculation. In early 2011 there were signs of increasing frustration on the part of US government authorities in scouring the world for evidence to use against him, including the subpoena of Twitter accounts. But there was also, among cooler legal heads, an appreciation that it would be virtually impossible to prosecute Assange for the act of publication of the war logs or state department cables without also putting five editors in the dock. That would be the media case of the century.
And, of course, we have yet to hear an unmediated account from the man alleged to be the true source of the material, Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old US army private. Until then no complete story of the leak that changed the world can really be written. But this is a compelling first chapter in a story which, one suspects, is destined to run and run.
London, 1 February 2011
Alan Rusbridger is the editor of the Guardian
CHAPTER 1
The Hunt
Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, England
November 2010
“You can’t imagine how ridiculous it was”
JAMES BALL, WIKILEAKS
Glimpsed in the half-light of a London evening, the figure might just have passed for female. She emerged cautiously from a doorway and folded herself into a battered red car. There were a few companions – among them a grim-visaged man with Nordic features and a couple of nerdy youngsters. One appeared to have given the old woman her coat. The car weaved through the light Paddington traffic, heading north in the direction of Cambridge. As they proceeded up the M11 motorway the occupants peered back. There was no obvious sign of pursuit. Nonetheless, they periodically pulled off the road into a lay-by and waited – lights killed – in the gloom. Apparently undetected, the group headed eastward along the slow A143 road. By 10pm they had reached the flatlands of East Anglia, a sepia landscape where the occasional disused sugar factory hulked out of the blackness.
Fifteen miles inland, at the unremarkable village of Ellingham, they finally turned left. The car skidded on a driveway, and drove past an ancient dovecote before stopping in front of a grand Georgian manor house. The woman stepped from the car. There was something odd about her. She had a kind of hump! If a CIA agent or some other observer were hidden in the woodland along with the pheasants, they could have been forgiven for a moment of puzzlement.
Close up, however, it was obvious that this strange figure was Julian Assange, his platinum hair concealed by a wig. At more than 6ft tall, he was never going to be a very convincing female. “You can’t imagine how ridiculous it was,” WikiLeaks’ James Ball later said. “He’d stayed dressed up as an old woman for more than two hours.” Assange was swapping genders in a pantomime attempt to evade possible pursuers. With him were also his young aide, Sarah Harrison, and his deputy, the Icelandic journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson. On that evening, this small team was the nucleus of WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website Assange had launched four years earlier.
In a breathtakingly short time, WikiLeaks had soared out of its previous niche as an obscure radical website to become a widely known online news platform. Assange had published leaked footage showing airborne US helicopter pilots executing two Reuters employees in Baghdad, seemingly as if they were playing a video-game. He had followed up this coup with another, even bigger sensation: an unprecedented newspaper deal, brokered with the Guardian newspaper in London, to reveal hundreds of thousands of classified US military field reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of them damning.
Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, was a computer hacker of genius. He could be charming, capable of deadpan humour and wit. But he could also be waspish, flaring into anger and recrimination. Assange’s mercurial temperament spawned groupies and enemies, supporters and ill-wishers, sometimes even in the same person. Information messiah or cyber-terrorist? Freedom fighter or sociopath? Moral crusader or deluded narcissist? The debate over Assange would reverberate in the coming weeks in headlines the world over.
Assange and his team had fled here from the Frontline Club, a hang-out for foreign correspondents and other media types in west London. Since July and the launch of the Afghan war logs, Assange had slept, on and off, in the club’s accommodation at Southwick Mews. The club’s founder, Vaughan Smith, had become a sympathiser and ally, and invited Assange and his coterie to his ancestral home, Ellingham Hall, tucked away in a remote corner of East Anglia. And here these unlikely refugees had now arrived.
Smith was a former captain of the Grenadier Guards, an elite regiment of the British army, who went on to become a freelance video journalist with Frontline TV. His adventures in war zones – Iraq during the first Gulf war, where he bluffed his way in disguised as a British army officer; Bosnia, with its massacres and horrors; Afghanistan; and Iraq again – had demonstrated a spirit of maverick independence. Smith was no anarchist. His family had served in the British army for generations. His paper of choice was Britain’s conservative, crusty Daily Telegraph. Smith was also brave. In Kosovo, his life was saved when a deadly bullet lodged in his mobile telephone.
But in common with other right-wing libertarians, he had a stubborn sense of fair play and believed in sticking up for the underdog. In this instance that meant Assange, who had become a hate figure for the bellicose US right. They wanted him arrested. Some were even calling for his assassination. Smith broadly supported Assange’s crusade for transparency at a time when – as Smith saw it – journalism itself had moved uncomfortably close to government, and was in danger of becoming mere PR fluff.
When Assange settled in to work at Ellingham Hall, already living in the manor house were Pranvera Shema, Smith’s Kosovo-born wife, and their two small children. Aged five and two, their bikes stood outside the hall’s imposing porte-cochère entrance. Also in residence on the estate were Vaughan’s upper-class parents. Vaughan’s fathe
r, too, had served in the Guards; a portrait of him as a young officer in a scarlet tunic hung in the dining room. Smith Sr could be seen holding a white pouch: a discreet reference to his career as a Queen’s Messenger. The role involved travelling around the world on Her Majesty’s business, hand-carrying diplomatic secrets. It was clear that Smith Sr took a dim view of Assange, who was believed to be in possession of an astonishingly large number of secret diplomatic dispatches.
Smith Sr would take to patrolling the estate – with its twin lakes and cedar trees – armed with a rifle. The rifle was fitted with a sniper-sight. The sniper-sight was camouflaged. Normally he fired at partridge and grouse. The temptation, however, to take a shot at the paparazzi that would soon encamp themselves outside the manor – or indeed at the unwashed radicals inside it – must have been considerable. Asked two days before Christmas whether he was enjoying playing host to the group of international leakers who were here, he answered through gritted teeth. “I wish they weren’t.” It was one of many ironies that would pepper the tension-filled weeks.
Among the WikiLeakers at Ellingham was 24-year-old James Ball, whom Assange had recruited, one of the few collaborators to receive a salary. Ball’s talent was for dealing with large data sets. A cool young man, he was experiencing a giddy rise. Within a matter of months he went from a job as reporter on the Grocer trade magazine to being a spokesman for WikiLeaks, and even debating with the US diplomat John Negroponte on BBC World’s Hardtalk programme. Ball’s first task was urgent: to go into Norwich, 15 miles away, and head for a branch of the John Lewis department store for technical equipment. He set off, carrying several thousand pounds in cash (Assange’s preferred medium of exchange), emerging with several laptops, a router, and cabling – and leaving a bemused shop assistant in his wake. “Have you ever tried spending £1,000 cash in John Lewis? Honestly, the assistant looked scared of £50 notes,” Ball reflected. “It was a surreal experience.”
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