WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

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Over in Brussels, Traynor was discovering, as many others had, that having Assange’s mobile number and actually being able to get in touch with him were two very different things. Fearing that the Australian had gone awol, Traynor headed for the Hotel Leopold on the Place Luxembourg, where Assange was staying, next to the European parliament. Traynor went up to his room and banged on the door. Assange eventually emerged and invited Traynor in. The room resembled that of a modern monk: Assange’s worldly possessions apparently comprised a couple of rucksacks stuffed full of gadgets, three laptops, and a jumble of mobile phones and Sim cards. His wardrobe seemed to be a T-shirt, a jumper and a pair of jeans.

Assange was in mischievous good spirits. The former hacker told Traynor: “You guys at the Guardian, you have got to do something about your security. You have got to get your email secure and encrypted.”

“He knew the contents of the email I had sent to London,” Traynor said, somewhat amazed. “He was showing off, but also expressing concern.”

When Davies arrived in town, the two Guardian reporters repaired again to the Leopold. They dialled upstairs. Assange – apparently still on Australian time – had crashed out again. He finally appeared 15 minutes later. The three sat in the hotel’s covered courtyard cafe. It was 3.30pm; nobody else was around.

What followed was a six-hour conversation. It would result in an extraordinary, if sometimes strained, partnership between a mainstream newspaper and WikiLeaks – a new model of co-operation aimed at publishing the world’s biggest leak. A Vanity Fair feature subsequently called it a courtship between “one of the oldest newspapers in the world, with strict and established journalistic standards” and “one of the newest in a breed of online muckrakers”. The article’s American author, Sarah Ellison, wrote: “The Guardian, like other media outlets, would come to see Assange as someone to be handled with kid gloves, or perhaps latex ones – too alluring to ignore, too tainted to unequivocally embrace.”

The hopes of an accord risked derailment from the outset, however. Assange had already positioned himself as an ideological enemy of Davies, whose high-profile campaign to force Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid the News of the World to confront and stop its phone-hacking had previously been denounced by Assange as a contemptible attempt by “sanctimonious handwringing … politicians and social elites” to claim a right to privacy. Assange had accused Davies of “a lack of journalistic solidarity” for criticising the News of the World – calling it merely “an opportunity to attack a journalistic and class rival”. Assange now failed to disguise a faint contempt for the MSM in general.

Assange nevertheless struck Davies as “very young, boyish, rather shy – and perfectly easy to deal with”. He drank orange juice. Delicately, Davies began setting out the options. He told Assange it was improbable anybody would attack him physically; that would be a global embarrassment for the US. Rather, Davies predicted, the US would launch a dirty information war, and accuse him of helping terrorists and endangering innocent lives. WikiLeaks’ response had to be that the world was entitled to know the truth about the murky US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We are going to put you on the moral high ground – so high that you’ll need an oxygen mask. You’ll be up there with Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa,” Davies told Assange. “They won’t be able to arrest you. Nor can they shut down your website.”

Assange was receptive. This wasn’t the first time WikiLeaks had worked with traditional news media, and Assange had decided it might be a good idea on this occasion to do so again. Then Assange revealed the scale of his cache. WikiLeaks had in fact obtained, he confided, logs detailing every single US military incident in the Afghanistan war. “Holy Moly!” remarked Davies. Not only that, Assange added, the website also had similar war logs from Iraq from March 2003. “Fuck!” exclaimed Davies.

But that wasn’t all. WikiLeaks was indeed in possession of the secret US state department cables from American diplomatic missions around the world. Fourthly and finally, he had files from enemy combatant review tribunals held in Guantanamo Bay, the US’s notorious penal colony in Cuba. In all, jaw-droppingly, there were more than a million documents.

This was stunning stuff. Davies proposed that the Guardian should be allowed to preview all the material, bringing context to what would otherwise be an incomprehensible mass data dump.

Assange said that WikiLeaks had been ready to post all the data for the past two weeks, but he was hesitating because, although he would never reveal whether Manning was a source, he was worried about the legal implications for the young soldier. The Army had still not charged Manning; Manning would have been trained to resist interrogation, he believed, and Lamo’s allegations were evidentially “not credible”; but Assange was concerned that publishing the leaked material might give Pentagon investigators further evidence to work on.

Davies and Assange discussed adding the New York Times as a partner. There was no way, Davies argued, that the Obama administration would attack the most powerful Democrat-leaning newspaper in the US. Any WikiLeaks stories in the paper would enjoy the protection of the free speech provisions of the first amendment to the US constitution; furthermore, there was the precedent of the New York Times’s historic battle to gain the right to publish the Pentagon papers. The paper’s domestic US status would also make it harder for the authorities to press espionage charges against Manning, which might follow from purely foreign publication. Assange agreed with this.

Ian Traynor recalls: “Assange knew people at the New York Times. He was concerned that the stuff should be published in the US and not only abroad. He felt he would be more vulnerable if it was only published abroad.”

Assange also insisted that, in any deal, the Times in New York should publish five minutes ahead of the Guardian in London. He theorised that this would reduce the risk of Manning being indicted for breaking the Espionage Act. Traynor suggested the possibility of additionally bringing on board Der Spiegel in Berlin. The German news magazine had lots of money, and Germany was itself embroiled militarily in Afghanistan, he pointed out.

Assange said that if the Big Leak were to go ahead, he would want to control the Guardian’s timing: he didn’t want to publish too soon if this would damage Manning, but he was also prepared to post everything immediately if there was any kind of attack on WikiLeaks.

At one point, the would-be partners went out to refuel at an Italian restaurant. As he ate, Assange scanned nervously over his shoulder to see if he was being watched. (There were no US agents there, as far as anyone could tell – only the European Green leader and former student rebel Daniel Cohn-Bendit sitting just behind them.) Assange cautioned that, if the deal were to go ahead, the Guardian would have to raise its game on security and adopt stringent measures. The paper had to assume phones were bugged, emails read, computers compromised, he said. “He was very, very hot on security,” Davies recalled. And he seemed media- savvy, too. “He suggested that we find a suitable story to give to Fox News, so that they would be brought on side rather than becoming attack dogs. Another good idea. We were motoring.”