The money shot, later played again and again on YouTube from China to Brazil, was a view from the air: it showed clouds of dust erupting among a scattering group of men, as they were knocked down and killed by the cannon-shells of a helicopter gunship. One man, wounded, was trying to crawl away from the carnage off to the right of the screen. Later a driver can be seen trying to drag the wounded man into a van, which is shot up by more cannon-fire. Told on the radio traffic that children were hurt, a pilot transmits, defensively: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”
The pictures had been taken by an AH-64 Apache’s military camera as it hovered over a Baghdad suburb, firing its 30mm gun while virtually invisible to those on the ground. The helicopter was a kilometre up in the sky. Leigh watched, stunned, as the uncut video of these killings ran on the little laptop for nearly 39 minutes.
The video was, explained Assange, the classified record of a scandal. In July 2007, US army pilots, in a pair of circling helicopters, had managed to kill two innocent employees of the Reuters news agency: Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. Noor-Eldeen was a 22-year-old war photographer. Chmagh was a 40-year-old Reuters driver and assistant, who had been wounded and attempted to crawl away. Altogether 12 people died in that single encounter. The van driver’s two young children were wounded, but survived.
Assange didn’t say where the raw video had come from, other than that he had got hold of a cache of material from “military sources”. But he did tell the
Iceland, in the far north Atlantic, was not so weird a destination for Assange as might be thought. The nomadic WikiLeaks founder had recently become popular there, since agreeing to post a leaked secret document listing major Icelandic bank loans which had been made to bankers’ cronies, and the bank’s own large shareholders. Iceland’s financial meltdown had left an angry and resentful populace behind, and they seemed to appreciate Assange’s brand of transparency.
Kristinn Hrafnsson was one of many Icelanders impressed by Assange. He was so inspired that he subsequently became his close lieutenant. Hrafnsson, who was to travel to Baghdad with a cameraman to check out the Apache helicopter story on Assange’s behalf, says: “The first I heard of WikiLeaks was at the beginning of August 2009. I was working as a reporter for state television when I got a tip this website had important documents just posted online. It was the loan book for the failed Kaupthing Bank … They [the bank] got a gag order on the state TV – the first and only one in its history.”
The scandal brought an invitation to Reykjavik for Assange and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and the two campaigners found themselves urging the small country to promote its own free speech laws. Assange sat on the TV studio sofa and declared: “Why doesn’t Iceland become the centre for publishing in the world?” Domscheit- Berg recalls: “Julian and I were just throwing that idea out, declaring on national TV that we thought this would be the next business model for Iceland. That felt pretty weird … realising the next day that everyone wanted to talk about it.”
Assange was like a pied piper, gathering followers around him in region after region. Another Iceland-based WikiLeaks enthusiast, programmer Smari McCarthy, told Swedish TV, “We had failed as a country because we had not been sharing the information that we needed. We were in an information famine … WikiLeaks gave us the nudge that we needed. We had this idea but didn’t know what to do with it. Then they came and told us, and that is an incredibly valuable thing. They are information activists first and foremost, who believe in the power of knowledge, the power of information.”
An Icelandic MP, Birgitta Jonsdottir, was at the forefront of subsequent moves to draw up a proposal the campaigners called MMI, the Modern Media Initiative, which was endorsed unanimously by the Icelandic parliament. The proposal was stitched together by Assange, his Dutch hacker-businessman friend Rop Gonggrijp, and three Icelanders: Jonsdottir, McCarthy and Herbert Snorrason. They called for laws to enshrine source protection, free speech and freedom of information. Jonsdottir, 43, is an anti-capitalist activist, poet and artist – an unexpectedly romantic figure to find in the Reykjavik legislature. “They were presenting this idea they called the ‘Switzerland of bytes’,” she explains, “which was basically to take the tax haven model and transform it into the transparency haven model.”
Assange decided to publish some Icelandic tidbits from his newly acquired secret cache of military material to coincide with the MMI campaign: one was a very recent cable from the US embassy in Reykjavik, dated 13 January 2010, describing Icelandic officials’ views about the banking crisis. The deputy chief of mission at the embassy, Sam Watson, had reported that those he met “painted a very gloomy picture for Iceland’s future”. Assange followed this up with leaked profiles of the Icelandic ambassador to Washington (“prickly but pragmatic … enjoys the music of Robert Plant, formerly of Led Zeppelin”), the foreign minister (“fond of the US”), and the prime minister, Johanna Sigur?ardottir (“although her sexual orientation has been highlighted by the international press, it has barely been noted by the Icelandic public”).
The US authorities took no visible action about these leaks. There was nothing apparently to connect Reykjavik, where this stuff was coming out, with an obscure military base in the Mesopotamian desert, thousands of miles away.
So at the end of March, Assange returned to Iceland from his triumphant conference appearance in Norway, and, bankrolled by an advance of €10,000 ($13,000) from Gonggrijp, set about renting a house and editing his Apache helicopter film. Leigh, back in London, tried hard to get back into contact to propose a deal under which the
Khatchadourian was present to record Jonsdottir, the feisty feminist MP for Reykjavik South, rather unwillingly trimming Assange’s hair while he sat hunched over his laptop, engaged in important messaging. The profile writer was also taking notes when the message came back from Baghdad:
The journalists who had gone to Baghdad … had found the two children in the van. The children had lived a block from the location of the attack, and were being driven to school by their father that morning. “They remember the bombardment, felt great pain, they said, and lost consciousness,” one of the journalists wrote …
Jonsdottir turned to Gonggrijp, whose eyes had welled up. “Are you crying?” she asked.
“I am,” he said. “OK, OK, it is just the kids. It hurts.” Gonggrijp gathered himself. “Fuck!” he said … Jonsdottir was now in tears, too, and wiping her nose.
Assange premiered the Apache helicopter video at the National Press Club in Washington on 5 April. He chose to title it “Collateral Murder”. Although the video caused a stir, something went wrong. It did not generate the universal outrage and pressure for reform of, say, Seymour Hersh’s earlier expose of leaked photos in the
