throwing ‘dialogue’ parties for their friends with foundation money. They … love cameras.”
Assange cast himself in contrast to these people, as a man of courage. He invoked one of his personal heroes in that WikiLeaks mail-out: “This quote from Solzhenitsyn is increasingly germane: ‘A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the west today. The western world has lost its civic courage … Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites.’” Assange would often pronounce to those around him: “Courage is infectious.”
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
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
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
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.”
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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
In July 2008, for instance, he declared: “[Have] the
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 Chavez. 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: “
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
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
