It was Kenya that gave WikiLeaks its first journalistic coup. A massive report about the alleged corruption of former president Daniel Arap Moi had been commissioned from the private inquiry firm Kroll. But his successor, President Mwai Kibaki, who commissioned the report, subsequently failed to release it, allegedly for political reasons. “This report was the holy grail of Kenyan journalism,” Assange later said. “I went there in 2007 and got hold of it.”
The actual circumstances of publication were more complex. The report was leaked to Mwalimu Mati, head of Mars Group Kenya, an anti-corruption group. “Someone dumped it in our laps,” he says. Mati, prompted by a contact in Germany, had previously registered as a volunteer with WikiLeaks. The fear of retribution made it too dangerous to post the report on the group’s own website: “So we thought: can we not put it on WikiLeaks?” The story appeared simultaneously on 31 August on the front page of the Guardian in London. The full text of the document was posted on WikiLeaks’ website headed, “The missing Kenyan billions”. A press release explained, “WikiLeaks has not yet publicly ‘launched’. We are open only to submissions from journalistic and dissident contacts. However, given the political situation in Kenya we feel we would be remiss to withhold this document any longer.” The site added: “Attribution should be to … ‘Julian A, WikiLeaks’ spokesman’.”
The result was indeed sensational. There was uproar, and Assange was later to claim that voting shifted 10% in the subsequent Kenyan elections. The following year, his site ran a highly praised report on Kenyan death squads, “The Cry of Blood – Extra-Judicial Killings and Disappearances”. It was based on evidence obtained by the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights. Four people associated with investigating the killings were themselves subsequently murdered, including human rights activists Oscar Kingara and John Paul Oulu.
Assange was invited to London to receive an award from the human rights organisation Amnesty: it was a moment of journalistic respectability. Characteristically, he arrived in town three hours late after a convoluted series of flights from Nairobi which involved withholding his passport details from the authorities until the last minute. His acceptance speech was generous, if a little grandiose: “Through the courageous work of organisations such as the Oscar foundation, the KNHCR [Kenya National Commission on Human Rights], Mars Group Kenya and others we had the primary support we needed to expose these murders to the world. I know that they will not rest, and we will not rest, until justice is done.” Again, there was a symbiotic relationship with the MSM, the mainstream media: the Kenyan story only gained global traction when followed up by Jon Swain of the London Sunday Times.
A coda to the Kenya episode left a bad taste. In March 2009, journalist Michela Wrong published a book on corruption in the east African nation, called It’s Our Turn to Eat, which took her three years to write. Nairobi bookshops proved nervous about stocking it, but she was startled to find a pirated copy posted worldwide on WikiLeaks without consultation. “This was a violation of copyright, involving a commercial publication, a book not banned by any African government, not a secret document. It left me feeling pretty jaundiced.”
She wrote protesting: “I was delighted when WikiLeaks was launched, and benefited personally from its fearlessness in publishing leaked documents exposing venality in countries like Kenya. This strikes me as a totally different case.” In what she terms a “gratingly self-righteous” reply, WikiLeaks, who eventually agreed to take the book down, wrote: “We are not treating document as a leak; it has been treated as a censored work that must be injected into the Kenyan political sphere. We thought you … had leaked the PDF for promotional reasons. That said, the importance of the work in Kenya as an instrument of political struggle eclipses your individual involvement. It is your baby, and I’m sure it feels like that, but it is also its own adult – and Kenya’s son.”
*
Assange and his group were by now starting to see a flow of genuinely leaked documents, including some from UK military sources. Assange sought to market them. He wrote several times to the Guardian, calling himself the “editor” or the “investigative editor” of WikiLeaks, trying to get the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, to take up his stories. He seemed unable to accept that sometimes his leaks might just not be that interesting – no, the lack of response was always due to a failure of nerve, or worse, on the part of the despised MSM.
In July 2008, for instance, he declared: “[Have] the Guardian and other UK press outlets lost their civic courage when dealing with the Official Secrets Act?” He was offering the media access to a leaked copy of the 2007 UK counter-insurgency manual, but no one had signed up to his proffered “embargo pool”: “I suggest the UK press has lost its way … Provided all are equally emasculated, all are equally profitable. It is time to break this cartel of timidity.”
Those who recalled his Melbourne dating-site entry would have been intrigued by his remark that running combative journalistic exposures as he did was also, in fact, an excellent way to get laid: “In Kenya, where we are used to newspaper raids and manageable arrests, we don’t care too much. These hamfisted attempts drive home the story that ignited them, sell newspapers, look good on the CV, and attract lovers like knighthoods.”
A further Assange experiment in media manipulation in 2008 saw him try to auction a cache of what were claimed to be thousands of emails from a speechwriter to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. The winning bidder was to get exclusive access, for a time, to the documents. The auction was based on his theory that nobody took material seriously if it was provided free of charge. He pointed out: “People magazine notoriously paid over $10 [million] for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s baby photos.” Bafflingly, the minutiae of Venezuelan politics did not prove as saleable as celebrities’ baby pics: nobody bid.
Assange had by now discovered, to his chagrin, that simply posting long lists of raw and random documents on to a website failed to change the world. He brooded about the collapse of his original “crowd-sourcing” notion: “Our initial idea was, ‘Look at all those people editing Wikipedia. Look at all the junk that they’re working on … Surely all those people that are busy working on articles about history and mathematics and so on, and all those bloggers that are busy pontificating about … human rights disasters … surely those people will step forward, given fresh source material, and do something?’ No. It’s all bullshit. It’s all bullshit. In fact, people write about things, in general (if it’s not part of their career), because they want to display their values to their peers, who are already in the same group. Actually, they don’t give a fuck about the material.”
He carried on hunting vainly for a WikiLeaks model that could both bring in working revenue and gain global political attention. His published musings from that period are revealing: they show he saw the problem from the outside, but could not yet crack it:
“The big issue for WikiLeaks is first-rate source material going to waste, because we make supply unlimited, so news organisations, wrongly or rightly, refuse to ‘invest’ in analysis without additional incentives. The economics are counter-intuitive – temporarily restrict supply to increase uptake … a known paradox in economics. Given that WikiLeaks needs to restrict supply for a period to increase perceived value to the point that journalists will invest time to produce quality stories, the question arises as to which method should be employed to apportion material to those who are most likely to invest in it.”
There was only one, relatively limited, way in which the Assange model was beginning to gain the interest of the mainstream media: and that was by behaving not as the originally envisaged anonymous document dump, but as what he called “the publisher of last resort”. A fascinating clash between WikiLeaks and a Swiss bank demonstrated that at least one of the key claims for Assange’s new stateless cyberstructure was true – it could laugh at lawyers.
Rudolf Elmer ran the Cayman Islands branch of the Julius Baer bank for eight years. After moving to Mauritius
, and vainly trying to interest authorities in what he said was outrageous tax-dodging by some of his former employer’s clients, he contacted Assange to post his documents: “We built up contact over encrypted software and I received instructions on how to proceed … I wasn’t looking for anonymity.”
The fuming Zurich bankers then went to court in California to force WikiLeaks to take down the files, claiming “unlawful dissemination of stolen bank records and personal account information of its customers”. The bank won a preliminary skirmish when California-based domain name hosters Dynadot were ordered to disable access to the name “wikileaks.org”. But Baer very quickly lost the entire war: WikiLeaks retained access to other sites hosted in Belgium and elsewhere; many “mirror sites” sprang up carrying the offending documents; and the court ruling was reversed as a stream of US organisations rallied behind WikiLeaks in the name of free speech. They included the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as a journalistic alliance which included the Associated Press, Gannett News Service, and the Los Angeles Times.
The Swiss bank and its corrupt customers merely managed to shine more light on themselves, while WikiLeaks demonstrated that it was genuinely injunction-proof. It was WikiLeaks one, Julius Baer nil. Assange picked up another award in London from the free speech group Index on Censorship. One of the judges, poet Lemn Sissay, blogged about a typical piece of showmanship: “We did not know whether Julian Assange … was to turn up to accept. Thankfully he came, a tall, studious man with shock-blonde hair and pale skin. Seconds before stepping on stage he whispered, ‘Someone may lunge at the stage to present me with a subpoena. I cannot allow them to do this, and shall leave if I see them.’”
The Guardian in London now saw the value in having its own sensitive documents posted on WikiLeaks. Lawyers for Barclays Bank had woken up a judge one morning at 2am to force the takedown of the Guardian’s leaked files detailing the bank’s tax-avoidance schemes. But the files were promptly posted in full by Assange, rendering the gag futile. (In an entertaining blend of old and new anti-censorship techniques, the Guardian and all other British media were also at first legally gagged from saying that the files were available on WikiLeaks. It took a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords, speaking under the ancient device of parliamentary privilege, to blow that nonsense away.)
Similarly, WikiLeaks functioned as an online back-up, along with Dutch Greenpeace and Norwegian state TV, in posting in full a damning report on toxic waste dumped by the oil traders Trafigura. Trafigura’s lawyers had gagged the Guardian in the UK from running the leaked report: their draconian moves were thus proved to be a waste of time in a digitally globalised world.
Yet Assange himself was still striving for a way to be more than a niche player. At the outset, in 2006, he had incurred the ire of John Young, of the parallel intelligence-material site Cryptome. Young deplored Assange’s approaches to billionaire George Soros, who funded a variety of mostly eastern European media projects, and he broke off relations angrily when Assange talked of raising $5 million. “Announcing a $5 million fund-raising goal by July [2007] will kill this effort,” he wrote. “It makes WikiLeaks appear to be a Wall Street scam. This amount could not be needed so soon except for suspect purposes. Soros will kick you out of the office with such over-reaching. Foundations are flooded with big talkers making big requests flaunting famous names and promising spectacular results.”
Now, two years on from that false start, Assange made another attempt to raise a substantial sum. He and his lieutenant, Domscheit-Berg, approached the Knight Foundation in the US, which was running “a media innovation contest that aims to advance the future of news by funding new ways to digitally inform communities”. Domscheit-Berg asked for $532,000 to equip a network of regional newspapers with what were, in effect, “WikiLeaks buttons”. The idea, developed and elaborated by Domscheit-Berg, was that local leakers could make contact through these news sites, and thus generate a regular flow of documents. A rival project, Documentcloud, designed to set up a public database of the full documents behind conventional news stories, was backed by staff at the New York Times and the nonprofit investigative journalism initiative ProPublica. They got $719,500. Assange got nothing. As 2009 ended, WikiLeaks was still struggling to make a name for itself.
CHAPTER 5
The Apache video
Quality Hotel, Tønsberg, Norway
3am, 21 March 2010
“It’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle”
US HELICOPTER PILOT
Even in March, there was still ice in the harbour, and snow lay on the Slottsfjellet hill where the old fortress stood. But down in the waterfront hotel ballroom, the Boogie Wonder Band were hard at it: they were pumping out sweaty dance rhythms for hundreds of Norwegian reporters celebrating the Jubileumsfest – the 20th anniversary shindig of SKUP, the lively association of investigative journalists. “Bring nice clothes and good humour,” said the invitation; and although Assange had not changed out of his regular brown leather jacket zipped up to the neck, he was certainly in a good mood. In fact, he was excited, and with good reason: he was about to take the first step towards becoming a world celebrity.
The billing for his lecture read, “Some believe the WikiLeaks site has done more investigative journalism than the New York Times over the past 20 years.” But Assange knew that the world had seen nothing yet, compared with what was about to come. After a night of reindeer steaks and repeated Viking-style toasts with raised glasses, he could contain himself no longer. “Want to see something?” he asked David Leigh, the Guardian journalist who was also speaking at the conference. Assange, with his lean frame and long silver hair, had a boyishly enticing grin that had already been having its effect on nearby women: his present invitation was also intriguing.
Up in Leigh’s hotel bedroom, with the door locked and the chain on, Assange produced one of his little netbooks from the backpack he never let out of his sight. He punched in a series of what seemed like lengthy passwords, and after a while a black-and-white video began to run. It was one of the most shocking things Leigh had ever seen.
The money shot, later played again and again on YouTube from China to Brazil, was a view from the air: it showed clouds of dust erupting among a scattering group of men, as they were knocked down and killed by the cannon-shells of a helicopter gunship. One man, wounded, was trying to crawl away from the carnage off to the right of the screen. Later a driver can be seen trying to drag the wounded man into a van, which is shot up by more cannon-fire. Told on the radio traffic that children were hurt, a pilot transmits, defensively: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”
The pictures had been taken by an AH-64 Apache’s military camera as it hovered over a Baghdad suburb, firing its 30mm gun while virtually invisible to those on the ground. The helicopter was a kilometre up in the sky. Leigh watched, stunned, as the uncut video of these killings ran on the little laptop for nearly 39 minutes.
The video was, explained Assange, the classified record of a scandal. In July 2007, US army pilots, in a pair of circling helicopters, had managed to kill two innocent employees of the Reuters news agency: Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. Noor-Eldeen was a 22-year-old war photographer. Chmagh was a 40-year-old Reuters driver and assistant, who had been wounded and attempted to crawl away. Altogether 12 people died in that single encounter. The van driver’s two young children were wounded, but survived.
Assange didn’t say where the raw video had come from, other than that he had got hold of a cache of material from “military sources”. But he did tell the Guardian journalist what he planned to do next. He was going to travel to Iceland, where he would arrange for this sensational leak to be verified and edited up into a properly captioned version. Then he would reveal it to the world.
Iceland, in the far north Atlantic, was not so weird a destination for Assange as might be thought. The nomadic WikiLeaks founder had recent
ly become popular there, since agreeing to post a leaked secret document listing major Icelandic bank loans which had been made to bankers’ cronies, and the bank’s own large shareholders. Iceland’s financial meltdown had left an angry and resentful populace behind, and they seemed to appreciate Assange’s brand of transparency.
Kristinn Hrafnsson was one of many Icelanders impressed by Assange. He was so inspired that he subsequently became his close lieutenant. Hrafnsson, who was to travel to Baghdad with a cameraman to check out the Apache helicopter story on Assange’s behalf, says: “The first I heard of WikiLeaks was at the beginning of August 2009. I was working as a reporter for state television when I got a tip this website had important documents just posted online. It was the loan book for the failed Kaupthing Bank … They [the bank] got a gag order on the state TV – the first and only one in its history.”
The scandal brought an invitation to Reykjavik for Assange and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and the two campaigners found themselves urging the small country to promote its own free speech laws. Assange sat on the TV studio sofa and declared: “Why doesn’t Iceland become the centre for publishing in the world?” Domscheit-Berg recalls: “Julian and I were just throwing that idea out, declaring on national TV that we thought this would be the next business model for Iceland. That felt pretty weird … realising the next day that everyone wanted to talk about it.”
Assange was like a pied piper, gathering followers around him in region after region. Another Iceland-based WikiLeaks enthusiast, programmer Smári McCarthy, told Swedish TV, “We had failed as a country because we had not been sharing the information that we needed. We were in an information famine … WikiLeaks gave us the nudge that we needed. We had this idea but didn’t know what to do with it. Then they came and told us, and that is an incredibly valuable thing. They are information activists first and foremost, who believe in the power of knowledge, the power of information.”
WikiLeaks Page 7
