Present were a detective, Mats Gehlin from the Klara police station family violence unit, and a lawyer.
Assange: Between the 13th and 14th August, I, as you put it, deliberately tore a condom during intercourse?
Police: How do you react to that?
Assange: It’s not true.
He agreed that something had been said at the time, the police account notes. “Sonja looked at the sheet and saw that it was wet and said, ‘Look at that,’ and Julian answered, ‘It must be you’ … Julian just thought she was pointing to it as an indication of how loving the sex had been although she spoke as if it came from him … Then they didn’t discuss it any more.” He accepted there was no more intercourse all week after that event “but there were other sexual acts”.
He told the interrogators that Braun only challenged him at the very end of the week he spent at her flat: “She accused me of various things… many of which were false … That I took the condom off during sex. It was the first I had heard of it.” Her friend Klara (not her real name) had also been in contact and Assange had been arranging to meet her on the following day to discuss what he had heard were “incredible lies” being told about him. He did not consider that Braun was planning to make any formal complaint and was “really surprised” to find she had been to a hospital and there was talk of DNA and the police. “I expected the whole thing to be over until I heard the news from Expressen.”
That might have been the end of the story. But the two aggrieved women appointed a high-profile lawyer on their own behalf, Claes Borgström, former Swedish equal opportunities ombudsman and prominent Social Democrat politician. He got both cases reopened, as law allowed, by appealing to a chief prosecutor (överåklagare), the sex crimes specialist Marianne Ny. He told a news agency the women didn’t even know it was possible to appeal a prosecutor’s decision until he so advised them. “I had read the police reports. I had seen my clients and heard their stories,” Borgström said. “In my opinion, it was rape and attempted rape or sexual molestation.” He added: “We have better knowledge than other countries in the field of gender equality … That also means women don’t accept certain things in the same way they do in other countries.”
Not surprisingly, Assange was much dismayed. Facing a further interrogation about his unhappy one-night stand with the second woman, Katrin Weiss, he decided to leave town. He told friends he feared being arrested and paraded in front of a media circus. Subsequently, he circulated the idea that the resultant demand for his extradition was the result of covert pressure from the US government, who wanted to get their hands on him for the WikiLeaks exploits. No concrete evidence has yet surfaced to support this theory, although the US has threatened repeatedly that it will seek to bring its own indictment against Assange for information crimes. The claim certainly muddied the WikiLeaks waters, as conspiracy theories began to rage up and down the internet.
That summer, contemplating the imbroglio in Sweden from afar, the Guardian’s reporters in London were also dismayed. Leigh and Davies took a decision that it was nevertheless their duty to ensure the Guardian was steadfast – and indeed first – in reporting the facts. What happened in Stockholm may have been complex and equivocal, but some questionable sexual encounters had certainly occurred, and there was no evidence to support the claims of dirty tricks and honeytraps. The journalists were acutely aware that to ignore the fresh controversy that had erupted around their new collaborator could only increase the risk that it might taint the WikiLeaks enterprise as a whole.
CHAPTER 13
Uneasy partners
Editor’s office, the Guardian, Kings Place, London
1 November 2010
“I’m a combative person”
JULIAN ASSANGE, TED CONFERENCE, OXFORD, 2010
The three partner papers decided it was time for a meeting with Julian Assange. Everything was threatening to get rather messy. The embattled WikiLeaks founder now wanted the Americans frozen out of the much-delayed deal to publish the diplomatic cables jointly – a punishment, so it was said, for a recent profile of him, by the New York Times veteran London correspondent John F Burns. Assange had intensely disliked it.
The British were anxious about the fact that another copy of the cables had apparently fallen into the hands of Heather Brooke, a London-based American journalist and freedom of information activist. And the Germans were worried that things could get acrimonious all round unless the editors held a clear-the-air meeting with what was left of WikiLeaks.
There were at least three loose copies of the cables believed to be circulating now: with Brooke in the UK, Daniel Ellsberg – of Pentagon papers fame – in the US, and Smári McCarthy, an Icelandic former WikiLeaks programmer who had, according to Assange, let a copy pass to Brooke. David Leigh had signalled to the New York Times he was willing personally to hand them a copy if Assange would not co-operate. But none of the huge secret cache of state department dispatches had yet actually been analysed and published to the world as originally planned. Would the whole audacious project end in tears?
The conference was arranged for 1 November, at the Guardian’s London offices near King’s Cross station, with an initial meeting to go through the material in detail, trying to reach agreement on a possible day-by-day running order. Assange was supposed to join around 6pm – but a series of text messages to deputy editor Ian Katz indicated he was running late. Around 7pm, Rusbridger’s phone rang. It was Mark Stephens, a British libel lawyer he’d known for years. He said he had something to tell him: could he come straight round? Twenty minutes later Stephens burst through the door of the editor’s office, followed by Assange himself, along with his dour Icelandic lieutenant Kristinn Hrafnsson, and a young woman lawyer, later introduced as a junior solicitor in Stephens’ office, Jennifer Robinson. It looked, and felt, like an ambush.
Assange had barely sat down before he started angrily denouncing the Guardian. Did the New York Times have the cables? How did they have them? Who had given them to them? This was a breach of trust. His voice was raised and angry. Every time Rusbridger tried to respond, he pitched in with another question. When he finally paused for breath Rusbridger pointed out that the Spiegel people and other Guardian executives were waiting. Why didn’t we tell them to come in to continue the discussion? But Assange’s fury returned: this matter had to be settled first. He needed to know the truth about the New York Times. “We are getting the feeling that a large organisation is trying to find ways to step around a gentlemen’s agreement. We’re feeling a bit unhappy.”
Rusbridger responded that things had changed. WikiLeaks had sprung a leak itself. The cables had fallen into the hands of Heather Brooke. Things would soon move out of our control unless they decided to act more quickly. Assange didn’t look well. He was pale and sweating and had a racking cough. Rusbridger stuck to the line that he hadn’t given anyone the cables – which was perfectly true – and eventually persuaded Assange that it was better to deal with the larger group.
David Leigh immediately objected, however, to the presence of Stephens and Robinson. This was an editorial meeting, he protested. If Assange was going to have lawyers there, the Guardian needed lawyers. Rusbridger went off to try and raise a lawyer. The Guardian’s head of legal was cycling home and could not hear her BlackBerry ringing, so Geraldine Proudler, from the legal firm Olswang, who had fought many battles on behalf of the Guardian in the past, was interrupted at her gym and jumped in a taxi.
The argument – for the moment without lawyers – began again with the Spiegel team of editor-in-chief Georg Mascolo, Holger Stark and Marcel Rosenbach. Assange seemed obsessed with the New York Times, however, and launched into repeated denunciations of the paper.
“They ran a front-page story – the front page! – a front-page story which was just a sleazy hit job against me personally, and other parts of the organisation, and based upon falsehoods. It wasn’t even an assemblage of genuine criticism, assembling criticism without any balance. T
heir aim is to make themselves look impartial. It is not enough to simply be impartial. It is not enough to simply go: ‘That’s the story’ and put it through – they actually have to be actively hostile towards us, and demonstrate that on the front page, lest they be accused of being some kind of sympathiser.”
The Burns profile had dwelt, among other things, on the continuing police investigation into the Swedish sex allegations. Assange was quoted saying: “They called me the James Bond of journalism. It got me a lot of fans, and some of them ended up causing me a bit of trouble.”
Burns had written that WikiLeaks staff had turned against Assange in the scandal’s wake. They complained, he wrote, that their founder’s “growing celebrity has been matched by an increasingly dictatorial, eccentric and capricious style”. To one defector, 25-year-old Icelander Herbert Snorrason, Assange messaged: “If you have a problem with me, you can piss off.” Assange had announced: “I am the heart and soul of this organisation, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organiser, financier, and all the rest.” Snorrason riposted stoutly: “He is not in his right mind.”
Burns’ piece actually omitted the full facts: Assange’s key lieutenant, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, was also privately denouncing Assange’s “cult of stardom”. The German would write later: “It is not for nothing that many who have quit refer to him as a ‘dictator’. He thinks of himself as the autocratic ruler of the project and believes himself accountable to no one. Justified, even internal, criticism – whether about his relations with women or the lack of transparency in his actions – is either dismissed with the statement ‘I’m busy, there are two wars I have to end’ or attributed to the secret services’ smear campaigns.”
Round the Guardian editor’s table, the others now sat silently as Assange fulminated against Burns and the New York Times in the strangely old-fashioned declamatory baritone he used when angry. He returned to his questions. Did they have the cables? How?
The problem, interjected Rusbridger, was that the paper now had a second source for the cables. It was negotiating with Heather Brooke for her to join the Guardian team. Otherwise she would be free to take them to any paper – which would mean the Guardian losing all access, control and exclusivity. Assange turned on Rusbridger. This wasn’t a second source. Brooke had stolen the cables. It had been done “by theft, by deception … certainly unethical means”. He knew enough about the way she had operated to “destroy” her. The climax came when Assange (the underground leaker of illegal secrets) threatened that his lawyers could sue for the loss of WikiLeaks’ “financial assets”.
“I’d look forward to such a court case,” said the Guardian’s editor with a smile. None of this tirade made sense to Rusbridger. Brooke was a professional journalist: she had stolen nothing. More to the point, either the Guardian had a second source – in which case it no longer had to rely on Assange’s copy – or it all originated, as Assange claimed, from a single source, WikiLeaks, in which case WikiLeaks had broken its agreement to make a copy only for the Guardian, and Assange was in a poor position to be ranting at others.
Katz asked what other copies of the database existed: for instance, was it correct that Ellsberg had one? Assange shot back: “Daniel Ellsberg’s is an encrypted back-up copy of the database which he was to give the New York Times in a piece of political theatre.”
Assange returned to his favourite theme of how a gentleman leaker would behave: “People who aren’t behaving like gentlemen should start behaving like one. On the basis that the Guardian has given this to the New York Times, why should we collaborate with the Guardian?”
Assange began suggesting deals with other American papers. The Washington Post was hungry for this stuff. Under questioning, he elaborated a little, admitting that he had already been in discussion both with the Post and the US McClatchy newspaper group about possible co-operation.
Assange launched into the NYT again: “The strategy that the New York Times engaged in was … not very gentlemanly … They wrote a terrible piece about Bradley Manning and this terrible, terrible piece about me on the front page by John F Burns. He says that he has received the most criticism of anything that he has ever written in his entire journalistic career over that piece, from senior people, and there’s a reason for that.
“We’re willing to engage in realpolitik if necessary, but that’s an organisation whose modus operandi is to protect itself, by destroying us. I do advise you to read it. It is obvious to anyone who reads it that it is designed to be a smear. It uses unnamed sources to quote some random person who has never had anything to do with our organisation except running some chat room, saying that I’m mad, etcetera, etcetera. It really is bad journalism. I’m not asking much. We are asking for the Times to follow its own standards. The standards that it follows for other people, because those standards apply, and the Times should not go out of its way to produce a negative, sleazy hit-piece and place it on the front page.”
Katz asked him directly how far he had got in negotiation with the Washington Post. “I haven’t made an agreement. Though I think we’ll probably go with the Post unless we get a very good counter-offer, because the Times has defiled the relationship.”
Rusbridger suggested a short break. When they reassembled, still without lawyers (Stephens and Robinson were sitting outside the room, Proudler down the corridor) the temperature had lowered a bit. Rusbridger suggested they look at some of the issues around the sequencing of stories. Ian Katz led Assange through the work they had done earlier in the day on which items should run in which order. Assange listened calmly. Gone was the aggression and finger-pointing. In its place there was a new engagement – as though his brain had flicked a switch to channel the rational, highly strategic zones which had been missing in the early confrontation.
He was, however, now insisting on yet further delay. The journalists asked how WikiLeaks would ideally release the cables. He replied, “Our ideal situation is not till next year. Anything before one month is semi-lethal even under emergency conditions. We have woken a giant by wounding one of its legs [the US defence department] and the release of this material will cause the other leg [the state department] to stand up. We are taking as much fire as we can but we can’t take any more.” He stressed that he wanted the cables to be released in an orderly way and not in a “big dump”. Ideally, a “gradual release played out over two months”. But he was willing to see the launch in as soon as a month’s time: “We can gear up to attempt to be in a position such that we can survive, in a month.”
Assange had already spoken, only half-jokingly, of his need to have a safe refuge in Cuba before the cables came out. Now he said the ordering had to be arranged so that it didn’t appear anti-American. He didn’t want WikiLeaks to seem obsessed with America. The stories in the cables had far wider significance – so it was important to establish a running order which would make people realise that this wasn’t simply about the US.
“There are security exposés and abuses by other countries, these bad Arab countries, or Russia,” he said. “That will set the initial flavour of this material. We shouldn’t go exposing, for example, Israel during the initial phase, the initial couple of weeks. Let the overall framework be set first. The exposure of these other bad countries will set the tone of American public opinion. In the initial couple of weeks the frame is set that will colour the rest of it.”
Assange then made another startling announcement. He wanted to involve other newspapers from the “Romance languages”, to broaden the geopolitical impact. He mentioned El País and Le Monde. The others in the room looked at each other. This was going to double the complexities of an arrangement that was difficult enough to co-ordinate. How could they possibly do a deal between an American daily on a different time zone, with a French afternoon paper, a Spanish morning paper and a German weekly?
But by now there was at least a negotiation about the means to go forward. It was nearly 10pm. The discussions had been going relent
lessly for nearly three hours. Rusbridger produced a couple of bottles of Chablis. The mood eased. Everyone readily agreed it could all be settled over some food at the Rotunda restaurant downstairs at Kings Place. The journalists moved, meeting Mark Stephens, Geraldine Proudler and Jennifer Robinson still sitting patiently outside the editor’s office.
Dinner was more relaxed, though Assange was still obsessed with the New York Times and its behaviour. Asked under what conditions he would now collaborate with the Americans, he said he would only consider it if the paper agreed to run no more negative material about him and offered him a right to reply to the Burns piece with equal prominence. “Good relationships extend to good people, they don’t extend to bad people. Unless we see a very serious counter-offer [from the New York Times] they have lost their exclusivity … Is the NYT a lost cause or is it a credible media outlet? Have things got that bad?”
The others decided to ignore that for the time being. They talked in more detail about how they could draw up a publication schedule, with agreed themes for each day. Assange was keen for the period of exclusivity to continue beyond the new year, or “the Christian calendar”, as he put it. He said WikiLeaks had already redacted the cables “and if there is a critical attack against us we will publish them all”.
By midnight the restaurant was empty and closing. It was decided that Rusbridger would go and ring Bill Keller in New York while the others relocated – taking the wine with them – to another meeting room back upstairs in the Guardian. Rusbridger had known Keller for about 10 years, which helped shortcut what was bound to be a slightly surreal conversation. “I’m going to tell you what Assange is demanding,” said Rusbridger. “I know what you’re going to say, but I have to go back and say I’ve put this to you.”
WikiLeaks Page 17
