The deal
Hotel Leopold, Place Luxembourg, Brussels
9.30pm, 21 June 2010
“I felt this was the biggest story on the planet”
NICK DAVIES
Three men were in the Belgian hotel courtyard cafe, ordering coffee after coffee. They had been arguing for hours through the summer afternoon, with a break to eat a little pasta, and evening had fallen. Eventually, the tallest of the three picked up a cheap yellow napkin, laid it on the flimsy modern cafe table and started to scribble. One of those present was Ian Traynor, the Guardian’s Europe correspondent. He recalls:
“Julian whipped out this mini-laptop, opened it up and did something on his computer. He picked up a napkin and said, ‘OK you’ve got it.’
“We said: ‘Got what?’
“He said: ‘You’ve got the whole file. The password is this napkin.’”
Traynor went on: “I was stunned. We were expecting further very long negotiations and conditions. This was instant. It was an act of faith.”
Assange had insouciantly circled several words and the hotel’s logo on the Hotel Leopold napkin, adding the phrase “no spaces”. This was the password. In the corner he scrawled three simple letters: GPG. GPG was a reference to the encryption system he was using for a temporary website. The napkin was a perfect touch, worthy of a John le Carre thriller. The two Guardian journalists were amazed. Nick Davies stuffed the napkin in his case together with his dirty shirts. Back in England, the yellow square was reverently lodged in his study, next to a pile of reporters’ notepads and a jumble of books. “I’m thinking of framing it,” he says.
Just a few days earlier, Davies had been sitting peacefully in that study, glancing up from his morning paper to his garden and the Sussex landscape. Davies is one of the Guardian’s best-known investigative journalists. In a career spanning more than three decades, he has worked on many stories exposing the dark abuses of power. His book Flat Earth News was an acclaimed account of how the newspaper industry had gone badly wrong, abandoning real reporting for what he memorably dubbed “churnalism”.
Davies was currently embroiled in a long-term investigation into a phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World during the editorship of Andy Coulson. Coulson – who was as a result forced to resign in January 2011 as the public relations boss for Conservative prime minister David Cameron – denied all knowledge of his staff illegally hacking the phones of celebrities and members of the royal family.
Today, however, Davies’s attention was caught by the Guardian’s foreign pages: “American officials are searching for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in an attempt to pressure him not to publish thousands of confidential and potentially hugely embarrassing diplomatic cables that offer unfiltered assessments of Middle East governments and leaders.”
The story continued: “The Daily Beast, a US news reporting and opinion website, reported that Pentagon investigators are trying to track down Assange – an Australian citizen who moves frequently between countries – after the arrest of a US soldier last week who is alleged to have given the whistleblower website a classified video of American troops killing civilians in Baghdad. The soldier, Bradley Manning, also claimed to have given WikiLeaks 260,000 pages of confidential diplomatic cables and intelligence assessments. The US authorities fear their release could ‘do serious damage to national security’.”
Davies was thunderstruck. An unknown 22-year-old private had apparently downloaded the entire contents of a US classified military database. Manning was held in prison in Kuwait. But was there any way the Guardian could lay its hands on the cables? “I felt this was the biggest story on the planet,” says Davies. He searched online for “Bradley Manning”, and found the transcripts published by Wired.com. These detailed the conversations with former hacker Adrian Lamo, in which Manning apparently confirmed he had illicitly downloaded more than a quarter of a million classified documents, talked of “almost criminal political back-dealings” by the US, and said: “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack.”
If only a fraction of what Manning said was true, WikiLeaks was now sitting on hundreds of thousands of cables detailing dubious diplomatic operations, war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and God knows what else. It was a goldmine. “There was clearly a bigger story here. It wasn’t hard to see,” Davies says. His reporter’s radar was bleeping with excitement. But amazingly, nobody else on what used to be known as Fleet Street seemed to have yet worked out the massive potential dimensions.
The key to accessing the cables – and to the stories they contained – had to be Julian Assange. Davies himself had never met him but was aware of Assange’s website: he had come across WikiLeaks during the Guardian’s 2009 investigation into tax evasion and Swiss banks. He wanted to get to Assange fast, before the Pentagon investigators or anyone else. But where was he? The Daily Beast reported that Assange had cancelled a US public appearance in Las Vegas due to “security concerns”; a group of former US intelligence officers had warned publicly that Assange’s physical safety was at risk. There were few clues.
Davies sent a series of exploratory emails to Assange. He offered to assist on Manning, and to publicise the 22 -year-old’s plight. On 16 June, he wrote: “Hi Julian, I spent yesterday in the Guardian office arguing that Bradley Manning is currently the most important story on the planet. There is much to be done, and it will take a little time. But right now, I think the crucial thing is to track and expose the effort by the US government to suppress Bradley, you, WikiLeaks, and anything that either of you may want to put in the public domain.” The email went on: “Can you communicate with me about that; or hook me up with somebody who can? Maybe one possibility might be for me to talk to any lawyer who has been helping Bradley. Good luck, Nick.”
This tentative pitch elicited a reply from Assange – but not a very helpful one. Assange merely sent back a press release describing how WikiLeaks had persuaded Icelandic parliamentarians to build a “new media haven” in Iceland.
