WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

unprecedented scale, the secret leaked diplomatic dispatches of a superpower. It was a project of astonishing boldness, which stood a chance of redefining journalism in the internet age. But while the newspapers laboured to behave responsibly, Assange continued to go his own way.

Disguising himself as an old woman, as detailed in Chapter 1, he moved operations to his rural hideaway at Ellingham Hall, out in the Norfolk countryside. There, his security over the cables, which he had once described as worth at least $5 million to any foreign intelligence agency, seemed less than watertight. Staff say that Assange handed over batches of them to foreign journalists, including someone who was simply introduced as “Adam”. “He seemed like a harmless old man,” said one staffer, “apart from his habit of standing too close and peering at what was written on your screen.” He was introduced as the father of Assange’s Swedish crony, the journalist Johannes Wahlstrom, and took away copies of cables from Russia and post-Soviet states. According to one insider, he also demanded copies of cables about “the Jews”.

This WikiLeaks associate was better known as Israel Shamir. Shamir claims to be a renegade Russian Jew, born in Novosibirsk, but currently adhering to the Greek Orthodox church. He is notorious for Holocaust-denying and publishing a string of anti-semitic articles. He caused controversy in the UK in 2005, at a parliamentary book launch hosted by Lord Ahmed, by claiming: “Jews … own, control and edit a big share of mass media.”

Internal WikiLeaks documents, seen by the Guardian, show Shamir was not only given cables, but he also invoiced WikiLeaks for €2,000, to be deposited in a Tallinn bank account, in thanks for “services rendered – journalism”. What services? He says: “What I did for WikiLeaks was to read and analyse the cables from Moscow.”

Shamir’s byline is on two previous articles pillorying the Swedish women who complained about Assange. On 27 August, in Counterpunch, a small radical US publication, Shamir said Assange was framed by “Langley spies” and “crazy feminists”. He alleged there had been a “honeytrap”. On 14 September, Shamir then attacked “castrating feminists and secret services”, writing that one of the women involved, who he deliberately named, had once discussed the Cuban opposition to Castro in a Swedish academic publication “connected with” someone with “CIA ties”.

Subsequently, Shamir appeared in Moscow. According to a reporter on the Russian paper Kommersant, he was offering to sell articles based on the cables for $10,000. He had already passed some over to the state-backed publication Russian Reporter. He travelled on to Belarus, ruled by the Soviet-style dictator Alexander Lukashenko, where he met regime officials. The Interfax agency reported that Shamir was WikiLeaks’ “Russian representative”, and had “confirmed the existence of the Belarus dossier”. According to him, WikiLeaks had several thousand “interesting” secret documents. Shamir then wrote a piece of grovelling pro-Lukashenko propaganda in Counterpunch, claiming “the people were happy, fully employed, and satisfied with their government.”

Assange himself subsequently maintained that he had only a “brief interaction” with Shamir: “WikiLeaks works with hundreds of journalists from different regions of the world. All are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and are generally only given limited review access to material relating to their region.”

One can only speculate about whose interests Shamir was serving by his various wild publications. Perhaps his own personal interests were always to the fore. But while the newspapers had hammered out a deal to handle the cables in a responsible fashion, Shamir’s backstairs antics certainly made WikiLeaks look rather less so.

CHAPTER 14

Before the deluge

El Pais newspaper, Calle de Miguel Yuste, Madrid

14 November 2010

“It was a fruit machine. You just had to hold your hat under there for long enough”

ALAN RUSBRIDGER, THE GUARDIAN

Viewed on screen, the unkempt, silhouetted figures looked like hostages held in the basement of a terrorist group’s safehouse. One of the stubbly, subterranean figures moved closer to the camera. He held up a sheet of paper. Written on it was a mysterious six-digit number. A secret Swiss bank account, perhaps? A telephone number? Something to do with The Da Vinci Code?

The shadowy figures had not, in fact, been seized by some radical faction, but were a group of journalists from Spain’s El Pais newspaper. Nor was their note a ransom demand. It was the index reference of one of more than 250,000 cables. Since being invited to join the existing British-US-German consortium – or “tripartite alliance” as the New York Times’s Bill Keller dubbed it – El Pais had wasted no time in setting up its own underground research room.

The paper – and France’s Le Monde – had joined the WikiLeaks party late. They had only two weeks to go through the cables before the D-day publication night. The Guardian had been in the luxurious position of having held the same material for several months. El Pais’s editor-in-chief, Javier Moreno, and executive Vicente Jimenez urgently summoned back to Madrid their foreign correspondents; sitting in the paper’s bunker, next to endless discarded coffee cups, they ploughed through the database.

The journalists may have been heartened to read that, according to a secret cable from US officials in Madrid dated 12 May 2008, El Pais was Spain’s “newspaper of record”. It was also, apparently, “normally pro-government”. But they also found sensational material: the US embassy in Madrid had tried to influence judges, the government and prosecutors in cases involving US citizens. One involved a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, another covered secret rendition flights in Spain, and another was about the murder of a Spanish journalist by US fire in Baghdad. They also discovered stories from all across Latin America: from Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela.

From the beginning, the papers had agreed to work collaboratively. They shared some discoveries from the cables and even circulated lists of possible stories. Assange later claimed in a Swedish TV documentary that it was he personally who was pulling the strings of the old-fashioned MSM. He said: “What is new is us enforcing co- operation between competitive organisations that would otherwise be rivals – to do the best by the story as opposed to simply doing the best by their own organisations.”

In reality, this was a co-operative technique that the Guardian, along with other international outlets, had long been building. The previous year, for example, the paper had successfully beaten off lawyers for the Trafigura company, who had dumped toxic waste, by working in concert with BBC TV’s Newsnight, with a Dutch paper, Volkskrant, and with the