WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

Davies went up to the Guardian office in London to consult David Leigh, a colleague and old friend. Leigh had met Assange earlier in the year and, having failed to reach a deal over the Apache helicopter video, was sceptical. He warned Davies that the Australian was unpredictable. He doubted Assange would be willing to co-operate. But, Leigh added, “You’re welcome to try.”

Davies persevered. He sent Assange another email offering “to travel anywhere to meet you or anybody else, to take any of this forward”. This time Assange was more forthcoming. He sent back the contact name of Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic parliamentarian who had co-produced the Apache video, and whose tweets the US department of justice would later attempt to subpoena. He also mentioned Kristinn Hrafnsson, his loyal deputy. Assange signed off: “I’m a bit hard to interview presently for security reasons, but send me ALL your contacts.” Davies sent further emails to Jonsdottir, Hrafnsson and other WikiLeaks players, and spoke to several of them on the phone. He felt he was beginning to make progress. But he was also painfully aware that if he simply demanded that WikiLeaks share its information, Assange would see him as yet another representative of the greedy, duplicitous mainstream media – or MSM, as it is derisively described on much of the internet. Something more subtle was called for – something that ultimately gave the Guardian access to the cables, but perhaps also offered Assange a way to resolve his own problems.

On the evening of Sunday 19 June, Davies received a phone call. His informant said, “Don’t tell Julian I told you, but he’s flying to Brussels to give a press conference tomorrow at the European parliament.” Excited, Davies called Leigh, who was at home in London. Leigh was absorbed in a television detective serial, and seemed far from impressed by the development. Davies promptly dialled the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. The pair had started on the paper together in 1979 as junior reporters, and had lived in neighbouring flats in London’s Clerkenwell. Rusbridger trusted Davies completely, and had given him free rein to pursue investigative projects, believing he would always bring back something of value.

This unusual arrangement had seen Davies launch long-term investigations into a range of areas, including poverty in the UK, Britain’s education system, and police corruption. Davies’s challenging, in-depth journalism had made political waves and proved popular with readers.

“Alan, what do you know of this guy Bradley Manning?” Davies asked.

“Not much,” Rusbridger replied.

“Well, it’s the biggest story on the planet …”

Yes, Rusbridger agreed, “Go to Brussels.”

There was no transport to get Davies to Brussels in time for the press conference, however, so the editor suggested that Traynor, who was highly experienced and who was based in the city, should try to buttonhole Assange. Davies emailed Traynor that night:

“Bradley Manning, aged 22, is an American intelligence analyst who has been working at a US base outside Baghdad, where he had access to two closed communication networks. One carried traffic from US embassies all over the world, classified ‘secret’; the other carried traffic from US intelligence agencies, classified ‘top secret’. Manning decided he didn’t like what he saw and copied masses of it on to CDs.”

Davies explained his view that Manning then made a “good move and a bad move”. The good decision was to approach Assange; the bad one was apparently to blurt out what he had done to Lamo, “a lonesome American computer hacker”.

Davies asked Traynor to get to Assange’s lunchtime panel debate in the parliament building. “Longer term, it’s a question of trying to forge some kind of alliance so that, if and when Assange releases any of the material which Manning claims to have leaked, we are involved.”

Traynor successfully made contact with Assange’s colleague Birgitta Jonsdottir, the next day in Brussels. He spotted her in a cafe with two male companions, including “a guy wearing a large Icelandic woolly jumper”. This turned out to be Assange, but Traynor – having never seen him before – failed to recognise him. “Otherwise I would have grabbed him!” Traynor only caught up with Assange himself at the European parliament event. The only other British reporter there was a junior hack from BBC radio. But the room was full, and there were a number of foreign journalists – among them an Austrian television journalist who Traynor knew had a good nose for a story – so the Guardian correspondent acted swiftly to get Assange away from the crowd as the meeting ended.

They set off together into a warren of parliament corridors and talked privately for half an hour. Traynor thought Assange quiet, cautious and inscrutable. He was impressed by his intellect and quick wit – and though he sometimes found his gnomic answers evasive and hard to follow, “I liked him and I think he liked me.” Traynor was pleased to hear that the WikiLeaks founder presented himself as a big fan of the Guardian. He seemed keen to engage in a collaborative project with a newspaper which had progressive credentials. Assange revealed, significantly, that WikiLeaks was planning to dump “two million pages” of raw material on its website. Traynor asked what it was about. Assange replied simply: “It concerns war.” Assange gave Traynor his local Brussels cellphone number; they agreed to meet again the next day.

Davies was meanwhile anxiously lunching with Rusbridger at the ground-floor restaurant in Kings Place, the Guardian’s London headquarters, overlooking the moored houseboats on the Regent’s Canal. In the middle of their lunch, Traynor’s email arrived. It confirmed that Assange was willing to meet. That night Davies didn’t sleep: “I was too excited.” First thing next morning he was on the high-speed train from London St Pancras station, through the Channel tunnel and on to Brussels.

As his Eurostar carriage shot through the green Kent countryside, he formulated and reformulated his pitch. As he saw it, Assange was facing four separate lines of attack. The first was physical – that someone would beat him up or worse. The second was legal – that Washington would attempt to crush WikiLeaks in the courts. The third was technological – that the US or its proxies would bring down the WikiLeaks website. The fourth and perhaps most worrisome possibility was a PR attack – that a sinister propaganda campaign would be launched, accusing Assange of collaborating with terrorists.

Davies also knew that Assange was disappointed at the reception of his original Apache video, single-handedly released in Washington. The story should have set off a global scandal; instead the narrative had flipped, with attention focused not on the murder of innocent Iraqis but on WikiLeaks itself.

There was another important concern. If the Guardian alone were to obtain and publish the diplomatic cables, the US embassy in London might seek to injunct the paper. The UK is home to some of the world’s most hostile media laws; it is regarded as something of a haven for dodgy oligarchs and other dubious “libel tourists”. What was needed, Davies felt, was a multi-jurisdictional alliance between traditional media outlets and WikiLeaks, possibly encompassing non-governmental organisations and others. If the material from the cables were published simultaneously in several countries, would this get round the threat of a British injunction? Davies opened his notebook. He wrote: “New York Times/Washington Post/Le Monde.” He added: “Politicians? NGOs? Other interested parties?” Maybe the Guardian could preview the leaked cables and select the best story angles. The Guardian and WikiLeaks would then pass these “media missiles” to other friendly publications. He liked that plan. But would Assange buy