WikiLeaks

by Harding, Luke

  “Go ahead,” said Keller.

  “OK, he wants a front-page rejoinder for the Burns piece and he also wants a guarantee that you’re not going to publish any more sleazy hit pieces on him.”

  Keller let out a little snort. “He can write a letter,” he said curtly. “Strictly speaking, that’s not my department, but I’d certainly use any influence I had to suggest that it’s published. And – what was the second one? – er, you can certainly assure him we are not planning any sleazy hit pieces.”

  Rusbridger returned to the room and conveyed Keller’s message. As he feared, Assange reacted furiously, saying this was not sufficient and, in terms, all bets were off. He announced that both the New York Times and Guardian themselves were now to be thrown out of the deal.

  It was Georg Mascolo’s turn to speak – deliberately and firmly. The three papers were tied together. If Assange was cutting out the other two papers then Der Spiegel was out, too.

  It was now nearly 1.30am. The discussion was going nowhere, so Rusbridger turned to Assange and summarised the position.

  “As I see it you have three options. One, we reach no deal; two, you try and substitute the Washington Post for the New York Times; three, you do a deal with us three.

  “One and Two don’t work because you’ve lost control of the material. That’s just going to result in chaos. So I can’t see that you have any option but Three. You’re going to have to continue with us. And that’s good. We have been good partners. We have treated the material responsibly. We’ve thrown huge resources at it. We’re good at working together, we like each other. We’ve communicated well with your lot. It’s gone well. Why on earth throw it away?”

  If Assange was convinced, he wasn’t going to show it. Not that night, anyway. Rusbridger could see that doing it Assange’s way he would still be up for another few rounds before dawn. As the WikiLeaks capo di tutti capi headed off coughing into the night, he shook hands with David Leigh, with whom he had previously worked so closely. Assange shot him a meaningful look and said in low, distinct tones: “Be careful.”

  The next day Rusbridger sent Mark Stephens 10 bullet points to put to Assange:

  •

  Publish on Nov 29 in a staggered form.

  •

  Run over two weeks or more up to just before Xmas.

  •

  Exclusive to G, NYT, DS (plus El Pais and ? Le Monde).

  •

  Subject matter to be co-ordinated between partners and to stay off certain issues initially. No veto to anyone over subjects covered over whole course of series (post Jan). WL to publish cited documents at same time.

  •

  After Xmas the exclusivity continues for one more week, starting around Jan 3/4.

  •

  Thereafter WL will start to share stories on a regional basis among 40 serious newspapers around the world, who will be given access to “bags” of material relating to their own regions.

  •

  G to hire HB [Heather Brooke] on an exclusive basis.

  •

  If “critical” attack on WL they will release everything immediately.

  •

  If material is leaked to/shared with any other news organisation in breach of this understanding all bets are off.

  •

  If agreed the team will commence work on a grid of stories for the first phase.

  Within 24 hours Stephens rang back to say Assange had okayed the deal. Whether or not it met Assange’s criteria for “a gentlemen’s agreement”, it was, anyway, an agreement.

  *

  Five of the world’s most reputable papers were now committed to selecting, redacting and publishing, on an unprecedented scale, the secret leaked diplomatic dispatches of a superpower. It was a project of astonishing boldness, which stood a chance of redefining journalism in the internet age. But while the newspapers laboured to behave responsibly, Assange continued to go his own way.

  Disguising himself as an old woman, as detailed in Chapter 1, he moved operations to his rural hideaway at Ellingham Hall, out in the Norfolk countryside. There, his security over the cables, which he had once described as worth at least $5 million to any foreign intelligence agency, seemed less than watertight. Staff say that Assange handed over batches of them to foreign journalists, including someone who was simply introduced as “Adam”. “He seemed like a harmless old man,” said one staffer, “apart from his habit of standing too close and peering at what was written on your screen.” He was introduced as the father of Assange’s Swedish crony, the journalist Johannes Wahlstrom, and took away copies of cables from Russia and post-Soviet states. According to one insider, he also demanded copies of cables about “the Jews”.

  This WikiLeaks associate was better known as Israel Shamir. Shamir claims to be a renegade Russian Jew, born in Novosibirsk, but currently adhering to the Greek Orthodox church. He is notorious for Holocaust-denying and publishing a string of anti-semitic articles. He caused controversy in the UK in 2005, at a parliamentary book launch hosted by Lord Ahmed, by claiming: “Jews … own, control and edit a big share of mass media.”

  Internal WikiLeaks documents, seen by the Guardian, show Shamir was not only given cables, but he also invoiced WikiLeaks for €2,000, to be deposited in a Tallinn bank account, in thanks for “services rendered – journalism”. What services? He says: “What I did for WikiLeaks was to read and analyse the cables from Moscow.”

  Shamir’s byline is on two previous articles pillorying the Swedish women who complained about Assange. On 27 August, in Counterpunch, a small radical US publication, Shamir said Assange was framed by “Langley spies” and “crazy feminists”. He alleged there had been a “honeytrap”. On 14 September, Shamir then attacked “castrating feminists and secret services”, writing that one of the women involved, who he deliberately named, had once discussed the Cuban opposition to Castro in a Swedish academic publication “connected with” someone with “CIA ties”.

  Subsequently, Shamir appeared in Moscow. According to a reporter on the Russian paper Kommersant, he was offering to sell articles based on the cables for $10,000. He had already passed some over to the state-backed publication Russian Reporter. He travelled on to Belarus, ruled by the Soviet-style dictator Alexander Lukashenko, where he met regime officials. The Interfax agency reported that Shamir was WikiLeaks’ “Russian representative”, and had “confirmed the existence of the Belarus dossier”. According to him, WikiLeaks had several thousand “interesting” secret documents. Shamir then wrote a piece of grovelling pro-Lukashenko propaganda in Counterpunch, claiming “the people were happy, fully employed, and satisfied with their government.”

  Assange himself subsequently maintained that he had only a “brief interaction” with Shamir: “WikiLeaks works with hundreds of journalists from different regions of the world. All are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and are generally only given limited review access to material relating to their region.”

  One can only speculate about whose interests Shamir was serving by his various wild publications. Perhaps his own personal interests were always to the fore. But while the newspapers had hammered out a deal to handle the cables in a responsible fashion, Shamir’s backstairs antics certainly made WikiLeaks look rather less so.

  CHAPTER 14

  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 so
me 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.