WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

Norwegian TV channel NRK. The British arms giant BAE had also been brought to a $400m corruption settlement with the US department of justice, following a campaign in which the Guardian co- operated with other TV and print media in countries from Sweden to Romania to Tanzania.

The most distinguished pioneer of this globalised form of investigation was probably Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington DC, who, a full decade earlier, organised a massive exposure of the British American Tobacco company’s collusion in cigarette smuggling, with simultaneous publication by media in Colombia, London and the US.

So the present five-way media consortium was not a new invention. It was – or would be if it actually worked – the culmination of a growing media trend. What made this trend possible was what also made it necessary: the technological growth of massive, near-instantaneous global communications. If media groups did not learn to work across borders on stories, the stories would leave them behind.

In the run-up to cable D-Day, Ian Katz, the deputy editor managing these complex relationships, held regular Skype chats with the Guardian’s multilingual counterparts. “They were hilarious conversations,” Katz recalls. The reason the Spaniards were holding up the number of a US state department cable to the Skype camera was security – it had been agreed that no sensitive mentions would be made over the phone or by email.

In Berlin, similarly, Marcel Rosenbach, from Der Spiegel, was the first to unearth a cable with the deceptively bland title: “National HUMINT Collection Directive on the United Nations.” In fact, it revealed the US state department (on behalf of the CIA) had ordered its diplomats to spy on senior UN officials and collect their “detailed biometric information”. They were also told to go after “credit card account numbers; frequent flyer account numbers; work schedules and other relevant biographical information”. The cable, number 219058, was geopolitical dynamite. Nobody else had spotted it. “Marcel had written down the number. I could only see half of it. I had to tell him: ‘Left a bit, left a bit,’” Katz recalls.

For Julian Assange – like Jason Bourne, the Hollywood secret agent constantly on the run from the CIA – elaborate security precautions may have been second nature. But for journalists used to spilling secrets down at the pub after a gossipy pint or two they were a new and tricky-to-master art form. Katz and Rusbridger borrowed inspiration from The Wire, the cult US drama series set amid the high rises and drug dealers of Baltimore. The noir show was popular among some of the Guardian’s staff; in it, the dealers typically relied on “burners”, or pay-as-you-go phones, to outsmart the cops.

Katz therefore asked his assistant to go out and buy 20 burner phones for key members of the cables team. The Guardian now had its own leak-proof network. Unfortunately, nobody could remember their burner number. At one point Alan Rusbridger sent a text from his “burner” to Katz’s regular cellphone – an elementary error that in The Wire would almost certainly have prompted the cops to swoop. The Guardian editor picked up another burner during a five-day trip to Australia. When he got back to London Katz called him on that number. The conversation – routed right round the world – fizzled out after just three minutes when Katz ran out of credit. “We were basically completely useless at any of the spooky stuff,” Katz confesses.

Like El Pais, the Guardian had deployed a team of experts and foreign correspondents for a thorough final sift through the cables. Some – such as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent Luke Harding – were physically recalled to London for security reasons. Other foreign staff accessed the cables remotely via a VPN (virtual private network) connection. Ian Traynor in Brussels examined cables referring to the European Union, Nato and the Balkans; Declan Walsh, the Guardian’s correspondent in Islamabad, looked at Afghanistan and Pakistan; David Smith did Africa and Jason Burke took on India.

Other reporters included Washington correspondent Ewen MacAskill and Latin America correspondent Rory Carroll in Caracas. (Carroll’s VPN connection quickly packed up, making it impossible to eyeball the Chavez cables.) Simon Tisdall, Ian Black and Jonathan Steele, all immensely experienced, combed through the cables on the Middle East and Afghanistan. The sheer range of journalistic expertise that five major international papers were throwing at the data would perhaps demonstrate the value of the world’s remaining MSM. They could be the genuine information professionals, standing out in an otherwise worthless universe of internet froth.

Sitting in the fourth-floor bunker, Harding and a colleague, reporter Robert Booth, were among those who would spend long hours staring, increasingly dizzy eyed, at the dispatches. It soon became clear that there was an art to interrogating the database. If your search term was too big – say, “Britain”, or “corruption” – the result would be unfathomably large. The search engine would announce: “More than 1,000 items returned.” The trick was to use a relatively unusual name. Better still was to experiment with something off the wall, or even a bit crazy. Putting in “Batman”, for example, yielded just two results. But one was a delightful cable in which a US diplomat noted that “Dmitry Medvedev continues to play Robin to Putin’s Batman.” The comparison between the Russian president and his prime minister would whizz round the world, and prompt a stung Vladimir Putin to accuse the United States of “arrogance” and unethical behaviour.

Likewise, punching in the search term “vodka” popped the cork on unexpected results: drunken meetings between US ambassadors and central Asian despots; a memorable wedding in Dagestan in which Chechnya’s president – the murderous Ramzan Kadyrov – danced with a gold-plated revolver stuck down his trousers; and a Saudi Arabian sex party that spoke volumes about the hypocrisy of the Arab state’s princely elite.

In contrast to the staccato jargon of the war logs, the cables were written in the kind of prose one might expect from Harvard or Yale. Harold Frayman had improvised the original search engine used to sift the much smaller Afghan and Iraq war logs. By now he had improved these techniques. “I’m a journalist. I knew what we were going to look for,” he explains. “Diplomats were much more verbose than squaddies in the field. They knew longer words.”

The data set contained more than 200 million of those words. Frayman had originally used the computer language Perl to design the Afghan and Iraq databases. He describes it as a “very well developed set of bits of software … It did little jobs very tidily.” For the cables Frayman added refinements. Journalists were able to search the cables sent out by individual embassies. In the case of Iran, which had not had a US mission since the 1970s, most of the relevant diplomatic chatter actually came out of the US embassy in Ankara. It was therefore helpful to be able to quickly collect up the Ankara embassy output.

Of the files, 40% were classified confidential and 6% secret. Frayman created a search by five detailed categories: secret/noforn (that is, not to be read by non-Americans); secret; confidential/ noforn; confidential; and unclassified. There was no top-secret: such super-sensitive material had been omitted from the original SIPRNet database, along with a substantial number of dispatches that the state department in Washington considered unsuitable for sharing with its colleagues in the military and elsewhere. There were idiosyncrasies in the data: for example, very little material from Israel seemed to be circulated: suggesting that the US embassy there did not play an intimate role in the two-way dealings between Tel Aviv and Washington, and was largely kept out of the loop.

“Secret” was the place for the rummaging journalists to start. Some of these searches produced remarkable scoops. Many, however, did not. The secret category, it soon emerged, tended to cover a limited number of themes: the spread of nuclear material and nuclear facilities; military exports to Iran, Syria and other states