About the Book
It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world’s greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa. The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet messiah or a cyber-terrorist? Information freedom fighter or sex criminal? The debate would echo around the globe as US politicians called for his assassination.
Award-winning Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding have been at the centre of a unique publishing drama that involved the release of some 250,000 secret diplomatic cables and classified files from the Afghan and Iraq wars. At one point the platinum-haired hacker was hiding from the CIA in David Leigh’s London house. Now, together with the paper’s investigative reporting team, Leigh and Harding reveal the startling inside story of the man and the leak.
Inside Julian Assange’s
War on Secrecy
David Leigh and Luke Harding
with Ed Pilkington, Robert Booth and Charles Arthur
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9780852652404
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Guardian Books 2011
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © The Guardian
David Leigh and Luke Harding have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Guardian Books
Kings Place
90 York Way
London
N1 9GU
www.guardianbooks.co.uk
A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-85265-239-8
CONTENTS
Cast of characters
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Hunt
Chapter 2: Bradley Manning
Chapter 3: Julian Assange
Chapter 4: The rise of WikiLeaks
Chapter 5: The Apache video
Chapter 6: The Lamo dialogues
Chapter 7: The deal
Chapter 8: In the bunker
Chapter 9: The Afghanistan war logs
Chapter 10: The Iraq war logs
Chapter 11: The cables
Chapter 12: The world’s most famous man
Chapter 13: Uneasy partners
Chapter 14: Before the deluge
Chapter 15: Publication day
Chapter 17: The ballad of Wandsworth jail
Chapter 18: The future of WikiLeaks
Appendix: US Embassy Cables
Acknowledgements
CAST OF CHARACTERS
WikiLeaks
MELBOURNE, NAIROBI, REYKJAVIK, BERLIN, LONDON, NORFOLK, STOCKHOLM
Julian Assange – WikiLeaks founder/editor
Sarah Harrison – aide to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
Kristinn Hrafnsson – Icelandic journalist and WikiLeaks supporter
James Ball – WikiLeaks data expert
Vaughan Smith – former Grenadier Guards captain, founder of the Frontline Club and Assange’s host at Ellingham Hall
Jacob Appelbaum – WikiLeaks’ representative in the US
Daniel Ellsberg – Vietnam war whistleblower, WikiLeaks supporter
Daniel Domscheit-Berg – German programmer and WikiLeaks technical architect (aka Daniel Schmitt)
Mikael Viborg – owner of WikiLeaks’ Swedish internet service provider PRQ
Ben Laurie – British encryption expert, adviser to Assange on encryption
Mwalimu Mati – head of anti-corruption group Mars Group Kenya, source of first major WikiLeaks report
Rudolf Elmer – former head of the Cayman Islands branch of the Julius Baer bank, source of second major WikiLeaks report
Smári McCarthy – Iceland-based WikiLeaks enthusiast, programmer, Modern Media Initiative (MMI) campaigner
Birgitta Jónsdóttir – Icelandic MP and WikiLeaks supporter
Rop Gonggrijp – Dutch hacker-businessman, friend of Assange and MMI campaigner
Herbert Snorrason – Icelandic MMI campaigner
Israel Shamir – WikiLeaks associate
Donald Böstrom – Swedish journalist and WikiLeaks’ Stockholm connection
The Guardian
LONDON
Alan Rusbridger – editor-in-chief
Nick Davies – investigative reporter
David Leigh – investigations editor
Ian Katz – deputy editor (news)
Ian Traynor – Europe correspondent
Harold Frayman – systems editor
Declan Walsh – Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent
Alastair Dant – data visualiser
Simon Rogers – data editor
Jonathan Steele – former Iraq correspondent
James Meek – former Iraq correspondent
Rob Evans – investigative journalist
Luke Harding – Moscow correspondent
Robert Booth – reporter
Stuart Millar – news editor, guardian.co.uk
Janine Gibson – editor, guardian.co.uk
Jonathan Casson – head of production
Gill Phillips – in-house head of legal
Jan Thompson – managing editor
New York Times
NEW YORK, LONDON
Max Frankel – former executive editor
Bill Keller – editor
Eric Schmitt – war correspondent
John F Burns – London correspondent
Ian Fisher – deputy foreign editor
Der Spiegel
HAMBURG, LONDON
Georg Mascolo – editor-in-chief
Holger Stark – head of German desk
Marcel Rosenbach – journalist
John Goetz – journalist
El País
MADRID, LONDON
Javier Moreno – editor-in-chief
Vicente Jiménez – deputy editor
Other Media
Raffi Khatchadourian – New Yorker staffer and author of a major profile of Assange
Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen – Reuters news agency employees accidentally killed by US army pilots in 2007
David Schlesinger – Reuters’ editor-in-chief
Kevin Poulsen – former hacker, senior editor at Wired
Gavin MacFadyen – City University professor and journalist, London host to Assange
Stephen Grey – freelance reporter
Iain Overton – former TV journalist, head of Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Heather Brooke – London-based American journalist and freedom of information activist
Bradley Manning
Bradley Manning – 23-year-old US army private and alleged WikiLeaks source
Rick McCombs – former principal at Crescent high
school, Crescent, Oklahoma
Brian, Susan, Casey Manning – parents and sister
Tom Dyer – school friend
Kord Campbell – former manager at Zoto software company
Jeff Paterson – steering committee member of the Bradley Manning support network
Adrian Lamo – hacker and online confidant
Timothy Webster – former US army counter-intelligence special agent
Tyler Watkins – former boyfriend
David House – former hacker and supporter
David Coombs – lawyer
Julian Assange
Christine Hawkins – mother
John Shipton – father
Brett Assange – stepfather
Keith Hamilton – former partner of Christine
Daniel Assange – Julian’s son
Paul Galbally – Assange’s lawyer during his 1996 hacking trial
Stockholm allegations / extradition
“Sonja Braun” – plaintiff; member of Brotherhood movement
“Katrin Weiss” – plaintiff; museum worker
Claes Borgström – lawyer for both women, former Swedish equal opportunities ombudsman and prominent Social Democrat politician
Marianne Ny – Swedish chief prosecutor and sex crimes specialist
Mark Stephens – Assange lawyer
Geoffrey Robertson, QC – Assange lawyer
Jennifer Robinson – lawyer in Mark Stephens’ office
Gemma Lindfield – lawyer acting for the Swedish authorities
Howard Riddle – district judge, Westminster magistrates court
Mr Justice Ouseley – high court judge, London
Government
Hillary Clinton – US Secretary of State
Louis B Susman – US ambassador in London
PJ Crowley – US assistant secretary of state for public affairs
Harold Koh – US state department’s legal adviser
Robert Gates – US defence secretary
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles – former UK government special representative to Afghanistan and former ambassador to Kabul
INTRODUCTION
Alan Rusbridger
Back in the days when almost no one had heard about WikiLeaks, regular emails started arriving in my inbox from someone called Julian Assange. It was a memorable kind of name. All editors receive a daily mix of unsolicited tip-offs, letters, complaints and crank theories, but there was something about the periodic WikiLeaks emails which caught the attention.
Sometimes there would be a decent story attached to the emails. Or there might be a document which, on closer inspection, appeared rather underwhelming. One day there might arrive a diatribe against a particular journalist – or against the venal cowardice of mainstream media in general. Another day this Assange person would be pleased with something we’d done, or would perambulate about the life he was living in Nairobi.
In Britain the Guardian was, for many months, the only paper to write about WikiLeaks or to use any of the documents they were unearthing. In August 2007, for instance, we splashed on a remarkable secret Kroll report which claimed to show that former President Daniel Arap Moi had been siphoning off hundreds of millions of pounds and hiding them away in foreign bank accounts in more than 30 different countries. It was, by any standards, a stonking story. This Assange, whoever he was, was one to watch.
Unnoticed by most of the world, Julian Assange was developing into a most interesting and unusual pioneer in using digital technologies to challenge corrupt and authoritarian states. It’s doubtful whether his name would have meant anything to Hillary Clinton at the time – or even in January 2010 when, as secretary of state, she made a rather good speech about the potential of what she termed “a new nervous system for our planet”.
She described a vision of semi-underground digital publishing – “the samizdat of our day” – that was beginning to champion transparency and challenge the autocratic, corrupt old order of the world. But she also warned that repressive governments would “target the independent thinkers who use the tools”. She had regimes like Iran in mind.
Her words about the brave samizdat publishing future could well have applied to the rather strange, unworldly Australian hacker quietly working out methods of publishing the world’s secrets in ways which were beyond any technological or legal attack.
Little can Clinton have imagined, as she made this much praised speech, that within a year she would be back making another statement about digital whistleblowers – this time roundly attacking people who used electronic media to champion transparency. It was, she told a hastily arranged state department press conference in November 2010, “not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community.” In the intervening 11 months Assange had gone viral. He had just helped to orchestrate the biggest leak in the history of the world – only this time the embarrassment was not to a poor east African nation, but to the most powerful country on earth.
It is that story, the transformation from anonymous hacker to one of the most discussed people in the world – at once reviled, celebrated and lionised; sought-after, imprisoned and shunned – that this book sets out to tell.
Within a few short years of starting out Assange had been catapulted from the obscurity of his life in Nairobi, dribbling out leaks that nobody much noticed, to publishing a flood of classified documents that went to the heart of America’s military and foreign policy operations. From being a marginal figure invited to join panels at geek conferences he was suddenly America’s public enemy number one. A new media messiah to some, he was a cyber-terrorist to others. As if this wasn’t dramatic enough, in the middle of it all two women in Sweden accused him of rape. To coin a phrase, you couldn’t make it up.
Since leaving Nairobi, Assange had grown his ambitions for the scale and potential of WikiLeaks. In the company of other hackers he had been developing a philosophy of transparency. He and his fellow technologists had already succeeded in one aim: he had made WikiLeaks virtually indestructible and thus beyond legal or cyber attack from any one jurisdiction or source. Lawyers who were paid exorbitant sums to protect the reputations of wealthy clients and corporations admitted – in tones tinged with both frustration and admiration – that WikiLeaks was the one publisher in the world they couldn’t gag. It was very bad for business.
At the Guardian we had our own reasons to watch the rise of WikiLeaks with great interest and some respect. In two cases – involving Barclays Bank and Trafigura – the site had ended up hosting documents which the British courts had ordered to be concealed. There was a bad period in 2008/9 when the high court in London got into the habit of not only banning the publication of documents of high public interest, but simultaneously preventing the reporting of the existence of the court proceedings themselves and the parties involved in them. One London firm of solicitors over-reached itself when it even tried to extend the ban to the reporting of parliamentary discussion of material sitting on the WikiLeaks site.
Judges were as nonplussed as global corporations by this new publishing phenomenon. In one hearing in March 2009 the high court in London decided that no one was allowed to print documents revealing Barclays’ tax avoidance strategies – even though they were there for the whole world to read on the WikiLeaks website. The law looked a little silly.
But this new form of indestructible publishing brought sharp questions into focus. For every Trafigura there might be other cases where WikiLeaks could be used to smear or destroy someone. That made Assange a very powerful figure. The fact that there were grumbles among his colleagues about his autocratic and secretive style did not allay the fears about this new media baron. The questions kept coming: who was this shadowy figure “playing God”? How could he and his team be sure of a particular document’s authenticity? Who was determining the ethical framework that decided some information should be published, and some not? All this meant that Assange was in many respects – more,
perhaps, than he welcomed – in a role not dissimilar to that of a conventional editor.
As this book describes, the spectacular bursting of WikiLeaks into the wider global public eye and imagination began with a meeting in June 2010 between the Guardian’s Nick Davies and Assange. Davies had sought out Assange after reading the early accounts that were filtering out about the leak of a massive trove of military and diplomatic documents. He wanted to convince Assange that this story would have more impact and meaning if he was willing to ally with one or two newspapers – however traditional and cowardly or compromised we might be in the eyes of some hackers. An agreement was struck.
And so a unique collaboration was born between (initially) three newspapers, the mysterious Australian nomad – and whatever his elusive organisation, WikiLeaks, actually was. That much never became very clear. Assange was, at the best of times, difficult to contact, switching mobile phones, email addresses and encrypted chat rooms as often as he changed his location. Occasionally he would appear with another colleague – it could be a journalist, a hacker, a lawyer or an unspecified helper – but, just as often, he travelled solo. It was never entirely clear which time zone he was on. The difference between day and night, an important consideration in most lives, seemed of little interest to him.
What now began was a rather traditional journalistic operation, albeit using skills of data analysis and visualisation which were unknown in newsrooms until fairly recently. David Leigh, the Guardian’s investigations editor, spent the summer voraciously reading his way into the material. The Guardian’s deputy editor in charge of news, Ian Katz, now started marshalling wider forces. Ad hoc teams were put together in assorted corners of the Guardian’s offices in King’s Cross, London, to make sense of the vast store of information. Similar teams were assembled in New York and Hamburg – and, later, in Madrid and Paris.