WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

considered unsavoury; negotiations involving top-ranking US army personnel. By far the largest number of stories came from lower classified documents.

Like the other reporters, Harding and Booth soon found themselves developing their own quirky search techniques. They discovered it was often useful to start at the bottom, working backwards from a country’s most recent cables, written as they were up to 28 February 2010. Such searches became, however, an exercise in stamina; after reading a batch of more than 40 cables, the reporters had to take a break. Adjacent to the secret bunker was a free coffee machine. There was also a relaxation room. “Here, after a long session of cable-bashing, you could at least flick the sign to engaged, grab a cushion and lie groaning on the floor,” says Harding. Katz said the company would pay for massages: but none of the Guardian’s weary cable slaves had time to spare.

To editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, the abundant disclosures pouring out of the US cables at first seemed like a player hitting the jackpot every time in an amusement arcade. He recalled how Leigh – after reading the material for a couple of weeks over the summer, chortling and astonished – had come back with enough stories for 10 splashes, articles that could lead the newspaper front page. “It was a fruit machine. You just had to hold your hat under there for long enough,“ Rusbridger says.

The analogy is a good one. But it perhaps makes the task sound too easy. To comb properly through the data, teams of Guardian staff had to be recruited. The reporters, especially the foreign correspondents, brought much to the table: contextualisation, specialist knowledge and a degree of entrepreneurship in divining what to look for. All these skills were needed to turn the cables into significant newspaper stories.

Leigh sent a memo to Rusbridger:

We’ve now got to the stage of story selection on project 3. The previous exercises (Iraq and Afghanistan) worked well politically, I thought, because Nick and I were able to focus the coverage [and the resultant global coverage] on elements that it was highly in the public interest to make known.

With Afghanistan, this was civilian casualties. With Iraq, it was torture. This time, I think it’s also important that we try and major on stories that ought to be made known in the public interest. That was the compass-needle which helped me when I originally tried to put together the first dozen stories.

So – top stories revealing corruption and crime (Russia, Berlusconi, etc) and improper behaviour (eg unwarranted US pressure on other countries, unwarranted leaking to the US by other country officials). This will then position us where we can be best defended on all fronts??

A herd of publishable articles began to grow in size. The task of readying them for publication fell to Stuart Millar, the Guardian’s web news editor, who says he felt like a harried cowboy. “I was trying to lasso them into some kind of shape.” This was a far more complicated production problem than the similar exercise with the Iraq and Afghan war logs. At first, it had seemed the cables would yield just a hatful of stories. By the eve of D-day, Guardian journalists had produced more than 160 articles, with more coming in all the time. “There was a crazy, enormous heave of copy,” Millar recalls.

For Millar, as a web expert, it was clear that the emergence of the vast cables database marked the end of secrecy in the old-fashioned, cold-war-era sense. “The internet has rendered that all history,” he reflects. “For us, there was a special responsibility to handle the material carefully, and to bring context to the stories, rather than just dump them out.”

There were further concerns. The full text of relevant cables was intended to be posted online alongside individual news stories. This practice – what Assange called “scientific journalism” – was something the Guardian and some other papers had now been routinely doing for several years, ever since the technology had made it possible.

Each reporter was now made responsible for “redacting” their own cables – blanking out from the original any sources who might have been put at risk if their names were published. Heads of state, well-known politicians, those in public life generally, were fair game as a rule. In some parts of the world, however – the Middle East, Russia and central Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – to be seen even talking to the Americans was a risky proposition.

The cables team took a conservative approach. If there was seen to be a risk of someone being compromised, then the name was scrubbed out. This was at times frustrating: long, informative cables might be stripped down to a couple of dull paragraphs. But the alternative was far worse. Redactions were passed on to Jonathan Casson, the paper’s apparently miracle-working head of production, and his harassed-looking team, who set up camp in a neighbouring fourth-floor room normally used as a training suite. Rusbridger had suggested early on that each paper nominate a “redactions editor” to ensure a belt and braces approach to protecting sources. Now Casson worked brutally long days comparing the Guardian’s editing decisions with those of his counterparts, and considering the representations about particular cables from the US state department that were passed on by the New York Times. The task was made vastly more difficult by the journalists’ determination not to discuss cables on the phone or in emails; after his daily round of Skype calls with international partners, Casson would meticulously alter the colour of some of the 700 or so cables listed on a vast Google spreadsheet that only he could understand. He looked like a man close to the edge.

And then there were the legal risks. Could the Guardian be prosecuted under the British Official Secrets Act or the US Espionage Act? And, if so, would it have to hand over internal documents and emails? Rusbridger had already sought the opinion of Alex Bailin, a QC who specialised in secrecy law, ahead of publication of the Afghan war logs. There had been no prosecution. But this did not mean that the White House would necessarily acquiesce in the far more damaging publication of the secret US state department cables.

Geraldine Proudler, of the Guardian’s law firm, Olswang, had been full of forebodings. Ahead of the publication of the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs she suggested it was “entirely possible” the US could bring a prosecution against the Guardian under the Espionage Act – though an all-out assault against the international media partners seemed unlikely. It was also possible the Americans could seek to lay hands on Rusbridger. “In a worst case scenario we cannot rule out extradition attempts.” At the least, it was “very likely” that the US might serve a subpoena demanding that the Guardian hand over material after publication, she had advised.

In addition to worrying about the risks of possible injunctions under the Official Secrets Act and the Espionage Act, Gill Phillips, the Guardian’s in-house head of legal, spent many hours weighing up the libel and privacy dangers: both were big problems domestically, because the UK lacked the free speech protections enshrined in the US constitution. The cables were fascinating, and credible as documents. They revealed international skullduggery and double-dealing, among other things. But the fact they had been written by US diplomats didn’t make them libel proof. Some of the cables from the former Soviet Union, Pakistan and Afghanistan made eye-popping assertions of top-level corruption, but could they land the Guardian with a costly writ? All had to be handled with care.

To a certain degree, Phillips could rely on the Reynolds defence, following a celebrated 1999 ruling that journalists were able to publish important allegations that could not be proved, so long as the material was in the