This was, of course, hardly the first time the New York Times had published secrets that discomfited the US government. Before the year of WikiLeaks, nothing the paper had done on Keller’s watch had caused quite the agitation of two articles the paper published about tactics employed by the Bush administration after the attacks of 11 September 2001. One article, which was published in 2005 and won a Pulitzer prize, revealed that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on domestic phone and email conversations without the legal courtesy of a warrant. The other, published in 2006, described a vast treasury department programme to screen international banking records.
The editor had vivid memories of sitting in the Oval Office as President George W Bush tried to persuade him and the New York Times’s publisher to withhold the eavesdropping article. Bush told him that if the paper published, it should share the blame for the next terrorist attack. Unconvinced, the paper published anyway, and the reaction from the government and conservative commentators in particular was vociferous.
This time around, the US administration reaction was different. It was, for the most part, sober and professional. The Obama White House, while strongly condemning WikiLeaks for making the documents public, did not seek an injunction to halt publication. There was no Oval Office lecture, no plea to Keller or the publisher not to write about the documents. “On the contrary, in our discussions before the publication of our articles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusions we drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents with care. The secretaries of state and defence and the attorney general resisted the opportunity for a crowd-pleasing orgy of press-bashing,” Keller says, adding: “Though the release of these documents was certainly painfully embarrassing, the relevant government agencies actually engaged with us in an attempt to prevent the release of material genuinely damaging to innocent individuals or the national interest.”
From his secret hideout back in Ellingham Hall, Assange sought to open his own channel of negotiations, sending a letter on 26 November to the US embassy in London. Headed “Julian Assange, editor-in-chief, WikiLeaks”, it began: “Dear Ambassador Susman, I refer to recent public statements by United States government officials expressing concern about the possible publication by WikiLeaks and other media organisations of information allegedly derived from United States government records.”
Assange invited the US government to “privately nominate” examples where publication of a cable could put an individual “at significant risk of harm”. He promised WikiLeaks would quickly consider any US government submissions ahead of publication. The state department’s legal adviser Harold Koh sent an uncompromising letter back. It stated that the cables “were provided in violation of US law and without regard for the grave consequences of this action”.
Releasing them “would place at risk the lives of countless individuals”, jeopardise ongoing military operations, and threaten co-operation between the US and its allies and partners, the letter said. It would hinder co-operation on “common challenges such as terrorism, pandemic diseases and nuclear proliferation”.
The letter ordered WikiLeaks to halt plans to publish the cables, hand back the stolen files, and “destroy all records of this material from WikiLeaks’ databases.”
Assange wrote to Susman again on 28 November. He made clear that WikiLeaks had no intention of putting anybody at risk, “nor do we wish to harm the national security of the United States”. He continued: “I understand that the United States government would prefer not to have the information that will be published in the public domain and is not in favour of openness. That said, either there is a risk or there is not. You have chosen to respond in a manner which leads me to conclude that the risks are entirely fanciful and that you are instead concerned only to suppress evidence of human rights abuses and other criminal behaviour.”
The negotiations with the state department – such as they were – thus terminated. All that was left was to prepare for simultaneous publication of the biggest leak in the history. What could possibly go wrong?
CHAPTER 15
Publication day
Basel railway station, Switzerland
28 November 2010
“Launch! Launch! Launch!”
GUARDIAN NEWSROOM
It was Sunday morning at the sleepy Badischer Bahnhof. Few were around. The station sits precisely on the border between Germany and Switzerland. It is a textbook example of European co-operation – with the Germans providing the trains, and the Swiss running the cafés and newspaper kiosks. This morning, however, the station would become briefly notorious for something else: a gigantic foul-up.
Early in the morning, a van rolled in, bearing 40 copies of the German news magazine Der Spiegel. The weekly normally starts distributing copies to newsagents over the weekend, with revellers in Berlin able to buy it late on Saturday night on their way home. But on this occasion – as with the publication of the Afghan war logs – Der Spiegel was supposed to have held all copies of its edition back. The international release of the US embassy cables had been painstakingly co-ordinated for 21.30 GMT that Sunday evening. The Guardian, New York Times, El País and Le Monde were all waiting anxiously to push the button on the world’s biggest leak. Der Spiegel had agreed to roll its stories out at the same time on its website, with the magazine only published on the following Monday morning. Everyone knew the script.
But the gods of news had decided to do things differently. At around 11.30am Christian Heeb, the editor-in-chief of the local Radio Basel, discovered a copy of Der Spiegel at the station. It was dated 29/11/10. It cost €3.80. The front cover was nothing less than sensational: “Revealed: How America Sees the world”. The strap-line confirmed: “The secret dispatches of the US foreign ministry”. Against a red background was a photo-gallery of world leaders, each accompanied by a demeaning quotation culled from the US cables. Angela Merkel, Germany’s increasingly un popular chancellor, was “risk averse and rarely creative”. Guido Westerwelle, Merkel’s disastrous foreign minister, was “aggressive”. Then there were the others. Vladimir Putin? “Alpha dog”. Dmitry Medvedev? “Pale and hesitant”. Silvio Berlusconi? “Wild parties”. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? “Hitler”. Next to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi were the tantalising words “Luxuriant blonde nurse”. More extraordinary revelations were promised inside.
Heeb’s station started to broadcast the news, saying a few early copies of Der Spiegel had become available at Basel station. It was at this point that an anonymous Twitter user called Freelancer_09 decided to check out the prospect for himself. He tweeted: “Der Spiegel zu früh am Badischen Bahnhof Basel! Mal schaun was da steht.” (Der Spiegel too early at Basel station! Let’s see what’s there.) Freelancer_09 managed to obtain one of the last two or three copies of the rogue Spiegel batch, just as panicked executives at the magazine’s Berlin headquarters were realising something had gone horribly wrong: one of the distribution vans sent to crisscross Germany had set off for Switzerland 24 hours too early.
Radio Basel in Switzerland received a hasty phone call from Germany. Would they come off the air in return for subsequent help with the story? But it was too late. Freelancer_09 was already at work: within minutes he had begun tweeting the magazine’s contents. Merkel had a better relationship with US president George W Bush than with his successor Barack Obama! US diplomats have a low opinion of Germany’s regional politicians! The Americans think Westerwelle is a jerk! At the start of the morning Freelancer_09 had a meagre tally of 40 Twitter followers. His own political views seemed pretty clear – alternative, counter-cultural, even anarchist – judging from the leftist Twitter users he followed, and from his own profile photo: a child shouting through a loud-hailer above the words: “Police state”. Who he was exactly was uncertain. (His identity remained mysterious; some weeks later his Twitter account went dormant.)
Soon, word spread through the blogosphere that an anonymous local journalist in Basel had stumbled on t
he Holy Grail. Other German journalists started “retweeting” his posts. Der Spiegel frantically messaged him to make contact. He ignored them. “His Twitter follows rapidly snowballed. We could see it was becoming a serious problem,” admits Der Spiegel’s Holger Stark. “While we were closing the hole, he had managed to get a copy of the magazine.”
Sitting helplessly in London, Alan Rusbridger realised that the 9.30pm GMT embargo for the release of the cables looked wobbly. “You have five of the most powerful news organisations, and everything was paralysed by a little freelancer. We started having conferences on the hour wondering what to do,” Rusbridger says. There was more bad news. Rival German news organisations contacted Freelancer_09 and asked him to start scanning entire pages of Der Spiegel’s edition. By about 3pm, he had 150 followers, with more joining every minute. By 4pm he had found a scanner, and was pumping the embargoed articles out onto the internet. His followers jumped to around 600. A French mirror site began translating Freelancer_09’s posts. “We realised the story wasn’t going to hold. We had sprung a leak ourselves,” Rusbridger recalls wryly. It was a great irony. Rusbridger had been an early Twitter proselytiser; he had relentlessly encouraged Guardian journalists to sign up to the San Francisco-based micro-blogging site. Now Twitter had turned round and – figuratively speaking – skewered him in the bottom.
The previous day, Saturday, at around 5pm a German technician from Der Spiegel’s own online service in Hamburg had made an earlier gaffe: he managed to go live on the website with an extract from the edition of the magazine. It gave a few intriguing early details: that there were 251,287 cables; that one cable dated back to 1966, but most were newer than 2004; that 9,005 documents dated from the first two months of 2010. Stark apologised for the accident and said the German link was erased as soon as it was discovered. The screen shots circulated through the net for some time. Then on Sunday afternoon more material appeared on Spiegel’s popular English-language site. The rumours were now sweeping feverishly across Twitter. The anticipation was reaching bursting point.
The New York Times soon spotted the Spiegel online story. The paper’s executives said the embargo was dead – now effectively meaningless. “What was so brilliant was the irony that of all the people to mess up it was the Germans,” said Katz – not always the Guardian’s most politically correct representative. Until now, it was the Germans – impeccably ethical at all times – who had managed to avoid the recriminations hurled freely by Assange at both the Americans and the British. Janine Gibson, editor of guardian.co.uk, the Guardian’s website, compared the pratfall-strewn cables launch to Britain’s 1993 Grand National. That shambolic instalment of the historic horse race was infamously cancelled after two false starts.
“It all got terribly untidy,” Rusbridger says. “But it was the most complicated thing we have ever done, co-ordinating a Spanish morning paper with a French afternoon paper with a German weekly with an American [paper] in a different time zone and a bunch of anarchists in a bunker who would only communicate via Jabber [online instant messaging].”
By 6pm the Guardian and everyone else agreed just to publish, go with it. As though at Nasa’s Mission Control Center in Houston, the Guardian’s production staff stood poised at the newspaper’s King’s Cross office in front of a flickering bank of screens. Production boss Jon Casson asked: “Will we launch?” Katz replied: “LAUNCH!” The word was taken up and spread instantly across the back bench, the newsroom echoing with the words: “Launch! Launch! Launch!” The world’s biggest leak had gone live.
The Guardian’s front-page splash made the historic dimensions of the story clear. With David Leigh’s byline, it appeared on guardian.co.uk at 6.13pm. The headline proclaimed: “US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis.” It began:
“The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year. At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many designated ‘secret’ – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership.”
The story went on: “These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers’ website, also reveal Washington’s evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.”
At 6.15pm the Guardian launched a WikiLeaks live blog, to chart reaction as it came in. More live blogs would follow; they would become an innovative part of the cables coverage. The disclosures in Leigh’s story were the first of many over the next four weeks. Despite its scrappy launch, the publication of the US state department cables amounted to the biggest leak since 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon papers to the New York Times, provoking a historic court case and revealing the White House’s dirty secrets in Vietnam. This data spillage was far bigger – an unprecedented release of secret information from the heart of the world’s only superpower.
Nobody could think of a bigger story – certainly not one authored by the media themselves. “You could say the World Trade Center was a bigger story, or the Iraq war. But in terms of a newspaper, where by the act of publication you unleash one story that is then talked about in every single corner of the globe, and you are the only people who have got it, and you release it each day, this was unique,” Rusbridger says.
The US state department had already assembled a team of 120 people, to burn the midnight oil and sift through those cables likely to be disclosed. The department also issued a condemnatory statement. It said: “We anticipate the release of what are claimed to be several hundred thousand classified state department cables on Sunday night that detail private diplomatic discussions with foreign governments. By its very nature, field reporting to Washington is candid and often incomplete information. It is not an expression of policy, nor does it always shape final policy decisions. Nevertheless, these cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers around the world, it can deeply impact not only on US foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world.” The release of the cables was a “reckless and dangerous action”. It had put lives at risk, the White House declared.
The statement was a damage limitation exercise. Even opponents of WikiLeaks had to acknowledge that some of the disclosures – for example, that the US had spied on UN officials and sought to gather their credit card account numbers – were overwhelmingly in the public interest. The White House, moreover, frequently expressed concern when other authoritarian regimes clamped down on freedom of speech. This testy response when the leak came from inside its own large governmental machinery would provoke the Russians, Chinese, and just about everyone else, to accuse Washington of double standards.
The Guardian posted its own riposte. It pointed out that the paper had carefully redacted many cables. This was done “in order to protect a number of named sources and so as not to disclose certain details of special operations”.
The New York Times also vigorously defended its decision to publish: “The cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money. They shed light on the motivations – and, in some cases, the duplicity – of allies on the receiving end of American courtship and foreign aid. They illuminate the diplomacy surrounding two current wars and several countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where American military involvement is growing. As daunting as it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name.”
Franco Frattini, Italy’s foreign minister, was one of the earlie
st politicians to grasp that the leak could not be undone, and was game-changing. “It will be the 9/11 of world diplomacy,” he exclaimed. For once the comparison didn’t look like hyperbole. “It was being discussed in the White House, the Kremlin, the Élysée, by Berlusconi and the UN, by Chávez, in Canberra, in every capital city of the world,” Rusbridger said. “The ones where it wasn’t being discussed, you knew they were bracing themselves. You just had this sense of mayhem being let loose. All these incredibly powerful people, the most powerful people in the world, were scrambling into emergency board meetings.”
At Kings Place, the following day’s editorial conference was more crowded than usual. Morning conferences are a Guardian ritual: the heads of department – home, foreign, city, sport, as well as features, comment and arts – give a quick run-down of the day’s offerings. All staff can attend and anybody can speak. The seating arrangement mirrors the Guardian’s unspoken hierarchy: Rusbridger sits in the middle of an elongated yellow sofa; junior staff perch uncomfortably on stools around the glass walls. After the news roundup the editor typically says: “What else?” The words are often hard to hear. It is a brave, or foolish, person who opens the debate; sometimes the silence extends awkwardly for 10 seconds. This morning, however, there was no hesitation. The room was packed; the atmosphere one of excitement, and astonishment that the Guardian had managed, with a few glitches, to pull the story off.
One of the unfamiliar faces there was Luke Harding, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, who had mined the cables for a series of hard-hitting stories about Russia and who, having just returned again from Moscow, stood unshaven and jet-lagged next to the door. Ian Katz recalled Sunday’s dramatic events and explained the decision to bring forward publication when it became clear that Cablegate itself had sprung a leak. Katz described the Guardian’s sitcom-style wranglings with its many Euro-partners: “It was a cross between running a Brussels committee and an episode of ’Allo ’Allo!” He came up with a characteristically rococo analogy – “like being a kind of air traffic controller, with several small aircraft crashing at Stansted but managing to land a couple of big jets at Heathrow”.
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